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Title: Reamde Authors: Neal Stephenson Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 36 Date: 2026-01-20 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
Waging war on his enemies had been Sokolovâs habit and his profession for a long time, but being chivalrous to everyone else was simply a basic tenet of having your shit together as a human and as a man.
Richardâs ex-girlfriends were long gone, but their voices followed him all the time and spoke to him, like Muses or Furies. It was like having seven superegos arranged in a firing squad before a single beleaguered id, making sure he didnât enjoy that last cigarette.
Each death meant that a particular set of ideas and perceptions and reactions was gone from the world, apparently forever, and served as a reminder to Richard that one day his ideas and perceptions and reactions would be gone too.
âAs hire As, and Bs hire Cs,â the point being that as long as you continued to recruit only the very best people, they would attract others, but as soon as you let your standards slip, the second-raters would begin to seine up third-raters to act as their minions and advance their agendas.
People who had job titles and business cards could say easily where they worked and what they did for a living, but those who worked for themselves, doing things of a complicated nature, learned over time that it was not worth the trouble of supplying an explanation if its only purpose was to make small talk. Better to just go directly to airline travel.
Tags:complexity,work
âDe gustibus non est disputandum.â
Note: âIn matters of taste, there can be no disputesâ (literally âabout taste, it should not be disputedâ).
Tags:favorite
That, as far as she could tell, was the purpose of the religion she had been brought up in: it made people feel better when really horrible things happened, and it offered a repertoire of ceremonies that were used to add a touch of class to such goings-on as shacking up with someone and throwing dirt on a corpse.
The opening screen of TâRain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel.
Torrents of glowing, crystalline photos rushed across their screens, making a funny and sad contrast with the dozen or so family photographs, developed and printed through the medieval complexities of chemical photography, laboriously framed, and hung on the walls of the room.
Richard fell silent for a while, wondering whether there was any way that he could delegate to an underling all meetings whose sole purpose was for the people he was meeting with to demonstrate that they were doing their jobs.
Tags:work
He was seriously thinking that, if he survived this, he might try to launch a new venture: a vacation services provider for wealthy, hardworking people that would work by showing up at their homes without warning and abducting them.
Sokolov had spoken to them of the need to sever the loop: the loop of observing, thinking, deciding, and acting. In normal circumstances the loop was a good thing but not now; they had to act without thinking for a few moments, and only then could they observe and think and decide.
âWhy do they believe that?â âBecause we are hackers,â Csongor said, âand they have seen movies.â
Tags:lol,technology
Now Richard had a new item on his list, which, unlike Zulaâs, was a stew of nagging worries, vague intentions, and dimly perceived karmic debts that he carried around in his head.
Tags:cognition,habits,problem_solving
âBirth and death,â Chet said. âThe poles of human existence. Weâre like meridians, all beginning and ending in the same place. We spread out from the beginning and go our separate ways, over seas and mountains and islands and deserts, each telling our own story, as different as they could possibly be. But in the end we all converge and our ends are as much the same as our beginnings.â
Tags:death
To paraphrase Tolstoy, all rich places were alike, but each poor place was poor in its own way.
It was clear how he had become the leader of a sort of gang back home: not by asserting his leadership but by being so relentless in his production, evaluation, and exploitation of ideas that his friends had been left with no choice but to form up in his wake.
Tags:ideas,leadership
The first of these sentences meant that, according to the biometric sensors on Devinâs body, he had just entered into what psychologists referred to as the flow state, and he was not to be disturbed until he emerged from it of his own volition.
This was always the hard part. If you knew what was normal to the enemy, then everything became easy: you could lull them to sleep by feeding them normal, and you could scare the hell out of them by suddenly taking normal away.
Tags:fear
âYouâre just clever enough to be stupider than if you werenât clever at all,â
Tags:lol
Boys, he said, only want to know two things: who is in charge, and what are the rules.
Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between those two ways of dying.
Tags:culture,death,perspective
You laugh, Richard had once said to a colleague, after theyâd visited the place, but all heâs doing is applying scientific management principles to a hundred-million-dollar production facility (i.e., Devin) with an astronomical profit margin.
To which Richard responded, with equal if not greater patience, that he still didnât give a shit because this was ultimately about marketing, and the crazy apps that random people on the Internet were writing were much better than anything he, Richard, could ever come up with.
âTensors?â Richard had no idea what a tensor was, but he had noticed that when math geeks started throwing the word around, it meant that they were headed in the general direction of actually getting something done.
So youâve got guys here who run lathes. But they have colored Mohawks and college degrees, and they program the lathes in computer languages. I was trying to come up with a name for them. Cerulean-collar workers, maybe.â
Tags:lol,perspective,work
Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certain amount of effort that tended to remain stable over time.
Seamus had complimented him on his skill, being careful not to make it gushy or patronizing, since Csongor was not some coddled American kid who needed positive feedback all the time.
The young woman had turned toward him and thrust her pink gloves up in the air in a gesture that, from a man, meant âTouchdown!â and, from a woman, âI will hug you now!â
There are always fuckups, and there is always a goat. Sometimes the goat is you.
By the time theyâd made it to the exit, heâd decided that the Walmart was not so much a starship as an interdimensional portal to every other Walmart in the known universe, and that when they walked out the doors past the greeters they might find themselves in Pocatello or Wichita. But as it turned out they were still in Iowa.
Other people would want to sentimentalize about the old days, but the great thing about traveling with Pluto was that he only cared about you to the extent that you were interesting to him now. In that way he kept you on your toes. No aspect of the relationship could be counterfeited when it was being minted anew from moment to moment.
And while on one level the situation was, obviously, ridiculously chaotic and dangerous, the Hungarian in him said, I was wondering when I was going to end up like this.
Factory workers watching widgets stream off the assembly line, inspecting them for defects, ought to be able to metaphrase their work into something way more neuron grabbing, such as flying up a river valley on a winged steed, gazing into its limpid waters at the rocks strewn up its channel, looking for the one that contained traces of some magical ore.
THE SPACE WAS windowless. Or, if you were willing to consider giant flat-panel screens as being windows into other worlds, it was a greenhouse.
But Richard had already gone the cop route and found it not nearly as productive as driving around with a sledgehammer and retaining the services of men with oxyacetylene torches.