Well, it is true that his compass tends to spin wildly much of the time. But that's half the fun, isn't it?
And I'm sure he tells the truth. It's just that what's convenient to be the truth at one time may not be the same truth that's convenient later, but regardless, I'm sure that he sincerely believes both to be true when he says them. And actually that makes him more flexible than those who pull a truth out of some smelly orifice and won't waver or "flip-flop" on it, no matter how untrue it later proves to be. Isn't flexibility considered a virtue any more, or should we all just doggedly double down and "stay the course"?
People who are well-motivated and self-driven can work without someone continuously breathing over their shoulder.
People who are slackers can slack off just as well in the middle of a crowded office. Dilbert's fellow-employee Wally is alive and well and I've had the questionable honor of working in offices with many of his clones over the years.
People who have to be forcibly driven to work are going to resent it and the results are going to show in the quality of their work. Although, what am I saying - qualify took back seat to cheap and fast years ago.
Personally, my home office is organized and equipped a lot better than most employer-supplied workspaces I've been given. I can have a comfortable chair because it doesn't have to conform to HR's ranking of who gets what kind of chair based on whether one is a manager or not (even to the point of whether it should be floral or plaid). I don't spend my time looking for items to set fire to because the office thermostat isn't set to arctic levels in the misguided idea that the colder it is the more "productive" i am. I don't arrive at work in a bad mood because of the commute or connive to quit early in order to avoid the rush and I can even adapt my working schedule to be more friendly to natural body rhythms by taking a break in the middle of the afternoon and returning to work in the evening since I don't have a long commute in and out of work.
I don't even talk to headhunters who expect me to work exclusively on-premises anymore.
I've been mentoring junior developers for years, and there's been absolutely no uncertainty about which ones were struggling. Or which ones were overjoyed to be guided and which were just hoping I'd do their job for them,
Some of them were even located on the same continent I am.
Though I've never met any of them face-to-face. Or even voice-to-voice.
Originally, credit unions had limited charters. These days almost anyone can join any credit union.
In my experience, the economies of scale that are supposed to be coming from the big banks are illusory. Some of the worst penalties and service fees I've seen were from the largest banks. All the money they save on doing business in bulk seems to disappear into the maws of overpriced consultants, questionable investments, and other stuff like super-expensive fad IT systems that often make industry headlines by failing.
I'm not really sure I want "one-stop shopping" for all my financial matters, a la the Wells Fargo "Gr8" initiative. It sounds too much like putting all my eggs in one basket and it's one of the things that made abusive institutions "too big to fail".
For quite some time now the rule I've heard quoted is that if you're a business, get a bank account. For personal finances, you're better off with a credit union. At a minimum, the big banks don't really care about the little people anyway, and if you believe their ad campaigns about how VERY important you are to them, believe ME when I tell you I've got a great deal on a bridge in downtown NYC!
It's not just banking - it's virtually *any* publicly traded business.
When pressure is on to look good on the quarterly reports, you quickly lose any sense of ethics. =Smidge=
Not unique to public businesses. Private businesses can press employees to please the bosses, government agencies can be squeezed to placate CongressThings (despite all the civil service cruft that's supposed to make that impossible). And so forth.
Machines and dart boards don't let their emotions or their greed cloud their judgements.
The greed is incorporated into the algorithms.
That's corporate greed though. To the shareholders, corporate greed is good.
What's bad is when the CEO shafts the shareholders to assuage his own greed. Or lust. Or other purely personal selfish reasons. A robot isn't likely to have any personal selfish reasons.
One thing I didn't run across in the Communist Manifesto was the concept of centralized control by a human.
About the closest I've ever heard was the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" and I'm pretty sure that meant democratic rule, not a single ruler.
Even that wasn't in the manifesto. I'd say that if anything what was promoted there was more of an ad-hoc system where interested persons would come together to resolve a situation then return to a more uncontrolled state. But that might be just me.
For the concept of a Communist Dictatorship a la Lenin, Stalin and Mao, I think you'll have to search elsewhere.
Not that the Communist Manifesto doesn't have some garbage in it, but give credit and blame where it's due, not where our ideological programmers have instructed us to.
