If they are really advanced civilisations they might just be really energy efficient. "Radio waves, how quaint." So the only civilizations that might be vaguely detectable are those that are a bit more advanced than ours and have harnessed things like fusion and have gone to town making a mess and lots of noise.
I always love to think about how well a modern day time traveller could hide in ancient Rome with a whole bevy of modern tech. I could be walking down a busy street in ancient Rome with a 9mm silenced glock strapped to my side my iPhone in my pocket running up to small earphones, I could have clothes all modern materials, just in their style, a top of the line bowie knife on my other side, I could even be smearing suntan lotion on before taking pictures of everyone with my DLSR (with the screen and lights taped over) and beyond my obvious height and health, not turn any heads.
Even if and when I used my silenced glock I doubt that many would find it wildly incomprehensible as they would just translate it into their knowledge. So it would be some ingenious use of a sling that threw the lead shot into the guy's head. Not magic fire stick.
It simply would not occur to them that anything I had was much more than some jewellery or an interesting tool. Thus I see the same with us. I doubt that civilizations are wasteful to any great degree as they move forward. I would not be shocked if as they solve things like the GUT that whole other ways of dealing with energy are available. Such as "borrowing" energy from another dimension and then returning that energy to the dimension in the form of waste heat. Something completely fantastic but to them it would be routine and power their iPhones or their interstellar space ships. Or they have learned to live a very simple happy life. They might limit their numbers and spend time with their friends and family immortally exploring the entire universe; not setting up massive galactic civilizations.
Oddly enough the universe might not be a mirror of what we are now.
I love how this defeated policeman (thug) is trying to play down his attempted violation of their rights through intimidation. I suspect his grandfather defended his actions when police chief saying, "We didn't run the black men out of town, we just gave them a one way drive."
In the 14 years my children have been going to school about the only place I saw an even slightly useful deployment was in a day care. They had some basic software for teaching the alphabet that the kids seemed to like.
In all other deployments I could see no educational purpose to the computers. As far as I could tell the computers were there to serve three non-educational purposes:
First was to give administrators and politicians the ability to say that the schools were modern and computerized.
The second was to give government contracts that installed crap computers for inflated prices, so that politically connected companies to make lots of money.
The last purpose was to keep network admins employed within the school system as they deployed terrible wifi with net-nanny type crap that made it impossible to access many excellent educational resources such as youtube.
But as for actual use, the only thing that I could see them being really used for was as glorified typewriters for the kids to type reports and the teachers to print out tests and whatnot.
My guess is that proper use of a computer for learning is pretty much the antithesis of how today's educational system works. Computers are excellent at self-paced learning where the student has a plethora of options to chose from so that they can find a source that fits their educational desires. This sort of environment though completely fails the unmotivated incapable students while it would send the best students into the stratosphere and potentially causing them to skip grades at a rapid pace. It also starts to take the teacher way out of the loop for the best students and leaves them with the worst students to squabble with.
So where I see computers impacting education is not from within our educational system but from outside. I suspect that as it finally matures to the point where a "complete" education can be had and that the certificates earned are respected that it will provide competition to the existing system. In this I see two interesting developments. One is that I see the most motivated and capable students beginning to complete their grade school educations outside the system. Thus the bell curve of students will largely have the top portion cropped off leaving the lesser students in the system. This will then create a bit of a feedback loop where the remaining top students will also leave the public system. This will have the effect of a two tiered set of certificate where some higher educational institutions will prefer the non-public ones. Again this will pressure another few percentiles of students to leave the public system.
But once the students and their parents learn the benefits of a two tiered educational system it will potentially begin to impact the lesser universities. For which would many people rather have, a piece of paper earned in person at a clearly second rate university or a certificate earned online from a top tier university? I am actually not suggesting a clear answer here as there are so many factors. Many people argue that High School and University are social experiences as much as educational ones; except that universities don't give a diploma for having a social network, they give you the paper for completing the courses.
So I don't think that a computer education will eliminate the non-computer one, I suspect that it will provide much needed competition and cause a massive shakeup of our existing educational systems.
I have met many programmers who became religious about particular technologies. I know an electrical engineer who wants to pretty much set fire to the arduino factory. His argument is that the entire at family of controllers are for amateurs. He was royally pissed when I found one in a brand name toothbrush.
Then you get XML people who think that JSON is basically satan's breath. Or Python 3.x people who think that Python 2.7 people should all be thrown into a pit. But PHP is about the least "academic" language in the world. If you go to a ML conference and your slides and sample code are in R, matlab, Python, or the newest ML fad lua then you will get approving nods. But if you pulled out a strong AI written in PHP they would tar and feather you and nobody would cite your paper, they would cite the paper where someone redid your AI in a "proper" language.
Even the people accomplishing these astounding performance increases in PHP aren't getting much cred. If someone altered either of the core pythons to get this kind of performance they would be hailed as heros. But instead the PHP developers are looked at with a mixture of hatred and scorn. Scorn because PHP was seen as so slow. And hatred because now PHP will live to fight their favourite language another day.
My theory on PHP is that one of the problems that many people have with PHP is that it was written to do a set of jobs very well. It is an excellent language for non-programmers who are wanting to make their html more powerful and it is a great language for quick and dirty tasks. Whereas if you look at Python 2.7 it very much was in this same sort of spirit of simplicity. But Python 3.x is getting more and more "Pythonic" which generally means that it no longer reads like Pseudocode but you have to actually parse the code in your head in order to understand what is going on. This is great for people who want to be able to separate themselves by being experts in their language. The key being that expert is a separate definition than being good. Expert, as in they know the ins and outs of the language. Whether they can write quality, easy to maintain code, is a whole other skill that often the "experts" in a single language never seem to focus on.
