Quotes About Technology

the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.

scattering of schizophrenic first worlders who have long ago burned their brains to ash in the radiant heat of their own imaginings.

It was no longer necessary to send out dirty yokels in coonskin caps to chart the wilderness, kill the abos, and clear-cut the groves; now all you needed was a hot young geotect, a start matter compiler, and a jumbo Source.

The complications, as always, had to do with avoiding collisions and respecting what was still called "air space" around habitats, even though it had no air in it and might more properly have been called "space space.

the old world, death had led to endless philosophical ruminations and spawned religions, but in Bitworld it led to one-star ratings from furious bereaved and threats of class-action lawsuits.

Il mondo moderno è un disastro per chi si diletta a scrivere haiku: quante sillabe ci sono in «generatore elettrico»? Nove? Non ci starebbe neanche nel secondo verso.

Neal Stephenson

In layperson's terms: if it has to be dunked in liquid helium to work, I don't understand it. If it's in a rack with fans blowing on it, that's a different story.

He wondered whether the designers of the phone had performed clinical studies on snoozers in order to decide on the nine-minute interval. Why not eight minutes, or ten? The makers of the phone were famously particular about design. This had to have been data-driven.

charge blindly across the emotional minefield and get down as soon as possible to geeking out

Neal Stephenson

When he came to his senses, he was aware that a large number of telephones were singing their little electronic songs. Including his. The birth cry of a new age. IVY

For most of history those battles happen only every few centuries—you have the chariot, the compound bow, gunpowder, ironclad ships, and so on. But something happens around, say, the time that the Monitor, which the Northerners believe to be the only ironclad warship on earth, just happens to run into the Merrimack

The reversion of Windows to a CLI when it was in distress proved to Mac partisans that Windows was nothing more than a cheap facade, like a garish afghan flung over a rotted-out sofa.

But the ability (at least in theory) of computers to perform the calculations needed to generate three-dimensional graphics suggested a future in which immersive audiovisual experiences might become possible.

As it happened, what actually brought the cost of graphics hardware down was videogames—in particular Doom, which came out the year after Snow Crash was published.

I'll set up a cron job to do it right now," Corvallis said. "Once an hour?" "I was thinking once a minute.

He woke up his phone. Its home screen was chickenpoxed with little red dots with accusatory numbers in them

The end state of all this would be a Dyson sphere:

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces.... We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft to make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary.

Humans were biology. They lived for the dopamine rush. They could get it either by putting the relevant chemicals directly into their bodies or by partaking of some clickbait that had been algorithmically perfected to make brains generate the dopamine through psychological alchemy. It was not a way to live long or to prosper, but it was a way of being as ineradicable, now, as the ragweed that flourished in the roadside ditches.

Neal Stephenson

Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army. Most people know it only by reputation, and its reputation, as the Dilbert cartoon suggests, is mixed. But everyone seems to agree that if it could only get its act together and stop surrendering vast tracts of rich agricultural land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war to the onrushing invaders, it could stomp them (and all other opposition) flat.

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.