Virtual History ROMA
The Elements by Theodore Gray
Here On Earth by Arcade Sunshine Media,
So you are referring to specific "books" being available on iOS? I thought you were talking about some kind of interactive book framework/platform. This seems even more ridiculous.
Maybe I'm not sure. HTLML5 has a long history of offering latencies on mobile which people find uncomfortable and offering lowest common denominator compatibility problems.
I thought you were talking about apps that were more like books rather than video games. If you want cross platform mobile video game performance, you can use unity.
But even if they could be authored that way that's not really relevant. What is relevant is are they being authored that way.
Unity is pretty popular.
Lots of business software that exists for Windows could be easily written around the Qt/KDE framework but the fact that it isn't still makes Linux desktops a worse choice for many business applications.
I have been developing on Qt for like 9 years. It seems to be a pretty popular platform. Linux desktops are a worse choice for many business applications because they've already invested heavily into MS office. At our company we do all our work on Linux, but we still need a windows machine just to be able to run outlook and get our email, because it's all our IT staff knows how to use.
Even in the realm of documents, there are groups starting to replace Ms documents with tex files, because they are easier to version control and we don't really use any of the features of MS Office.
The world is changing. Office software is moving to the cloud. It no longer even matters what kind of computer you have as long as it has a current browser.
Your claim was that Google had invested heavily in tablet software. You have to deal with the reality that the total base of tablet software spending is heavily skewed towards iOS.
tablets and phones run the same software, and there is just as much android software as ios software. I think you have to deal with the reality that products these 2 companies offer are essentially equivalent.
You are shifting the goal in this response from there is no reason for an end user to prefer iPad to a theoretical discussion of whether in an alternative universe in which Android had been successful in attracting the same level of development resources for tablet applications things would look similar to today.
No I talking about the original topic of what choice is better for school students.
I happen to believe that there are good reasons iOS was successful where Google was not and that the current market is a sensible reaction to their alternative strategies.
If you think Google is not successful, you need to move back to earth.
But even if I'm wrong that's irrelevant to what LAUSD was facing. They were facing a world where interactive textbooks mainly do exist on one platform.
I question the educational value of what you call "interactive textbooks" over other materials. The money wasted in ipads could have been used on something much more useful.
I don't think anyone is saying essential. But the 2013 spec the goal was highly interactive textbook applications and these mainly exist on iOS. That's not arbitrary.
Do you have a particular app in mind? An interactive textbook could be done as an html5 app that is completely platform independent.
a) Interactivity leads to greater enjoyment thus higher literacy and lower refusal to use
I hope you aren't under the impression that computers running android are not interactive.
b) iPad and Chromebook are used by California testing and thus familiarity with these two devices is a plus.
Thats a really good argument to become familiar with more than 2 kinds of computers.
As a percentage of the total tablet software, no they haven't invested very much.
Just a complete mobile computing platform, same as apple.
I'm not sure that's really true in practice having used cross platform toolkits for 18 years. Certainly not quite that range. But regardless what can happen is not what does happen.
I'm not sure 18 year old experience in cross platform toolkits is relevant to the topic of what tools exist today, especially when a google search is so easy.
Well it depends on your definition of "make a decision". My definition of "making a decision" (however good or bad it turns out to be) is a standard that committee's frequently can't meet.
If a human being is deciding to either jump out of a plane with his/her parachute or chickening out and staying in the plane, then a committee making a decision is like the person hanging onto the landing gear for dear life with his/her parachute partially open.
It's too bad Linus wasted all this time making a temporary kernel that was just going to be surpassed a mere 24+? years later by the official GNU kernel. Nothing stings more than when the code you write isn't being used.
Apple has done quite a bit of work to allow central administration of app deployment, security, and OS configuration that, to my understanding, Android can't match.
Can you cite an example of how this superiority that you think iOS has, actually be important? I have no idea if what you are claiming is true or false, because it is so vague.
Apple has certainly spent a lot of time on (and I will agree succeeded) in locking down their environment in such a way that Apple has almost total control over what can be deployed on their devices.
Google doesn't match this, but not because they were incapable of doing it. Google made a conscious choice to create a more open mobile computing platform. They give you the tools to lock it down. But ultimately it's the user's choice in configuring their software. You can use the default Google provides, or you can substitute it with your own. That's why amazon can have it's own android appstore.
