Quotes About Technology

There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.

Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.

Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing—this pivotal separation between being and nonbeing—is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths.

The opening screen of T'Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this since he had heard that Google Earth in turn was based on an idea from some old science fiction novel

It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished, sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.

Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it... a speelycaptor... at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.

They made data a controlled substance.

The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on Arbre with reasonable amounts of money. I hadn't known that, I said. I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there. There might as well be, Arsibalt said, but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.

Kids who are obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with crypto.

The revolution proceeded routinely and according to the rules of networked 21st-century protest.

What if the places you went and the things you encountered in your work were more interesting than what was available in the physical world around you?

Izzy was full of people who were skewed toward the Asperger's end of the social spectrum, and there was no better way to get them to start talking than to ask them a technical question.

Put 'em on and be yourself, mister alienated loner steppenwolf bemused distant meta-izing technocrat rationalist fucking shithead.

When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.

A speech with magical force. Nowadays, people don't believe in these kinds of things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a form of speech—the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L. Bob Rife's fiber-optic network.

Why do they believe that?" "Because we are hackers," Csongor said, "and they have seen movies.

Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.

Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 lives in a pleasant black-and-white Metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow on trees, dangling at head level from low branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them.

The suit's got a cervical airbag that blows up when you fall off the board, so you can bounce on your head. Besides, helmets feel weird. They say it doesn't affect your hearing, but it does.

A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest.

We had these throwbacks who would do stuff like printing their emails out on paper to read them, or asking you for your goddamn fax number two decades after you had thrown away your fax machine.

so efficient it doesn't waste power by making noise