we're going to see a huge change in programming methods coming pretty soon. Today, A.I. is still math and computer based. The problem is that data, input, and all of the algorithms you're going to write can result in a plane nose-diving -- even though no human being has ever chosen to nose-dive under any scenario in a commercial flight.
Why was an algorithm written that could do something that no one has ever wanted to do?
The shift is going to be when psychology takes over A.I. from the math geeks. It'll be the first time that math becomes entirely useless because the scenarios will be 90% exceptions. It'll also be the first time that psychology becomes truly beneficial -- and it'll be the direct result of centuries of black-box science.
That's when the programming changes to "should we take a nose-dive? has anyone ever solved anything with a nose-dive? are we a fighter jet in a dog fight like they were?" Instead of what is it now: "what are the odds that we should be in a nose-dive? well, nothing else seems better."
I think a lot of people, particularly those in the know, forget what safety really is. Security isn't about wasting all of your resources to protect something that no one is trying to steal.
Case in point: I drive at 154 kph (~100mph) on a highway with thousands of other cars doing the same. The only thing protecting each of us from the other is a dashed white line.
There's no one trying to steal my e-mail from my servers. And that's mostly because there's very little value in doing so right now.
So why not do it anyway? What does it hurt?
Some people do have valuable e-mail, and indeed they should encrypt it. But making everything encrypted is the same as wasting medications. You breed stronger bugs faster than you can keep up.
They didn't "have it removed on copyright grounds". They called their private-company friends, and asked for somethat that isn't illegal -- for that friend to stop providing a particular product/service/client, just for fun. Welcome to business. "We reserve the right to deny service to anyone."
So yes, everyone has the right to do what they did.
The question you were to ask was this one: Why did they publish their content on youtube in the first place, when they could have published on their own controlled networks?
Welcome to having given up control over their content when they gave it to someone else. This is not a surprise.
Absolutely, yes I should be able to risk someone else's life for juts about anything. Millions are risking my life. Every bit of my financial life. Every bit of my profesional life, and every bit of my personal life, and every bit of my love life. And I'm not risking their lives. I'm just making it realyl easy for them to risk their own. If they don't walk across the street, or drive on the street, I'm not risking their lives at all. They choos eto take the risk. I just choos eto make it a bigger risk for them. Let's keep that clear. They can always choose not to play. Especially in this city, where movies have been made of people who never need to leave shelter between work and home -- it's a big city with a big underground city too.
Second, there is way more benefit to talking while driving than just the enjoyment.
If I'm going to be late -- and there's a lot of traffic in this city, and a lot of construction, and a lot of road closures -- I can drive more aggressively, or I can call ahead and say that I'll need a few more minutes to get there, then not rush.
If any husband has a female wife, he knows that leaving her to stew, wondering where he is, is never good. It's not emotionally good, it's not physiologically good, and it's not healthy for either of them.
And there are hundreds of potential emergencies for which I need to be reachable. If you're a surgeon, a fire fighter, a police officer, a parent, a guardian of any kind, or a reliable friend, you know that people count on you during their emergencies. The idea that you wouldn't answer the phone when someone is stranded somewhere and needs your help is just disrespectful. What if you child collapses at school, and hospitals need a guardian to make life or death decisions. You're not going to answer the phone? Or it won't ring at all because your local movie theatre blocks them?
We're talking here, heh, about removing one of our species' greatest advantages -- communication. We communicate better than almost every other species on this planet. And you're discussing removing that capability for significant periods of time.
And, again, not every collision results in death. And not every collision is the fault of either driver. And not every collision is the fault of the one legally responsible for the collision.
So yes, I should be allowed to risk someone els's life for my own enjoyment. Otherwise, I should be taking all of my recreational dollars, and buying food for those who are starving, and houses for those who are homeless. You want to know what would save the most lives? If I took the $41'744.34 that I spend on my convertible sports car, plus the $2'743.89 that I spent on the vertical doors modification, and fed starving people in my own city.
