"i write for people smarter than me, such that they can figure out what i meant without me saying it" -- me
"writing [conventional, high-level] code will become like writing assembly" -- some LinkedIn commentator on the age of LLMs
"just be yourself, and not your own imitation of yourself" -- me
"don't seek to emulate your elders, but seek what they sought" -- Buddhism quoted by Peter Gomes
"the real purpose of playing golf is not to put the ball in the hole" -- Donald Knuth
"don't judge a cover [behaviour] by its book [most typical cause]" -- my roommate's friend, interpreted generously
"you pay for food twice, once to acquire, the other time for your body to suffer it" -- me
"X isn't real Y, insofar as X doesn't substantiate the stereotype that Y tends to be Z" -- G. Gordon, abstracted
"to the novice, a good question teaches more than its answer" -- me
"scientists play life in Developer Mode" -- me
"they also serve who only stand and wait and keep their idiot mouths shut" -- John Milton extended by Scott Alexander Siskind
"if you don't test it, it won't work" -- Mark Alan Horowitz
"good writers know also when not to write" -- me
"the happy are no better than the wretched for half their lives [as by sleep]" -- saying quoted by Aristotle
"X implies Y means 'Y' alone connotes 'not X' insofar as X is more specific than Y" -- me
"the road can change in the time it takes to open the car door" -- MVA curriculum
"dust : lasers :: avoidance : pain" -- me
"you only ought to use even my favourite tools if you see a way to use them to help with what matters to you" -- Andy Matuschak, paraphrased
"the goal is not self-improvement, [but] engaging more deeply with the World" -- are.na
"know the bird's name in every language [and] you'll only know about humans ... and what they call the bird" -- Richard Feynman
"any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands" -- sourceless proverb
"the invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck" -- Paul Virilio quoted by Nir Eyal
"learn to read before you learn to write" -- me
"what use is this secret intelligence of people who say they're smart but 'don't test well'?" -- Fernando Borretti
"it would be of interest to see if [we] can prove [it], but of course, it might not be true, in which case it would be even more impressive to prove it" -- Bill Gasarch
"from the perspective of parsing, this has two chief drawbacks: 1. it doesn't work, 2. [unimportant]" -- Matt Might and Daniel Spiewak
"eat leftovers like it is tomorrow" -- me
"[we] don't need it to be ... always morally good, just ... not so evil as to merit legal abolition" -- Mathew Lu
"we would never willingly trade places with them, [but] they [may] have [something] left worth respecting" -- Leon Kass
"Jews : Christians :: Kabbalah : Latin etymologic arguments" -- me
"do it in the morning, for if you love it, that's great, and if you hate it, at least you ate a frog" -- me
"if you have to cheat on your ethics test, you have bigger problems to deal with than a bad grade" -- J. Wolfensberger
"i'd prefer a world without X, but given that X already exists, i will use/benefit from it" -- me
"every future former X is a former future X" -- me
"every researcher ... expects ... a simple fix, propose their own clever solution, [but] efforts to turn these clever solutions into perfect results have always failed" -- Pierre Benard and Aaron Hertzmann
"we know the window firstly by its dirt" -- me
"if people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is" -- John von Neumann
"i think something is either wrong with you, or wrong with me for thinking there is something wrong with you" -- friend of Xe Iaso
"may we all grow so much in character that we come to regret the things we say today" -- Isaac Schlueter
"a student said 'i have removed all bias from the model', [the master replied] 'how do you know?', 'i checked', 'with what?'" -- Claude Mythos Preview in System Card
"how far is it from east to west? a day's journey for the sun" -- Ali bin Abi Talib
"don't ... guess, [but do it] with logic ... if you're wrong, it's fine, because if you got there thru a fault of logic, you will change the logic" -- Mihalis Eleftheriou
"i [pursued] the puzzle [over] the end product, so if ... someone else has already thought of [this] ... i'll be happy to hear it, [as] it means i'm on the right track" -- Britt Crawford
"if you beat around the bush, you'll never get the innermost berries" -- me
"your UI feels easy until you have to guide an old person who's never used it" -- me
"i used to spend time [on] what i had, and now i just spend time on what [exists]" -- Solène Rapenne
"write more than you read, then burn most of it" -- me
"software libraries are automated tutorials" -- me
"when the barley is gone from the pitcher, strife knocks and enters" -- Talmud, Bava Metzia 59a:9
"all Syrian cakes are forbidden, but Syrian cakes of Baitos are permitted?" -- Talmud, Chullin 108a:1
"when you [think] about it [long enough] to eat [more than your body weight] of salt, [you will grasp it]" -- Talmud, Chullin 112a:4
"a UI is well-designed [insofar as] the program behaves how the user thought it would" -- Joel Spolsky
"get used to the tool which treats your use as standard" -- me
"sometimes in order to cook someone else, you have to get cooked yourself" -- T. Dogg
"if you’re using the wrong terminology, you’ll have a hard time finding solutions" -- Danika Dakika
"don't worry about wasting the 'best idea you'll ever have'; making it real will make you better at coming up with better ideas" -- Tim Blais
"ideally, a function should do one thing, [but] if a function has an else statement in it, it is now by definition ... doing two things" -- Jamezs Gladney
"if you keep talking for long enough, you will eventually be wrong" -- A. Guerra
"excellent explanation exposes exciting extrapolative expectation" -- me
"negate three human universals and you have an alien species" -- me
"lies are contagious along speech, and truth along action" -- me
"who overcomes by force has overcome but half his foe" -- John Milton
"to understand quantum spin, imagine a spinning ball, only it's not a ball, and it's not spinning" -- A. Frost quoting another
"self-control ... is the the granddaddy of first-world problems" -- Daniel Reeves