No, there's no irony there at all - not even in the manner "irony" gets misused sometimes.
Of course there is - in that aspect the 486 is more secure than the new chips that are billed as having all sorts of security-promoting features.
There's no NX bit on the 486, though, so overall it's not more secure, even with the recent vulnerabilities.
But the exploits are literally predicated on things the new chips have that older chips did not! It's like saying "Ironically, our Christmas vacation in Alaska was cold."
Ironic would be if the old processor was subject to the same exploits in spite of not having out-of-order execution and branch prediction.
We need laws which make it illegal for the cops to roll up on someone and execute them on the basis that someone claimed that there was a crime occurring at a specific address.
They had the caller WHO THEY BELIEVED THEY WERE SHOOTING on the phone AT THE TIME THEY WERE SHOOTING HIM, and didn't bother to interact with him using the established communications channel AT ALL.
There's a lot to find wrong about this scenario, but even if you grant all sorts of things like "hostage situations are scary", and "it was dark", the fact that they apparently did not use a tool that was in their hands the entire time makes the other things sound more like excuses than reasons.
Something the linked article didn't seem to address it that the population for each language will differ. The average Haskell programmer is going to be very different from the average C++ programmer, or, god forbid, the average Python programmer.
Also, while they did try to address problem domains, I don't think they addressed systemic issues. For historical reasons, there are many projects which use C or C++ simply because of what they need to interface with to get the job done. For instance, there simply aren't going to be that many browser projects which aren't written in C++.
Personally, I think the interesting take-home is not the difference between languages, it's how small the number of commits for security and memory issues was.
Large tax breaks to corporations generally equate to those companies spending between 10 and 20% of the initial take on employees wages and bonus's. This is already known. The larger portion goes to dividends for stock holders and the rest is company cash assets. The fact that Comcast is claiming that the investment they have already been making is now due to the end of net neutrality is absurd at any level. I can claim that I'll pay my electric bill for the rest of the year because of net neutrality, so what.
Weirdly enough, an equivalent tax break directed at payroll tax offsets would go 100% to employee wages!
[OK, no, the company would probably drop top-line wages due to the bump in bottom-line wages, but a pithy statement with a caveat like that isn't as pithy.]
This kind of response is completely necessary, since the days when you could just go out into the countryside and find five or ten square miles of contiguous land which you could purchase is long gone. At this point roadways are some of the cheapest land available, and experience has shown that roadways are very easy and convenient to access for maintenance. Combining roadways with transmission lines should provide clear gains, as you always gain from synergy when combining unrelated operations into one svelte system. Wins all around!
You could call it grandstanding. I prefer to call it "getting everyone to declare their position". If the House takes this up and passes it, great. If they don't, then it's clear that the House, and the speaker in particular are on the wrong side of the issue and need to be replaced. If it doesn't pass the Senate, and it's on party lines, then it's clear that the talk about "doing it the proper way" is just another in a long line of self-serving rules the GOP insists Democrats observe while doing nothing of the sort themselves.
There is a slight risk in the metaphor: some people like to cook instinctively, using their nose, eyes, experience and information about the ingredients available. Some of those recipes for chefs don't contain all the steps or handling of the ingredients as they are assumed self-evident, or situational (points of variability in software architecture). Baking a cake could be a better metaphor for the lay person, as everybody fails at it at the first time if they don't follow the recipe.
Except that the computer is implementing the recipe, the programmer is writing it. So you could spin it as "Who is the worst cook you've ever met?", and then say "I write recipes that let that person cook decent meals."
I say its like cooking. A program is like a recipe. Its a series of very detailed instructions on how to take a bunch of ingredients and turn them into something else. For the computer program the ingredients may be numbers, letters, pictures, sounds, keystrokes, mouse clicks,... all sorts of different things; the instruction are how to manipulate those numbers, letters, pictures, sounds, etc. Bugs are like a recipe where something was written down incorrectly or left out and you end up with something that tastes bad.
