Peter Hunt Welch:

Not a single living person knows how everything in your five-year-old MacBook actually works.

Quinn Norton:

Your average piece-of-shit Windows desktop is so complex that no one person on Earth really knows what all of it is doing, or how.

Courtney Nash:

We have reached a point in software development where we can no longer understand, see, or control all the component parts, both technical and social/organizational -- they are increasingly complex and distributed. The business of software itself has become a distributed, complex system. How do we develop and manage systems that are too large to understand, too complex to control, and that fail in unpredictable ways?

Tom Whipple:

In a world controlled by algorithms, sometimes the most apparently innocuous of processes can have unintended consequences.

Mike Loukides:

The bottom line is that, in the security game, there's no one to trust. All trust is misplaced, and blind faith in any software provider will end up in misery.

Quinn Norton:

It's hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire.

Computers, and computing, are broken.

Written by people with either no time or no money, most software gets shipped the moment it works well enough to let someone go home and see their family. What we get is mostly terrible.

Scott Rich:

Why is it that modular reuse seems to work so well all of a sudden? ... The average programmer in communities like Node.js or Ruby is comfortable turning to the Lazyweb for building blocks for software. ... a few minutes of searching almost always produces candidate modules to solve a problem ...