PHP with its extreme focus on just getting the damn job done seems to really piss these sorts off. Thus my theory that the "experts" at FB hate PHP and aren't really interested in getting the damn job done, but instead want to impress people with their HHVM. This gives a whole lot more cred then having built a better way to upload a fart joke to your friends.
My theory about the HHVM is that you have all this top talent at FB who are forced to either use PHP to work on the core product or they can use other languages but not hang out with the core developers. Thus the HHVM would be much like the JVM in that it would allow for PHP to be end run and other languages could run inside the VM.
Also working on the VM would appeal to the academic pseudo cred that they want while working at the very heart of FB. In theory this end run will allow these top tier developers to go to conferences and say, I am a core developer at FB, I work on the key features, but I am not a pathetic hack using PHP, I am a god programming in (Haskell, Lisp, Scala, Go, Rust, R, Erlang, etc) and thus I am beyond mere mortals who program in the pedestrian languages that are so far beneath me that can barely think about them.
All this without spitting in Zuckerberg's face and telling him his life's work was done like a two bit hack using the tools of a nube.
But some of the wind might be taken out of their sails if PHP 7 comes along and eats at the main metric that they can use to justify this end run. I suspect that somehow stats will be pulled out that show that under carefully crafted circumstances that lowly mortals can barely understand that HHVM is so much better than PHP 7 that it completely justifies the massive efforts that have gone into HHVM.
The real test will be to see if some organizations such as Wikipedia then dump HHVM to return to the less complex deployment environment found in PHP 7.
We have all seen this before. A zillion things like UML being used for code generation. And yes, I fully believe that this will be the future of programming. I personally pretty much think in symbols for what I am going to do. Way back in the early days of VB (before.net) they had an interesting idea that you would click on a button and that would bring up the code that "powered" that button. This sort of symbolic thinking is definitely the way to go. But this breathless reporting on this "breakthrough" deserves to have propellers attached and be put on the front page of Popular Mechanics.
Here is a simple litmus test. Every language that has taken the world (at least eventually) by storm had a slow but almost methodical progression from interesting idea to reaching an interesting point where the language was ready and suddenly the world was seeking just such a language. C++ was object oriented just as the Windowed operating environment really was calling for something more than C. Perl was ready in the early days of the web and Python came into its own when hyper efficiency of a language was no longer a chief concern but ease of use was.
Even languages such as Go are being thrust upon us by the likes of Google aren't really getting as much traction that such a marketing effort would suggest.
So in the history of languages I can't think of a single one that did something that others could already do that took over in a flash; even if that language was theoretically better.
So my prediction for the eventual graphical/symbolic language that will eventually take over is that nobody but a very few will hear about it for many years as it slowly matures. Then some new problem will come along where that language is very very good at solving the problem. At that point everyone will leap aboard that language. The alternative is that some dildo at a company like Apple will choose it as the de facto standard for programming their proprietary system such as iOS 11 and then force it down our throats. I very much doubt that one person in 1000 who knows Objective-C learned it for any other reason than to make iOS apps.
My old city was planning a citywide Wifi project. I suspect that this will be shot in the face by the local telcos but assuming it did go ahead I begged them not to pooch it with things like an "I agree page" it is very hard for me to get an arduino to "agree" thus they will have old yeller'd their IoT from day one if they put in a "I agree" page.
I suggested various workarounds if they were forced to put in an I Agree Page by people like the mayor who probably wanted his picture on the I Agree page "Welcoming" (polishing his ego) the users.
But the last thing I would want is the city trying to actually build their own IoT in some grandiose way that is certain to fail. Especially if they were thinking that this IoT was going to somehow fund the network itself. Cities should be rushing to get city wide Wifi as this could very well cause local companies to be first to the post when it comes to cool new IoT technologies. I have a long list of things that I could build with a citywide wifi. Bike Lojack systems. Drones that I can control from anywhere. Taxi dispatch systems. Car GPS for security.
Not to mention things like alarm systems that don't need to have stupid monthly fees, etc. These are things that could end up saving the taxpayers more money than the system would cost. But only if it is done simply and done right. The city is good at things like infrastructure. The city is terrible at things like R&D.
I liken the "I agree" thing being like a car that wouldn't pull onto the road unless you went through a pile of menus to get to an I Agree to use the roads properly page. Then you could keep going. One other thing with the I Agree pages is that often instead of using fairly commodity networking gear it requires that you hire some two bit company that specializes in crappy little hotel networks. These networks are often shoddy affairs where the packet inspection and whatnot in dealing with all the user management vastly increases the costs while killing the capacity.
But one of the great advantages for a tiny few people within the city when dealing with these crappy little companies..... kickbacks.
I would use my technological/business skills to properly and permanently correct the wrongs around me, except that I would make sure the combine it with things that I love. So for instance where I once lived the local aid organizations were always begging for their local food banks. There are families who need food, this is a terrible thing in a modern country. Thus I would spend my money buying up some prime farmland where half of it would be to grow food, and the other half would be leased out to create a revenue stream to fund the growing half.