Yes its dumbed down and oversimplified but people usually get it. Its how the professor explained it on day one of the "Introduction to Computer Programming" class.
Start with "Writing programs is like making a recipe", but then point out that you also have to "make a recipe" for "1 cup" versus "1 tablespoon" versus "1 pound", plus for "measure out" and "stir" and "simmer" and each other operation on the recipe card... then for "flour", and how to make flour, etc. Also point out that some of the ingredients and operations are provided by the user, and the instructions have to accomodate that the user cannot always be trusted to do the thing you expect or need them to do. Likewise, reality itself (the net and disk drive and memory and the like) isn't always trustworthy, at least not at the scale of billions of operations.
Sure, point out that sometimes you can find a third-party thing that can do some of the operations you need. I just think it's important to get across that it's not a 3x5 card you're building, it's a stack of 3x5 cards which re-create a sub-section of civilization in a way suitable for your desired result.
Perhaps if you built a fingerprint based on the structure of calls across functions, you could map it back to source code from github. Not that malware is generally posted to github, but I'd be surprised if they didn't use a TON of third_party libraries, and factoring all of those out would make what's left easier to understand and also let you focus better.
Think I'll skip the outrage on this one, especially considering the vast benefit that pro brings humanity. You wonder why there's not been a WWIII? Internet porn.
IMHO the problem is implying that this is somehow wasteful in the first place. One can probably make a solid argument for Game of Thrones or House of Cards being more worthwhile then Random Porn, but... Jersey Shore? Floribama Whatever? Various Kardashian shows? The non-porn streaming places are FULL of utter shit shows, if one were really worried about waste, that's probably a better place to start.
And yes, apparently fees are the #1 issue at Patreon - creators just complain constantly how much money is taken away. So Patreon decided to shift payment fees away from the creator and onto the donator in an effort to quell the complaints. End result was what happened last week when creators realized that the shift may mean more money for them per donator, but a lot of donators simply left.
I've left them feedback that I'm perfectly fine with shifting some of the fees to my side of the divide. The part that annoyed me is dis-aggregating my contributions, since that kind of small transaction was really my entire point in using them. I could already provide support via Paypal or Google Wallet with the $fee+%percentage model, and save the %5 Patreon overhead.
Actually, I'm not entirely clear about having both %percentage-from-patron and %percentage-from-creator. It's the same percent either way. It would probably make more sense to have the percentage entirely on the creator side, and the per-charge fee entirely on the patron side. That gives patrons an incentive to aggregate their payments to make everything easier.
Of course, aggregating payments does open them up to confusion in case of chargebacks, but I find it hard to imagine why they'd let abusive chargebacks happen more than once for a given user. Maybe they could just separate "The charge which starts your support" from ongoing support.
But there were reportedly a couple abuses of this. One involved people who would pledge to a particular creator, view the creator's patron-only posts, and cancel the pledge the user's before billing date. Another is that a chargeback by a cardmember who doesn't remember his pledges would affect all pledges. So instead, Patreon switched to separately on behalf of each creator.
Like, someone does this... once? Because if they do it routinely, presumably to access the same content, wouldn't it be easier to just terminate their account, rather than restructure your entire fee system?
Also, I don't fully understand the chargeback point. AFAICT, I only can chargeback my entire monthly aggregate pledge amount, not a portion of it. Patreon may have a policy of honoring such things at their level, but I'm not sure why that would need to involve the credit-card chargeback system at all. Just as returning an item at a retail store isn't considered a chargeback.
I guess his writings are "truthy", but I'm going to be honest, anyone who even bothers to call out a broad replacement to C is pretty much delusional. It will continue to take a smaller percentage of things, due to overall growth in the field, but said growth will probably continue to increase the absolute number of C programmers.
I've been on highly-distributed teams (no two people co-located), and on teams with one or two far-flung elements, and everything in between. Working from home can work very well, if the team is focused and actively maintains contact, even on days when they don't feel like it, even when things aren't going well. But many workers simply don't work that way, in which case working from home can become a way to hide things and avoid things. Same can happen in an office environment, it's just a little harder at the margins.
