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Russia’s attack on Ukraine represents a demand for a new world order
"If the sanctions really did push Russia down, the result would tend to push the whole world economy toward collapse, because the rest of the world is extremely dependent upon Russia’s fossil fuel exports."
"Energy represents the value of work already done as well as the potential of work which can be done."
"The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results good and bad as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism."
"It’s a world that demands you become comfortable with a lot of things not working, lots of things failing, and constant disappointment, because “success” means you tried ten things and eight of them fail miserably but two change your life."
"The key part is that low expectations and accepting frequent losses increase the odds of sticking around long enough to eventually be right enough to make up for it, and then some."
"Low expectations don’t make you depressed – they do the opposite, making little gains feel amazing while bad news feels normal."
"But imagine the tragedy of unbelievable progress throughout your life and enjoying none of it because you expected all of it."
"Thus any engineer worth her salt soon learns to be paranoid of code growth. She assumes, correctly, that whenever she ceases to be vigilant, the code will get itself into trouble."
"If we want to finish the refactoring project Darwin started 150 years ago — to fix up the holes left by removing God from our worldview — we can't just continue to apply mechanical thinking. If we do, it will seem like we're making progress, but eventually we'll reach a dead end where it becomes clear (if it hasn't already) that there are deeper structural problems, and further opportunistic fixes won't get the thing to compile."
"So, in short, a helpful strategy for becoming a magician: Surround yourself with people who look like magicians to you. Then imagine yourself as one, older and wiser, in great detail. Imagine yourself as the person you would be afraid to say you want to be out loud to others (because it seems so ridiculously impossible right now). Write it down in great clarity and detail, then forget it. And let the part of your subconscious mind that still remembers lead you to becoming the things you want, and maybe, years later, check if it did."
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