Siim > Siim's Quotes

“Most people are just too self-absorbed, well-meaning, and lazy to bother orchestrating Machiavellian plans to slight or insult us. It’s more often a boring, complicated story of wrong assumptions, miscommunication, bad administration, and cover-ups—people trying, and mostly failing, to do the right thing, hurting each other not because that’s their intention but because it’s impossible to avoid.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“what sets the best suppliers apart is not the quality of their products, but the value of their insight—new ideas to help customers either make money or save money in ways they didn’t even know were possible.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“There’s something else about this list that really jumps out. Take another look at the top five attributes listed there—the key characteristics defining a world-class sales experience: Rep offers unique and valuable perspectives on the market. Rep helps me navigate alternatives. Rep provides ongoing advice or consultation. Rep helps me avoid potential land mines. Rep educates me on new issues and outcomes. Each of these attributes speaks directly to an urgent need of the customer not to buy something, but to learn something. They’re looking to suppliers to help them identify new opportunities to cut costs, increase revenue, penetrate new markets, and mitigate risk in ways they themselves have not yet recognized. Essentially this is the customer—or 5,000 of them at least, all over the world—saying rather emphatically, “Stop wasting my time. Challenge me. Teach me something new.”
― Matthew Dixon, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

“We kill people based on metadata.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Data is the pollution problem of the information age, and protecting privacy is the environmental challenge.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“If something is free, you’re not the customer; you’re the product.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Following someone covertly, either on foot or by car, costs around $175,000 per month—primarily for the salary of the agents doing the following. But if the police can place a tracker in the suspect’s car, or use a fake cell tower device to fool the suspect’s cell phone into giving up its location information, the cost drops to about $70,000 per month, because it only requires one agent. And if the police can hide a GPS receiver in the suspect’s car, suddenly the price drops to about $150 per month—mostly for the surreptitious installation of the device. Getting location information from the suspect’s cell provider is even cheaper: Sprint charges law enforcement only $30 per month. The difference is between fixed and marginal costs. If a police department performs surveillance on foot, following two people costs twice as much as following one person. But with GPS or cell phone surveillance, the cost is primarily for setting up the system. Once it is in place, the additional marginal cost of following one, ten, or a thousand more people is minimal. Or, once someone spends the money designing and building a telephone eavesdropping system that collects and analyzes all the voice calls in Afghanistan, as the NSA did to help defend US soldiers from improvised explosive devices, it’s cheap and easy to deploy that same technology against the telephone networks of other countries.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Estimates put the current number of Internet-connected devices at 10 billion.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“By 2010, we as a species were creating more data per day than we did from the beginning of time until 2003. By 2015, 76 exabytes of data will travel across the Internet every year.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Those of us who fought the crypto wars, as we call them, thought we had won them in the 1990s. What the Snowden documents have shown us is that instead of dropping the notion of getting backdoor government access, the NSA and FBI just kept doing it in secret.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Your job in a world of intelligent machines is to keep making sure they do what you want, both at the input (setting the goals) and at the output (checking that you got what you asked for).”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“If you’re a lazy and not-too-bright computer scientist, machine learning is the ideal occupation, because learning algorithms do all the work but let you take all the credit.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“God created not species but the algorithm for creating species.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“We’re face-to-face with our old foe: the combinatorial explosion. Therefore we do what we always have to do in life: compromise. We make simplifying assumptions that whittle the number of probabilities we have to estimate down to something manageable. A very simple and popular assumption is that all the effects are independent given the cause. This means that, for example, having a fever doesn’t change how likely you are to also have a cough, if we already know you have the flu. Mathematically, this is saying that P(fever, cough | flu) is just P(fever | flu) × P(cough | flu). Lo and behold: each of these is easy to estimate from a small number of observations. In fact, we did it for fever in the previous section, and it would be no different for cough or any other symptom. The number of observations we need no longer goes up exponentially with the number of symptoms; in fact, it doesn’t go up at all.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“A good learner is forever walking the narrow path between blindness and hallucination.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you’re not doing it right.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

“Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

“All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elefant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains makkeable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense "perfectly", such as a grid, Prallian scope, 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be traced to civilisations lacking a realistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies.

The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attibutes of the pieces, is inevitably to schackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value, As a work of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“The computer scientist Donald Knuth was struck that “AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do ‘without thinking’—that, somehow, is much harder!”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development—and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“Nature might be a great experimentalist, but one who would never pass muster with an ethics review board – contravening the Helsinki Declaration and every norm of moral decency, left, right, and center.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“three conclusions: (1) at least weak forms of superintelligence are achievable by means of biotechnological enhancements; (2) the feasibility of cognitively enhanced humans adds to the plausibility that advanced forms of machine intelligence are feasible—because even if we were fundamentally unable to create machine intelligence (which there is no reason to suppose), machine intelligence might still be within reach of cognitively enhanced humans; and (3) when we consider scenarios stretching significantly into the second half of this century and beyond, we must take into account the probable emergence of a generation of genetically enhanced populations—voters, inventors, scientists—with the magnitude of enhancement escalating rapidly over subsequent decades.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“As Bokonon says: 'peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from god.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“No damn cat, no damn Cradle.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“If you wish to study a granfalloon, Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“Rather than setting goals for the number of yes’s you are planning to get each week, you set goals for the number of no’s you’re going to collect.”
― Richard Fenton, Go for No! Yes is the Destination, No is How You Get There

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time