You can run your own custom version of android if you want. There are many out there.
The choice of school/parents in being able to decide and change their minds for what goes on their own tablets I would think would be a good thing. Ceding this responsibility to Apple, is one approach that I feel is pretty irresponsible, even if it seems easier.
It's one thing to buy a $700 device and regret it because apple pulled your favorite app from it's store. It's another to have a whole school district be potentially held hostage by the whims of Apple.
Androids aren't "cheaper". Devices that run the Android operating system tend not to be as expensive on average compared with Apple products. Some are just as expensive.
And no, I probably wouldn't think the average android device would be a good option either. Lot's of those devices are locked down by their manufacturers just like Apple. But you don't have to get a crappy android device. You can get an unlocked (by the manufacturer) device that does not preclude any OS that does not preclude itself from running on the device. And you can even choose to lock it down in whatever way is deemed appropriate by the educators and parents.
By spending a relatively little bit of money (maybe a few million), you could probably have a custom OS (android or whatever) made that is specifically tailored around education (e.g. comes with the right apps and has the appropriate security policies, etc). By relatively little money I mean, as compared to paying the Apple brand premium of hundreds of dollars per locked down device.
It's not a chicken and the egg problem. It's a definition problem. If you define iOS as essential to education, then by defintion any device not running iOS will be inadequate.
I could define open source software as essential to education, but I would be required to justify such a claim.
Which is the OS that's getting the tablet software investment.
If you haven't already, you should check out this small startup company called Google. They have actually invested quite a bit of money into tablet software, if that's what's important to you.
You can develop software for any platform whether it's iOS, android, windows, macOS, linux, etc. In fact people have developed software that makes it possible to develop software for all these platforms simultaneously.
I think Apple should do the honorable thing and give them the refund. Then we should execute all the school administrators involved for killing America's future.
It's worth noting there's a school of educational research suggesting that introducing young children to high technology is actively bad, and that high technology should be taught outright after age 10-12 rather than used as a platform to deliver old teaching methods.
Is any of it based on science? Would you even know how to tell?
This is like the 90s when everyone's answer to everything related to computer security was "ENCRYPTION!"
Chromebooks are like the pic-n-save shoes of computing. "Yo momma is so poor that she enrolled you in a STEM school with mobile computers that have plastic cases instead of brushed aluminum cases with design patents", they'll say.
That is the heart of it. I imagine they publicly boasted quite often about how wonderful it would be to have the Ipads, without ever stating exactly how they would be used, but held it up as a sign of forward thinking progress.
The problem is that they never really showed exactly how the ipads in Starfleet Academy were used either. I guess it was assumed that by the time the deal went through, the next upcoming Star Trek movie would have elaborated on how the exactly technology works.
OTOH, Apple knew better, and had the choice to bring their expectations down to reality rather than inflate them.
Everyone knows that apple waits until the next ithing comes out to make you feel like a shithead for owning the old one.
It's all relative. Private schools are bad at decision making because people in general are bad at decision making. The only thing worse than a human making a decision, is when the human making the decision is not bound by the costs and benefits of his/her decision. Humans that only suffer the costs of a decision will fail to make good decisions that have reasonable costs. Humans that only receive the benefits of their decisions will not filter decisions with unreasonable costs.
Yes it's true that when people's own profit is on the line, they sometimes cheap out and end up worse off.
What is far more prevalent is people spending other people's money and not giving 2 shits about whether the money is being well spent, because it doesn't effect them.
They *did* test the iPad / content combo to establish usability / feasibility / usefulness prior to dropping *all* this cash. They tested it by dropping 18% of the cash and got the reality check that it was a dumb and a FBI investigation to provide further analysis for free (i.e. it used tax money that is not part of the school budget).
Who's running the test? My guess is that it won't be scientists. It will probably be the same people who are ultimately responsible for the fuckups that necessitated the test to begin with. And now with a new testing requirement there are more job openings to fill with some of their friends, and probably a pay raise to go with the increased responsibility.
As a general rule, LAUSD will do which ever option is worse. If you are unsure of which option is better, the safe bet is to just pick the opposite of what LAUSD decided to do.
