You mean you don't stage the software?" I asked him. "You don't test it?" "Why should we? Everything we do is live all the time, always new, minute by minute.This is the Web! Code it, post it, run it, change it, run it again.

We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

Meanwhile, the original programmers will have left, and their replacements -- believing they understand the code -- will make some truly spectacular errors, mistakes that will suddenly make everything completely stop working for a while. So that what had seemed to be a descending curve of bugs, a fall toward the ever-receding zero, will reveal itself as the shape of another equation altogether: a line of relentlessly rising, bug-counts climbing in an endless battle against infinity.

Computers have no idea what goes on outside of them except what humans tell them.