Brian Sholis

- “Text interfaces are much easier for machines to use. And as more work is done autonomously by the workflows we teach machines to perform, text interfaces are starting to matter just as much as human ones.”

- “It seems like the quantified self movement is about our relationship with time, about the fact that we don’t know how much we exercised or what we ate, we can’t really perceive ourselves mechanically and in a world where there are so many units of time all at once, where there are so many timeframes. It’s really easy to lose track of when you... See more

- "Review drift happens whenever the context of review differs from the context of use. … If the context of review is typically short-term, then companies are incentivized to optimize for short-term satisfaction, even at the cost of long-term quality."

* “You imagine that you are fighting against the mob, but actually you are becoming a part of it. Within the mob there is no justice and no argument and no reasoning, no space for inquiry or investigation. The only good move is not to play.”

* "[Writing] should feel like work rather than labor."

- “The way we talk about relevance suggests that it is a quality a work possesses, something an author has engineered or achieved, an accomplishment. This, too, seems wrong to me. Relevance may have more to do with the audience; it is a quality of our reading at least as much as an attribute of what we read.”

- "Rather than applying the traditional object oriented approach of wrapping a consumer around a product; instead by identifying every opportunity to establish a brand as a cultural institution (that serves the public in it’s operation), the brand consistently fortifies an ethical and moral foundation from which to exist."

* “When you get on a plane and travel you go 15 heartbeats per mile. That is, in the time it takes to travel a mile in flight your heart beats 15 times. On a train your heart might beat 250 times per mile. And we count this up and we make sense of it. We’re constantly switching accelerations; we’re jumping between time frames. That’s what we’re... See more

- “Modern software workflows cross application and service boundaries all the time. Textual interfaces provide an enforceable, rigorous contract between services and applications that can act as the interfaces for apps to integrate with external services, in a way that visual interfaces can’t.”