Hope in Source

There is no inevitability as long as there's a willingness to understand what is happening.

There is this transcendent, holy mystery that we are part of and that we confront.

Technology as a whole feels like a coping mechanism to not be able to deal with our problems.

we're always trying to do things for God, but we should think about doing things with God.

people are just individually irreplaceable. Engineering is about kinda getting rid of those differences in some sense. When you engineer a system, you try to make it replicable. You try to use pieces that are interchangeable.

we delight to praise what we enjoy because it doesn't just express what we like, but also completes the enjoyment. It is its appointed consummation.

In the physical world, you can be silent and present at the same time. We could be sitting in this room together, not talking, and there would be some benefit of shared human contact there, even though there was no quote unquote content.

Everything now can just be a source of production, right? It has no integrity on its own terms except as a potential source of content.

I really do think that the way that we help people to understand hope is not merely talking about hope. That's part of it, but we just need to live as hopeful people, right. We just need to show people.

what we think is clarity and accuracy is sometimes neutering the messiness of everything.

progress is not a thought of our civilization, it's the form of our civilization. So it's not a content that we think about. It's the way that we think.

It's not so much that reality answers your questions as that it explodes them. Reality really is in the driver's seat. So it walks in and takes over.

The right is not the copyright holders as though this were physical property. The right is anyone to whom the idea comes because once it has entered their head, it is now their idea as well.

Do I live in such a way that I am prepared to be surprised? By my circumstances, by the world, by people. But if I only ever think about my self given goals, right? The goals I give myself to accomplish. You're inhabiting the world in such a way that you're not able to see what may be there. The gifts that might be there, right in your path.

How do I refuse the framing that modern technological culture offers to me, of being the one who will master and control the world. The one who sees the world as raw material for my own projects.

Ideally, we would know ourselves, like when we feel anything. When I feel emotions, when I feel like my body needs food or whatever, right. And then you could see a moment where like the app will tell me everything and then I won't need to rely on my own sense of feeling.

Losing at Tetris is basically the state of software right now where blocks are just falling into place. We don't have time, we don't have the resources to put them in the right place, so they just kind of pile up and there's kind of an explosion of kind of arbitrary complexity.

A good project idea comes out of some kind of personal history or personal relationship that you have with the concepts or with the system. It's something that not anybody could just come up with and try.

I don't think of a material reality as being like distinct from religious reality. It's just all the same thing. Maybe that's one of the things that is so intoxicating about Christianity and about faith is like becoming part of this integrated whole.

A not insignificant part of coming back to religion for me was feeling this like insufficiency of rationalism, where I felt like it really wasn't actually answering all of my questions or some of the answers felt really like incomplete, unsatisfying.

These rituals again, they're not things that we just do alongside our active remembrance. They themselves are the remembrance. It's a memorial that causes us to remember.

If you have a brain in a machine, how does it know what up and down is? And left and right, and front and back, and heavy and light? And the experience of having a body? If it doesn't have that, like it isn't capable of understanding human thought and rationality and cognition like on a fundamental level. That's a conversation that never happens in AI.

Singing a hymn that has been sung for thousands of years and you think, Oh, well, you know, it has no meaning to me, let's just not do it anymore. You're not making space for what maybe it can like teach you that you aren't consciously aware of.

One of the threats of modern tools and modern institutions is that they teach us to depend upon the products that they offer or the services they render, instead of our neighbor. Instead of another person, right, another human being. So we lose the capacity, to not just take responsibility for ourselves, but to care for one another, in this context.

The proposition that there should be limits is a kind of modern heresy. It goes against something I think, deeply ingrained in Western modernity.

I think emotions are a big deal in programming. Like I think most of the work in programming is managing your own feelings about it.

We deny completely the dimension of taking care the space we live. In a daily scale, we don't make it visible. We don't look for it. It's this blurry part of life on which we all depend.