Also, the team has to be committed to working from home, you can't just wave a wand on it, they need to be actively on top of broadly communicating things. Otherwise you end up with "in" groups and people get cut out of the loop and everyone gets upset. Again, that can totally happen in an office environment, too, but in my experience it's SO much easier to happen accidentally in a mixed group. Sometimes something will get ironed out over lunch or a quick bull session, and nobody thinks to send the minutes to the offsite people. If that happens too often, the offsite people will find themselves routinely behind the curve, finding out about decisions after they're already being implemented, which can really chip away at their morale.
Lastly, it's really really hard to successfully add new people to a team who work from home. Basically, they need good referrals from trusted sources, and the team needs to really focus on integrating the new person.
Just to be really really clear - I'm not saying work-from-home cannot work or anything like that. I did it for a decade before getting a "real" job, and I quite enjoyed it, it really worked for me. But there were significant downsides, some of which I didn't realize until I had the opportunity to work with similarly-qualified networks of co-located people. I'd be very nervous about joining a group which was trying to set ambitious goals and also having most members working from home.
So if some site in Russia is posting divisive crap to try to manipulate American opinions, that's bad. But if some idiot in Boulder creates an opaque network of sites posting divisive crap to drive ad revenue, well that's just fine?
Some tools are just tools, and you need to look at the users to figure out if the tool is being used badly. The tools in question are DESIGNED to divide us and influence us to do things we wouldn't choose to do if we actually thought about it. Russia having access to these tools is a relatively minor problem in the overall scheme of things, but I guess it's easier to blame Russia, throw in some stupid "fixes" which don't address the underlying problem, and claim victory.
I guess they expect that the groups mining the high-quality nickel will serve the battery industry *and* all other nickel-using industries? Because that seems dumb, like even a middle-schooler could probably figure out that the high-end nickel will go to expensive high-end uses, and the prices of low-end nickel will rise because the high-end nickel is no longer available for low-end uses.
But that's just me, I'm some weirdo who doesn't even feel the need to tie nickel prices to illicit drugs for a headline.
I switched careers to something completely unrelated at 30-ish. After about 8 years, I felt like I was just fixing the same problems over and over again, and I wanted a bigger challenge.
Yeah, this is part of what helped decide me to take a break in my late 40's. Back in the 90's, it really felt like we were doing something. Now it feels like often we're just moving the furniture around for the sake of moving the furniture around. Or worse, we're taking a product which is quite functional as-is and trying to "increase engagement" for reasons outside of the user's needs.
The total number of people using computers will continue to rise dramatically, so that the percentage of people using keyboards will continue to fall over time. But the core set of people who were using keyboard for functional reasons will continue to use keyboards. For instance, programmers, or writers, or people who use spreadsheets, etc.
So the question is not "What will replace keyboards", the question is "What will people use computers for?" If they're using computers for virtual reality, then goggles probably _are_ the way to go. But just because a lot of people are using computers for virtual reality doesn't mean that people have to use virtual reality for other tasks.
This comes from the same strain of short-sightedness which leads to phrases like "iPhone killer" and "email killer". I have more confidence that I'll still be using email in 20 years than that I'll still have to drive my car.
Worse, chances are I'll still be using a keyboard to write something which looks a lot like C++ code.
At Google, for awhile I was very near a common area we called "the wine cave", because one section was decorated with the ends of wine barrels. Initially, it was a nice place to go chill out for a bit in the middle of the day. Over time, though, as employee density kept being ratcheted up, it became a campground for visitors and for locals who were trying to get some time away from their neighbors. So eventually it became overcrowded during the bulk of the workday, completely negating any value it previously added.
I can completely see why a workplace would not optimize to make your workspace so perfect that you never wanted to leave it. That's probably too far past the point of high-cost-low-returns. But if people's working space sucks to the point where alternative venues become a requirement, you are doing it wrong, and it's unlikely that an employer like that would then turn around and provide enough alternative spaces to meet the actual need.