And there's no way that I'm going to do that. I've worked far too hard to be giving money away to those who don't work hard enough.
you'll never save them all, and still walk out the door ever. there simply needs to be an acceptable level of risk. Since, you know, everything you do can kill someone. especially when you start to consider that causing someone to go broke has psychological and health detriments. as does being in a high building. or on a plane.
so when the risk that you're discussing, whatever risk that might be, is lower than the risks that you take every day, naturally, then it's not a risk to care about yet.
and since you eat junk food, and you walk across the street, and you get into a plane, and you bungee jump, and you don't have a smoke detector, and you don't have a carbon monoxide detector, and you burn candles every week, and you use knives, and you live next to a drug dealer, and you live next to a drug addict...and there are earth quakes, and mud slides, and floods, and colds, and flus, and war.
and still, even with all of that, it's worth a number of lives to let the rets of us enjoy driving. no one ever said that you get to live in a place that safe.
I'd probably say that if 10'000 people died every year, because the rest of us drive, that would be an easily acceptable number. quite possible 100'000. And if appropriately distributed, even 1 million car-related deaths could be acceptable, when you consider that some of those deaths were in place of other normal deaths anyway.
I did. I fought it. I did so alone. And I lost. I still think it's better to hold the phone, than to be hands-free, and I can clearly explain why. But that's not the point here. Also not the point here is that Mario Andretti can drive just fine while talking on the radio -- remember that we already train people to drive; I don't know why we don't train people to drive while talking: it's a skill like any other.
The point here should be that if you can't drive while talking on a dry road with perfect lighting, you shouldn't be driving in the rain at all, let a alone a blizzard with ice on the road. If you were banning talking while driving in a blizzard, I'd be fine with that. If you were saying that I can't drive without corrective lenses, adn he can't drive while talking, I'd be fine with that too. Each is skill-based. Easily taught and tested.
But that won't be the point here either.
The point here is that I can paint your future. In 5 years, an automated car won't be just a prototype any more. In 10 years, it'll be a standard option on many high-end cars. And it 20 years, it'll be a standard option on most cars. At some point, someone's going to calculate a statistic that the self-driving car is safer than the human-driven car. And it won't matter that the stat includes teenage drivers, and criminals, and human emergencies. And it won't matter whether or not the stat is valid at all, or reliable across geographical, weather, or cultural divides. One day, someone will lobby to require all driving to be automatic. And one day, one of those someones will win.
And it doesn't matter how many lives are saved. Because that too isn't the point. Not driving at all would save lives too. So would being encased in a bubble, or only driving huge trucks.
The only point here is that when that day comes, you'll have said that a safety risk is more important than a recreational freedom. Many people enjoy driving. Many people enjoy driving to work. Many people enjoy controlling the machine, repairing the machine, cleaning the machine, and playing with the machine.
So you'll live in a city where something enjoyable is prohibited. And the irony will be that police cars will be the very last to be automated. So you'll have a human police officer trained to drive to catch a human driver to arrest them for driving. It'll be funny.
And the best part is that you will not have removed all car collisions. Because the automated driving will still not be able to deal with all of the black ice. So you'll have removed the ability for humans to drive, and only saved a few lives. And you'll never have the stats to prove it. But you'll still have air bags, seat belts, road signs, crumple zones, automatic driving, and ejection seats.
Forgetting is a very important skill -- it's a big huge part of something that we call focus.
With the exception of completely arbitrary doors, I'd argue that every door our there separates two head-spaces for a damn good reason.
The experiment that you want to do next is to see if crossing back through the doorway re-strengthens the original memory. I would hope that it not only restrengthens the original memory, but that the original memory winds up being stronger after returning through the door (that's two door passes) than it would have been had the door not been there (that's two non-door passes).
