Yeah, I always wanted to be a well known idiot. - Niko Bellic, after not wanting to appear on camera associated with a street justice man
“Don’t whistle while you’re pissing.” —Hagbard Celine - Illuminatus by Robert Anton Wilson
My personal favorite is (and I’m probably messing it up because it’s been 30 years…):
If there were more bloody noses, there’d be fewer wars.
When I read that, I was finally able to reconcile my pacifist upbringing with the reality I was observing.
“Cause nothin’ moves faster than the hands of time”
“I ship is safest in harbour, but that’s not what ships are for.”
“When people turn to you when shit goes wrong. That’s when you’re a man.”
Or a sysadmin
Also sysadmin
They can’t point at me. They wanted me to RTO and I Dead-Sea-Effected myself out.
Guys left behind - I wasn’t in the rock-star phase of the DSE but more the last in the lifeboats - have no skills in any of it and they can’t attract talent and experience to do it right. They’re reimplementing it in some last-gen tech like Ansible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
“Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any” – Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence,—it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”
-George Washington (allegidly) The true author is debatable, but the quote is accurate, none the less.
Internet and social media has made general public a part of this “fire” drowning out the voice of the wise and the learned with the cacophony of angry noise.
“Man was born free, but everywhere is in chains.” -Rousseau
“No matter where you go, there you are”
– Dr. Buckaroo Banzai“I conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.”
Charles Fort
“If you’re not falling, you’re not learning”. No idea who said it but it was about skateboarding at the time. It works for everything though.
“You gotta learn to live between the lines”. From Big Deal by the Dead Milkmen.
Please don’t ask me to explain it because I don’t know, but the writer/musician John Darneille of the Mountain Goats once wrote “God is present in the sweeping gestures, but the devil is in the details”. I just really like it even though I’m stuck on its meaning.
God as broad: Your Mom makes you a sandwich.
Devil as details: The meat in the sandwich is a dead animal. Your mom bought it from an evil mega corp. She paid for it with wages from her soul crushing job. No one makes her a sandwich.
Oh nice explanation.
Here are a few nice ones, I can’t really pick:
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” - John Maynard Keynes
(You can also apply this one to proprietary software vs. Free software (don’t say open source in my presence))
“The tyrants are only great because we are on our knees.” - Étienne de La Boétie
“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” - Rosa Luxemburg
don’t say [those words] in my presence
Will I regret asking why?
Free software tells you “do whatever you want, you’re free” but open source completely misses the point: it means you can read the code, but not necessarily recompile, modify and redistribute. Plus the term was invented for the confusion that would come from it. For example, a lot of AI models like LLM’s claim they are “open-source”, which basically means nothing: it’s far easier to say that than to claim it’s a free model, because that would imply freedoms to modify, reuse, redistribute the training data, weight etc. (no AI model allows that for now, and there will probably never be one that does).
Not OP, but I personally heavily dislike the confusion surrounding those terms - that is IMHO entirely self-inflicted. “Open-source” referring to FOSS as a whole, and what open-source sounds like actually being called “source available”, is needlessly confusing.
I usually write FOSS since I like acronyms, but when I speak I’d say open-source. I don’t see how open-source is any more confusing than free software, considering most people would immediately think “free as in beer”.
If only the term “free software” itself wasn’t just as confusing lol
In a similar vein “the greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” … Steve Biko
your future hasn’t been written yet. No one’s has. Your future is whatever you make it, so make it a good one.
From Back to the Future.