Dick, though, holds up really well, despite being a lot older. So if you're a freak like me who questions the premise of this article, and you haven't read his stuff, give it a shot:)
FALSE! After 35 years of reading science fiction and fantasy, I saw that the new Blade Runner movie was coming out, and realized "You know, I've not read much PKD, I should fix that." So I ordered some material and collections, and got to work.
Some stories like "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" are fine, minor dated bits, but the core story is strong. But other stories have a lot of uninspected misogyny which makes them hard to read - not like he's been mean or anything, it reads more like a young man trying to impress someone (same issue I have with lots of Heinlein). The theories on autism and mental illness read like someone decided to knock out a science fiction story based on pattern-matching some Scientific American articles, the theories are so grossly wrong, even somewhat offensive. And the drug stories... I pushed on with "Through a Scanner Darkly" to the end because I felt like reputation-wise it was warranted, but it was a slog, the story was too obviously working hard to support his point.
I'll keep reading, because there's obviously a "there" there, but at this point I'm definitely not willing to make a blanket observation about how PKD holds up really well.
There is no viability to Pro or Con studies for this. We simply would not be capable of knowing if we're simulated as our own thought processes would in fact be governed by the same rules of the system we're attempting to prove or disprove. You're trying prove a proof by using the proof as proof. It's just an exercise in futility as any civilization or system capable of creating such a complete simulation will undoubtedly have put in to place provisions for "what if the simulation starts questioning reality".
I think the goal with something like this is to disprove that we incidentally live in a simulated universe - where the basic rules were put in place and someone pressed "Start", and later everything had evolved to this point.
In theory, there are infinitely many potential points where a universe could be simulated between there and the notion that you're just a brain in a box that is being told what to think, like maybe the simulation is at the atomic level but quarks and lower are just implied, and they edit us to make it all work. But we already know that having an understanding of many of the basics of a system does not lead directly to understanding of higher-order effects of the system. So someone simulating the universe at such a low level is really unlikely to be able to simultaneously retcon the perceptions of all of the entities in that universe to keep things consistent. It's easier at that point to assume that everything goes to the other extreme, it is a simulation with a single consciousness in it. Whether you yourself are a simulation is impossible to falsify, because the simulation has direct access to your means of perception.
I hate people who ask rhetorical questions like this. Not "Convince me to spend $1,000 on a phone", but "I'm not willing to spend $1,000 on a phone, what's wrong with me?" Why do you even care? That's the entire point of having different price points, some people only want a $350 phone, some people only want a $25 flip-phone. In fact, you can get by without any phone at all.
I own a car which cost $17k when new. While I sometimes think maybe I should have gotten something a bit more roomy and comfortable, there's no way I'd want to spend $100k and more on some fancy vehicle. The fact that some other people do doesn't matter at all - they can go ahead and spend their money however they please, I don't need to justify what they spend on their vehicle for myself.
Forever, because AI learns faster so if we create a new job, ANY new job, AI will be able to do it better and cheaper...understand?
Perhaps you are missing the point. Machines can already play chess better than humans, but those chess players are not losing their jobs to machines.
While I realize this area might be a bit niche, that's just one of the only areas where computers have actually already surpassed humans in ability. Perhaps there's other variables that are at play in determining whether we will pay a human being to do something than simply skill and cost?
If there were a situation which needed millions of high-level chess players, would we start schools to create them organically, or would we just point computers at the problem?
The reason computers haven't displaced chess players is because computers playing chess against computers is not at all interesting to anyone. People play chess against people because people like to pay chess against people, and insofar as there is money in it, people like to watch people play chess against people. In many other pursuits, the people involved are a detriment to the ability to meet the customer's self-professed needs, so automation isn't held up (few people go to McDonalds for the witty banter at the counter).
Slashdot Mirror
No, there's no irony there at all - not even in the manner "irony" gets misused sometimes.
Of course there is - in that aspect the 486 is more secure than the new chips that are billed as having all sorts of security-promoting features.
