Quotes About Technology

Facebook's photo-sharing site Instagram may be even worse for human well-being. A 2017 survey by the British Royal Society for Public Health found that Instagram was the most harmful of all the major social networks. Use of the app caused loneliness, anxiety over body image, and other maladies.

Will there be a Gen5 series of Glocks?

barrels and slides

A single-stack Glock could come close, but even if Glock did it, probably not.

The Americans are the nature of the future, she would announce in her hearty voice. Here's to 'em. God bless their gadgets, great and small, God bless Frigidaire, Tampax and Coca-Cola. Yes, even Coca-Cola,darling. (It was generally conceded that Coca-Cola's advertising was ruining the picturesqueness of Morocco.)

Your fingers want to be strong. They weren't designed to tap at a keyboard or text bulls*** on a stupid cell phone. They were meant to be dangerous weapons on the hands of a caveman!

Clean this place out. I want hard drives, gadgets, papers, circuit boards, everything. Grab the pencil sharpener if it looks interesting.

Television, I'm afraid, has isolated us more than race, class, or ethnicity.

A hunter-gatherer's needs are few, but a Western citizen expects a car, paved streets, hot water on demand, airports, sewer lines, phone service, a refrigerator, computer, microwave, and a PlayStation... as a start.

Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense. If you can develop technology that's simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don't need to rely on other defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice.

A restaurant can afford to serve the occasional burnt dinner. But in technology, you cook one thing and that's what everyone eats. So any difference between what people want and what you deliver is multiplied. You please or annoy customers wholesale. The closer you can get to what they want, the more wealth you generate.

One of the less publicized benefits of the open source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program.

Programmers tend to be divided into tribes by the languages they use. More even than by the kinds of programs they write.

The government spying on people doesn't literally make programmers write worse code. It just leads eventually to a world in which bad ideas will win. And because this is so important to hackers, they're especially sensitive to it. They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm.

Part of what software has to do is explain itself. So

Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead- end a Neanderthal language.

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. But with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen. One of the biggest remaining groups is computer programmers.

And the reason everyone doesn't use Listp is that programming languages are not merely technologies, but habits of mind as well, and nothing changes slower.

If you can't find ten Lisp hackers, then your company is probably based in the wrong city for developing software

Live in the future, then build what's missing.

If you look at the dominant technologies today, you'll find that most of them grew organically.

I'd like to propose an alternative idea: that in a modern society, increasing variation in income is a sign of health. Technology seems to increase the variation in productivity at faster than linear rates. If we don't see corresponding variation in income, there are three possible explanations: (a) that technical innovation has stopped, (b) that the people who would create the most wealth aren't doing it, or (c) that they aren't getting paid for it.

It would be pretty easy to write a better word processor than Microsoft Word, for example, but Microsoft, within the castle of their operating system monopoly, probably wouldn't even notice if you did. The place to fight design wars is in new markets, where no one has yet managed to establish any fortifications. That's where you can win

Technology = Leverage Startups offer anyone a way to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. They allow measurement because they're small, and they offer leverage because they make money by inventing new technology.