So when do you set aside your current head-space for a new one?
no one ever used e-mail to replace the spoken word. especially in business. we use e-mail to replace the mailed word -- that's why it's e-mail, not e-spoken.
you can't send a document via text message, or twitter. and you can't send a confidential document via facebook or skype.
and, in business, records matter. the fantastic part about e-mail is that both sides get a record of instructions. the whole: yes-i-did-tell-you, no-you-didn't-tell-me is easily resolved. e-mail is easily a basic crm.
if you were using e-mail for anything else, you were always mis-using it.
My doors aren't for rams. They are for air and light.
And wow, you clearly live in a safety-zone.
One can burn a piece of paper in a simple non-plastic garbage pail, next to your desk, inside, with a match and the document itself. Maybe with the window open, maybe not.
Seriously? Fire-proof container? Outside? Multiple matches? It's a stupid few pieces of paper. No big deal to burn.
it takes less effort, and less time, and less technology, to burn documents than to shred them. If shredding ceases to become useful, it'll take eight seconds before the new fangled algorithm will be useless.
Exactly. And if you look back, before the U., you see that one day, someone said "screw you, I don't like your laws. I'm going to walk over here, draw this line in the sand, and I'm going to live by my own laws." It happened some 50 times!
Incidentally, I'm not in the U.S.. I'm in Canada. And at present, even in Toronto with 7 million people, we aren't worried about that sort of government surveillance. It exists only in the most fundamental, and elemental manner -- for real criminal prevention.
And if it does escalate, there are plenty of smaller cities.
we've got people protesting that bankers make too much money. those very same protesters have never counted just how much of their own money they've paid to those same bankers.
if you don't want to be on camera, stop going to the cameras.
yeah, you'll lose the benefits of those services. of course. welcome to making choices. if it's important to you, you'll make it appropriately.
so stop complaining. start noticing that you've chosen to take the taxi with the camera. you've chosen to take the subway with the camera. you've chosen to purchase the car with the limiter. you could have walked, you could have cycled, and you coudl have built your own car.
It's still new, wait. As a new concept, people actually believe that if they give money to someone trying to invent something weird, that it'll actually get invented most of the time. Just wait.
In short-order, people will realize that 50% of this kind of research goes nowhere forever, and another 40% of it fails out-right quickly. Only 10% makes it to what we're going to call, here, a prototype. And of those, only half make it to what we'll call a break-even point.
Finding people willing to invest has never been the difficult part. The challenge is in finding people willing to lose their investment 18 times, and break even once, before finally succeeding on the 20th attempt.
The part you hate isn't the programming. It's the programming for someone else. It's the 9-5. It's the office. It's the colleagues. It's the politics.
In short, it's the factory.
Start your own programming company, in whatever industry or market is your favourite. When the code you write is yours, and you get to choose your own projects, and you get to not only see the value of your better code, but also get rewarded for it being a reality, then life is good.
But really, and most of all, programming isn't a 9-5 job. For a few reasons.
- programming is all about loading and unloading a few thousand lines of code into your head, repeatedly throughout the day.
- you can't be tired.
- you can't be planning to stop in 59 minutes, 2 hours and 59 minutes, or 6 hours and 59 minutes.
- it needs to be a "I'm doing this today, however long it takes"
- sometimes that's 1 hour, sometimes it's 18 hours. but it's always fun.
I tend to start working, home office, around noon, immediately after I wake up. I take a TV break around 3pm. I continue to work until 6pm. I eat, shower, dress. I then go out and enjoy life. sometimes I come back before midnight, and get another 3 or 4 hours of work in. Occasionally I don't go out in the evening.
The end result is that I get between 3 and 18 hours of work done per day, and tend to easily average around 10. Which does a nice job of letting me go on vacation, or be ill, or take a day off for a dexter marathon, whenever I want.
Most importantly, life is amazing, work isn't work, and it's fun.
each new UI is designed to make things easier for users who have trouble with previous UIs. So everyone currently using them, and comfortable with them, get a lesser, albeit more pretty UI. So they complain, and rightfully so. All of the new users don't have anything to complain about because they aren't current users. They don't rejoice in advance because they still don't believe that the new UI will make it easier for them. And generally, they are correct.