THERE IS NO WAY HORSELESS CARRIAGES will be here soon. A horseless carriage cannot see obstacles and automatically swerve to avoid them - they'd just run right into or over them! Horseless carriages require specialized fuel. A horse-drawn carriage requires nothing more than easily-obtainable vegetable fodder. And there's no way you could mix horses and horseless carriages on today's roads. We'd have to attach noisemakers to the horseless carriages or something to get their attention.
In fact, today's roads are ill-suited to horseless traffic. The expense of bringing all those roads up to that quality would be prohibitive. And it would take YEARS!
I've heard enough rap that was nothing but murky audio, heavy repetitive bass and lots of epithets. Also repetitive. That would be trivial to automate. You don't even have to support a melody line.
To my mind one of the biggest issues that needs to be sorted out for widespread adoption of "creative" or "decision-making" robots is liability. If a human screws up, fails to deliver or (worse) gets someone hurt or killed then we have a handy meatsack that can be thrown in jail or sued into poverty.
Robots have already done a pretty good job of replacing unskilled and semi-skilled labor.
What should concern us more is that they're replacing now.
Stop thinking about robots as tin-plated mechanical men or blind automated arm-devices. Start thinking of them as disembodied algorithms. Think of them as Watson. Think of them as Siri. Be afraid.
It's been happening for some time now. AI-directed securities trading programs that make decisions at speeds so fast that the SEC has had to take measures just to give mere humans a chance. In the last few years, we've seen AI playwriting, AI recipe-design, and a lot of other things.
Mostly the AI approach to creativity is pretty primitive at the moment, but when it comes to raw decision making, AIs can often do at least as well as humans. Although to be fair, in some cases, dart boards have been shown to do as well as humans. Machines and dart boards don't let their emotions or their greed cloud their judgements.
What happens when the day comes that major corporations can only be competitive when their executive decisions are made by machines? First you clear out the executive suite - who needs all those VPs and C-levels? Then, might as well dump the CEO himself, since he's nothing but a figurehead. The actual decision-making is done on a rental basis from IBM. Sales people? We've been training people to be "self serve" when buying for decades now.
This is the real SkyNet and it's already happening. Hopefully it won't make a computed decision to kill all humans, but that doesn't mean that it has to keep them on the payroll either.
Just out of curiosity, I yanked a copy of the Communist Manifesto off Project Gutenberg the other day and was rather amazed to discover that all this had pretty well been already anticipated by Marx and Engels.
We have been programmed to think of Communism solely in terms of "rob the hard-working rich and give to the useless parasitic poor", but that wasn't the primary focus there. Instead it was based on the idea that industry would become so productive that without communal ownership of resources, we'd ultimately end up with exactly what we fear we're heading for.
Not to say that the Communist Manifesto presents a viable solution to that problem. After touching on the above, it goes on to promote things that have either been demonstrated not to work and/or morally offend, but it does indicate that we haven't discovered anything new here.
Different ink formulations, among other things. We take advantage of stuff like that even now to read many of these old palimpsests.
This is just another arrow in the quiver, but it's an important one, since a lot of old texts are stuck together and frequently too brittle to separate. I'm thinking especially of the charred works recovered from the remains of the Library at Alexandria.
Much of the modern black attitude is based on not being "disrespected". Not by earning respect, but by applying violence to those who "disrespect" you. By being the biggest, baddest (word not allowed for white people) in the 'hood.
That's not how Dr. King taught people to handle adversity, but Dr. King is dead.
Like most underclass minorities, they find it's not nearly as easy to stick it to The Man as it is to each other. So they do. And just for good measure, they fire their anger with a fantasy of "getting even" for generations of slavery.
The slavery thing needs to go away. Slavery has been illegal in the USA for well over 150 years now. Everyone responsible - both offender and victim - are long dead. At the present rate of interracial marriage, even the blackest of families is likely to be partially descended from slaveholders, even the whitest have ancestors who were slaves. And slavery isn't some sort of magical black-only thing anyway. The first slaves of Westerners in the New World were Carib Indians, thank you Christopher Columbus. And on top of that, with the immigration rate we've got, a lot of the people in the USA had ancestors who were nowhere near the American Slavery thing.