Not only am I *not* saying that it's Microsoft's fault, the point I am trying to make is that this situation should not even be looked at from the point of view of fault.
The point of view "We figure out who's at fault, and that party should then compensate all parties that were damaged, and there will be an incentive to be responsible." breaks down as a viable strategy for this situation because Darkside can't cover the losses. Microsoft could try to demand that they be reimbursed for the $2M they invested. With their lawyers they could probably win (and spend $10M in the process).
Rather than assigning fault, I think a better strategy in this sort of asymmetric relationship is for the larger company to take on more responsibility in making sure the goals are feasible and on track to being completed. Not because they are obligated to in some moral sense, but simply because it is in their best interest to receive the product they are purchasing.
If it's a big company vs. big company, it starts to make *more* sense to solve disputes with fierce litigation and being cutthroat. Even if you can't recoup losses this way, harming your competitors can be beneficial. This is still bad for society, and we should probably set up the rules to incentivize the good kind of competition (the kind where effort is put into defeating your competitors through making superior products).
Microsoft asked Darkside if they could deliver the changes requested in the original budget. Darkside said yes.
And what I am saying is that Microsoft being a big and experienced company might have been able to realize that it wasn't going to work out well.
What did microsoft gain by getting Darkside to agree to a new product and price that they couldn't deliver? I'm sure they were hoping to gain a wider profit margin, but instead it's just a big loss.
You keep saying that Darkside would have just wasted the whole $8M, but that's just speculation on your part. It seems like everything would have been fine if microsoft didn't change what they wanted (i.e. the original goal was within the capability of Darkside at the agreed budget).
And yes, darkside was excited and promised more than they could deliver to microsoft, but that didn't help microsoft, it just lead to no product being produced.
It's like a parent tricking a child into promising to clean the dog poop every day. It doesn't actually benefit the parent if the child is not responsible enough to actually do it. The parent just ends up doing it anyway.
If you really think Darkside was never going to make a finished game even at $8M, then you have a lower opinion of Microsoft than I do (i.e. how incredibly stupid they were to lose $2M with a 0% chance of return).
They could have given them $3M ($8M in total) more, and still had nothing to show for it.
That's true any time you contract anyone to do anything.
Keep in mind they only spent $2M of the planned $5M by the time they cancelled the contract.
The "bunch of money" I referred to microsoft losing was the $2M. It was 40% of their total budget.
Darkside agreed to the scope changes one week after signing the contract. As far as Microsoft was concerned, it was fine. Darkside showed they couldn't deliver what they agreed to in the budget agreed upon, why give them more money? They'll just fail to deliver again.
I don't recall claiming that Microsoft should give them the money they asked for.
Sure, it makes sense for microsoft to pull the plug if they genuinely felt that continuing the deal was not going to be productive, but it also indicates that giving them the first $2M was a huge mistake.
My point is that I don't think this is a case of Microsoft being evil. I think it's a case of Microsoft (and also possibly Darkside) being stupid. No one benefits from this outcome.
Microsoft should have figured out what they wanted before contracting anyone to start on a game. Darkside should have done a better job of rejecting any proposals or additional requests that were not feasible within the budget. Microsoft should be doing a better job of making sure companies can actually do the work for what they say they can.
I work in the defense industry and the government doesn't just take the lowest bids, it audits contractors to determine whether they are actually able to do the work for the bid price. It doesn't benefit anyone if a company underbids on a contract, wins that contract, and can't deliver.
I understand the motivation for microsoft to try to get more game for less money (i.e. more profit), but this can't be good for them either. They've already invested a bunch of money, and nothing to show for it. I don't think this is a case of the big company exploiting the small company, but rather incompetent people causing everyone to lose out.
I feel like any serious attempt at AI is going to have some pretty serious security vulnerabilities. I think facial recognition can probably be done better than a human without artificial consciousness, but if we want a human-like AI with creativity, and personality, etc, we might also get some pretty serious problems (like maybe it could be convinced to believe in causes and commit crimes or hurt people).
In the safe world where control planes and data planes don't mix, we can be very secure and predictable, but that's pretty boring, and I might not ever like any songs or paintings created by such a computer or algorithm.