(: hey, it's a good argument, that you made, with organizations having corrective elements as a part of the job. I was thinking of the show organizers as an individual -- being an entrepreneur, I do that sometimes.
Here's the problem with each of those: they aren't realistic, they're neutered. That's pretty well my point.
Think of the real-world humans who actualyl do simulate the evacuation of a coastal town. Did you fight to get a budget from the city? Did you fight to convince the city that there really is a risk? Did you manage to prove that the bridge into town needs to be widenned? How do you know that you got anything right?
The real challenges in almost any scientific career hasn't been the experimentation phase for quite some time. It's the fighting. The fighting for money, the fighting to convince others that you did anything at all -- in this case, you're fighting me. When those types of things are factored in, your practicals didn't help you at all.
I build Internet shopping applications for a living. The difficult part is meeting the client's schedule when their bank delays the launch. The difficult part is talking on the phone to their e-commerce gateway to convince them that I don't need to take their developer course to follow their simple API for the fourth time.
Modern computer games take millions of dollars and multiple years. Whatever you learned in a single course taught you to not be afraid of 3d graphics. But between motion capture, memory usage, speed, multiple GPUs, CPUs, and legal regulations, you can't dive right in and make a modern game tomorrow.
The bridge over the creek is actually a wonderful example. Mine was a similarly diminuitive bridge. So tell me, did you select your materials? You said they were supplied to you. So you didn't need to select suitable materials, legally available, readily available, consider the transport of those materials to the campus, get a police escort for your extra-wide transport, get the city's permission to take streets normally not designed for such large loads, ask teh city to move power lines temporarily so your truck could get through.
My point is not that you didn't learn anything. My point is that you didn't reach the threshhold of knowledge necessary to actually start a project on your own. Just start. If I gave you the keys to the office, and all of the respect required for you to have the power to be that office, what would you do on your first day?
Most people have zero clue where to start. It's not that they can't be useful as employees within a process, it's that they can't envision the start-to-finish process.
Which means that when it comes to any profession requiring a single human to manage the start-to-finish, these people flounder. And there are many such fields. Your family doctor sees you on day one, and you expect him to at least start you on a road, all by himself. You expect the same of any boss you've ever had.
For some dumb reason, academia has never taught what I'm going to call "process engagement". A fancy term for "starting from nothing". That means without any help, and usually without any knowledge or experience on the specific matter at hand. Because learning is a part of that process -- it's called innovation.
I'm buying a house on wednesday. I want to replace the toilets with nicer ones. How many persons do I know that said "you should hire a professional for that". I haven't any idea how to replace a toilet. But I know that I can learn, within a few days, and I know that it's not the most complicated task. Sure it'll take me longer than a professional plumber, but I'll be able to do it, and to do it right. And if I'm wrong, then I can hire a professional.
Everyone I know, is scared to even think about trying -- let alone actually trying.
I'm sure the organizers never wanted the pirate party there at all. But inviting them was a brilliant business move. For a whole host of reasons, from inflaming other exhibitors, getting those other exhibitors to spend more, encouraging another segment to exhibit, and impressing sponsors in the first place. Then, finally, supporting those that wanted the pirate party gone.
I'll bet it was the best period of business activity for the organizers. Welcome to playing one side against the other, and getting news-level advertising fory our show in the process.
Why is any of this surprising to anyone? It's just a gossip-tree and a rumour-mill at the business level.
Ooh, guess who's coming to dinner. Oh, sorry, they cancelled at the last minute.
Slashdot Mirror
we're going to see a huge change in programming methods coming pretty soon. Today, A.I. is still math and computer based. The problem is that data, input, and all of the algorithms you're going to write can result in a plane nose-diving -- even though no human being has ever chosen to nose-dive under any scenario in a commercial flight.
Why was an algorithm written that could do something that no one has ever wanted to do?
The shift is going to be when psychology takes over A.I. from the math geeks. It'll be the first time that math becomes entirely useless because the scenarios will be 90% exceptions. It'll also be the first time that psychology becomes truly beneficial -- and it'll be the direct result of centuries of black-box science.
That's when the programming changes to "should we take a nose-dive? has anyone ever solved anything with a nose-dive? are we a fighter jet in a dog fight like they were?" Instead of what is it now: "what are the odds that we should be in a nose-dive? well, nothing else seems better."
I think a lot of people, particularly those in the know, forget what safety really is. Security isn't about wasting all of your resources to protect something that no one is trying to steal.
Case in point: I drive at 154 kph (~100mph) on a highway with thousands of other cars doing the same. The only thing protecting each of us from the other is a dashed white line.
There's no one trying to steal my e-mail from my servers. And that's mostly because there's very little value in doing so right now.
So why not do it anyway? What does it hurt?
Some people do have valuable e-mail, and indeed they should encrypt it. But making everything encrypted is the same as wasting medications. You breed stronger bugs faster than you can keep up.
You're going to have a difficult time making a recreational track to mimic a mountain road, without, say, the mountain.
Which means that you're thick. Roads will simply start to get classified as human or machine.
And one by one, they'll switch back and forth, until the confusion becomes unbearable.
They didn't "have it removed on copyright grounds". They called their private-company friends, and asked for somethat that isn't illegal -- for that friend to stop providing a particular product/service/client, just for fun. Welcome to business. "We reserve the right to deny service to anyone."
So yes, everyone has the right to do what they did.
The question you were to ask was this one: Why did they publish their content on youtube in the first place, when they could have published on their own controlled networks?
Welcome to having given up control over their content when they gave it to someone else. This is not a surprise.
Tracks are not recreational, they are professional. So you clearly have no idea.
Absolutely, yes I should be able to risk someone else's life for juts about anything. Millions are risking my life. Every bit of my financial life. Every bit of my profesional life, and every bit of my personal life, and every bit of my love life. And I'm not risking their lives. I'm just making it realyl easy for them to risk their own. If they don't walk across the street, or drive on the street, I'm not risking their lives at all. They choos eto take the risk. I just choos eto make it a bigger risk for them. Let's keep that clear. They can always choose not to play. Especially in this city, where movies have been made of people who never need to leave shelter between work and home -- it's a big city with a big underground city too.
Second, there is way more benefit to talking while driving than just the enjoyment.
If I'm going to be late -- and there's a lot of traffic in this city, and a lot of construction, and a lot of road closures -- I can drive more aggressively, or I can call ahead and say that I'll need a few more minutes to get there, then not rush.
If any husband has a female wife, he knows that leaving her to stew, wondering where he is, is never good. It's not emotionally good, it's not physiologically good, and it's not healthy for either of them.
And there are hundreds of potential emergencies for which I need to be reachable. If you're a surgeon, a fire fighter, a police officer, a parent, a guardian of any kind, or a reliable friend, you know that people count on you during their emergencies. The idea that you wouldn't answer the phone when someone is stranded somewhere and needs your help is just disrespectful. What if you child collapses at school, and hospitals need a guardian to make life or death decisions. You're not going to answer the phone? Or it won't ring at all because your local movie theatre blocks them?
We're talking here, heh, about removing one of our species' greatest advantages -- communication. We communicate better than almost every other species on this planet. And you're discussing removing that capability for significant periods of time.
And, again, not every collision results in death. And not every collision is the fault of either driver. And not every collision is the fault of the one legally responsible for the collision.
So yes, I should be allowed to risk someone els's life for my own enjoyment. Otherwise, I should be taking all of my recreational dollars, and buying food for those who are starving, and houses for those who are homeless. You want to know what would save the most lives? If I took the $41'744.34 that I spend on my convertible sports car, plus the $2'743.89 that I spent on the vertical doors modification, and fed starving people in my own city.
