There’s something really liberating about having some corner of your life that’s yours, that no one gets to see except you. It’s a little like nudity or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone has to squat on the toilet. There’s nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them.
For hundreds of years, the human race has dreamt of a world where knowledge could be shared universally, where every human being on the planet could have access to our storehouse of knowledge. Because knowledge is power, and shared knowledge is a superpower. Now, after centuries, we have it within our grasp to realize one of our most beautiful dreams.
The best way to be superhuman is to do things that you love with other people who love them, too. The only way to do that is to admit you’re doing it because you love it and if you do more than everyone, you’re still only doing that because that’s what you choose.
So close the book and go. The world is full of security systems. Hack one of them.
Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s crashware turd that no one under the age of forty used voluntarily.
This sounds like you’re saying that national security is more important than the Constitution.
I had spoken to the universe, and the universe hadn’t given a damn.
The law didn’t care if you were actually doing anything bad; they were willing to put you under the microscope just for being statistically abnormal.
People actually like supporting the artists whose work they like. It makes them feel happy. You don’t have to force them. And if you force them, they don’t feel as good.
Stories become great by hacking your brain. Nothing that happens in fiction matters. The people in fiction are fictional so their triumphs and tragedies have literally no consequence. The death of the yogurt you doomed to a fiery death in your gut acid this morning is finitely more tragic than the “deaths” of Romeo and Juliet. The yogurt was alive and then it died. Romeo and Juliet never lived in the first place.
Everything good in the world comes from the efforts of people who came before us.
She was forty-five minutes late to work that day, but she had toast for breakfast. Goddamnit.
Utopia is impossible; everyone who isn’t a utopian is a shmuck.
It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time.
But if you’re not prepared to learn from the teachers that life gives you, you’ll always be ignorant.
Every wonderful thing in our world has a fight in its history: our rights, our good fortune, our happiness. All that is sweet was paid for, once upon a time, by principled people who risked everything to change the world for the better.
Anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and doesn’t give you a key, that lock is not there for your benefit.
I’ve always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarter about the world around me.
With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
Real invention is a process of repeated, crushing failure that leads, very rarely, to a success. If you want to succeed faster, there’s nothing for it but to fail faster and better.