22 Ellen Ullman Quotes on Humor, The Bug and By Blood - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous Ellen Ullman quotes. There are more than 22 quotes in our Ellen Ullman quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Ellen Ullman wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Humor, The Bug and By Blood

I used to have dreams in which I was overhearing conversations I had to program. Once, I had to program two people making love. In my dream they sweated and tumbled while I sat with a cramped hand writing code. The couple went from gentle caresses to ever-widening passions, and I despaired as I tried desperately to find a way to express the act of love in the C computer language.

This is what makes them good engineers. Perfectionism: incinerating perfectionism.

Debugging: what an odd word. As if “bugging” were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for some period of time, normally longer than the time it takes to design and write the code in the first place, the programmer tries to remove the mistakes.

In this privatized world, what sort of “cultural” conversation can there be? What can one of us possibly say to another about our experience except “Today I visited the museum of me, and I liked it.

I’m an engineer for the same reason anyone is an engineer: a certain love for the intricate lives of things, a belief in a functional definition of reality. I do believe that the operational definition of a thing – how it works – is its most eloquent self-expression.

People who have no choice are generally unhappy. But people with too many choices are almost as unhappy as those who have no choice at all.

Code and forget, code and forget: programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.

We build our computers the way we build our cities – over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

There is a purpose of life in the nerd world, which is treating reality as code, and optimizing it. Life becomes a problem-solving activity, and the problem is some sort of lack of optimization.

Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents Quotes

I’ve managed to stay in a perpetual state of learning only by maintaining what I think of as a posture of ignorant humility. This humility is as mandatory as arrogance… There is only one way to deal with this humiliation: bow you head, let go of the idea that you know anything, and ask politely of this new machine “How do you wish to be operated?” If you accept your ignorance, once you really admit to yourself that everything you know is now useles, the new machine will be good to you and tell you: here is how to operate me.

Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents Quotes

I've managed to stay in a perpetual state of learning only by maintaining what I think of as a posture of ignorant humility.

Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents Quotes

The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.

Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents Quotes

The therapist could not budge the patient from her syllogism. She replayed it throughout the hour, 'stuck in a single organization of events.' Seeing it from the other side (from behind the wall, as an observer), I understood the obsessive quality of such an attachment, something comforting in holding on to a smug, all-seeing knowledge, even a sad or hurtful one; something that let the patient control the precise amount of pain she administered to herself.

By Blood Quotes

The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-it notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer.

Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents Quotes

I believed my motivations were clear: to help the patient see the pattern that had been imposed upon her, this endless repetition of being selected yet judged to be not exactly what was wanted, a purchase the buyer wished to return.

By Blood Quotes

I had this idea we would have ordered some good champagne, launched toast after toast to our humanity, which after all had created everything: the opportunities for the bug, the bug itself, and its solution. I think now it might have changed us, softened our failures, made us feel we belonged to—had a true stake in—those lives full of code we had separately stumbled into. I like to think it would have reassured him, saved him: To know that at the heart of the problem was the ancient mystery of time. To discover that between the blinks of the machine’s shuttered eye—going on without pause or cease; simulated, imagined, but still not caught—was life.

The Bug Quotes

The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we're doing. We're good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else is densely unaware of himself.

Programming Quotes / Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents Quotes

Do I have to recite any further risks you have taken? How much you have not conformed? How much internal bravery this implies?

By Blood Quotes

But now what? Is this a ticket to a new understanding of my life, or a bomb that's going to blow up everything?Consider one more possibility: that you remain essentially the same person you were, neither new nor destroyed.

By Blood Quotes

But you can't stop knowing something, can you?

By Blood Quotes

The machine seemed to understand time and space, but it didn’t, not as we do. We are analog, fluid, swimming in a flowing sea of events, where one moment contains the next, is the next, since the notion of “moment” itself is the illusion. The machine—it—is digital, and digital is the decision to forget the idea of the infinitely moving wave, and just take snapshots, convincing yourself that if you take enough pictures, it won’t matter that you’ve left out the flowing, continuous aspect of things. You take the mimic for the thing mimicked and say, Good enough. But now I knew that between one pixel and the next—no matter how densely together you packed them—the world still existed, down to the finest grain of the stuff of the universe. And no matter how frequently that mouse located itself, sample after sample, snapshot after snapshot—here, now here, now here—something was always happening between the here’s. The mouse was still moving—was somewhere, but where? It couldn’t say. Time, invisible, was slipping through its digital now’s.

The Bug Quotes

Debugging: what an odd word. As if "bugging" were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for some period of time, normally longer than the time it takes to design and write the code in the first place, the programmer tries to remove the mistakes.

Humor Quotes Nerdy Quotes The Bug Quotes