4 years ago in Quotes
The numbers in a billionaire's net worth include no contextual information - nothing about the lives damaged, the jobs lost, the opportunities eliminated, the time wasted, the scamming, cheating, and manipulation, the ecological support structures destroyed.

Business and personal accounting systems deny, ignore, and suppress those contextual details. So does the "investment" industry. And that makes a mockery of "price discovery" because the nominal market price always excludes critical externalities.

It's possible to become extremely rich without negative externalities. It just happens to be incredibly difficult. The looser your ethics, and the less empathy you have for competitors and victims, the easier it gets. It's a feedback loop which rewards unethical behaviour.

Essentially, money itself is a form of morality-laundering. It's an integer when it should be a complete trace through a common contextual event map.
 4 years ago in Quotes
Yet another circumstance must be mentioned which proves favorable for the Nazis and their immensely powerful apparatus of oppression: the development of modern technology gives the rulers, as has long been insufficiently understood, an advantage over the ruled. The more effective the weapons become and the less you can protect yourself against them, the more the armed is superior to the unarmed. The Bastille could not be successfully stormed in the age of airplanes and tear gas. Rifles equipped with rifles have no chance against motorized police forces; it makes no sense to build barricades against a government that has tanks. And in the event of a revolution, it is not only weapons development that favors those in power, the state over the individual: modern technical development and the associated sophisticated organization work in the same direction. Traffic has led to the countries becoming small and easy to monitor. How many hiding places there were in a country a hundred years ago! At that time, every power hit natural barriers! Today there is no loophole and no hideout for the rebel anymore. Even the thoughts that are able to penetrate the walls have become "controllable" because they are tied to the mass distribution of news, to radio, film and the press. How long will it take before every house has its own microphone and every private word, like every telephone call today, can be heard? The ant state is at hand. It may not be a coincidence that states like Germany and Russia have elevated technology to the status of a religion. Conversely, this development of modern technology makes the preservation of freedom a human task that is more urgent than ever.
"Germany: Jekyll & Hyde (1939 - Deutschland von innen betrachtet)"
 4 years ago in Quotes
Each new generation of programmers creates new tools to replace the 'complex' ones that came before without even bothering to understand them.

In my 25 year career I've seen it multiple times. We are all going downhill.

Attention spans in the smartphone era might be preventing people from reading the f*ing manual.

This means that any system or library which has an operating model that must be understood before it can be effectively used[1] simply can't be understood by the majority of programmers today.

[1] The currently popular things in software world are mostly the type of system that lack such a model and which can be 'mastered' by asking discrete questions on stack overflow. This lack of complexity causes a loss of expressive power.
 4 years ago in Quotes
So long as you are alive you have a place in all this and you play a role in it. Everyone here -- on the sidewalks, pedaling by on bicycles, looking at us, or not looking at us -- has a part he's playing in this story. Everyone is doing something that relates to us. They may kick sick guys in the belly as much as they like, or kill them, or force guys with the shits to remain closed up inside a church and then shoot them because they shit, or yell Alles Scheiße, alles Scheiße! for the millionth time, between them and us a relationship nevertheless exists that nothing can destroy. They know what they're doing, they know what's being done to us. They know it as well as if they were us. And they are. You are us. One looks at each of these creatures who doesn't know and one would like to get inside their consciousness that only wants to see a piece of striped cloth, a bearded face, a line of men with a martial SS figure at their head. They're going to ignore us; whenever we go through a town, it's a sleep of human beings that passes through a sleep of sleeping persons. That's how it appears. But we know; each group knows about the other, knows everything about it.
"The Human Race"
 4 years ago in Quotes
Remember that your path will be difficult, at times unbearably so. All your loved ones will die. All your plans will go awry. You will be betrayed and abandoned. And you cannot escape death. Life is suffering. Accept it. But once you accept it, once you accept the inevitability of suffering, you must still accept your cross and follow your dream, because otherwise things will only get worse. Be an example, be someone on whom others can depend. Do not obey despots, fight for the freedom of body and soul, and build a country in which your children can be happy.
 4 years ago in Quotes
An obedient population is extremely vulnerable to authority figures. The whole point of democracy is to create stability by removing that single point of failure, by involving so many people in everything that crazy or malicious individuals can not easily gain excessive power, and democracy is under no circumstances compatible with obedience: Either you think critically and vote in your own interest, or you are obedient and vote how the dictator tells you to. It's impossible to have a population that critically evaluates candidates and selects the best one and that also follows orders without regard to their own evaluation of that order.
 4 years ago in Quotes
We knew perfectly well that we had no chance of winning. We fought simply not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths. We knew we were going to die. Just like all the others who were sent to Treblinka.... Their death was far more heroic. We didn't know when we would take a bullet. They had to deal with certain death, stripped naked in a gas chamber or standing at the edge of a mass grave waiting for a bullet in the back of the head.... It was easier to die fighting than in a gas chamber.
 4 years ago in Zitate
Es war einmal eine glückliche Zeit, als Menschen frei wählen konnten; Lieber tot als Sklav', lieber stehend sterben, als auf den Knien leben. Es war einmal eine verruchte Zeit, als schwachsinnig gewordene Intellektuelle erklärten, das Leben sei der Güter höchstes. Gekommen ist heute die furchtbare Zeit, in der jeden Tag bewiesen wird, daß der Tod seine Schreckensherrschaft genau dann beginnt, wenn das Leben das höchste Gut geworden ist; daß der, der es vorzieht, auf den Knien zu leben, auf den Knien stirbt; daß niemand leichter zu morden ist als ein Sklave. Wir Lebenden haben zu lernen, daß man auf den Knien noch nicht einmal leben kann, daß man nicht unsterblich wird, wenn man dem Leben nachjagt, und daß, wenn man für nichts mehr sterben will, man stirbt, obwohl man nichts getan hat.
 4 years ago in Zitate
Auf einem Dampfer, der in die falsche Richtung fährt, kann man nicht sehr weit in die richtige Richtung gehen.
 4 years ago in Zitate
Es gibt Reichtümer, an denen man zugrunde geht, wenn man sie nicht mit anderen teilen kann.
 4 years ago in Zeug
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 4 years ago in Zeug
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 4 years ago in Quotes
And imagine this girl is just studying accounting or design or engineering, her favourite thing to do is shopping with her friends and watching K drama, or maybe she is a computer nerd and gamer, I don't know. Perhaps she was planning to go on a year of working holiday after she graduates. She has her whole future ahead of her.

Now she is forced to abseil down this rope in her bare hands. She has no safety gear or fall arrest system to break her fall. All she has is her fragile body and her strong will to fight against the biggest bully currently in the world that other nations are too chicken to stand up against.

I want to give more than just a salute to this girl and countless others (guys or girls), whom we may not even get to see their faces or know their names ever. I think the whole of humanity and all that is good (or what is left of the good in humanity) owe them. Whatever the outcome of this current mess, you have already won. I wish there are more people like you in the world, and I hope one day if I am forced to face a giant, I can be like you.
 4 years ago in Quotes
SaaS is more closed than closed: you control nothing, not even your data, and can trivially be spied on and monetized in other questionable ways. The fact that some of the pieces of a SaaS site are open source is meaningless and changes nothing.