Most people use laptops. You want a laptop, you pick one, it comes with Windows, and it works out of the box. (Or you buy an Apple one, if you prefer that. Or a Chromebook.)
You want a laptop with Linux, good luck finding one. You have to really want Linux, because you're in for quite a bit of work finding a laptop without Windows. Then you need to pick a distro, which most people will have no clue about. Then suppose you find a laptop without Windows, it will most likely have no OS installed, and you'd have to install one. Good luck with that if you're not a technical person.
Even if you know enough to install the OS, if you want to learn how to use it or have a device that's not automatically recognised, good luck getting help. Linux is used less, so has less online help, and because it's so fractured, good luck finding the help that matches the version you have.
Then you want to install some software, and you need to research that too, because you can't run what your friends and co-workers have, and even if they do use Linux, they typically have no idea why what they suggest doesn't seem good enough for you.
By this time you've spent tons of time, and will continue to spend tons of time, that you wouldn't have spent if you just stuck to Windows (or Mac OS). If you've saved any up front money (which is doubtful), you've already paid for it with time and stress.
The only reasonable way to get into Linux as a layman is if you have a personal Linux IT person.
By the way, this also applies to desktop, although there if you custom build it you at least save some money, and you already have a clue how to install an OS. But that doesn't save you the need to do a lot of research, make sure the hardware is actually supported by Linux, and in short invest a lot more time.
In my reality, the top news on Slashdot is "14-Year-Old Earned $200,000 Playing Fortnite on YouTube". In my reality, a lot of tech news has sadly moved to videos on YouTube, and new tech YouTube channels appear almost daily. My kids watch YouTube, not TV.
> The spectre of superintelligent machines doing us harm is not just science fiction, technologists say
Okay, so what exactly is it if not just science fiction? It's a worry that seems to me to have no basis in reality. We have no indication that AI can become self aware or what might happen then.
Sure, bugs in AI systems, bad training etc., can have terrifying consequences. That's true of any computer system. Just look at the Boing 737 MAX and its insistence to crash a plane even though it's been repeatedly told not to do that.
Sure, we need to make sure that systems are fully tested, and since AI, in the form of DNNs, is becoming very common, it's important to make sure these do their jobs correctly (which won't be easy). We also need to make sure that AI isn't used for nefarious purposes, which of course we won't, because every military organisation will use AI in its systems, and because it's simply hard to control AI use and it can be quite a powerful tool. But worrying about AI becoming self aware and what happens then, that to me is simply scaremongering and avoiding the real issues. People using AI will likely hurt a lot more people than AI will ever do of its own free will.
Honestly, April Fools aside, I imagine that many people, like myself, have a soft spot for both the Amiga and OS/2, having moved from the former to the latter around the time of Commodore's death.
This Slashdot post is more recognition of the OS/2 Warp community than it got in a long while. Now all they need is to merge with the Satanic Temple and the world will be complete.
I keep trying to respond, and keep finding that I can't focus on one thing that's wrong there.
The idea that people who are successful deserve that particular level of success is of course faulty. But the moment you dial down the 'particular', the correlation should hold true. Bill Gates might have needed luck to become the richest man in the world, but if he didn't have luck there, he would have taken advantage of another opportunity. Perhaps he wouldn't have had billions, only millions. It's only when we distinguish these levels that the failure occurs. The factors that made Bill Gates successful are part of him, not pure luck. A person with no business sense who doesn't care much about making money wouldn't have gotten there given the same opportunities.
Of course, 'merit' is still a questionable descriptor. Does having business sense, a desire to make money, and enough ruthlessness makes one merit success? Perhaps it does, if all we care in life is money and power. That would be the source of the problem, not the particular definitions.
Money and power go to managers, to people of a specific type who don't usually have any real positive impact on anyone's lives. It's the actual researchers, developers and artists who do what makes our lives better, not the managers or publishers who make the money.
Perhaps we do need meritocracy, in the sense that people who make people's lives better should be more successful. For example, a nurse should make more than a web developer, whose work is basically marketing. But it only works in that direction - determining what we think it important and trying to reward it. Looking at who gets money and power and trying to reason that they deserve it will always fail.
Well, it could have, but I assume that Microsoft alerted the company involved and had expected a fix to be released.
What's not clear to me is why Microsoft has failed to provide a workaround for this. The only reason I can think of is that the software has a vulnerability which is deliberately asserted.
Agreed. I often listen to a small selection of songs at work, and I find that I don't even notice when one ends and another begins. It masks outside noise, which is more distracting.