There's no NX bit on the 486, though, so overall it's not more secure, even with the recent vulnerabilities.
But the exploits are literally predicated on things the new chips have that older chips did not! It's like saying "Ironically, our Christmas vacation in Alaska was cold."
Ironic would be if the old processor was subject to the same exploits in spite of not having out-of-order execution and branch prediction.
We need laws which make it illegal for the cops to roll up on someone and execute them on the basis that someone claimed that there was a crime occurring at a specific address.
They had the caller WHO THEY BELIEVED THEY WERE SHOOTING on the phone AT THE TIME THEY WERE SHOOTING HIM, and didn't bother to interact with him using the established communications channel AT ALL.
There's a lot to find wrong about this scenario, but even if you grant all sorts of things like "hostage situations are scary", and "it was dark", the fact that they apparently did not use a tool that was in their hands the entire time makes the other things sound more like excuses than reasons.
Something the linked article didn't seem to address it that the population for each language will differ. The average Haskell programmer is going to be very different from the average C++ programmer, or, god forbid, the average Python programmer.
Also, while they did try to address problem domains, I don't think they addressed systemic issues. For historical reasons, there are many projects which use C or C++ simply because of what they need to interface with to get the job done. For instance, there simply aren't going to be that many browser projects which aren't written in C++.
Personally, I think the interesting take-home is not the difference between languages, it's how small the number of commits for security and memory issues was.
Large tax breaks to corporations generally equate to those companies spending between 10 and 20% of the initial take on employees wages and bonus's. This is already known. The larger portion goes to dividends for stock holders and the rest is company cash assets. The fact that Comcast is claiming that the investment they have already been making is now due to the end of net neutrality is absurd at any level. I can claim that I'll pay my electric bill for the rest of the year because of net neutrality, so what.
Weirdly enough, an equivalent tax break directed at payroll tax offsets would go 100% to employee wages!
[OK, no, the company would probably drop top-line wages due to the bump in bottom-line wages, but a pithy statement with a caveat like that isn't as pithy.]
This kind of response is completely necessary, since the days when you could just go out into the countryside and find five or ten square miles of contiguous land which you could purchase is long gone. At this point roadways are some of the cheapest land available, and experience has shown that roadways are very easy and convenient to access for maintenance. Combining roadways with transmission lines should provide clear gains, as you always gain from synergy when combining unrelated operations into one svelte system. Wins all around!
You could call it grandstanding. I prefer to call it "getting everyone to declare their position". If the House takes this up and passes it, great. If they don't, then it's clear that the House, and the speaker in particular are on the wrong side of the issue and need to be replaced. If it doesn't pass the Senate, and it's on party lines, then it's clear that the talk about "doing it the proper way" is just another in a long line of self-serving rules the GOP insists Democrats observe while doing nothing of the sort themselves.
So it's like choice.org, but for politicians?
There is a slight risk in the metaphor: some people like to cook instinctively, using their nose, eyes, experience and information about the ingredients available. Some of those recipes for chefs don't contain all the steps or handling of the ingredients as they are assumed self-evident, or situational (points of variability in software architecture). Baking a cake could be a better metaphor for the lay person, as everybody fails at it at the first time if they don't follow the recipe.
Except that the computer is implementing the recipe, the programmer is writing it. So you could spin it as "Who is the worst cook you've ever met?", and then say "I write recipes that let that person cook decent meals."
I say its like cooking. A program is like a recipe. Its a series of very detailed instructions on how to take a bunch of ingredients and turn them into something else. For the computer program the ingredients may be numbers, letters, pictures, sounds, keystrokes, mouse clicks, ... all sorts of different things; the instruction are how to manipulate those numbers, letters, pictures, sounds, etc. Bugs are like a recipe where something was written down incorrectly or left out and you end up with something that tastes bad.
Yes its dumbed down and oversimplified but people usually get it. Its how the professor explained it on day one of the "Introduction to Computer Programming" class.
