Ellen Ullman Quotes

People who have no choice are generally unhappy. But people with too many choices are almost as unhappy as those who have no choice at all.

I believed my motivations were clear: to help the patient see the pattern that had been imposed upon her, this endless repetition of being selected yet judged to be not exactly what was wanted, a purchase the buyer wished to return.

"You mean you don't stage the software?" I asked him. "You don't test it?"
"Why should we? Everything we do is live all the time, always new, minute by minute.This is the Web! Code it, post it, run it, change it, run it again."

I’m an engineer for the same reason anyone is an engineer: a certain love for the intricate lives of things, a belief in a functional definition of reality. I do believe that the operational definition of a thing — how it works — is its most eloquent self-expression.

Computers have no idea what goes on outside of them except what humans tell them.

"Debugging: what an odd word. As if "bugging" were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for some period of time, normally longer than the time it takes to design and write the code in the first place, the programmer tries to remove the mistakes."

Over the years, as I listened to the engineering give-and-take over the question of artificial life-forms, I kept coming up against something obdurate inside myself, some stubborn resistance to the definition of “life” that was being promulgated. It seemed to me too reductive of what we are, too mechanistic. Even if I could not quite get myself to believe in God or the soul or the Tao or some other metaphor for the ineffable spark of life, still, as I sat there high in the balcony of the Stanford lecture hall, listening to the cyberneticists’ claims to be on the path toward the creation of a sentient being, I found myself muttering, No, that’s not right, we’re not just mechanisms, you’re missing something, there’s something else, something more. But then I had to ask myself: What else could there be?

The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.

Then, just when it seemed that only the barest of bugs survived, there would be a new version of the software. And with that, a fresh opportunity for introducing bugs.

I've managed to stay in a perpetual state of learning only by maintaining what I think of as a posture of ignorant humility.

Yet, when we allow complexity to be hidden and handled for us, we should at least notice what we are giving up. We risk becoming users of components, handlers of black boxes that do not open or don’t seem worth opening. We risk becoming people who cannot really fix things, who can only swap components, work with mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected. But when something breaks or goes wrong or needs fundamental change, what will we do except stand helpless in the face of our own creations

This is what makes them good engineers. Perfectionism: incinerating perfectionism.

I had this idea we would have ordered some good champagne, launched toast after toast to our humanity, which after all had created everything: the opportunities for the bug, the bug itself, and its solution. I think now it might have changed us, softened our failures, made us feel we belonged to — had a true stake in — those lives full of code we had separately stumbled into. I like to think it would have reassured him, saved him: To know that at the heart of the problem was the ancient mystery of time. To discover that between the blinks of the machine’s shuttered eye — going on without pause or cease; simulated, imagined, but still not caught — was life.

A democracy, indeed a culture, needs some sustaining common mythos. Yet, in a world where “truth” is a variable concept — where any belief can find its adherents — how can a consensus be formed? How can we arrive at the compromises that must underlie the workings of any successful society?

And ceilings - ceilings! - that had been invisible, up there, of no account, suddenly insisting upon their supreme and deadly importance.