And there's no way that I'm going to do that. I've worked far too hard to be giving money away to those who don't work hard enough.
you'll never save them all, and still walk out the door ever. there simply needs to be an acceptable level of risk. Since, you know, everything you do can kill someone. especially when you start to consider that causing someone to go broke has psychological and health detriments. as does being in a high building. or on a plane.
so when the risk that you're discussing, whatever risk that might be, is lower than the risks that you take every day, naturally, then it's not a risk to care about yet.
and since you eat junk food, and you walk across the street, and you get into a plane, and you bungee jump, and you don't have a smoke detector, and you don't have a carbon monoxide detector, and you burn candles every week, and you use knives, and you live next to a drug dealer, and you live next to a drug addict...and there are earth quakes, and mud slides, and floods, and colds, and flus, and war.
and still, even with all of that, it's worth a number of lives to let the rets of us enjoy driving. no one ever said that you get to live in a place that safe.
I'd probably say that if 10'000 people died every year, because the rest of us drive, that would be an easily acceptable number. quite possible 100'000. And if appropriately distributed, even 1 million car-related deaths could be acceptable, when you consider that some of those deaths were in place of other normal deaths anyway.
I did. I fought it. I did so alone. And I lost. I still think it's better to hold the phone, than to be hands-free, and I can clearly explain why. But that's not the point here. Also not the point here is that Mario Andretti can drive just fine while talking on the radio -- remember that we already train people to drive; I don't know why we don't train people to drive while talking: it's a skill like any other.
The point here should be that if you can't drive while talking on a dry road with perfect lighting, you shouldn't be driving in the rain at all, let a alone a blizzard with ice on the road. If you were banning talking while driving in a blizzard, I'd be fine with that. If you were saying that I can't drive without corrective lenses, adn he can't drive while talking, I'd be fine with that too. Each is skill-based. Easily taught and tested.
But that won't be the point here either.
The point here is that I can paint your future. In 5 years, an automated car won't be just a prototype any more. In 10 years, it'll be a standard option on many high-end cars. And it 20 years, it'll be a standard option on most cars. At some point, someone's going to calculate a statistic that the self-driving car is safer than the human-driven car. And it won't matter that the stat includes teenage drivers, and criminals, and human emergencies. And it won't matter whether or not the stat is valid at all, or reliable across geographical, weather, or cultural divides. One day, someone will lobby to require all driving to be automatic. And one day, one of those someones will win.
And it doesn't matter how many lives are saved. Because that too isn't the point. Not driving at all would save lives too. So would being encased in a bubble, or only driving huge trucks.
The only point here is that when that day comes, you'll have said that a safety risk is more important than a recreational freedom. Many people enjoy driving. Many people enjoy driving to work. Many people enjoy controlling the machine, repairing the machine, cleaning the machine, and playing with the machine.
So you'll live in a city where something enjoyable is prohibited. And the irony will be that police cars will be the very last to be automated. So you'll have a human police officer trained to drive to catch a human driver to arrest them for driving. It'll be funny.
And the best part is that you will not have removed all car collisions. Because the automated driving will still not be able to deal with all of the black ice. So you'll have removed the ability for humans to drive, and only saved a few lives. And you'll never have the stats to prove it. But you'll still have air bags, seat belts, road signs, crumple zones, automatic driving, and ejection seats.
That's the point. And that's the problem.
Forgetting is a very important skill -- it's a big huge part of something that we call focus.
With the exception of completely arbitrary doors, I'd argue that every door our there separates two head-spaces for a damn good reason.
The experiment that you want to do next is to see if crossing back through the doorway re-strengthens the original memory. I would hope that it not only restrengthens the original memory, but that the original memory winds up being stronger after returning through the door (that's two door passes) than it would have been had the door not been there (that's two non-door passes).
So when do you set aside your current head-space for a new one?
no one ever used e-mail to replace the spoken word. especially in business. we use e-mail to replace the mailed word -- that's why it's e-mail, not e-spoken.
you can't send a document via text message, or twitter. and you can't send a confidential document via facebook or skype.
and, in business, records matter. the fantastic part about e-mail is that both sides get a record of instructions. the whole: yes-i-did-tell-you, no-you-didn't-tell-me is easily resolved. e-mail is easily a basic crm.
if you were using e-mail for anything else, you were always mis-using it.
