good examples

To my mind, randomness is not just inevitable; it is part of the beauty of life. Acknowledging it and appreciating it helps us respond constructively when we are surprised. Fear makes people reach for certainty and stability, neither of which guarantee the safety they imply.

– Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

The predominant narrative of this age of networked hardware and software is the displacement of humans by computers and robots, but again and again, when we look at the best possible results in areas like curation, recommendations, and personalization, the optimal strategy pairs humans with software.

– Charles Ying, Layout in Flipboard for Web and Windows

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.

– Jacob Bronowsk, The Ascent of Man

These days in TED talks and tech-world conversation, commerce is described as art and as revolution and huge corporations are portrayed as agents of the counterculture.

– Rebecca Solnit, Diary: Get Off the Bus

Measurements are a means to find the essence of something, they are not the essence itself. That’s particularly true for a qualitative craft like news. The essence, of course, is writing great stories that help people make better decisions in life and in work, that create accountability in the world, and that maybe even delight and entertain readers from time to time.

– Eric Eldon, It’s Never Too Early To Say Goodbye

Yeah, I like it when the app is re­spon­sive to ges­tures, and ob­jects slide in and fade out; but all that feels like icing on the cake… And I to­tally fuck­ing hate hav­ing four in­de­pen­dently-scrol­lable areas on the screen con­trolled by weird-look­ing JavaScript-ge­nius-hand­crafted scroll­bars. And then I’ll be work­ing with some fancy sin­gle-page app, ac­ci­den­tally hit the tab key and every­thing goes a lit­tle side­ways.

– Tim Bray, Software in 2014

It’s worth keeping in mind that the whole idea of one great entertainment medium that unites the country isn’t really that old a tradition, particularly American, nor necessarily noble. We may come to remember it as a twentieth-century quirk, born of particular business models and an obsession with national unity indelibly tied to darker projects.

– Tim Wu, Netflix’s War on Mass Culture

The scuba dive itself was nuministic enough, a drenched heaven; coastal shelves and their staggering, sub-aquatic architecture, like spilt cathedrals, gormless, ghostly fish gliding by like Jackson Pollock’s pets. Silent miracles. What got me, though, was when I came up for air, at the end, … there was something absurd about the surface. How we, the creatures of the land, live our lives, obliviously trundling, flat feet slapping against the dust.

– Russell Brand, It’s amazing how absurd it seems

Having a public opinion on absolutely everything you love is no way to live.

– Jason Kottke, On the regular

It’s very easy to make something that is new, but it won’t be new the day after tomorrow. So we are trying to make things that are better.

– Sir Jony Ive, quoted in The man behind Apple’s magic curtain

It’s always a sign of trouble when you’ve built something you don’t want to use yourself.

– John Gruber, Facebook Home and Dogfooding

Most of the stuff in a backpack is carried to overcome a lack of knowledge.

– Kevin Kelly, Cool Tools Review of Ultralight Backpackin’ Tips

One recipe for Internet success seems to be this: Start at the bottom, at the most awful, ridiculous, essential idea, and own it. Promote it breathlessly, until you’re acquired or you take over the world. Bitcoin is playing out in a similar way. It asks its users to forget about central banking in the same way Steve Jobs asked iPhone users to forget about the mouse.

– Paul Ford, Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy’s Last Safe Haven

It’s a desperate thing to need everybody to be really happy with everything you say

– Louis C.K., quoted in The Joke’s on Louis C.K.

One of the things that struck me very early on and that continues to puzzle me is the way in which some forms of knowledge are considered more valuable than others, and they tend to break along educational lines. College education is considered of higher status than the kind of education that lets a person know how to repair an engine, or design a truck that’s going to be safer for the workers, or organize things.

– Robin Nagle, quoted in The Secret World of ‘Garbagemen’