Then in the downtown I would do the same pairing. One property would be purchased to lease out and fund the food bank operations, while another building would be the food bank.
The key would then to completely opensource the above model.
The same sort of thing could be done with homeless shelters, research organizations, etc. This way where the government does not charge the wealthy elites enough taxes, I would just charge them rent.
The key would be that I would aim to charge the wealthy money that then goes to fund the worthy. Other examples would be to have a luxury hotel that funds a rehab center.
One other odd thing that I would set up is a medical research charity where my money covers all administrative costs. Donor money then 100% goes to actual research. Except that I would not spend the money with established researchers. I would only hire researchers who were working on their PhD or had graduated within the last 5 years. They would then get 10 years of funding that could only go to people meeting the same PhD conditions. At the end of 10 years they would either have delivered or failed. Close would be something for another funding organization to look at.
Thus donors to the charity would know that exactly zero of their money would be going to a bloated administration or to "established" researchers, many of whom have only established themselves as really good at getting grants. The 10 years would allow these young researchers to break the chains of convention and ignore their established peers and potentially explore areas that would be impossible if their established peers had any say. There would also be little auditing except to watch for violations where the designated researchers were somehow forced to hand the money over to others or egregious fraud.
When I am building robots my battery choices very much are the limiting factor in my designs and the final capabilities of the robot. I can go for big lumbering beasts with piles of lead acid. Or I can break the bank with enough lipo to keep a laptop factory running for a week. Or I can pair my design down until it is simply a toy. Other options are to make it sound like a garden tool and put some kind of gasoline motor in.
But if I had a reasonably priced source of reasonably power dense batteries then my robots would improve proportionally. For this doesn't just increase the power available to my existing designs but it also reduces the overall costs of a robot. For instance the more efficient the motor or cost computer module, generally the higher the cost. But it would be great if I could slap in any old small motherboard, and use run of the mill DC motors instead of ultra cool brushless.
Then whole other motor systems become possible. Linear motors, pneumatic systems, hydraulic systems, etc.
So a revolution in batteries would precipitate a revolution in robots; real robots doing real jobs in the real world.
I use Source Code Pro and when I tested hack I lost about 8 lines of code. I like to see as much of my code as possible so a taller font is not an improvement.
Here is a better hope for the cab industry. Remove the cap on how many cars there are and introduce competitive pricing. Maybe there need to be some regulations when it comes to preventing the worst of the worst abuses but that is about it.
Then cabs will be competitive and uber will just be one of the many excellent options.
SDCs should cut way back on useless policemen because most police spend 99.9% of their time either doing nothing or harassing drivers for money. Very few police spend very little of their times preventing or investigating crimes. With the revenue stream of bullshit tickets gone the police budgets for bullshit police should also dry up.
Thus the remaining police should be, in theory, actually busy doing actual policework. Thus like many worries about self driving cars, their ability or inability to stop them shouldn't really end up being much of an issue with just a tiny few strange edge cases.
Where it will get interesting is if you watch a typical episode of cops the police often have the same MO. A board cop looking to show off for the cameras will go to a poor neighbourhood. He will wait for a car with 4 or more black men in it drive by. Then he will follow behind for the 30-60 seconds it takes them to break one of a massive set of traffic violations, and then the cop will pull them over with his ready made excuse in hand. But then the police will "search them for weapons" demand ID and eventually search the car. Then somewhere somehow a felony or warrant will be discovered and the policeman can make some excuse that he took some more "dirtbags" off the streets. Except that warrant was probably for not paying fantastically expensive bullshit traffic tickets issued during previous similar stops. And if the driver doesn't have a licence it will be because the guy lost it for not paying said fines.
So am I concerned if those police all lose their jobs, NO; am I concerned that they might have trouble pulling people over, NO. The threshold for pulling a SDC over should be that they are certain that the specific car contains an active and ongoing serious crime such as a kidnapping. But if they start doing things like redirecting all the SDCs to a checkpoint so they can do warrant checks or with some BS excuse that there was a recent robbery then screw them and their fourth amendment violating inbred deliverance level thinking.
My ISP's modem/router does this so I just plugged in my own router and grounded their antenna inside a tinfoil faraday cage. Screw the MBAs working at my ISP.
I would laugh so hard if they develop a drug based on this and the only skills that people gain are the ability to recognize mice better and to be less scared of open spaces and cats. Oh and to find hidden escape ways.
But really I do look forward to what will happen someday if these cognitive enhancement drugs turn out to be safe and make people smarter. I am not talking a limitless sort of thing but what happens if a university course ends up be retuned to be just too difficult for most people unless they are taking these sorts of things? If that hasn't already happened with things like Modafinil.
Blocking uber is a clear and unambiguous test that the local government is corrupt and has been bought off by local business interests. Clearly Uber is in the public interest. Regardless of insurance or other values imposed by the local regulators Uber customers are choosing to drive with uber. They have made a clear and unambiguous rejection of the existing system and any "virtues" that regulation has blessed it with. Yet local governments then proceed to spit in the faces of these users and drivers with the clear goal of protecting the local taxi industry.
How exactly each local government official has been bribed is probably as different as there are governments but when democratic governments are acting in the interests of the very few and against the very many there has to be some form of incentive driving this undemocratic behaviour. Essentially corruption.
This sort of mad rush for the finish line tends to upset the men in grey suits. But when you are in a gold rush you don't spend time making detailed maps, building beautiful camps for the miners, setting up a day care, and otherwise making everything perfect. You yell "Charge!" and run at the enemy with your sword waving above your head.
