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" I like the little semi-competencies of human beings, I realize. Governance, after all, is a messy business, a world of demi-solutions and compromise, where ideals are tarnished regularly. "

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" I don't know where anyone ever got the idea that technology, in and of itself, was a savior. Like all human-created 'progress,' computers are problematic, giving and taking away. "

Ellen Ullman

Progress

Giving

Computers

" After we have put our intimate secrets and credit card numbers online, what can prevent us from putting our elections there as well? "

" When I hear the word 'disruption,' in my mind, I think of all these people in the middle who were earning a living. We will sweep away all that money they were earning, and we will move that to the people at the top. "

" When you lose your Visa card, you get a new card with a new number, and any new charges with the old number are blocked. Why can't we do the same with Social Security numbers? "

" If you've ever watched someone who is a mother talk on the phone, feed the dog, bounce the baby, it's just astounding to see someone manage, more or less well, to do all those things. But on a computer, multitasking is really binary. The task is either in the foreground, or it's not. "

" I broke into the ranks of computing in the early 1980s, when women were just starting to poke their shoulder pads through crowds of men. There was no legal protection against 'hostile environments for women.' "

" The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does. "

" Programmers seem to be changing the world. It would be a relief, for them and for all of us, if they knew something about it. "

" Reading code is like reading all things written: You have to scribble, make a mess, remind yourself that the work comes to you through trial and error and revision. "

" I think that focusing all experiences through the lens of the Internet is an example of not being able to see history through the eyes of others, to be so enamored of one's present time that one cannot see that the world was once elsewise and was not about you. "

" I don't like the idea that Facebook controls how people express themselves and changes it periodically according to whatever algorithms they use to figure out what they should do or the whim of some programmer or some CEO. That bothers me a great deal. "

" I came of technical age with UNIX, where I learned with power-greedy pleasure that you could kill a system right out from under yourself with a single command. "

" I feel the best villains are the ones you have feelings for. "

" There is always one more bug to fix. "

" I won't use Twitter. Twitter posts are thought-farts. I don't care about unconsidered thoughts of the moment. "

" The act of voting, to put it in computing terms, is a question of user interface. "

" The world of programmers is not going to change on its own. "

" Even simple fixes can bring the whole system down. "

" The brain is plastic, continuously changing its organization. "

" Watching a program run is not as revealing as reading its code. "

" People talk about computer programmers as if computers are our whole lives. That's simply not true. "

" I think many people have wonderful stories inside them and the talent to tell those stories. But the writing life, with its isolation and uncertain outcomes, keeps most from the task. "

" I fear for the world the Internet is creating. "

" It is one thing for an artist to experiment on a canvas, but it's entirely different to experiment on a living creature. "

" It's possible to let technology absorb what we know and then re-express it in intricate mechanisms - parts and circuit boards and software objects - mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected. "

" Human thinking can skip over a great deal, leap over small misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the attempts to see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or background. "

" Closed environments dominated the computing world of the 1970s and early '80s. An operating system written for a Hewlett-Packard computer ran only on H.P. computers; I.B.M. controlled its software from chips up to the user interfaces. "

" With all the attention given to the personal computer, it's hard to remember that other companion machine in the room - the printer. "

" Introduced in the 1960s, multitasking is an engineering strategy for making computers more efficient. Human beings are the slowest elements in a system. "

" I think storytelling in general is how we really deeply know things. It's ancient. "