Imagine trying to collaborate with your comment section is kind of like at the heart of why this stuff is so challenging.

The sort of turn, which I think is phenomenologically true, towards a kind of intuitional model of understanding. Sort of trusting your gut, rejecting external, believing that your desires are kind of ontologically good. All of these things are kind of natural, normal, and even rational responses to a broader question, which is you can't trust anybody else.

there's equal glory in you being a garbage woman that there is in you being like a pastor, a theologian, or like a great nonprofit worker

For them the small scale is the only scale.

By just kind of quitting you just free up your mind. They were known for Seinfeld obviously, but they also had a bunch of stuff afterwards. So I find that's pretty admirable.

Open source code is better than closed source code because there's more people looking at it. It's easy to contribute. You know, open source has clearly eaten software, right. But the way that we treat our knowledge is very close source.

I can't make a Windows 98 that's not accessible. I can't do it. That would be disgusting of me.

When the program dies, it's not when the program doesn't work, it's when the people don't understand how it works.

Patreon in a way is running under the guise of being a gift economy. All their marketing language and the way they pitch themselves is very much that we are supporting the new internet gift economy, but on the actual functional level they are pure market economy.

Our purpose is not to make something better. It's to make it as faithful to the original as possible.

That emotional reaction to technology, whether it's a digital file or a piece of software or a piece of hardware or whatever is really fascinating. It makes me hopeful, I think, for the future of how people will value their archives.

I think that it's foolish to try to make a game that pleases everyone and then you're just not doing a good job of pleasing the ... you can make everyone kind of like your game, but then you won't have people that just absolutely love it.

I think developing these core skills opens up new things. It pushes the frontier outward of what the possibilities of what you can possibly do.

People are the hardest part of software. The way I have been thinking about this for a while now is like, how can we solve the human interoperability problem, which will help improve a lot of our technical interoperability problems.

the nice thing about it being an open source project is we don't really have... we're not working for survival. I think that's the key. We don't have a burn rate, we don't have a runway. That relieves us from having to always rush.

We don't know how software gets built. It just happens.

If what you care about is having a big impact on the world, the business skills arguably did that just as much as the code. People don't just use things because they're out there.

Being firm allows you to not have that pent up aggression and be kinder overall.

You have a game that's kind of its own scientific field, where it's completely unknown at the start, it's a black box, but you can gradually start to pick away and find out what's going on with it.

We want to treat everything like a robot or a program because it's easy to reason about those things. But reality is so complicated that it actually makes more sense to treat it as living.

They substituted a living, very sophisticated, rich and subtle order, with something that was visually flashy and comprehensible, but that was outside of time and therefore dead.

You have people that are unpaid, that probably most maintainers are accidental. They didn't have experience in maintaining before. And yet, somehow you actually are able to make things happen. And in that sense this is almost surreal in a way.

through the practice of doing open source I learned to love it more.

People don't really understand why they believe what they believe, or they forgot about it because it becomes just like a what you do.

tradition is also like participatory. You have to connect to it or else it doesn't really work. You have to actually feel like you are carrying something on and feel like ownership in whatever that thing is, otherwise it's just meaningless.

The point of the tithing is to help people but it's also to help yourself. It's an opportunity for you to kind of act out that belief that your money is not yours.

If you don't actually truly believe it yourself and live it out, then how are you gonna be able to like show or convince that in anyone else?

To be in a relationship is actually to be inefficient.

If it's not ever done or there's always something else I could be doing, then how do I find a way to find my own inner quiet and be able to stand still and say, I'm doing this for me and not because I'm chasing after whatever extrinsic reward there is.

it's not because I'm devoted that I'm going. It's 'cause going will make me more devoted as well. Same with open source. Continuing to do it will make me continue to want to do it.

God already loves you, so you shouldn't have to work to get his approval, but because he loves you, you work. You're doing it out of a sense of joy or love already, instead of trying to gain it.