Brian Sholis

- “Textual interfaces make automation trivial, and automation tools much easier to build.”

- "But to listen is to act; of that, there’s no doubt. It takes effort and doesn’t happen by default."

Using the enforced idleness that comes after major surgery, Sven Birkerts meditates on how time contracts and dilates and what that means for a sense of self.

- “In a just world, a college like Swarthmore simply wouldn’t exist. The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene.”

- “What is our role in the world? To what extent is our institution a vehicle for political progress as opposed to academic excellence? Rational decision-making is impossible if these questions are left hanging, but at the same time it’s not hard to see why nobody tries to resolve them.”

- “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.”

- “The desire to invert a structure of injustice—to inflict on those we take to be the bearers of privilege the disregard they have inflicted on others—is one I very much understand, one I feel in myself. But it is always ethically suspect to speak of any human experience as irrelevant to our common human experience; it is always, let me go further... See more

- “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.”

- “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.”