I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” – because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one’s own “brain voices”.
ALAN KAYAny company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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And to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.
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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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It’s all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
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Any medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
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Bad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically.
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The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
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The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide.
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If you’re not failing 90% of the time, then you’re probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
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Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc.
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As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture.
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Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.
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And when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.
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Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can’t criticize anything.
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Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
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The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
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The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
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The result is – document destruction – we’re really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we’re going to come to.
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
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When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
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There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
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I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view.
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But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
ALAN KAY