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Philosophy

• What you do is all that matters. Philosophy is irrelevant except for the actions that result from it, and study is a poor subsitute for curiosity.
• We ignore the beautiful, fractal detail that is everywhere, all the time. Remember this any time you are sad or you believe you are correct.

Important Essays

The 2003 synthetic biology study

The Completeness of Molecular Biology

Biosimplicity: Engineering Simple Life

Molecular engineering: An approach to the development of general capabilities for molecular manipulation

The Use of Knowledge in Society

The Bitter Lesson

The Hacker Manifesto

The Joy of Writing

Awesome books

Nonfiction

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

Man's Search for Meaning

Fiction

The Dispossessed

The Stranger

Inspiring poems

The Pomegranate

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Listeners

Quotes (from other people)

• "I'd rather be a hypocrite than the same person forever."
• "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."
• "One must choose one's enemies well, for one will soon be just like them."
• "We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory."
• "One is too much, two is not enough."
• "Some patients can't be saved, but that burden is not on you."
• "If you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money."
• "If we don't study the mistakes of the future we're doomed to repeat them for the first time."/s
• "Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy."
• "A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
• "Whereas this version of romance is hypo-expressive, centered on the tragicomic inability to say what one means to say, despite desperately wanting to."
• "I am moved by fancies that are curled, Around these images, and cling: the notion of some infinitely gentle, Infinitely suffering thing."
• "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
• "Frankly I had enjoyed the war."
• "God isn't dead, but I'll get that bastard some day!"
• "It is useful to appear useless in the eyes of those who intend to misuse us."
• "Advice is a form of nostalgia."
• "Fragrance lingers in the hand that gives roses."
• "The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces. This is also the prime location for screwing it up."
• "You can't get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees."
• "The kingdom of God exists in our voices"
• "To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour."
• "Go to a new community where the race of progress is just beginning, where production and exchange are still rude and inefficient. The best house may be only a log cabin; the richest person must work every day. There is not enough wealth to enable any class to live in ease and luxury. No one makes an easy living, or even a very good one — yet everyone can make a living. While you won't find wealth and all its effects, neither will you find beggars. No one willing and able to work lives in fear of want. Though there is no luxury, there is no poverty."
• "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
• "The love I desire exists because I am full of it"
• "If art doesn't make you feel anything, make your own art, and feel something."
• "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it."
• "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

Lessons on biotech automation

• In biotechnology, the most dangerous protocol is not one that doesn't work; it is one that unreliably works.
• Optimize for iteration.
• The flywheel must keep turning.

Software I love

• (neo)vim
• golang
• lua / teal
• st
• i3
• OpenBSD
• Alpine linux
• sqlite
• llm.c