I do think it has a negative effect on concentration, but less so that chatter.
Netflix offers 2 or 4 concurrent streams. People are paying for these sub options, and probably most subs fall under these categories (because they also provide higher quality streaming). So this is not only totally legitimate but also paid for.
This is a stupid article in general, and the option of storing digital music locally is certainly the best, but I do believe that there's a big waste in streaming music off YouTube. It's quite a common practice (at least in my close environment), and I also do it, playing video streams just to listen to music. Huge waste of bandwidth and processing power.
Of course a manager would have to answer e-mails, that's part of their job. You'd expect a programmer to program, which would include things like writing code and debugging, and a manager to manage, which would include things like answering e-mails, talking to people and making decisions.
So if answering e-mails is part of your job and you're not doing it well, you're obviously not doing your job well. That doesn't mean that anyone not answering e-mail isn't good at their job. There are certainly a huge number of occupations where answering e-mails is not something you'd want a person to do.
When the question is "If a company loses my personal data/information I feel inclined to blame them above anyone else, even the hacker", the results aren't that surprising.
This survey feels truly meaningless to me. I doubt that many people truly prefer non-targeted ads or generic feeds. Sure, people might dislike ads in general, or hate it when targeting fails, which is what often happens, but that doesn't make targeting unethical.
If stores could sell me exactly what I'd be happy with, ads I see would be truly relevant, and news sites would show me news I'm interested in, that would be very helpful.
Anyone trying to sell a beauty product and using this should be sued.
Other than this, yes, I think it's a problem that people can't be accepted as they are. Of course we already use makeup, etc., but if anything we should move in the direction of accepting how people look instead of trying to stylise them further.
I don't think that Grindr should be held accountable for defects in the software, but it should be made accountable for running a service which enabled the harassment and not coming to the person's aid.
It's perfectly fine to have bugs and design flaws, it's something that happens because developers are humans and prone to make mistakes and not think of all consequences. A developer shouldn't be held legally responsible for a bug. However, a social service shouldn't be exempt from consequences. Law enforcement should be given a means to enforce laws on a social network.
Most laws are there to prevent abuse. We do hold people responsible if they sell alcohol to minors or sell guns without a license. When there's a problem that is deemed serious enough, an exploit that is dangerous enough, we have laws to take care of that.
Kurzweil gave more thought to this subject than this particular poster probably every will. He said that Moore's Law will slow down for integrated circuits, he just believed that a new technology will replace it. Sure, his estimates might not end up true, but it's still rather pointless to argue with his Singularity with arguments he has already discussed.
Far as AI processing has progressed, that hasn't had that much to do with Moore's Law and more to do with how to effectively use silicon for it. Eric Holloway himself talks about GPUs for AI, and these chips aren't more effective because they use a lot more transistors than CPUs (although they sometimes do), but because they process these particular calculations more effectively. AI chips (and GPUs updated to deal better with DNNs) do it even better. IBM is introducing an analogue chip for AI, another paradigm shift.
I'd say that it would be very hard to live without a phone at all. It's become a way to verify identity, and not having one would mean I could lose access to some important stuff.
Beyond that, the only reason I went back to a smartphone (I was an early adopter, but went back to a Nokia S60 phone) is because my wife wanted me to have access to Whatsapp. And really, that's something that a lot of people expect these days (I imagine other message apps, depending on your region), so although I could theoretically drop out, I think it would be rather anti-social. Even my 70+ mother is on Whatsapp, and she's struggled with tech her entire life.
So I treat a smartphone like I treat Facebook: it's a tool that's occasionally useful, and worth keeping for when it is.
I had several personal sites. The last of them got defaced because I failed to upgrade WordPress often enough to plug security holes. And because it used free hosting, I also didn't manage to salvage it from backup. And it's not like many people looked at the site. It was probably just some drive by hack. So even obscurity didn't protect me.
The amount of work that needs to go towards supporting a personal website (finding a host, possible registering a domain, setting it up,... and then maintenance) is something that only an enthusiast would do. Sure, you can do it more simply in Wix or WordPress.com (where I migrated my blog) or other such sites, but then you're under another big umbrella, so what's the huge difference from Facebook? And you still need to set things up.
Surveys are very often phrased so vaguely and inaccurately that it's virtually impossible to answer them in a meaningful way. Which is a real problem when trying to interpret the results. At other times surveys have leading questions.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people use laptops. You want a laptop, you pick one, it comes with Windows, and it works out of the box. (Or you buy an Apple one, if you prefer that. Or a Chromebook.)
