Keoni's Recommended

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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.
• Listen to what people do and say. Actually listen to what people do and say.
• Gifts of provenance and providence belong to all.

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

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

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."
• "My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like."
• "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
• "Killing's easier than you think; you just have to forget how sweet the sugar is."
• "I'm so sick of all these people, but I'm scared to be alone."
• "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."
• "Malcolm X never lived to see the government fall, But the state he opposed made him a stamp, And that's the best you can hope for if you never give up, Your enemies will teach your corpse to dance"
• "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."
• "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"

Lessons on biotech automation

• The flywheel must keep turning.
• Unmeasured reliability is not acceptable; measured unreliability is acceptable.
• Optimize for iteration.
• Work backwards using a prototyped full pipeline and controls rather than forward, troubleshooting as you go. When working backwards, things that work will naturally fit into place, and it is often much cheaper.
• The flywheel must keep turning.

Software I love

• (neo)vim
• golang
• lua / teal
• st
• i3
• OpenBSD
• sqlite