Yes, slavery is despicable, but you don't march into the future if you never take your eyes off the past. It's not 1860 or even 1960. There's a black president now and has been for nearly a decade. He may not be the best president we've ever had, but I'd wager that at least 8 people out of 10 would rather vote for him than either of the sad cases we've been offered as his successor.
But slavery is at best an excuse. Ongoing violence is like fire. As long as you feed it, it burns. To stop it, you have to stop dumping fuel on it. There are other, better ways to solve problems.
Most of us didn't trust computers. Hence many comedy skits and stories about the consequences of "computer error" - and how fighting those consequences was made difficult because the people at the company that owned the computer refused to admit that the error was even possible.
But I don't think you'll encounter that attitude any more. No one would believe them.
When a mainframe computer that cost tens of millions of dollars crashed, Very Important People got angry. It could potentially shut down much of the company and the outage could be computed in thousands of dollars a minute. So mainframe OS's were written not to crash. IBM's trademark on this was "RAS" - Reliability, Availability and Serviceability.
Windows, on the other hand, gave us the Blue Screen of Death. And while people would complain, they'd generally just reboot and go on.
That depends on how you want to live. Even minimum wage in America is more than is earned by 80% of the world. People don't work a second job to survive, they do it to improve their life and afford extra things.
"Minimum wage" doesn't mean "survival wage". You need at least a survival wage to pay for food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health care and so forth.
If a minimum wage job doesn't pay a survival wage - and such is the consensus on US minimum wages - then you darned well will get pushed into working a second, or even third jobs.
It really doesn't matter how much better USA minimum wage pays than pay in Kolkata if the cost of living in the USA is significantly higher than it is in Kolkata. Which it is, hence the popularity of outsourcing skilled jobs to places like India. People over there can earn a comfortable living on less than the US minimum wage because their living expenses are lower - they're not just taking advanced programming jobs for $10/hour because they're selfless public benefactors.
No, what we really need is people who hire coders intelligently.
It once was said that "Computers Don't Make Mistakes". Now, instead it's "Have you tried turning if off and back on again?".
When computers were expensive and programmers cheap by comparison, software errors were considered something to be exterminated. Now they're considered to be inevitable.
Because when we got cheap computers, we expected cheap programmers. We no longer accept that reliable (and secure) software takes time and money to produce and expect everything to be fast and cheap. We're less critical of software quality than we are of bags of pet food from Wal-Mart.
Start by educating people that "IT Doesn't Matter" is as much a myth as trickle-down wealth, and that if you want to avoid hearing that all your company's critical data ended up in Bulgaria on the nightly news you'll need to make realistic resource budgets for your IT no matter how much you "know" that it could never really be that hard.
That might prompt you to want to hire people with actual skills beyond Always the Low Price, which in turn might make a career in IT attractive to talented workers again. Spend the money educating just one decision-maker, and you could easily end up motivating a dozen rank-and-file to educate themselves.
The NewSpeak language in 1984 was developed from a popular linguistic theory whose name I forget, but has a Wikipedia article of its own, if I remember correctly.
It's based on the concept that words have absolute meaning and that the words you have in your vocabulary shape the way you think. As such, it's a darling of the "Political Correctness" crowd, who think that if you ban discriminatory words, it will result in the extinction of the corresponding discrimination.
Which isn't entirely true. Ban the use of the word "retard" as an insult and kids will run around calling each other "special". The human race is quite adaptable that way.
There are secrets and then there are Secrets. Sometimes things are done casually that wouldn't be done if there were explicitly-known attack vectors. Sometimes an "accident" might be forgivable if it was truly thought to be innocuous.
This has nothing to do with specific persons or political parties. If you insist on sliming the topic with drive-by political sniping, I'll have to ask Trump to sic our state officials on you.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it is true that his compass tends to spin wildly much of the time. But that's half the fun, isn't it?
And I'm sure he tells the truth. It's just that what's convenient to be the truth at one time may not be the same truth that's convenient later, but regardless, I'm sure that he sincerely believes both to be true when he says them. And actually that makes him more flexible than those who pull a truth out of some smelly orifice and won't waver or "flip-flop" on it, no matter how untrue it later proves to be. Isn't flexibility considered a virtue any more, or should we all just doggedly double down and "stay the course"?
