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Title: Snow Crash Authors: Neal Stephenson Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 30 Date: 2025-05-09 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:favorite,lol,perspective
No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.
Besides, interesting things happen along bordersâtransitionsânot in the middle where everything is the same.
Tags:problem_solving
Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.
Tags:engineering,lol,work
When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
Tags:perspective
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 peopleâs minds.â
Tags:religion
Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with virusesâviruses 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 binderâits DNAâxerox 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.
âShe doesnât want you to understand her. She knows thatâs impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.â
âSee, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,â Raven says.
But âsnow crashâ is computer lingo. It means a system crashâa bugâat 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.
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.â
Tags:cognition,language,systems
âRifeâs key realization was that thereâs no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TVâwhich is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power eliteâthe people who go into the Metaverse, basicallyâwho understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.
âIn many Creation myths, to name a thing is to create it.
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, thatâs 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.
Tags:software,technology
âSo the deuteronomists codified the religion. Made it into an organized, self-propagating entity,â Hiro says. âI donât 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 donât respect those people very much, Y.T., because youâre young and arrogant. But I donât respect them much either, because Iâm old and wise.â
Many linguists have tried to understand Babel, the question of why human language tends to fragment, rather than converging on a common tongue.â
All philosophies are either monist or dualist. Monists believe that the material world is the only worldâhence, materialists. Dualists believe in a binary universe, that there is a spiritual world in addition to the material world.â
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, thatâs 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.
Tags:hacker,software,technology
âEgypt was a civilization of stone. They made their art and architecture of stone, so it lasts forever. But you canât write on stone. So they invented papyrus and wrote on that. But papyrus is perishable. So even though their art and architecture have survived, their written recordsâtheir dataâhave largely disappeared.â
âWhat does ultima ratio regum mean?â âââThe Last Argument of Kings,âââ the Librarian says. âKing Louis XIV had it stamped onto the barrels of all of the cannons that were forged during his reign.â
But the class idea still held sway in his mind, because class is more than incomeâit has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships.
âWhat does ultima ratio regum mean?â ââThe Last Argument of Kings,â â the Librarian says. âKing Louis XIV had it stamped onto the barrels of all of the cannons that were forged during his reign.â
Now a Burbclave, thatâs the place to live. A city-state with its own constitution, a border, laws, cops, everything.
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 peopleâs minds.â
Tags:religion
This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to oneâs early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: Heâs broke and unemployed.