Giacomo Ruà > Giacomo's Quotes

“A volte uno si crede incompleto ed è soltanto giovane”
― Italo Calvino, Il visconte dimezzato

“Garlick was given access to Nvidia’s code base. He was appalled at what he saw.
“Basically, it was cancer,” he said. “Y’know, cancer cells aren’t efficient. They just mutate,
grow, and expand.” At 3dfx, Garlick had taken pride in the elegance of his programming,
developing orderly systems with lucid commenting, allowing other programmers to easily
maintain and improve his work. “In the time we spent making it clean, we went out of
business,” he said. Nvidia’s approach was slapdash, with blocks of code written during some
delirious midnight crunch serving as the foundation for critical systems. “What a shit show!
The code was crap, the tool-chain was a mess, and the thing was, they didn’t give a shit!”
Garlick said. “They didn’t give a shit about anything but the next tape-out.”
― Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip

“There may be nothing scarier in business than facing an existential threat. So scary that many in the organization will do anything to avoid facing it. They will look for any alternative, any way out, any excuse not to live or die in a single battle.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing about Hard Thing: Building a Business When There are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

“Is it going to—is it going to destroy jobs?” Huang asked, his voice crescendoing with anger. “Are calculators going to destroy math? That conversation is so old, and I’m so, so tired of it,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore! It’s the same conversation over and over and over and over and over again. We invented agriculture and then made the marginal cost of producing food zero. It was good for society! We manufactured electricity at scale, and it caused the marginal cost of chopping down trees, lighting fires, carrying fires and torches around to approximately zero, and we went off to do something else. And then we made the marginal cost of doing calculations—long division! We made it zero!” He was yelling now. “We make the marginal cost of things zero, generation after generation after generation, and this exact conversation happens every single time!” [...] “This cannot be a ridiculous sci-fi story,” he said. He gestured to his frozen PR reps at the end of the table. “Do you guys understand? I didn’t grow up on a bunch of sci-fi stories, and this is not a sci-fi movie. These are serious people doing serious work!” he said. “This is not a freaking joke! This is not a repeat of Arthur C. Clarke. I didn’t read his fucking books. I don’t care about those books! It’s not—we’re not a sci-fi repeat! This company is not a manifestation of Star Trek! We are not doing those things! We are serious people, doing serious work. And— it’s just a serious company, and I’m a serious person, just doing serious work.”
― Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip

“Nickolls was obsessed with getting the CUDA platform to work. Friends sometimes asked him why he was working for a video game company when he didn't play video games. Nickolls informed them he wasn't working on video games; he was working on one of the most important technologies of all time. He was building a platform so fast it would make every other computer look like a calculator watch. "Few inventions will have the impact on the world that CUDA will ultimately have", he would say.”
― Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip