“If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?”
— Seymour Cray
"... AI won't replace people, but maybe people that use AI will replace people that don't."
- Andrew Ng, 2024
"My Favorite Programming Language is Solder."
- Steve Ciarcia
Also atrributed to Bob Pease, Terry Pratchett, and others
"Every year there are 200,000 Chinese engineering
graduates, and they don’t know what we know. We can solve problems they cannot.”
- Robert A. Pease, Analog Circuits: World Class Designs, 2008
"... there's no patent on intellectual capability."
- Jim Williams, Interview with Bob Dobkin and Jim Williams April 19, 2006
Silicon Genesis: Oral Histories of Semiconductor Technology
"I may be
the only person at an electronics flea market who will pay more for the busted stuff!"
- Jim Williams, The Importance of Fixing,
The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design
"No one believes an analysis – except the person who did it.
Everyone believes a test – except the person who did it."
- ???
‘‘The best way to predict the future is to
invent it.’’
- Alan Kay
“Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.”
- Henry Petroski
"engineering ... is the art of doing that well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion."
- Arthur M. Wellingtony, The Economic Theory of the Location of Railways
"Engineer - the man who can do for a reasonable cost what
another would expend a fortune on"
- Rutherford Aris, Vector, Tensors and the Basic Equations of Fluid Mechanics
“In God we trust. All others bring data.”
- Bo Lojek, History of Semiconductor Engineering
"Research is when you don't know what you're doing."
- ???
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey
The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren’t there.
- C. Gordon Bell
"When you test you find something is wrong."
- Donald Trump (May 14, 2020, about the COVID tests)
I would rather have a general who was lucky than one who was good.
- Eric Johns (October 1988), U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings: 37
“If an expert says something can be done he is probably correct, but if he says it is impossible then consider getting another opinion.”
- Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
- Alan Kay
The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. […] Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.
Brooks's Law:
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
The Second-System:
This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs.
- Brooks, The Mythical Man Month
... this was going to be one of these Onion Syndrome deals - you peel off a couple layers, and cry; then you peel off a couple more layers, and cry some more.
- Bob Pease, What's All This Ground Noise Stuff, Anyhow?
Thinking is recommended. Heck, thinking is required.
- Bob Pease, Troubleshooting Analog Circuits
... a little known tenet of precision op amp circuits: Williams's Rule. Williams's Rule is simple: always invert (except when you can't).
- Jim Williams, Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science, and Personalities
"Any idiot can count to ONE ..."
- Quoted by Samuel Wilensky in Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science, and Personalities
(maybe attributed to Bob Wildar)
Anyone can build a bridge that stands up, but only an engineer can build a bridge that just barely stands up.
- ????
"A user interface is like a joke – if you have to explain it, it's not that good."
- ????
In software, debugging is harder than writing code. If you write the code as clever as you can, then you are not smart enough to debug it.
- ????
All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection, except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.
-????
... practicing what was called "the mushroom theory of management." ... defined it as follows: "Put 'em in the dark, feed 'em shit, and watch 'em grow."
- Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine
Hardware eventually fails. Software eventually works.
-Michael Hartung
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