Even the business plan should simply read we don't really know and even then the plan will change. Love Uber or hate uber we must all admit that it is shaking things up. I recently took a normal taxi in my city from the airport for the "standard" $55 plus a tip. I took uber back to the airport for $32 and no tip. But also at the airport I asked the first driver what the charge was and he said, "Standard charge $75 same as everyone else." except that he was a "Limo" driver. So the first taxi driver in my new city lied to me and tried pulling a fast one. With Uber this sort of crap is massively curtailed.
So on this issue get back to me when uber has finished growing; if at that point they still don't have profits then it might not actually be an uber good business model.
I might actually think that a guy with commodore 64 certifications on his wall was cool. I would first figure out if he took them seriously. "We are a commodore shop here." would probably leave me stunned for a minute or two before I could run.
These rate my doctor sites seem to generally be right on the money. Our first two dentists really sucked, and when I checked them out on these sites the consensus was that they sucked. Then when I read about some doctor losing their licence in my area I will check out their rating and with a single glaring exception they always have comments such as, "I have no idea where Dr. X got his licence to practice but a crackerjack box would be a good start.".
Then when I finally used these sites to find our present Dr. and Dentist the sites said they were great and they were causing me to add the chorus of glowing reviews.
The first fact is that this guy is technically correct. HR departments go all weak in the knees for certification. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some certification farm out there crapping out certifications in cmake.
But this completely misses the point as to the actual value a certification actually has when it comes to the reality of programming or maintaining/implementing systems. Most of us will agree that the value here is low to potentially negative. A wonderful personal example was that years ago my company asked me to become MSDN certified in something. In order to regurgitate the correct answers for the test I memorized all kinds of crap. But some of it was actually quite helpful. There were some bits about NT boot configs that suddenly made sense.
But the flaw was that I was already very good at working with NT servers. If I were in some stripmall comp collage studying this as my first exposure to computer stuff then it would have meant nothing and yet with some good studying I would have been "certified" to administer NT servers.
But where this really breaks down is when you get a shop that is completely filled with people from a certain company's certifications. I have met companies that say "We are a MSDN shop." Full stop. They won't even consider any other technology.
But my happy moment was years ago when our head of IT who had "over $20,000 worth of Novell certifications there on that wall" was installing a Novell server on his brand new shiny Dell powerhouse. But it wouldn't install. So he gets Dell tech support on the phone and ends up with their top tier who said, "We don't support that old Novell stuff anymore. If it runs on any of our machines it is luck not design. But I know for a fact that it won't run on that machine you have there." Now with this IT guy the whole development staff had long been trying to get Novell out of the building but the IT head swore by it and had a thousand defences as to why it was the best. But the day Dell said No was the day we were able to leverage that into finally getting Novell out of the building.
I have similar stories with other certifications.
So while I don't doubt that they can often increase the individual's salary and I don't doubt that the process of an existing capable user would potentially be enhanced by certification. I do suggest that the damage that is done by certifications being turned into religious scrolls could be enormous to companies that suddenly are "locked in" to a certain technology and not only stop considering alternatives but actively consider alternatives to be heresy.
If I couldn't build this in a week then I would give up on robotics. Keep in mind this wasn't a quest for perfection it was a "good enough bark removal".
Seeing that only one kind of tree went into the mill the only possible edge case would be wet wood or some kind of drastic lighting change. Thus I would be happy with a few day's video(with the user selected button) where I would have the guys there select the worst case scenario logs and I might spray them with water some of the time.
While I developed it I would leave the video/button pushing data continue to be gathered from the mill's best users so that I could compare my system's decisions with the user decisions on an even larger data set. Those cases where there was a dispute I would have the mill experts all weigh in on who was right and if my system was "good enough" or better than the user I would happily leave it running while also gathering data for a larger data set and providing an auditable trail.
If I were really aiming for a damn good system I would create a simple setup where the mill's best operators would all make decisions on the same logs unaware of the others' choices. This would allow me to statistically define what the error rate among experts was and give me an "acceptable disagreement rate"
So unless installing the relays into the switches in the operator room was somehow problematic this should entirely be a week's operation. Even there I could just install a servo that physically pushed the buttons.
I met a guy (he was around 17) who was working for a pulp mill. His job was working on a machine that debarked the trees. They would run through the machine and then appear in front of him. He had two cords ending in a button which he held in his hands. One button would send the insufficiently debarked tree around for another cycle of debarking, and the other button indicated that it was good enough and could continue.
He indicated that this job was mind numbing to the extreme but that it paid very very well for someone not yet finished highschool. If he worked there long enough his hourly pay would be actually pretty good for the rural area he was in. He told me that many people who worked at the mill never bothered to finish high school and few went to University because even with a degree it would be hard to beat a job at the mill.
I am pretty sure that I could build a bark detecting optical system in under a week to replace him if the mill were still open. But it isn't through a combination of far lower demand for paper product because of the electronic age, combined with far higher efficiencies at the existing mills.
But all one has to do is go to the early seasons of the show "How it's made" and see that even fairly automated assembly lines usually had people doing things such as quality control, packaging, and the occasional odd procedure in the middle. Now, if you watch the recent seasons, about the only thing people do is to load crap into the machines at the beginning, and forklift large boxes of the final product in the end.
