Robin Sloan Quotes

Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he's a friendless sixth-grader.

Books: boring. Codes: awesome. These are the people who are running the internet.

Maybe I'll just go ahead and buy her the Tufte book. I'll bring it wrapped in brown paper. Wait- is that weird? It's an expensive book. Maybe there's a low-key paperback edition. I could buy it on Amazon. That's stupid, I work at a bookstore. (Could Amazon ship it fast enough?)

The house was large and deeply lived-in, all the shelves and surfaces stacked with books and boxes, framed pictures, old greeting cards set up like tent cities...Every single surface told a story. A long one. With digressions.

You know, old books are a big problem for us. Old knowledge in general. We call it OK. Old knowledge, OK. Did you know that ninety-five percent of the internet was only created in the last five years? But we know that when it comes to all human knowledge, the ratio is just the opposite—in fact, OK accounts for most things that most people know, and have ever known."
"So where is it, right? Where's the OK? Well, it's in old books, for one thing...—and it's also in people's heads, a lot of traditional knowledge, that's what we call TK. OK and TK." He's drawing little overlapping blobs, labeling them with acronyms. "Imagine if we could make all that OK/TK available all the time, to everyone. On the web, on your phone. No question would go unanswered ever again.

They're just bacteria. They don't think or plan. They just...exist.'
'Just exist? They do things we only dream of. They are fecund and potent, they can speak to one another with chemicals and light, they can form teams — oh, the teams they can form. Millions strong, all working together perfectly. If we could cooperate like that — if we could even get close — we would have all of our problems solved.

To be honest, my life has exhibited many strange and sometimes troubling characteristics, but shortness is not one of them. It feels like an eternity since I started school and a techno-social epoch since I moved to San Francisco. My phone couldn't even connect to the internet back then.

I’ll attach the album. I like some tracks better than others (it gets oonce-y...), but mostly, I’m proud of my brother for making something that’s truly his.

At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn’t be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.

You know, old books are a big problem for us. Old knowledge in general. We call it OK. Old knowledge, OK. Did you know that ninety-five percent of the internet was only created in the last five years? But we know that when it comes to all human knowledge, the ratio is just the opposite - in fact, OK accounts for most things that people know, and have ever known.

"Rosemary, why do you love books so much?"
(...)
"Well, actually, I love books because books are my best friends."

Typographers are designers; designers are my people.