Chris Mack begins by arguing that nothing about Moore's Law was inevitable. "Instead, it's a testament to hard work, human ingenuity, and the incentives of a free market.
Humans working hard and having ingenuity, and being incentivized by the free market are all things that are sort of inevitable in themselves. I don't mean to diminish those positive features of humanity, but I think it's ok to take them for granted in the sense that I don't think it is likely for those things to stop being features of humanity barring some kind of catastrophe.
Was Moore's Law going to be as true as it was with 100% probability? No, some stuff could have gone wrong. Some people might have decided not to work so hard for whatever reason. But if we could rewind the clock and do it again, I think there is a very good chance it would turn out pretty much the same way, because I would expect people to be just as enthusiastic about making better and better solutions to problems. It's who we are.
In this respect, I think Moore's law was inevitable in the sense that another outcome like "win the lottery" isn't. We are a species that has had hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary training in creative problem solving. Not only was maintaining Moore's law for this long within our capability to figure out, we were driven to do it for the same reasons we were driven to eat food and procreate.
Was it inevitable for a particular monkey to swing through the trees? It's true that he/she could have decided not to, but the monkey was destined to swing through trees in a way that a fish was not.
After reading the article, it seems that the language allows for the code to modify itself. So that seems pretty flexible. Most languages specifically prohibit this kind of flexibility (as it is prone to errors).
You can stick 2 people in a room and make them fight each other to the death. This possibility doesn't mean that the interests of these two people is "never aligned". It just means that their interests are not always guaranteed to align. That doesn't mean they can't be aligned for certain stretches of time. As long as you can trust your own judgement about when people's interests align with yours, you should trust them.
This doesn't mean you continue to trust them after they've been caught.
Smart criminals are able to insulate themselves from being implicated in a crime, and understand when others do the same.
The modern criminal justice system is very adept at convincing people to roll on one another.
It is also very bad at keeping snitches safe from retaliation. There are instances of gangs looking up the names of snitches on government websites and then murdering them. I guess the government didn't think gangs knew how to use computers.
Slashdot Mirror
Virtual History ROMA The Elements by Theodore Gray Here On Earth by Arcade Sunshine Media,
So you are referring to specific "books" being available on iOS? I thought you were talking about some kind of interactive book framework/platform. This seems even more ridiculous.
Maybe I'm not sure. HTLML5 has a long history of offering latencies on mobile which people find uncomfortable and offering lowest common denominator compatibility problems.
I thought you were talking about apps that were more like books rather than video games. If you want cross platform mobile video game performance, you can use unity.
But even if they could be authored that way that's not really relevant. What is relevant is are they being authored that way.
Unity is pretty popular.
Lots of business software that exists for Windows could be easily written around the Qt/KDE framework but the fact that it isn't still makes Linux desktops a worse choice for many business applications.
I have been developing on Qt for like 9 years. It seems to be a pretty popular platform. Linux desktops are a worse choice for many business applications because they've already invested heavily into MS office. At our company we do all our work on Linux, but we still need a windows machine just to be able to run outlook and get our email, because it's all our IT staff knows how to use.
Even in the realm of documents, there are groups starting to replace Ms documents with tex files, because they are easier to version control and we don't really use any of the features of MS Office.
The world is changing. Office software is moving to the cloud. It no longer even matters what kind of computer you have as long as it has a current browser.
Your claim was that Google had invested heavily in tablet software. You have to deal with the reality that the total base of tablet software spending is heavily skewed towards iOS.
tablets and phones run the same software, and there is just as much android software as ios software. I think you have to deal with the reality that products these 2 companies offer are essentially equivalent.
You are shifting the goal in this response from there is no reason for an end user to prefer iPad to a theoretical discussion of whether in an alternative universe in which Android had been successful in attracting the same level of development resources for tablet applications things would look similar to today.
No I talking about the original topic of what choice is better for school students.
I happen to believe that there are good reasons iOS was successful where Google was not and that the current market is a sensible reaction to their alternative strategies.
If you think Google is not successful, you need to move back to earth.
But even if I'm wrong that's irrelevant to what LAUSD was facing. They were facing a world where interactive textbooks mainly do exist on one platform.
I question the educational value of what you call "interactive textbooks" over other materials. The money wasted in ipads could have been used on something much more useful.