One of the final job killers are the pick and place machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Or it is using some operating principle that we will find in 1 year. Narrowing the noisy window even more.
If they are really advanced civilisations they might just be really energy efficient. "Radio waves, how quaint." So the only civilizations that might be vaguely detectable are those that are a bit more advanced than ours and have harnessed things like fusion and have gone to town making a mess and lots of noise.
I always love to think about how well a modern day time traveller could hide in ancient Rome with a whole bevy of modern tech. I could be walking down a busy street in ancient Rome with a 9mm silenced glock strapped to my side my iPhone in my pocket running up to small earphones, I could have clothes all modern materials, just in their style, a top of the line bowie knife on my other side, I could even be smearing suntan lotion on before taking pictures of everyone with my DLSR (with the screen and lights taped over) and beyond my obvious height and health, not turn any heads.
Even if and when I used my silenced glock I doubt that many would find it wildly incomprehensible as they would just translate it into their knowledge. So it would be some ingenious use of a sling that threw the lead shot into the guy's head. Not magic fire stick.
It simply would not occur to them that anything I had was much more than some jewellery or an interesting tool. Thus I see the same with us. I doubt that civilizations are wasteful to any great degree as they move forward. I would not be shocked if as they solve things like the GUT that whole other ways of dealing with energy are available. Such as "borrowing" energy from another dimension and then returning that energy to the dimension in the form of waste heat. Something completely fantastic but to them it would be routine and power their iPhones or their interstellar space ships. Or they have learned to live a very simple happy life. They might limit their numbers and spend time with their friends and family immortally exploring the entire universe; not setting up massive galactic civilizations.
Oddly enough the universe might not be a mirror of what we are now.
I love how this defeated policeman (thug) is trying to play down his attempted violation of their rights through intimidation. I suspect his grandfather defended his actions when police chief saying, "We didn't run the black men out of town, we just gave them a one way drive."
In all other deployments I could see no educational purpose to the computers. As far as I could tell the computers were there to serve three non-educational purposes:
But as for actual use, the only thing that I could see them being really used for was as glorified typewriters for the kids to type reports and the teachers to print out tests and whatnot.
My guess is that proper use of a computer for learning is pretty much the antithesis of how today's educational system works. Computers are excellent at self-paced learning where the student has a plethora of options to chose from so that they can find a source that fits their educational desires. This sort of environment though completely fails the unmotivated incapable students while it would send the best students into the stratosphere and potentially causing them to skip grades at a rapid pace. It also starts to take the teacher way out of the loop for the best students and leaves them with the worst students to squabble with.
So where I see computers impacting education is not from within our educational system but from outside. I suspect that as it finally matures to the point where a "complete" education can be had and that the certificates earned are respected that it will provide competition to the existing system. In this I see two interesting developments. One is that I see the most motivated and capable students beginning to complete their grade school educations outside the system. Thus the bell curve of students will largely have the top portion cropped off leaving the lesser students in the system. This will then create a bit of a feedback loop where the remaining top students will also leave the public system. This will have the effect of a two tiered set of certificate where some higher educational institutions will prefer the non-public ones. Again this will pressure another few percentiles of students to leave the public system.
But once the students and their parents learn the benefits of a two tiered educational system it will potentially begin to impact the lesser universities. For which would many people rather have, a piece of paper earned in person at a clearly second rate university or a certificate earned online from a top tier university? I am actually not suggesting a clear answer here as there are so many factors. Many people argue that High School and University are social experiences as much as educational ones; except that universities don't give a diploma for having a social network, they give you the paper for completing the courses.
So I don't think that a computer education will eliminate the non-computer one, I suspect that it will provide much needed competition and cause a massive shakeup of our existing educational systems.
If you get in bed with the devil, sooner or later you are going to have to fu....
Did wikipedia just jump the shark?
I have met many programmers who became religious about particular technologies. I know an electrical engineer who wants to pretty much set fire to the arduino factory. His argument is that the entire at family of controllers are for amateurs. He was royally pissed when I found one in a brand name toothbrush.
Then you get XML people who think that JSON is basically satan's breath. Or Python 3.x people who think that Python 2.7 people should all be thrown into a pit. But PHP is about the least "academic" language in the world. If you go to a ML conference and your slides and sample code are in R, matlab, Python, or the newest ML fad lua then you will get approving nods. But if you pulled out a strong AI written in PHP they would tar and feather you and nobody would cite your paper, they would cite the paper where someone redid your AI in a "proper" language.
Even the people accomplishing these astounding performance increases in PHP aren't getting much cred. If someone altered either of the core pythons to get this kind of performance they would be hailed as heros. But instead the PHP developers are looked at with a mixture of hatred and scorn. Scorn because PHP was seen as so slow. And hatred because now PHP will live to fight their favourite language another day.
My theory on PHP is that one of the problems that many people have with PHP is that it was written to do a set of jobs very well. It is an excellent language for non-programmers who are wanting to make their html more powerful and it is a great language for quick and dirty tasks. Whereas if you look at Python 2.7 it very much was in this same sort of spirit of simplicity. But Python 3.x is getting more and more "Pythonic" which generally means that it no longer reads like Pseudocode but you have to actually parse the code in your head in order to understand what is going on. This is great for people who want to be able to separate themselves by being experts in their language. The key being that expert is a separate definition than being good. Expert, as in they know the ins and outs of the language. Whether they can write quality, easy to maintain code, is a whole other skill that often the "experts" in a single language never seem to focus on.
