Hope in Source

The seed needs to be extremely high quality. The seed of the idea, and then it'll produce the fruit of your project.

I see patterns often in that light as being a way to speak to the universe or a way for the universe to speak to us, in the patterns.

It's this idea that technology gives us this illusion of control, and we're continuing to move in that direction. But much of being a Christian is about the giving up of control.

A city is a medium, but the internet is a different medium where it just happens to be one of the primary theaters where human nature plays out today.

When we go for the most efficient method or tool or device or whatever, there's often no way of even accounting for what you're losing.

How can the Church sort of be the kind of wire cutters for this chain linked fence that we call hopelessness?

Authentic religion is full of ambiguity. It's full of the unknown.

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.

Surprises is what you can't see coming. It comes from beyond the horizon that you inevitably will establish. And if you can't be surprised, that's really the end.

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.

If ministry ought to be offered freely, and not given with reciprocity, expecting something in return, then it ought to be offered with a free license, provided that someone is conscious enough to think about licensing.

The gospel is offered freely and that's kind of what makes it distinctive from what's offered in many religions of the world. By your own effort, you earn righteousness, but Christianity is unique in that what it offers is entirely free.

Silence is a critical part of human communication. It's meaningful. Two bodies in proximity being silent before one another are still having a kind of meaningful exchange as it were between the two of them.

Do I live in such a way that I am prepared to be surprised? By my circumstances, by the world, by people. If I only ever think about my self given goals, I'm inhabiting the world in such a way that I'm not able to see what may be there.

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.

Maybe the answer is not more, but less. Or differently configured.

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.

We sort of deliberately create a sort of shifting sands that we then build on. It's kind of hilarious when you look at it from that distance.

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.

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.

I see reality overall as being kind of fractal, where you have patterns that repeat on every scale. And that's kind of how I think of the core symbolism of Christianity.

Christian history and Christian conceptions of time is both cyclical and linear. It's a spiral.

A pot and a pan suggests how you should use it if it's designed well. So it has both embodied knowledge and external knowledge in it. The artifact teaches you how to use itself in a certain way.

In the capitalist cosmology of this system, the reward is money instead of salvation. If we're going to call American capitalism a religious belief system in itself, which wouldn't be too difficult to argue, it is that your eternal salvation is you become a millionaire and buy a Ferrari.

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.

To simply look at the world is not to see it. And so we need to learn to see, and part of that I think involves the learning to name the world.

The proposition that there should be limits is a kind of modern heresy. It goes against something 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.

Content and presentation are always inseparable. And often when you do this naive translation of stuff that's in a physical medium into your computer screen, you lose a lot of important parts of the presentation.

Inhabiting is the best way to maintain a building alive.

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.

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.

A lot of the way we can frame our purpose as human beings is to be sub-creators and sub-restorers of Shalom.

I purposely want it so that between episodes, people have that context. So it almost feels like episodes of a TV show where you're assuming that people for the most part have read the previous one.

I talked to family and friends who aren't online. For them the small scale is the only scale. So I'm like, let me go back to doing that. It's like, wait, nobody says I can't go back to doing that.

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. But the way that we treat our knowledge is very close source.

People don't know that git is only 15 years old. There was a time before git. But it also means that five and 15 years from now, we would be doing completely different things.

It is a celebration, if you will, of retro computing. I was born in the early '90s. So I grew up playing games on Windows 98. Really, my first time on the computer was Windows 98.

All dirt is contextual. It all just depends on where we draw the boundaries.

If the thing that makes gift exchange means something to us, if we lose that direct social relationship, that's what threatens it maybe. That's what makes the economy not quite function the way we wish it would.

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.

As conservators and archivists, we're kind of tethered to these technologies that we don't have much control over. We can't tell Firefox, don't deprecate this thing because this artwork depends on it.

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.

In archives, it's often materials that only exist in this single place, in this single instance. So it's that uniqueness and the rare quality of things that makes them particularly special.

You can watch all the basketball you want, but you're going to have to actually go out and play to actually develop some kind of mastery.

If you read, you have no idea what someone is like. You might get some sense by how they write and what they choose to write about, but you're often surprised when you see them in person.

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 a burn rate, we don't have a runway. That relieves us from having to always rush.

When you are working on something that has no history burden, there's no obligation or anything, you're much more free to just let your creativity lead to whatever you want, where it wants to go.

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.

Boundaries are always most compassionate if set early.

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.

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.

The young can access information but wisdom comes with time because the whole thing about learning and an organic system is that it's gonna get to know you as you get to know it and it's gonna leave its mark on you.

The secret to a very long-lasting relationship is having some part of that person that you don't fully know.

Being guided by your own intrinsic motivation to contribute at whatever level feels right is sort of like, the ultimate authority that you're submitting to or letting yourself be guided by.

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

It's really important for a community to act as though everyone is watching because you don't know who might have stumbled upon your project and was thinking about contributing and then they saw something and then it just put them off and then they left.

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.

There's something intangible about a maintainer, where your level of commitment is strong enough that you're going up or down with the ship.

We have habits that affect how we actually live and what we believe, and sometimes what we think we believe isn't what we end up doing because we don't practice it.