You want a laptop with Linux, good luck finding one. You have to really want Linux, because you're in for quite a bit of work finding a laptop without Windows. Then you need to pick a distro, which most people will have no clue about. Then suppose you find a laptop without Windows, it will most likely have no OS installed, and you'd have to install one. Good luck with that if you're not a technical person.
Even if you know enough to install the OS, if you want to learn how to use it or have a device that's not automatically recognised, good luck getting help. Linux is used less, so has less online help, and because it's so fractured, good luck finding the help that matches the version you have.
Then you want to install some software, and you need to research that too, because you can't run what your friends and co-workers have, and even if they do use Linux, they typically have no idea why what they suggest doesn't seem good enough for you.
By this time you've spent tons of time, and will continue to spend tons of time, that you wouldn't have spent if you just stuck to Windows (or Mac OS). If you've saved any up front money (which is doubtful), you've already paid for it with time and stress.
The only reasonable way to get into Linux as a layman is if you have a personal Linux IT person.
By the way, this also applies to desktop, although there if you custom build it you at least save some money, and you already have a clue how to install an OS. But that doesn't save you the need to do a lot of research, make sure the hardware is actually supported by Linux, and in short invest a lot more time.
In my reality, the top news on Slashdot is "14-Year-Old Earned $200,000 Playing Fortnite on YouTube". In my reality, a lot of tech news has sadly moved to videos on YouTube, and new tech YouTube channels appear almost daily. My kids watch YouTube, not TV.
> The spectre of superintelligent machines doing us harm is not just science fiction, technologists say
Okay, so what exactly is it if not just science fiction? It's a worry that seems to me to have no basis in reality. We have no indication that AI can become self aware or what might happen then.
Sure, bugs in AI systems, bad training etc., can have terrifying consequences. That's true of any computer system. Just look at the Boing 737 MAX and its insistence to crash a plane even though it's been repeatedly told not to do that.
Sure, we need to make sure that systems are fully tested, and since AI, in the form of DNNs, is becoming very common, it's important to make sure these do their jobs correctly (which won't be easy). We also need to make sure that AI isn't used for nefarious purposes, which of course we won't, because every military organisation will use AI in its systems, and because it's simply hard to control AI use and it can be quite a powerful tool. But worrying about AI becoming self aware and what happens then, that to me is simply scaremongering and avoiding the real issues. People using AI will likely hurt a lot more people than AI will ever do of its own free will.
Honestly, April Fools aside, I imagine that many people, like myself, have a soft spot for both the Amiga and OS/2, having moved from the former to the latter around the time of Commodore's death.
This Slashdot post is more recognition of the OS/2 Warp community than it got in a long while. Now all they need is to merge with the Satanic Temple and the world will be complete.
I keep trying to respond, and keep finding that I can't focus on one thing that's wrong there.
The idea that people who are successful deserve that particular level of success is of course faulty. But the moment you dial down the 'particular', the correlation should hold true. Bill Gates might have needed luck to become the richest man in the world, but if he didn't have luck there, he would have taken advantage of another opportunity. Perhaps he wouldn't have had billions, only millions. It's only when we distinguish these levels that the failure occurs. The factors that made Bill Gates successful are part of him, not pure luck. A person with no business sense who doesn't care much about making money wouldn't have gotten there given the same opportunities.
Of course, 'merit' is still a questionable descriptor. Does having business sense, a desire to make money, and enough ruthlessness makes one merit success? Perhaps it does, if all we care in life is money and power. That would be the source of the problem, not the particular definitions.
Money and power go to managers, to people of a specific type who don't usually have any real positive impact on anyone's lives. It's the actual researchers, developers and artists who do what makes our lives better, not the managers or publishers who make the money.
Perhaps we do need meritocracy, in the sense that people who make people's lives better should be more successful. For example, a nurse should make more than a web developer, whose work is basically marketing. But it only works in that direction - determining what we think it important and trying to reward it. Looking at who gets money and power and trying to reason that they deserve it will always fail.
Well, it could have, but I assume that Microsoft alerted the company involved and had expected a fix to be released.
What's not clear to me is why Microsoft has failed to provide a workaround for this. The only reason I can think of is that the software has a vulnerability which is deliberately asserted.
Agreed. I often listen to a small selection of songs at work, and I find that I don't even notice when one ends and another begins. It masks outside noise, which is more distracting.
I do think it has a negative effect on concentration, but less so that chatter.
Netflix offers 2 or 4 concurrent streams. People are paying for these sub options, and probably most subs fall under these categories (because they also provide higher quality streaming). So this is not only totally legitimate but also paid for.