PHP with its extreme focus on just getting the damn job done seems to really piss these sorts off. Thus my theory that the "experts" at FB hate PHP and aren't really interested in getting the damn job done, but instead want to impress people with their HHVM. This gives a whole lot more cred then having built a better way to upload a fart joke to your friends.
My theory about the HHVM is that you have all this top talent at FB who are forced to either use PHP to work on the core product or they can use other languages but not hang out with the core developers. Thus the HHVM would be much like the JVM in that it would allow for PHP to be end run and other languages could run inside the VM.
Also working on the VM would appeal to the academic pseudo cred that they want while working at the very heart of FB. In theory this end run will allow these top tier developers to go to conferences and say, I am a core developer at FB, I work on the key features, but I am not a pathetic hack using PHP, I am a god programming in (Haskell, Lisp, Scala, Go, Rust, R, Erlang, etc) and thus I am beyond mere mortals who program in the pedestrian languages that are so far beneath me that can barely think about them.
All this without spitting in Zuckerberg's face and telling him his life's work was done like a two bit hack using the tools of a nube.
But some of the wind might be taken out of their sails if PHP 7 comes along and eats at the main metric that they can use to justify this end run. I suspect that somehow stats will be pulled out that show that under carefully crafted circumstances that lowly mortals can barely understand that HHVM is so much better than PHP 7 that it completely justifies the massive efforts that have gone into HHVM.
The real test will be to see if some organizations such as Wikipedia then dump HHVM to return to the less complex deployment environment found in PHP 7.
We have all seen this before. A zillion things like UML being used for code generation. And yes, I fully believe that this will be the future of programming. I personally pretty much think in symbols for what I am going to do. Way back in the early days of VB (before .net) they had an interesting idea that you would click on a button and that would bring up the code that "powered" that button. This sort of symbolic thinking is definitely the way to go. But this breathless reporting on this "breakthrough" deserves to have propellers attached and be put on the front page of Popular Mechanics.
Here is a simple litmus test. Every language that has taken the world (at least eventually) by storm had a slow but almost methodical progression from interesting idea to reaching an interesting point where the language was ready and suddenly the world was seeking just such a language. C++ was object oriented just as the Windowed operating environment really was calling for something more than C. Perl was ready in the early days of the web and Python came into its own when hyper efficiency of a language was no longer a chief concern but ease of use was.
Even languages such as Go are being thrust upon us by the likes of Google aren't really getting as much traction that such a marketing effort would suggest.
So in the history of languages I can't think of a single one that did something that others could already do that took over in a flash; even if that language was theoretically better.
So my prediction for the eventual graphical/symbolic language that will eventually take over is that nobody but a very few will hear about it for many years as it slowly matures. Then some new problem will come along where that language is very very good at solving the problem. At that point everyone will leap aboard that language. The alternative is that some dildo at a company like Apple will choose it as the de facto standard for programming their proprietary system such as iOS 11 and then force it down our throats. I very much doubt that one person in 1000 who knows Objective-C learned it for any other reason than to make iOS apps.
My old city was planning a citywide Wifi project. I suspect that this will be shot in the face by the local telcos but assuming it did go ahead I begged them not to pooch it with things like an "I agree page" it is very hard for me to get an arduino to "agree" thus they will have old yeller'd their IoT from day one if they put in a "I agree" page.
I suggested various workarounds if they were forced to put in an I Agree Page by people like the mayor who probably wanted his picture on the I Agree page "Welcoming" (polishing his ego) the users.
But the last thing I would want is the city trying to actually build their own IoT in some grandiose way that is certain to fail. Especially if they were thinking that this IoT was going to somehow fund the network itself. Cities should be rushing to get city wide Wifi as this could very well cause local companies to be first to the post when it comes to cool new IoT technologies. I have a long list of things that I could build with a citywide wifi. Bike Lojack systems. Drones that I can control from anywhere. Taxi dispatch systems. Car GPS for security.
Not to mention things like alarm systems that don't need to have stupid monthly fees, etc. These are things that could end up saving the taxpayers more money than the system would cost. But only if it is done simply and done right. The city is good at things like infrastructure. The city is terrible at things like R&D.
I liken the "I agree" thing being like a car that wouldn't pull onto the road unless you went through a pile of menus to get to an I Agree to use the roads properly page. Then you could keep going. One other thing with the I Agree pages is that often instead of using fairly commodity networking gear it requires that you hire some two bit company that specializes in crappy little hotel networks. These networks are often shoddy affairs where the packet inspection and whatnot in dealing with all the user management vastly increases the costs while killing the capacity.
But one of the great advantages for a tiny few people within the city when dealing with these crappy little companies..... kickbacks.
I would use my technological/business skills to properly and permanently correct the wrongs around me, except that I would make sure the combine it with things that I love. So for instance where I once lived the local aid organizations were always begging for their local food banks. There are families who need food, this is a terrible thing in a modern country. Thus I would spend my money buying up some prime farmland where half of it would be to grow food, and the other half would be leased out to create a revenue stream to fund the growing half.
Then in the downtown I would do the same pairing. One property would be purchased to lease out and fund the food bank operations, while another building would be the food bank.
The key would then to completely opensource the above model.
The same sort of thing could be done with homeless shelters, research organizations, etc. This way where the government does not charge the wealthy elites enough taxes, I would just charge them rent.
