People From Seattle

"Programs today get very fat; the enhancements tend to slow the programs down because people put in special checks. When they want to add some feature, they'll just stick in these checks without thinking how they might slow the thing down."

"The worst programs are the ones where the programmers doing the original work don't lay a solid foundation, and then they're not involved in the program in the future."

"Unfortunately, many programs are so big that there is no one individual who really knows all the pieces, and so the amount of code sharing you get isn't as great. Also, the opportunity to go back and really rewrite something isn't quite as great, because there's always a new set of features that you're adding on to the same program."

"Bill Gates [in his] new book, "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster" [asserts that if] humanity is to win the great race between development and degradation . . . green innovation must accelerate. . . . [G]iven the pressing need to decarbonise the global economy, says Mr Gates, "we have to force an unnaturally speedy transition" [to carbon-free energy, and the] linchpin of his argument is the introduction of a meaningful carbon price to account for the externalities involved in using dirty energy. . . . Ultimately his book is a primer on how to reorganise the global economy so that innovation focuses on the world’s gravest problems. It is a powerful reminder that if mankind is to get serious about tackling them, it must do more to harness the one natural resource available in infinite quantity — human ingenuity."

"In an interview with The Economist last month, Bill Gates stated that millions of people in developing countries would die before the COVID-19 pandemic was over. He noted, importantly, that 90 percent of the deaths would not result from the virus itself, but from "indirect" effects. These include most prominently the economic impact of the pandemic, as well as other causes such as the overwhelming of medical and public health resources, which increases fatalities from other diseases. Gates was not exaggerating at all. It's easy to see how this horror will materialize, if we project forward from the current situation. The World Food Program projects that the number of people facing acute hunger will nearly double this year, from 135 to 260 million."

"In May 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation to 'reinvent education.' Cuomo called Gates a visionary and argued that the pandemic has created 'a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates'] ideas...all these buildings, all these physical classrooms-why with all the technology you have?' In fact, Gates has been trying to dismantle the public education system of the United States for two decades."

"What J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were to the Age of Robber Barons, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett, as well as digital moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are to the contemporary age of the rule of the 1%. Then as now, the super-rich used governments to write laws and rules to allow them to accumulate unlimited wealth; then as now, creating monopolies by enclosing the commons and killing competition is the strategy for becoming the 1%."

"[Gates] apparently has made more money than anyone else his age, ever, in any business."

"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates. Gates is a good man."

"Bill Gates is a monocle and a Persian cat away from being the villain in a James Bond movie."

"Probably the most dangerous and powerful industrialist of our age."

"He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry."

"Well, it seems to me that he did have an education to get there. It happened to be mine, not his."

"There never was a chip, it is said, that Bill Gates couldn't slow down with a new batch of features."

"It's a business I don't know anything about, but I admire Bill Gates enormously. I know him individually, and I think he's incredible in business."

"Bill Gates is a very rich man today ... and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions."

"Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal."

"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place."

"If you're born poor it's not your fault, but if you die poor it's your fault."

"Choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it."

"A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."

"640 K ought to be enough for anybody."

"Life is not fair. Get used to it... Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one."

"Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana."

"I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years."

"We should spend the next decade focusing on the technologies, [governmental] policies and market structures that will put us on the path to eliminating greenhouse gases by 2050. It's hard to think of a better response to a miserable [year of COVID-19 disruptions during] 2020 than spending the next ten years dedicating ourselves to this ambitious goal."

"As a Consumer . . . Sign up for a green pricing program with your electric utility. . . . Reduce your home's emissions. . . . Buy an electric vehicle. . . . Try a plant-based burger."

"As a Citizen . . . Make calls, write letters, attend town halls. . . . [M]ake clear that this is an issue that will help determine how you vote. . . . Look locally as well as nationally. . . . Run for office."

"It helps to set ambitious goals and commit to meeting them, the way countries around the world did with the 2015 Paris Agreement. It’s easy to mock international agreements, but they’re part of how progress happens: If you like having an ozone layer, you can thank an international agreement called the Montreal Protocol."

"To get [the breakthroughs on the "Technologies needed" list] ready soon enough to make a difference, governments need to . . . [q]uintuple clean energy and climate-related R&D over the next decade. . . ."

"[W]ith transportation, the zero-carbon future is basically this: Use electricity to run all the vehicles we can, and get cheap alternative fuels for the rest. In the first group are passenger cars and trucks, light and medium trucks, and buses. In the second group are long-distance trucks, trains, airplanes, and container ships."

"Deploying today’s renewables and improving transmission couldn’t be more important. . . . Unless we use large amounts of nuclear energy . . . every path to zero in the United States will require us to install as much wind and solar power as we can build and find room for. . . . [M]ost countries aren’t as lucky as the United States when it comes to solar and wind resources. . . . That’s why, even as we deploy, deploy, deploy solar and wind, the world is going to need some new clean electricity inventions too."

"When it comes to climate change, I know innovation isn’t the only thing we need. But we cannot keep the earth livable without it. Techno-fixes are not sufficient, but they are necessary."

"I [have become] convinced of three things: 1. To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to get to zero {net emissions by the year 2050}. 2. We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter. 3. And we need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way."

"There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero. Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year. . . . Zero is what we need to aim for [by the year 2050 to] stop the warming and avoid the worst effects of climate change . . . ."

"Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds."

"We are running the worst testing system, in terms of who gets access to it, of any country"

"40,000 people came out of China, 'cause we didn't ban the rest of them citizens from coming back, so we created this rush and we didn't have the ability to quarantine those people, and that seeded the disease here"

"...this has been a mismanaged situation every step of the way. It's shocking. It's unbelievable — the fact that we would be among the worst in the world."

"We would like every country to be self-sufficient so that both in terms of running a good primary health care system and funding a good primary health care system, it's all OK, and they just participate in regional bodies that have standby capacity to deal with these things. Africa, of all the places in the world, is the furthest behind on being able to do that. And through aid, health and health systems in Africa have improved very, very dramatically."

"We're no longer in the days where everything is super well crafted. But at the heart of the programs that make it to the top, you'll find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really know what they were doing."

"The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree."

"You've got to be willing to read other people's code, and then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong..."

"The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system."

"One of the best things I read was an 1889 essay by Andrew Carnegie called The Gospel of Wealth. It makes the case that the wealthy have a responsibility to return their resources to society, a radical idea at the time that laid the groundwork for philanthropy as we know it today."

"People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that "he died rich" will not be one of them."

"The picture of the world's richest man killing the world's poorest children is not a pretty one."

"Within 10 years, AI will replace many doctors and teachers—humans won’t be needed ‘for most things’. It’s very profound and even a little bit scary — because it’s happening very quickly, and there is no upper bound,."

"India is an example of a country where there's plenty of things that are difficult there -- the health, education, nutrition is improving and they are stable enough and generating their own government revenue enough that it's very likely that 20 years from now people will be dramatically better off and it's kind of a laboratory to try things that then when you prove them out in India, you can take to other places. And so our biggest non-US office for the Foundation is in India and the most number of pilot roll out things we're doing anywhere in the world are with partners in India. If you go there and you've never been you might think whoa this is a chaotic place and you know you're not used to so many levels of income all being on the street at the same time but you will get a sense of vibrancy."

"So the idea of being able to explain something in a succinct form is such a cool thing, and it requires you to know a field so well."