My doors aren't for rams. They are for air and light.
And wow, you clearly live in a safety-zone.
One can burn a piece of paper in a simple non-plastic garbage pail, next to your desk, inside, with a match and the document itself. Maybe with the window open, maybe not.
Seriously? Fire-proof container? Outside? Multiple matches? It's a stupid few pieces of paper. No big deal to burn.
it takes less effort, and less time, and less technology, to burn documents than to shred them. If shredding ceases to become useful, it'll take eight seconds before the new fangled algorithm will be useless.
Exactly. And if you look back, before the U., you see that one day, someone said "screw you, I don't like your laws. I'm going to walk over here, draw this line in the sand, and I'm going to live by my own laws." It happened some 50 times!
Incidentally, I'm not in the U.S.. I'm in Canada. And at present, even in Toronto with 7 million people, we aren't worried about that sort of government surveillance. It exists only in the most fundamental, and elemental manner -- for real criminal prevention.
And if it does escalate, there are plenty of smaller cities.
You've missed another option.
Ever thought about leaving the place that you hate?
Nothing keeps you there.
Welcome to active decision-making.
ever thought of, oh I don't know, leaving?
there are plenty of places without so much surveillance. and they'd love to have you.
you're actively choosing to support something about which you're complaining. It just makes no sense.
no, you had to start making active choices ten years ago.
and you can still move to a city without so many cameras.
you think that you don't have any choice. it's amazing.
we've got people protesting that bankers make too much money. those very same protesters have never counted just how much of their own money they've paid to those same bankers.
if you don't want to be on camera, stop going to the cameras.
yeah, you'll lose the benefits of those services. of course. welcome to making choices. if it's important to you, you'll make it appropriately.
so stop complaining. start noticing that you've chosen to take the taxi with the camera. you've chosen to take the subway with the camera. you've chosen to purchase the car with the limiter. you could have walked, you could have cycled, and you coudl have built your own car.
make decisions; actively.
It's still new, wait. As a new concept, people actually believe that if they give money to someone trying to invent something weird, that it'll actually get invented most of the time. Just wait.
In short-order, people will realize that 50% of this kind of research goes nowhere forever, and another 40% of it fails out-right quickly. Only 10% makes it to what we're going to call, here, a prototype. And of those, only half make it to what we'll call a break-even point.
Finding people willing to invest has never been the difficult part. The challenge is in finding people willing to lose their investment 18 times, and break even once, before finally succeeding on the 20th attempt.
Wait, they'll learn fast.
The part you hate isn't the programming. It's the programming for someone else. It's the 9-5. It's the office. It's the colleagues. It's the politics.
In short, it's the factory.
Start your own programming company, in whatever industry or market is your favourite. When the code you write is yours, and you get to choose your own projects, and you get to not only see the value of your better code, but also get rewarded for it being a reality, then life is good.
But really, and most of all, programming isn't a 9-5 job. For a few reasons.
- programming is all about loading and unloading a few thousand lines of code into your head, repeatedly throughout the day.
- you can't be tired.
- you can't be planning to stop in 59 minutes, 2 hours and 59 minutes, or 6 hours and 59 minutes.
- it needs to be a "I'm doing this today, however long it takes"
- sometimes that's 1 hour, sometimes it's 18 hours. but it's always fun.
I tend to start working, home office, around noon, immediately after I wake up. I take a TV break around 3pm. I continue to work until 6pm. I eat, shower, dress. I then go out and enjoy life. sometimes I come back before midnight, and get another 3 or 4 hours of work in. Occasionally I don't go out in the evening.
The end result is that I get between 3 and 18 hours of work done per day, and tend to easily average around 10. Which does a nice job of letting me go on vacation, or be ill, or take a day off for a dexter marathon, whenever I want.