The key would be that I would aim to charge the wealthy money that then goes to fund the worthy. Other examples would be to have a luxury hotel that funds a rehab center.
One other odd thing that I would set up is a medical research charity where my money covers all administrative costs. Donor money then 100% goes to actual research. Except that I would not spend the money with established researchers. I would only hire researchers who were working on their PhD or had graduated within the last 5 years. They would then get 10 years of funding that could only go to people meeting the same PhD conditions. At the end of 10 years they would either have delivered or failed. Close would be something for another funding organization to look at.
Thus donors to the charity would know that exactly zero of their money would be going to a bloated administration or to "established" researchers, many of whom have only established themselves as really good at getting grants. The 10 years would allow these young researchers to break the chains of convention and ignore their established peers and potentially explore areas that would be impossible if their established peers had any say. There would also be little auditing except to watch for violations where the designated researchers were somehow forced to hand the money over to others or egregious fraud.
When I am building robots my battery choices very much are the limiting factor in my designs and the final capabilities of the robot. I can go for big lumbering beasts with piles of lead acid. Or I can break the bank with enough lipo to keep a laptop factory running for a week. Or I can pair my design down until it is simply a toy. Other options are to make it sound like a garden tool and put some kind of gasoline motor in.
But if I had a reasonably priced source of reasonably power dense batteries then my robots would improve proportionally. For this doesn't just increase the power available to my existing designs but it also reduces the overall costs of a robot. For instance the more efficient the motor or cost computer module, generally the higher the cost. But it would be great if I could slap in any old small motherboard, and use run of the mill DC motors instead of ultra cool brushless.
Then whole other motor systems become possible. Linear motors, pneumatic systems, hydraulic systems, etc.
So a revolution in batteries would precipitate a revolution in robots; real robots doing real jobs in the real world.
Terrible for the drivers. Very terrible for the company owners who had to build out calling/dispatch infrastructure. Great for the customers.
I use Source Code Pro and when I tested hack I lost about 8 lines of code. I like to see as much of my code as possible so a taller font is not an improvement.
Here is a better hope for the cab industry. Remove the cap on how many cars there are and introduce competitive pricing. Maybe there need to be some regulations when it comes to preventing the worst of the worst abuses but that is about it.
Then cabs will be competitive and uber will just be one of the many excellent options.
SDCs should cut way back on useless policemen because most police spend 99.9% of their time either doing nothing or harassing drivers for money. Very few police spend very little of their times preventing or investigating crimes. With the revenue stream of bullshit tickets gone the police budgets for bullshit police should also dry up.
Thus the remaining police should be, in theory, actually busy doing actual policework. Thus like many worries about self driving cars, their ability or inability to stop them shouldn't really end up being much of an issue with just a tiny few strange edge cases.
Where it will get interesting is if you watch a typical episode of cops the police often have the same MO. A board cop looking to show off for the cameras will go to a poor neighbourhood. He will wait for a car with 4 or more black men in it drive by. Then he will follow behind for the 30-60 seconds it takes them to break one of a massive set of traffic violations, and then the cop will pull them over with his ready made excuse in hand. But then the police will "search them for weapons" demand ID and eventually search the car. Then somewhere somehow a felony or warrant will be discovered and the policeman can make some excuse that he took some more "dirtbags" off the streets. Except that warrant was probably for not paying fantastically expensive bullshit traffic tickets issued during previous similar stops. And if the driver doesn't have a licence it will be because the guy lost it for not paying said fines.
So am I concerned if those police all lose their jobs, NO; am I concerned that they might have trouble pulling people over, NO. The threshold for pulling a SDC over should be that they are certain that the specific car contains an active and ongoing serious crime such as a kidnapping. But if they start doing things like redirecting all the SDCs to a checkpoint so they can do warrant checks or with some BS excuse that there was a recent robbery then screw them and their fourth amendment violating inbred deliverance level thinking.
My ISP's modem/router does this so I just plugged in my own router and grounded their antenna inside a tinfoil faraday cage. Screw the MBAs working at my ISP.
I would laugh so hard if they develop a drug based on this and the only skills that people gain are the ability to recognize mice better and to be less scared of open spaces and cats. Oh and to find hidden escape ways.
But really I do look forward to what will happen someday if these cognitive enhancement drugs turn out to be safe and make people smarter. I am not talking a limitless sort of thing but what happens if a university course ends up be retuned to be just too difficult for most people unless they are taking these sorts of things? If that hasn't already happened with things like Modafinil.
Blocking uber is a clear and unambiguous test that the local government is corrupt and has been bought off by local business interests. Clearly Uber is in the public interest. Regardless of insurance or other values imposed by the local regulators Uber customers are choosing to drive with uber. They have made a clear and unambiguous rejection of the existing system and any "virtues" that regulation has blessed it with. Yet local governments then proceed to spit in the faces of these users and drivers with the clear goal of protecting the local taxi industry.
How exactly each local government official has been bribed is probably as different as there are governments but when democratic governments are acting in the interests of the very few and against the very many there has to be some form of incentive driving this undemocratic behaviour. Essentially corruption.
In the city I just moved from a cabbie who sexually assaulted was just allowed to drive again by our regulator.
http://thechronicleherald.ca/m...
This sort of mad rush for the finish line tends to upset the men in grey suits. But when you are in a gold rush you don't spend time making detailed maps, building beautiful camps for the miners, setting up a day care, and otherwise making everything perfect. You yell "Charge!" and run at the enemy with your sword waving above your head.
