#machines

Joshua Joseph has no real hatred of modern technology - he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces, and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system....For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one that deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which humans use to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own little ecosystems. ↗

— Nick Harkaway

#machines #moderism #technology #life

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets. ↗

— William S. Burroughs

#naked-lunch #thinking #william-burroughs #introspection

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines - TV, telephone, cars - were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life. ↗

— Ben Fountain

#american #cars #come #completely #computers

No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does. ↗

— Henri Poincare

#know #machines #mathematician #more #need

The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers. ↗

— Eric S. Raymond

#hackers #machines #new #opened #others

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types. ↗

— Eric S. Raymond

#become #been #compiler #could #different

There were sometimes from forty to sixty English machines, but unfortunately the Germans were often in the minority. With them quality was more important than quantity. ↗

— Manfred von Richthofen

#forty #germans #important #machines #minority

The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. ↗

— Pico Iyer

#brighter #came #cannot #central #healthier

We believe that if men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work. ↗

— John F. Kennedy

#believe #invent #machines #men #new

The days when you needed amazing Silicon Graphics machines to run animation software are gone now. ↗

— Dave Rowntree

#animation #days #gone #graphics #machines