Computer quotes18.08.26

Doug McIlroy (Unix creator):
- "Write programs that do one thing and do it well."
- "Write programs to work together."
- "Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."
Ken Thompson:
- "When in doubt, use brute force."
- "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
Rob Pike:
- "A little copying is better than a little dependency."
- "Rule of Generation: Avoid the corollary."
Eric S. Raymond:
- "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection." (Butler Lampson, quoted by Raymond)
- "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." (Knuth)
Linus Torvalds:
- "Talk is cheap. Show me the code."
- "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."
Butler Lampson:
- "All problems can be solved by another level of indirection, except for the problem of too many layers of indirection."
YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It):
- Don't build something until you need it.
- "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection... except for the problem of too many layers of indirection."

Doug McIlroy:
- "This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."
Ken Thompson:
- "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
- "When in doubt, use brute force."
- "I think the key thing is to keep things as simple as possible."
Rob Pike:
- "A little copying is better than a little dependency."
- "The bigger the interface, the weaker the abstraction."
- "Don't calculate the whole thing: calculate what you can and then tell the user you don't know what to do with the rest."
Linus Torvalds:
- "Talk is cheap. Show me the code."
- "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."
- "The unix philosophy is 'laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong one. 'Do it yourself'. That's it."
- "Real engineering is when you can make it work for 10 cents the price."
Butler Lampson:
- "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection... except for the problem of too many layers of indirection."
- "KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid."
Donald Knuth:
- "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
- "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."
Eric S. Raymond:
- "Any tool should be self-documenting, telling the user everything they need to know."
- "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts."
- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability."
Kernighan & Plauger:
- "Don't comment bad code — rewrite it."
- "If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong."
Albert Einstein (often quoted in Unix circles):
- "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
The YC 90/10 rule (Paul Buchheit):
"Look for the 90/10 solution — accomplish 90% of what you want with only 10% of the work. A 90% solution available now is much better than a 100% solution that takes ages."
That last one is the inverse of your quote

Edsger Dijkstra:
- "The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point."
- "Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it."
Melvin Conway:
- "Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." (Conway's Law)
C.A.R. Hoare:
- "There are only two ways of constructing a software design: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult."
Fred Brooks (The Mythical Man-Month):
- "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
- "There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."
- "The second-system effect: the tendency to include in a second system all the features of the first that were left out." — This is exactly the complexity spiral.
Leslie Lamport:
- "A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."
The Law of Increasing Complexity (not attributed to one person):
"Every program expands until it can read mail. Every program expands until it has a database."
And the famous Worse Is Better (Richard P. Gabriel):
- Simple, correct, complete, consistent — pick two. Simplicity wins, even if it's "wrong," because complexity kills.
The quote you're thinking of might also be from Niklaus Wirth:
- "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster."
Or the broader Second Law of Thermodynamics applied to software — entropy increases: systems naturally tend toward disorder unless energy (effort) is continuously applied to maintain them.
Basically: computers don't reduce complexity, they shift it. Every abstraction layer hides complexity but creates new complexity underneath. That's why Docker exists (to solve deployment complexity), and then Docker adds compose complexity, and then you need env_file, and then env_file doesn't work with compose... turtles all the way down.

Anonymous

Cory Doctorow:
- "AI is just a way of laundering other people's work."
- "It's not artificial intelligence. It's automation of human labor without paying for it."
Timnit Gebru:
- "LLMs are statistical mirrors of the data they're trained on — biases and all."
Gary Marcus:
- "Large language models are autocomplete on steroids. They're not reasoning, they're recombining."
- "We don't have artificial intelligence. We have artificial Plagiarism."
Emily Bender:
- "LLMs are stochastic parrots — they mimic without understanding."
Jaron Lanier:
- "The AI is just a big mashup of everyone's creativity, and the creators don't get anything."
- "Social media did to politics what AI will do to creative work."
Stuart Russell:
- "An AI system trained on all of human knowledge is basically a very sophisticated way of not crediting anyone."
Yann LeCun:
- "LLMs don't understand anything. They just predict the next word really well."
- But also: "The sum of all human knowledge is compressed into billions of parameters."
Noam Chomsky (on AI/LLMs):
- "The human mind is not, like ChatGPT, a giant statistical engine for predicting the next word."
- "What's being sold as artificial intelligence is actually a form of automation that cheapens human thought."
Wendy Hall (Web pioneer):
- "The web was built on the idea that information wants to be free. AI is built on the idea that it wants to be paid for."
Cory Doctorow again (most quotable on this):
- "AI companies want to be a universal tollbooth on all human creativity."
- "They scraped the entire internet, compressed it into a product, and called it intelligence."
- "It's not a coincidence that the same people who spent 20 years fighting to destroy copyright are now demanding AI be exempt from it."
The bitter truth:
"AI is what happens when you feed the entire internet into a blender and pour it out in the voice of a confident white guy." — @webdevMason (not famous, but accurate)
Voltaire (repurposed):
"The AI is a machine for compressing 10 billion humans' unpaid labor into a single API call."
Marshall McLuhan (updated):
- "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." — Original, but now: "We fed the internet into AI, and now AI feeds us back to ourselves."
The core observation you're getting at is best stated by Richard Stallman:
- "Proprietary software is a system of injustice. AI trained on free software and then sold back as proprietary is the ultimate irony."
And Doctorow's "enshittification": platforms first serve users, then advertisers, then extract from both. AI companies first scraped the commons, now they're in the extracting phase.

18.08.26

Anonymous

18.08.26

Anonymous

Computer quotes18.08.26

Information Epoch 1789400200