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User:BurningLibrary/Sandbox

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A page for collecting quotes that strike my interest. According to Wikiquote:User page, users "can create subpages … by adding a slash (/) and the name of the subpage after [their] username". This is such a page.

Quotes

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Vanity

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  • I met a traveller from an antique land
    Who said: — Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
    Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
    And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
    And on the pedestal these words appear:
    "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
    Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
    Nothing beside remains: round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.
  • Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

Digital age

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"Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human." (The Tao of Programming)
  • Deborah Solomon: Your entry in Wikipedia says that your work has inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence.
    Douglas Hofstadter: I have no interest in computers. The entry is filled with inaccuracies, and it kind of depresses me.
    Deborah Solomon: So fix it.
    Douglas Hofstadter: The next day someone will fix it back.
  • Lex Fridman: Can you see how it can break a person? Because I have gotten the chance to experience small attacks here and there. Once they get to the core of things … you gain, for me, a feeling like there is a sizeable number of people who really don't like you, and say things about you that may cut deep, for a reason I don't understand why. It's just my own psychology.
    Joe Rogan: Well, it's also because you can't defend yourself, because they're saying it and you're not there. And you don't have any opportunity for a rebuttal. … And even if it's only ten percent of the people, that's a lot. That's a lot of negativity when you're dealing with thousands and thousands of tweets. … What are you doing, absorbing all this negativity? It's not good for you.
  • [T]he continuous stream of hate that I began to receive went through the roof. It was hundreds of messages, posts, and comments for a day. … However, most of it moved from something like GitHub issues or Twitter threads to my mail or IM. … In the last year, this has been added that I am a "Russian fascist".
  • Some of the computer utopians from Silicon Valley were also beginning to realize that the World Wide Web was not a new kind of democracy, but something far more complicated, where power was exercised over the individual in new and surprising ways. Carmen Hermosillo had been one of the earliest believers in the new communities of cyberspace. Her online name was "humdog", and she lived on the west coast. But then she lost faith, and she posted an attack which caused a sensation online.

    "It is fashionable to suggest," she wrote, "that cyberspace is some island of the blessed, where people are free to indulge and express their individuality. This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions, their guts, online. And I did so myself, until I began to see that I had commodified myself. Commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money value. In the ninetenth century, commodities were made in factories by workers who were mostly exploited. But I created my interior thoughts as commodities for the corporations that owned the board that I was posting to, like CompuServe or AOL. And that commodity was then sold on to other consumer entities as entertainment."

    "Cyberspace," she wrote, "is a black hole. It absorbs energy and personality, and then represents it as an emotional spectacle. It is done by businesses that commodify human interaction and emotion, and we are getting lost in the spectacle."

  • "I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium and Hard," said the master. "Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human."

    "Pray, great master," implored the novice, "how does one find these mysterious settings?"

    The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it under foot. And suddenly the novice was enlightened.

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