Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
Douglas AdamsRead
We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.
Interpretation
What this quote means
We often face challenges with technology that complicate simple tasks, as we desire functionality over complexity.
Douglas Adams highlights the frustration many people feel towards technology that promises convenience but often requires more effort to understand and use. His quote suggests that true progress in technology should prioritize usability and practicality, rather than being entangled with excessive features that complicate everyday life.
Themes
TechnologyFunctionalityUsabilityManualComplexity
In practice
Example use cases
During a tech workshop discussing user-friendly design, this quote could illustrate the importance of simplicity in technology.
More from Douglas Adams
All quotes →"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "Ask a glass of water."
Douglas AdamsRead
Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. [...] Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.
Douglas AdamsRead
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
Douglas AdamsRead
What the computer in virtual reality enables us to do is to recalibrate ourselves so that we can start seeing those pieces of information that are invisible to us but have become important for us to understand.
Douglas AdamsRead
Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality.
Douglas AdamsRead
Similar quotes
It's hard to pay attention these days because of multiple affects of the information technology nowadays. You tend to develop a faster, speedier mind, but I don't think it's necessarily broader or smarter.
Robert RedfordRead
When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance.
Nikola TeslaRead
So what used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.
Ray KurzweilRead
Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From tortured code to incomprehensible data layouts, the results of obsessing about speed or memory or disk usage at the expense of transparency and simplicity are everywhere. They spawn innumerable bugs and cost millions of man-hours - often, just to get marginal gains in the use of some resource much less expensive than debugging time
Eric S. RaymondRead
If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
Brian KernighanRead
A newspaper is complete. It is finished, sure of itself, certain. By contrast, digital news is constantly updated, improved upon, changed, moved, developed - an ongoing conversation and collaboration. It is living, evolving, limitless, relentless.
Katharine VinerRead