I don't think anyone is saying essential. But the 2013 spec the goal was highly interactive textbook applications and these mainly exist on iOS. That's not arbitrary.
Do you have a particular app in mind? An interactive textbook could be done as an html5 app that is completely platform independent.
a) Interactivity leads to greater enjoyment thus higher literacy and lower refusal to use
I hope you aren't under the impression that computers running android are not interactive.
b) iPad and Chromebook are used by California testing and thus familiarity with these two devices is a plus.
Thats a really good argument to become familiar with more than 2 kinds of computers.
As a percentage of the total tablet software, no they haven't invested very much.
Just a complete mobile computing platform, same as apple.
I'm not sure that's really true in practice having used cross platform toolkits for 18 years. Certainly not quite that range. But regardless what can happen is not what does happen.
I'm not sure 18 year old experience in cross platform toolkits is relevant to the topic of what tools exist today, especially when a google search is so easy.
Well it depends on your definition of "make a decision". My definition of "making a decision" (however good or bad it turns out to be) is a standard that committee's frequently can't meet.
If a human being is deciding to either jump out of a plane with his/her parachute or chickening out and staying in the plane, then a committee making a decision is like the person hanging onto the landing gear for dear life with his/her parachute partially open.
It's too bad Linus wasted all this time making a temporary kernel that was just going to be surpassed a mere 24+? years later by the official GNU kernel. Nothing stings more than when the code you write isn't being used.
Apple has done quite a bit of work to allow central administration of app deployment, security, and OS configuration that, to my understanding, Android can't match.
Can you cite an example of how this superiority that you think iOS has, actually be important? I have no idea if what you are claiming is true or false, because it is so vague.
Apple has certainly spent a lot of time on (and I will agree succeeded) in locking down their environment in such a way that Apple has almost total control over what can be deployed on their devices.
Google doesn't match this, but not because they were incapable of doing it. Google made a conscious choice to create a more open mobile computing platform. They give you the tools to lock it down. But ultimately it's the user's choice in configuring their software. You can use the default Google provides, or you can substitute it with your own. That's why amazon can have it's own android appstore.
You can run your own custom version of android if you want. There are many out there.
The choice of school/parents in being able to decide and change their minds for what goes on their own tablets I would think would be a good thing. Ceding this responsibility to Apple, is one approach that I feel is pretty irresponsible, even if it seems easier.
It's one thing to buy a $700 device and regret it because apple pulled your favorite app from it's store. It's another to have a whole school district be potentially held hostage by the whims of Apple.
Androids aren't "cheaper". Devices that run the Android operating system tend not to be as expensive on average compared with Apple products. Some are just as expensive.
And no, I probably wouldn't think the average android device would be a good option either. Lot's of those devices are locked down by their manufacturers just like Apple. But you don't have to get a crappy android device. You can get an unlocked (by the manufacturer) device that does not preclude any OS that does not preclude itself from running on the device. And you can even choose to lock it down in whatever way is deemed appropriate by the educators and parents.
By spending a relatively little bit of money (maybe a few million), you could probably have a custom OS (android or whatever) made that is specifically tailored around education (e.g. comes with the right apps and has the appropriate security policies, etc). By relatively little money I mean, as compared to paying the Apple brand premium of hundreds of dollars per locked down device.
It's not a chicken and the egg problem. It's a definition problem. If you define iOS as essential to education, then by defintion any device not running iOS will be inadequate.
I could define open source software as essential to education, but I would be required to justify such a claim.
Which is the OS that's getting the tablet software investment.
If you haven't already, you should check out this small startup company called Google. They have actually invested quite a bit of money into tablet software, if that's what's important to you.
You can develop software for any platform whether it's iOS, android, windows, macOS, linux, etc. In fact people have developed software that makes it possible to develop software for all these platforms simultaneously.
I think Apple should do the honorable thing and give them the refund. Then we should execute all the school administrators involved for killing America's future.
It's worth noting there's a school of educational research suggesting that introducing young children to high technology is actively bad, and that high technology should be taught outright after age 10-12 rather than used as a platform to deliver old teaching methods.
Is any of it based on science? Would you even know how to tell?
This is like the 90s when everyone's answer to everything related to computer security was "ENCRYPTION!"
Yeah and no one uses encryption anymore.... /s
WTF? What exactly can an ipad do that an android tablet can not?
Or he/she has an early pentium chip in his/her computer....... BOOOM!!! Intel slam!
Chromebooks are like the pic-n-save shoes of computing. "Yo momma is so poor that she enrolled you in a STEM school with mobile computers that have plastic cases instead of brushed aluminum cases with design patents", they'll say.
Does apple sell responsible parents? How much are they? Maybe we should try the 1/2 price android parents.
That is the heart of it. I imagine they publicly boasted quite often about how wonderful it would be to have the Ipads, without ever stating exactly how they would be used, but held it up as a sign of forward thinking progress.
The problem is that they never really showed exactly how the ipads in Starfleet Academy were used either. I guess it was assumed that by the time the deal went through, the next upcoming Star Trek movie would have elaborated on how the exactly technology works.
OTOH, Apple knew better, and had the choice to bring their expectations down to reality rather than inflate them.
Everyone knows that apple waits until the next ithing comes out to make you feel like a shithead for owning the old one.
It's all relative. Private schools are bad at decision making because people in general are bad at decision making. The only thing worse than a human making a decision, is when the human making the decision is not bound by the costs and benefits of his/her decision. Humans that only suffer the costs of a decision will fail to make good decisions that have reasonable costs. Humans that only receive the benefits of their decisions will not filter decisions with unreasonable costs.
Yes it's true that when people's own profit is on the line, they sometimes cheap out and end up worse off.
What is far more prevalent is people spending other people's money and not giving 2 shits about whether the money is being well spent, because it doesn't effect them.
They *did* test the iPad / content combo to establish usability / feasibility / usefulness prior to dropping *all* this cash. They tested it by dropping 18% of the cash and got the reality check that it was a dumb and a FBI investigation to provide further analysis for free (i.e. it used tax money that is not part of the school budget).
Who's running the test? My guess is that it won't be scientists. It will probably be the same people who are ultimately responsible for the fuckups that necessitated the test to begin with. And now with a new testing requirement there are more job openings to fill with some of their friends, and probably a pay raise to go with the increased responsibility.
As a general rule, LAUSD will do which ever option is worse. If you are unsure of which option is better, the safe bet is to just pick the opposite of what LAUSD decided to do.
Not only am I *not* saying that it's Microsoft's fault, the point I am trying to make is that this situation should not even be looked at from the point of view of fault.
The point of view "We figure out who's at fault, and that party should then compensate all parties that were damaged, and there will be an incentive to be responsible." breaks down as a viable strategy for this situation because Darkside can't cover the losses. Microsoft could try to demand that they be reimbursed for the $2M they invested. With their lawyers they could probably win (and spend $10M in the process).
Rather than assigning fault, I think a better strategy in this sort of asymmetric relationship is for the larger company to take on more responsibility in making sure the goals are feasible and on track to being completed. Not because they are obligated to in some moral sense, but simply because it is in their best interest to receive the product they are purchasing.
If it's a big company vs. big company, it starts to make *more* sense to solve disputes with fierce litigation and being cutthroat. Even if you can't recoup losses this way, harming your competitors can be beneficial. This is still bad for society, and we should probably set up the rules to incentivize the good kind of competition (the kind where effort is put into defeating your competitors through making superior products).
Microsoft asked Darkside if they could deliver the changes requested in the original budget. Darkside said yes.
And what I am saying is that Microsoft being a big and experienced company might have been able to realize that it wasn't going to work out well.
What did microsoft gain by getting Darkside to agree to a new product and price that they couldn't deliver? I'm sure they were hoping to gain a wider profit margin, but instead it's just a big loss.
You keep saying that Darkside would have just wasted the whole $8M, but that's just speculation on your part. It seems like everything would have been fine if microsoft didn't change what they wanted (i.e. the original goal was within the capability of Darkside at the agreed budget).
And yes, darkside was excited and promised more than they could deliver to microsoft, but that didn't help microsoft, it just lead to no product being produced.
It's like a parent tricking a child into promising to clean the dog poop every day. It doesn't actually benefit the parent if the child is not responsible enough to actually do it. The parent just ends up doing it anyway.
If you really think Darkside was never going to make a finished game even at $8M, then you have a lower opinion of Microsoft than I do (i.e. how incredibly stupid they were to lose $2M with a 0% chance of return).
They could have given them $3M ($8M in total) more, and still had nothing to show for it.
That's true any time you contract anyone to do anything.
Keep in mind they only spent $2M of the planned $5M by the time they cancelled the contract.
The "bunch of money" I referred to microsoft losing was the $2M. It was 40% of their total budget.
Darkside agreed to the scope changes one week after signing the contract. As far as Microsoft was concerned, it was fine. Darkside showed they couldn't deliver what they agreed to in the budget agreed upon, why give them more money? They'll just fail to deliver again.
I don't recall claiming that Microsoft should give them the money they asked for.
Sure, it makes sense for microsoft to pull the plug if they genuinely felt that continuing the deal was not going to be productive, but it also indicates that giving them the first $2M was a huge mistake.
My point is that I don't think this is a case of Microsoft being evil. I think it's a case of Microsoft (and also possibly Darkside) being stupid. No one benefits from this outcome.
Microsoft should have figured out what they wanted before contracting anyone to start on a game. Darkside should have done a better job of rejecting any proposals or additional requests that were not feasible within the budget. Microsoft should be doing a better job of making sure companies can actually do the work for what they say they can.
I work in the defense industry and the government doesn't just take the lowest bids, it audits contractors to determine whether they are actually able to do the work for the bid price. It doesn't benefit anyone if a company underbids on a contract, wins that contract, and can't deliver.
I understand the motivation for microsoft to try to get more game for less money (i.e. more profit), but this can't be good for them either. They've already invested a bunch of money, and nothing to show for it. I don't think this is a case of the big company exploiting the small company, but rather incompetent people causing everyone to lose out.
I feel like any serious attempt at AI is going to have some pretty serious security vulnerabilities. I think facial recognition can probably be done better than a human without artificial consciousness, but if we want a human-like AI with creativity, and personality, etc, we might also get some pretty serious problems (like maybe it could be convinced to believe in causes and commit crimes or hurt people).
In the safe world where control planes and data planes don't mix, we can be very secure and predictable, but that's pretty boring, and I might not ever like any songs or paintings created by such a computer or algorithm.
Chris Mack begins by arguing that nothing about Moore's Law was inevitable. "Instead, it's a testament to hard work, human ingenuity, and the incentives of a free market.
Humans working hard and having ingenuity, and being incentivized by the free market are all things that are sort of inevitable in themselves. I don't mean to diminish those positive features of humanity, but I think it's ok to take them for granted in the sense that I don't think it is likely for those things to stop being features of humanity barring some kind of catastrophe.
Was Moore's Law going to be as true as it was with 100% probability? No, some stuff could have gone wrong. Some people might have decided not to work so hard for whatever reason. But if we could rewind the clock and do it again, I think there is a very good chance it would turn out pretty much the same way, because I would expect people to be just as enthusiastic about making better and better solutions to problems. It's who we are.
In this respect, I think Moore's law was inevitable in the sense that another outcome like "win the lottery" isn't. We are a species that has had hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary training in creative problem solving. Not only was maintaining Moore's law for this long within our capability to figure out, we were driven to do it for the same reasons we were driven to eat food and procreate.
Was it inevitable for a particular monkey to swing through the trees? It's true that he/she could have decided not to, but the monkey was destined to swing through trees in a way that a fish was not.
After reading the article, it seems that the language allows for the code to modify itself. So that seems pretty flexible. Most languages specifically prohibit this kind of flexibility (as it is prone to errors).
You can stick 2 people in a room and make them fight each other to the death. This possibility doesn't mean that the interests of these two people is "never aligned". It just means that their interests are not always guaranteed to align. That doesn't mean they can't be aligned for certain stretches of time. As long as you can trust your own judgement about when people's interests align with yours, you should trust them.
This doesn't mean you continue to trust them after they've been caught.
Smart criminals are able to insulate themselves from being implicated in a crime, and understand when others do the same.
The modern criminal justice system is very adept at convincing people to roll on one another.
It is also very bad at keeping snitches safe from retaliation. There are instances of gangs looking up the names of snitches on government websites and then murdering them. I guess the government didn't think gangs knew how to use computers.