Sorry. That's shit, too.
People who are well-motivated and self-driven can work without someone continuously breathing over their shoulder.
People who are slackers can slack off just as well in the middle of a crowded office. Dilbert's fellow-employee Wally is alive and well and I've had the questionable honor of working in offices with many of his clones over the years.
People who have to be forcibly driven to work are going to resent it and the results are going to show in the quality of their work. Although, what am I saying - qualify took back seat to cheap and fast years ago.
Personally, my home office is organized and equipped a lot better than most employer-supplied workspaces I've been given. I can have a comfortable chair because it doesn't have to conform to HR's ranking of who gets what kind of chair based on whether one is a manager or not (even to the point of whether it should be floral or plaid). I don't spend my time looking for items to set fire to because the office thermostat isn't set to arctic levels in the misguided idea that the colder it is the more "productive" i am. I don't arrive at work in a bad mood because of the commute or connive to quit early in order to avoid the rush and I can even adapt my working schedule to be more friendly to natural body rhythms by taking a break in the middle of the afternoon and returning to work in the evening since I don't have a long commute in and out of work.
I don't even talk to headhunters who expect me to work exclusively on-premises anymore.
I've been mentoring junior developers for years, and there's been absolutely no uncertainty about which ones were struggling. Or which ones were overjoyed to be guided and which were just hoping I'd do their job for them,
Some of them were even located on the same continent I am.
Though I've never met any of them face-to-face. Or even voice-to-voice.
It's not the political compass mapping that worries people about Trump, though.
Anyone who'd work for Rupert Murdoch probably should be given the gravlox treatment.
Originally, credit unions had limited charters. These days almost anyone can join any credit union.
In my experience, the economies of scale that are supposed to be coming from the big banks are illusory. Some of the worst penalties and service fees I've seen were from the largest banks. All the money they save on doing business in bulk seems to disappear into the maws of overpriced consultants, questionable investments, and other stuff like super-expensive fad IT systems that often make industry headlines by failing.
I'm not really sure I want "one-stop shopping" for all my financial matters, a la the Wells Fargo "Gr8" initiative. It sounds too much like putting all my eggs in one basket and it's one of the things that made abusive institutions "too big to fail".
For quite some time now the rule I've heard quoted is that if you're a business, get a bank account. For personal finances, you're better off with a credit union. At a minimum, the big banks don't really care about the little people anyway, and if you believe their ad campaigns about how VERY important you are to them, believe ME when I tell you I've got a great deal on a bridge in downtown NYC!
It's not just banking - it's virtually *any* publicly traded business.
When pressure is on to look good on the quarterly reports, you quickly lose any sense of ethics.
=Smidge=
Not unique to public businesses. Private businesses can press employees to please the bosses, government agencies can be squeezed to placate CongressThings (despite all the civil service cruft that's supposed to make that impossible). And so forth.
I made that observation years ago.
If you reward workers for collecting red jellybeans and punish them for getting blue ones, the first thing they'll do is bring in a can of red paint.
Machines and dart boards don't let their emotions or their greed cloud their judgements.
The greed is incorporated into the algorithms.
That's corporate greed though. To the shareholders, corporate greed is good.
What's bad is when the CEO shafts the shareholders to assuage his own greed. Or lust. Or other purely personal selfish reasons. A robot isn't likely to have any personal selfish reasons.
One thing I didn't run across in the Communist Manifesto was the concept of centralized control by a human.
About the closest I've ever heard was the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" and I'm pretty sure that meant democratic rule, not a single ruler.
Even that wasn't in the manifesto. I'd say that if anything what was promoted there was more of an ad-hoc system where interested persons would come together to resolve a situation then return to a more uncontrolled state. But that might be just me.
For the concept of a Communist Dictatorship a la Lenin, Stalin and Mao, I think you'll have to search elsewhere.
Not that the Communist Manifesto doesn't have some garbage in it, but give credit and blame where it's due, not where our ideological programmers have instructed us to.
Communism and socialism are two different things.
Yes? What does that have to do with the discussion at hand?
You say that now, but what about when they offer you The Low Price Always[TM]?
THERE IS NO WAY HORSELESS CARRIAGES will be here soon. A horseless carriage cannot see obstacles and automatically swerve to avoid them - they'd just run right into or over them! Horseless carriages require specialized fuel. A horse-drawn carriage requires nothing more than easily-obtainable vegetable fodder. And there's no way you could mix horses and horseless carriages on today's roads. We'd have to attach noisemakers to the horseless carriages or something to get their attention.
In fact, today's roads are ill-suited to horseless traffic. The expense of bringing all those roads up to that quality would be prohibitive. And it would take YEARS!
---
Percival Dunwoody, Idiot Timer Traveler
How could it not?
"Your call is very important to us!"
Heh.
I've heard enough rap that was nothing but murky audio, heavy repetitive bass and lots of epithets. Also repetitive. That would be trivial to automate. You don't even have to support a melody line.
To my mind one of the biggest issues that needs to be sorted out for widespread adoption of "creative" or "decision-making" robots is liability. If a human screws up, fails to deliver or (worse) gets someone hurt or killed then we have a handy meatsack that can be thrown in jail or sued into poverty.
And THAT, sir, is why we have CORPORATIONS!
Robots have already done a pretty good job of replacing unskilled and semi-skilled labor.
What should concern us more is that they're replacing now.
Stop thinking about robots as tin-plated mechanical men or blind automated arm-devices. Start thinking of them as disembodied algorithms. Think of them as Watson. Think of them as Siri. Be afraid.
It's been happening for some time now. AI-directed securities trading programs that make decisions at speeds so fast that the SEC has had to take measures just to give mere humans a chance. In the last few years, we've seen AI playwriting, AI recipe-design, and a lot of other things.
Mostly the AI approach to creativity is pretty primitive at the moment, but when it comes to raw decision making, AIs can often do at least as well as humans. Although to be fair, in some cases, dart boards have been shown to do as well as humans. Machines and dart boards don't let their emotions or their greed cloud their judgements.
What happens when the day comes that major corporations can only be competitive when their executive decisions are made by machines? First you clear out the executive suite - who needs all those VPs and C-levels? Then, might as well dump the CEO himself, since he's nothing but a figurehead. The actual decision-making is done on a rental basis from IBM. Sales people? We've been training people to be "self serve" when buying for decades now.
This is the real SkyNet and it's already happening. Hopefully it won't make a computed decision to kill all humans, but that doesn't mean that it has to keep them on the payroll either.
Just out of curiosity, I yanked a copy of the Communist Manifesto off Project Gutenberg the other day and was rather amazed to discover that all this had pretty well been already anticipated by Marx and Engels.
We have been programmed to think of Communism solely in terms of "rob the hard-working rich and give to the useless parasitic poor", but that wasn't the primary focus there. Instead it was based on the idea that industry would become so productive that without communal ownership of resources, we'd ultimately end up with exactly what we fear we're heading for.
Not to say that the Communist Manifesto presents a viable solution to that problem. After touching on the above, it goes on to promote things that have either been demonstrated not to work and/or morally offend, but it does indicate that we haven't discovered anything new here.
Different ink formulations, among other things. We take advantage of stuff like that even now to read many of these old palimpsests.
This is just another arrow in the quiver, but it's an important one, since a lot of old texts are stuck together and frequently too brittle to separate. I'm thinking especially of the charred works recovered from the remains of the Library at Alexandria.
Much of the modern black attitude is based on not being "disrespected". Not by earning respect, but by applying violence to those who "disrespect" you. By being the biggest, baddest (word not allowed for white people) in the 'hood.
That's not how Dr. King taught people to handle adversity, but Dr. King is dead.
Like most underclass minorities, they find it's not nearly as easy to stick it to The Man as it is to each other. So they do. And just for good measure, they fire their anger with a fantasy of "getting even" for generations of slavery.