Most importantly, life is amazing, work isn't work, and it's fun.
each new UI is designed to make things easier for users who have trouble with previous UIs. So everyone currently using them, and comfortable with them, get a lesser, albeit more pretty UI. So they complain, and rightfully so. All of the new users don't have anything to complain about because they aren't current users. They don't rejoice in advance because they still don't believe that the new UI will make it easier for them. And generally, they are correct.
(: hey, it's a good argument, that you made, with organizations having corrective elements as a part of the job. I was thinking of the show organizers as an individual -- being an entrepreneur, I do that sometimes.
That's a good point. I agree with you.
considering someone else's intentional choices as undesirable or stupid on their part is almost always incorrect.
Here's the problem with each of those: they aren't realistic, they're neutered. That's pretty well my point.
Think of the real-world humans who actualyl do simulate the evacuation of a coastal town. Did you fight to get a budget from the city? Did you fight to convince the city that there really is a risk? Did you manage to prove that the bridge into town needs to be widenned? How do you know that you got anything right?
The real challenges in almost any scientific career hasn't been the experimentation phase for quite some time. It's the fighting. The fighting for money, the fighting to convince others that you did anything at all -- in this case, you're fighting me. When those types of things are factored in, your practicals didn't help you at all.
I build Internet shopping applications for a living. The difficult part is meeting the client's schedule when their bank delays the launch. The difficult part is talking on the phone to their e-commerce gateway to convince them that I don't need to take their developer course to follow their simple API for the fourth time.
Modern computer games take millions of dollars and multiple years. Whatever you learned in a single course taught you to not be afraid of 3d graphics. But between motion capture, memory usage, speed, multiple GPUs, CPUs, and legal regulations, you can't dive right in and make a modern game tomorrow.
The bridge over the creek is actually a wonderful example. Mine was a similarly diminuitive bridge. So tell me, did you select your materials? You said they were supplied to you. So you didn't need to select suitable materials, legally available, readily available, consider the transport of those materials to the campus, get a police escort for your extra-wide transport, get the city's permission to take streets normally not designed for such large loads, ask teh city to move power lines temporarily so your truck could get through.
My point is not that you didn't learn anything. My point is that you didn't reach the threshhold of knowledge necessary to actually start a project on your own. Just start. If I gave you the keys to the office, and all of the respect required for you to have the power to be that office, what would you do on your first day?
Most people have zero clue where to start. It's not that they can't be useful as employees within a process, it's that they can't envision the start-to-finish process.
Which means that when it comes to any profession requiring a single human to manage the start-to-finish, these people flounder. And there are many such fields. Your family doctor sees you on day one, and you expect him to at least start you on a road, all by himself. You expect the same of any boss you've ever had.
For some dumb reason, academia has never taught what I'm going to call "process engagement". A fancy term for "starting from nothing". That means without any help, and usually without any knowledge or experience on the specific matter at hand. Because learning is a part of that process -- it's called innovation.
I'm buying a house on wednesday. I want to replace the toilets with nicer ones. How many persons do I know that said "you should hire a professional for that". I haven't any idea how to replace a toilet. But I know that I can learn, within a few days, and I know that it's not the most complicated task. Sure it'll take me longer than a professional plumber, but I'll be able to do it, and to do it right. And if I'm wrong, then I can hire a professional.
Everyone I know, is scared to even think about trying -- let alone actually trying.
I'm sure the organizers never wanted the pirate party there at all. But inviting them was a brilliant business move. For a whole host of reasons, from inflaming other exhibitors, getting those other exhibitors to spend more, encouraging another segment to exhibit, and impressing sponsors in the first place. Then, finally, supporting those that wanted the pirate party gone.
I'll bet it was the best period of business activity for the organizers. Welcome to playing one side against the other, and getting news-level advertising fory our show in the process.
Why is any of this surprising to anyone? It's just a gossip-tree and a rumour-mill at the business level.
Ooh, guess who's coming to dinner. Oh, sorry, they cancelled at the last minute.