Even the business plan should simply read we don't really know and even then the plan will change. Love Uber or hate uber we must all admit that it is shaking things up. I recently took a normal taxi in my city from the airport for the "standard" $55 plus a tip. I took uber back to the airport for $32 and no tip. But also at the airport I asked the first driver what the charge was and he said, "Standard charge $75 same as everyone else." except that he was a "Limo" driver. So the first taxi driver in my new city lied to me and tried pulling a fast one. With Uber this sort of crap is massively curtailed.
So on this issue get back to me when uber has finished growing; if at that point they still don't have profits then it might not actually be an uber good business model.
I might actually think that a guy with commodore 64 certifications on his wall was cool. I would first figure out if he took them seriously. "We are a commodore shop here." would probably leave me stunned for a minute or two before I could run.
These rate my doctor sites seem to generally be right on the money. Our first two dentists really sucked, and when I checked them out on these sites the consensus was that they sucked. Then when I read about some doctor losing their licence in my area I will check out their rating and with a single glaring exception they always have comments such as, "I have no idea where Dr. X got his licence to practice but a crackerjack box would be a good start.".
Then when I finally used these sites to find our present Dr. and Dentist the sites said they were great and they were causing me to add the chorus of glowing reviews.
The first fact is that this guy is technically correct. HR departments go all weak in the knees for certification. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some certification farm out there crapping out certifications in cmake.
But this completely misses the point as to the actual value a certification actually has when it comes to the reality of programming or maintaining/implementing systems. Most of us will agree that the value here is low to potentially negative. A wonderful personal example was that years ago my company asked me to become MSDN certified in something. In order to regurgitate the correct answers for the test I memorized all kinds of crap. But some of it was actually quite helpful. There were some bits about NT boot configs that suddenly made sense.
But the flaw was that I was already very good at working with NT servers. If I were in some stripmall comp collage studying this as my first exposure to computer stuff then it would have meant nothing and yet with some good studying I would have been "certified" to administer NT servers.
But where this really breaks down is when you get a shop that is completely filled with people from a certain company's certifications. I have met companies that say "We are a MSDN shop." Full stop. They won't even consider any other technology.
But my happy moment was years ago when our head of IT who had "over $20,000 worth of Novell certifications there on that wall" was installing a Novell server on his brand new shiny Dell powerhouse. But it wouldn't install. So he gets Dell tech support on the phone and ends up with their top tier who said, "We don't support that old Novell stuff anymore. If it runs on any of our machines it is luck not design. But I know for a fact that it won't run on that machine you have there." Now with this IT guy the whole development staff had long been trying to get Novell out of the building but the IT head swore by it and had a thousand defences as to why it was the best. But the day Dell said No was the day we were able to leverage that into finally getting Novell out of the building.
I have similar stories with other certifications.
So while I don't doubt that they can often increase the individual's salary and I don't doubt that the process of an existing capable user would potentially be enhanced by certification. I do suggest that the damage that is done by certifications being turned into religious scrolls could be enormous to companies that suddenly are "locked in" to a certain technology and not only stop considering alternatives but actively consider alternatives to be heresy.
If I couldn't build this in a week then I would give up on robotics. Keep in mind this wasn't a quest for perfection it was a "good enough bark removal".
Seeing that only one kind of tree went into the mill the only possible edge case would be wet wood or some kind of drastic lighting change. Thus I would be happy with a few day's video(with the user selected button) where I would have the guys there select the worst case scenario logs and I might spray them with water some of the time.
While I developed it I would leave the video/button pushing data continue to be gathered from the mill's best users so that I could compare my system's decisions with the user decisions on an even larger data set. Those cases where there was a dispute I would have the mill experts all weigh in on who was right and if my system was "good enough" or better than the user I would happily leave it running while also gathering data for a larger data set and providing an auditable trail.
If I were really aiming for a damn good system I would create a simple setup where the mill's best operators would all make decisions on the same logs unaware of the others' choices. This would allow me to statistically define what the error rate among experts was and give me an "acceptable disagreement rate"
So unless installing the relays into the switches in the operator room was somehow problematic this should entirely be a week's operation. Even there I could just install a servo that physically pushed the buttons.
I met a guy (he was around 17) who was working for a pulp mill. His job was working on a machine that debarked the trees. They would run through the machine and then appear in front of him. He had two cords ending in a button which he held in his hands. One button would send the insufficiently debarked tree around for another cycle of debarking, and the other button indicated that it was good enough and could continue.
He indicated that this job was mind numbing to the extreme but that it paid very very well for someone not yet finished highschool. If he worked there long enough his hourly pay would be actually pretty good for the rural area he was in. He told me that many people who worked at the mill never bothered to finish high school and few went to University because even with a degree it would be hard to beat a job at the mill.
I am pretty sure that I could build a bark detecting optical system in under a week to replace him if the mill were still open. But it isn't through a combination of far lower demand for paper product because of the electronic age, combined with far higher efficiencies at the existing mills.
But all one has to do is go to the early seasons of the show "How it's made" and see that even fairly automated assembly lines usually had people doing things such as quality control, packaging, and the occasional odd procedure in the middle. Now, if you watch the recent seasons, about the only thing people do is to load crap into the machines at the beginning, and forklift large boxes of the final product in the end.
One of the final job killers are the pick and place machines.