The slavery thing needs to go away. Slavery has been illegal in the USA for well over 150 years now. Everyone responsible - both offender and victim - are long dead. At the present rate of interracial marriage, even the blackest of families is likely to be partially descended from slaveholders, even the whitest have ancestors who were slaves. And slavery isn't some sort of magical black-only thing anyway. The first slaves of Westerners in the New World were Carib Indians, thank you Christopher Columbus. And on top of that, with the immigration rate we've got, a lot of the people in the USA had ancestors who were nowhere near the American Slavery thing.
Yes, slavery is despicable, but you don't march into the future if you never take your eyes off the past. It's not 1860 or even 1960. There's a black president now and has been for nearly a decade. He may not be the best president we've ever had, but I'd wager that at least 8 people out of 10 would rather vote for him than either of the sad cases we've been offered as his successor.
But slavery is at best an excuse. Ongoing violence is like fire. As long as you feed it, it burns. To stop it, you have to stop dumping fuel on it. There are other, better ways to solve problems.
Most of us didn't trust computers. Hence many comedy skits and stories about the consequences of "computer error" - and how fighting those consequences was made difficult because the people at the company that owned the computer refused to admit that the error was even possible.
But I don't think you'll encounter that attitude any more. No one would believe them.
When a mainframe computer that cost tens of millions of dollars crashed, Very Important People got angry. It could potentially shut down much of the company and the outage could be computed in thousands of dollars a minute. So mainframe OS's were written not to crash. IBM's trademark on this was "RAS" - Reliability, Availability and Serviceability.
Windows, on the other hand, gave us the Blue Screen of Death. And while people would complain, they'd generally just reboot and go on.
That depends on how you want to live. Even minimum wage in America is more than is earned by 80% of the world. People don't work a second job to survive, they do it to improve their life and afford extra things.
"Minimum wage" doesn't mean "survival wage". You need at least a survival wage to pay for food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health care and so forth.
If a minimum wage job doesn't pay a survival wage - and such is the consensus on US minimum wages - then you darned well will get pushed into working a second, or even third jobs.
It really doesn't matter how much better USA minimum wage pays than pay in Kolkata if the cost of living in the USA is significantly higher than it is in Kolkata. Which it is, hence the popularity of outsourcing skilled jobs to places like India. People over there can earn a comfortable living on less than the US minimum wage because their living expenses are lower - they're not just taking advanced programming jobs for $10/hour because they're selfless public benefactors.
No, what we really need is people who hire coders intelligently.
It once was said that "Computers Don't Make Mistakes". Now, instead it's "Have you tried turning if off and back on again?".
When computers were expensive and programmers cheap by comparison, software errors were considered something to be exterminated. Now they're considered to be inevitable.
Because when we got cheap computers, we expected cheap programmers. We no longer accept that reliable (and secure) software takes time and money to produce and expect everything to be fast and cheap. We're less critical of software quality than we are of bags of pet food from Wal-Mart.
Start by educating people that "IT Doesn't Matter" is as much a myth as trickle-down wealth, and that if you want to avoid hearing that all your company's critical data ended up in Bulgaria on the nightly news you'll need to make realistic resource budgets for your IT no matter how much you "know" that it could never really be that hard.
That might prompt you to want to hire people with actual skills beyond Always the Low Price, which in turn might make a career in IT attractive to talented workers again. Spend the money educating just one decision-maker, and you could easily end up motivating a dozen rank-and-file to educate themselves.
The NewSpeak language in 1984 was developed from a popular linguistic theory whose name I forget, but has a Wikipedia article of its own, if I remember correctly.
It's based on the concept that words have absolute meaning and that the words you have in your vocabulary shape the way you think. As such, it's a darling of the "Political Correctness" crowd, who think that if you ban discriminatory words, it will result in the extinction of the corresponding discrimination.
Which isn't entirely true. Ban the use of the word "retard" as an insult and kids will run around calling each other "special". The human race is quite adaptable that way.
There are secrets and then there are Secrets. Sometimes things are done casually that wouldn't be done if there were explicitly-known attack vectors. Sometimes an "accident" might be forgivable if it was truly thought to be innocuous.
This has nothing to do with specific persons or political parties. If you insist on sliming the topic with drive-by political sniping, I'll have to ask Trump to sic our state officials on you.