Robin Sloan Quotes

I needed a more interesting life.
I could start by learning something.
I could start with the starter.

The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk.

And then, on a sunny Friday morning, for three seconds, you can't search for anything. You can't check your email. You can't watch any videos. You can't get directions. For just three seconds, nothing works, because every single one of Google's computers around the world is dedicated to this task.

This is Mat's secret weapon, his passport, his get-out-of-jail-free card: Mat makes things that are beautiful.

Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue.

When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it's actually you that's time-shifted?

America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want.

The shelves were packed close together, and it felt like I was standing at the border of a forest — not a friendly Californian forest, either, but an old Transylvanian forest, a forest full of wolves and witches and dagger-wielding bandits all waiting just beyond moonlight's reach.

my great weakness: if a task was even mildly challenging, any sense of injustice drained away and I simply worked quietly until I was done.

"But it will make mistakes," she says. "Hadoop will probably get us from a hundred thousand buildings down to, like, five thousand."
"So we're down to five days instead of five years."
"Wrong!" Kat says. "Because guess what — we have ten thousand friends. It's called" — she clicks a tab triumphantly and fat yellow letters appear on the screen — "Mechanical Turk. Instead of sending jobs to computers, like Hadoop, it sends jobs to real people. Lots of them. Mostly Estonians."
She commands King Hadoop and ten thousand Estonian footmen. She is unstoppable.

People want things to be real. If you give them an excuse, they'll believe you.

Southeastern Michigan is flat, almost concave; here was a world with a z-axis.

"[...] We keep a record for every member, and for every customer who might yet become a member, in order to track their work." He paused, then added, "Some of them are working very hard indeed."

"What are they doing?"

"My boy," he said, eyebrows raised. As if nothing could be more obvious: "They are reading."

I know I have strong opinions about everything - I can’t help it, I do - but this one’s the strongest. I waited too long to get out of that office. Much too long. I weep for those years.

On both sides, they've failed us...of course, we know about the industrialists. Their corn syrup and cheese product. Their factory farms ringed by rivers of blood and shit, blazing bonfires of disease barely contained by antibiotic blankets. These are among the most disgusting scenes in the history of this planet...

But on the other side...the organic farms, the precious restaurants...these are toy supply chains. 'Farm to table,' they say. Well. When you go from farm to table, you leave a lot of people out...I think more poorly of these people than I do of the industrialists, because they know better. They know it's all broken, and what do they do? They plant vegetables in the backyard.