> As a memorable warning sign says: "The machine has no brain. Use your own." First lesson of the first day of the first year in my CS degree -- the professor

> As a memorable warning sign says: "The machine has no brain. Use your own." First lesson of the first day of the first year in my CS degree -- the professor starts saying something to the effect of: "I want you to think of computers as meaningless machines doing meaningless operations on meaningless symbols". To this day, that sentence is a massive influence in how I think about computers and technology in general.