Surely you can match my 5 weeks and 5 days.
This is a stupid article in general, and the option of storing digital music locally is certainly the best, but I do believe that there's a big waste in streaming music off YouTube. It's quite a common practice (at least in my close environment), and I also do it, playing video streams just to listen to music. Huge waste of bandwidth and processing power.
Recent coverage of The Verge has certainly reduced any trust I had in them. Not that I had any.
What a worthless story.
Of course a manager would have to answer e-mails, that's part of their job. You'd expect a programmer to program, which would include things like writing code and debugging, and a manager to manage, which would include things like answering e-mails, talking to people and making decisions.
So if answering e-mails is part of your job and you're not doing it well, you're obviously not doing your job well. That doesn't mean that anyone not answering e-mail isn't good at their job. There are certainly a huge number of occupations where answering e-mails is not something you'd want a person to do.
When the question is "If a company loses my personal data/information I feel inclined to blame them above anyone else, even the hacker", the results aren't that surprising.
This survey feels truly meaningless to me. I doubt that many people truly prefer non-targeted ads or generic feeds. Sure, people might dislike ads in general, or hate it when targeting fails, which is what often happens, but that doesn't make targeting unethical.
If stores could sell me exactly what I'd be happy with, ads I see would be truly relevant, and news sites would show me news I'm interested in, that would be very helpful.
Anyone trying to sell a beauty product and using this should be sued.
Other than this, yes, I think it's a problem that people can't be accepted as they are. Of course we already use makeup, etc., but if anything we should move in the direction of accepting how people look instead of trying to stylise them further.
I don't think that Grindr should be held accountable for defects in the software, but it should be made accountable for running a service which enabled the harassment and not coming to the person's aid.
It's perfectly fine to have bugs and design flaws, it's something that happens because developers are humans and prone to make mistakes and not think of all consequences. A developer shouldn't be held legally responsible for a bug. However, a social service shouldn't be exempt from consequences. Law enforcement should be given a means to enforce laws on a social network.
Most laws are there to prevent abuse. We do hold people responsible if they sell alcohol to minors or sell guns without a license. When there's a problem that is deemed serious enough, an exploit that is dangerous enough, we have laws to take care of that.
Kurzweil gave more thought to this subject than this particular poster probably every will. He said that Moore's Law will slow down for integrated circuits, he just believed that a new technology will replace it. Sure, his estimates might not end up true, but it's still rather pointless to argue with his Singularity with arguments he has already discussed.
Far as AI processing has progressed, that hasn't had that much to do with Moore's Law and more to do with how to effectively use silicon for it. Eric Holloway himself talks about GPUs for AI, and these chips aren't more effective because they use a lot more transistors than CPUs (although they sometimes do), but because they process these particular calculations more effectively. AI chips (and GPUs updated to deal better with DNNs) do it even better. IBM is introducing an analogue chip for AI, another paradigm shift.
I haven't been looking for a job for years, but I still occasionally get offers through LinkedIn.
So while I don't think that LinkedIn is strictly necessary, it's also not pointless, so I think that it's worth being on it.
I'd say that it would be very hard to live without a phone at all. It's become a way to verify identity, and not having one would mean I could lose access to some important stuff.
Beyond that, the only reason I went back to a smartphone (I was an early adopter, but went back to a Nokia S60 phone) is because my wife wanted me to have access to Whatsapp. And really, that's something that a lot of people expect these days (I imagine other message apps, depending on your region), so although I could theoretically drop out, I think it would be rather anti-social. Even my 70+ mother is on Whatsapp, and she's struggled with tech her entire life.
So I treat a smartphone like I treat Facebook: it's a tool that's occasionally useful, and worth keeping for when it is.
I got this figure by extrapolating from this particular study.
I had several personal sites. The last of them got defaced because I failed to upgrade WordPress often enough to plug security holes. And because it used free hosting, I also didn't manage to salvage it from backup. And it's not like many people looked at the site. It was probably just some drive by hack. So even obscurity didn't protect me.
The amount of work that needs to go towards supporting a personal website (finding a host, possible registering a domain, setting it up, ... and then maintenance) is something that only an enthusiast would do. Sure, you can do it more simply in Wix or WordPress.com (where I migrated my blog) or other such sites, but then you're under another big umbrella, so what's the huge difference from Facebook? And you still need to set things up.
Surveys are very often phrased so vaguely and inaccurately that it's virtually impossible to answer them in a meaningful way. Which is a real problem when trying to interpret the results. At other times surveys have leading questions.