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Title: Snow Crash Authors: Neal Stephenson Category:#supplementals Number of Highlights: 30 Date: 2022-07-17 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world.
It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.
The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.
Tags:#perspective,#favorite
No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.
Tags:#favorite,#act,#cognition
Besides, interesting things happen along borders—transitions—not in the middle where everything is the same.
Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.
When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people’s minds.”
Tags:#religion
Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses—viruses generated from within itself.
Tags:#systems
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder—its DNA—xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.
“She doesn’t want you to understand her. She knows that’s impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.”
“See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,” Raven says.
But “snow crash” is computer lingo. It means a system crash—a bug—at such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the screen, turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard.
“The problem with you hackers is you never stop working.” “That’s what a hacker is,” Hiro says.
There are two schools: relativists and universalists. As George Steiner summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language is not the vehicle of thought but its determining medium. It is the framework of cognition. Our perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of sensations passing over that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of language is the study of the evolution of the human mind itself.”
Tags:#language
“Rife’s key realization was that there’s no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV—which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite—the people who go into the Metaverse, basically—who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.
“In many Creation myths, to name a thing is to create it.
“Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn’t get any work done,” L. Bob Rife says. “You should ask these people what they think.”
When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that’s no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.
“So the deuteronomists codified the religion. Made it into an organized, self-propagating entity,” Hiro says. “I don’t want to say virus. But according to what you just quoted me, the Torah is like a virus. It uses the human brain as a host.
You don’t respect those people very much, Y.T., because you’re young and arrogant. But I don’t respect them much either, because I’m old and wise.”
Many linguists have tried to understand Babel, the question of why human language tends to fragment, rather than converging on a common tongue.”
All philosophies are either monist or dualist. Monists believe that the material world is the only world—hence, materialists. Dualists believe in a binary universe, that there is a spiritual world in addition to the material world.”
“So the deuteronomists codified the religion. Made it into an organized, self-propagating entity,” Hiro says. “I don’t want to say virus. But according to what you just quoted me, the Torah is like a virus. It uses the human brain as a host. The host—the human—makes copies of it. And more humans come to synagogue and read it.”
“It’s like, if you—people of a certain age—would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn’t have to take these drastic measures.”
When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that’s no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.