Start with "Writing programs is like making a recipe", but then point out that you also have to "make a recipe" for "1 cup" versus "1 tablespoon" versus "1 pound", plus for "measure out" and "stir" and "simmer" and each other operation on the recipe card ... then for "flour", and how to make flour, etc. Also point out that some of the ingredients and operations are provided by the user, and the instructions have to accomodate that the user cannot always be trusted to do the thing you expect or need them to do. Likewise, reality itself (the net and disk drive and memory and the like) isn't always trustworthy, at least not at the scale of billions of operations.
Sure, point out that sometimes you can find a third-party thing that can do some of the operations you need. I just think it's important to get across that it's not a 3x5 card you're building, it's a stack of 3x5 cards which re-create a sub-section of civilization in a way suitable for your desired result.
Perhaps if you built a fingerprint based on the structure of calls across functions, you could map it back to source code from github. Not that malware is generally posted to github, but I'd be surprised if they didn't use a TON of third_party libraries, and factoring all of those out would make what's left easier to understand and also let you focus better.
Think I'll skip the outrage on this one, especially considering the vast benefit that pro brings humanity. You wonder why there's not been a WWIII? Internet porn.
IMHO the problem is implying that this is somehow wasteful in the first place. One can probably make a solid argument for Game of Thrones or House of Cards being more worthwhile then Random Porn, but ... Jersey Shore? Floribama Whatever? Various Kardashian shows? The non-porn streaming places are FULL of utter shit shows, if one were really worried about waste, that's probably a better place to start.
And yes, apparently fees are the #1 issue at Patreon - creators just complain constantly how much money is taken away. So Patreon decided to shift payment fees away from the creator and onto the donator in an effort to quell the complaints. End result was what happened last week when creators realized that the shift may mean more money for them per donator, but a lot of donators simply left.
I've left them feedback that I'm perfectly fine with shifting some of the fees to my side of the divide. The part that annoyed me is dis-aggregating my contributions, since that kind of small transaction was really my entire point in using them. I could already provide support via Paypal or Google Wallet with the $fee+%percentage model, and save the %5 Patreon overhead.
Actually, I'm not entirely clear about having both %percentage-from-patron and %percentage-from-creator. It's the same percent either way. It would probably make more sense to have the percentage entirely on the creator side, and the per-charge fee entirely on the patron side. That gives patrons an incentive to aggregate their payments to make everything easier.
Of course, aggregating payments does open them up to confusion in case of chargebacks, but I find it hard to imagine why they'd let abusive chargebacks happen more than once for a given user. Maybe they could just separate "The charge which starts your support" from ongoing support.
But there were reportedly a couple abuses of this. One involved people who would pledge to a particular creator, view the creator's patron-only posts, and cancel the pledge the user's before billing date. Another is that a chargeback by a cardmember who doesn't remember his pledges would affect all pledges. So instead, Patreon switched to separately on behalf of each creator.
Like, someone does this ... once? Because if they do it routinely, presumably to access the same content, wouldn't it be easier to just terminate their account, rather than restructure your entire fee system?
Also, I don't fully understand the chargeback point. AFAICT, I only can chargeback my entire monthly aggregate pledge amount, not a portion of it. Patreon may have a policy of honoring such things at their level, but I'm not sure why that would need to involve the credit-card chargeback system at all. Just as returning an item at a retail store isn't considered a chargeback.
I am *so* glad I didn't buy a membership a year ago when they were trying to raise funds for moving the San Jose shop.
Imagine how happy you'd be if you'd got in on the $750 membership deal they were running for Halloween!
I guess his writings are "truthy", but I'm going to be honest, anyone who even bothers to call out a broad replacement to C is pretty much delusional. It will continue to take a smaller percentage of things, due to overall growth in the field, but said growth will probably continue to increase the absolute number of C programmers.
I've been on highly-distributed teams (no two people co-located), and on teams with one or two far-flung elements, and everything in between. Working from home can work very well, if the team is focused and actively maintains contact, even on days when they don't feel like it, even when things aren't going well. But many workers simply don't work that way, in which case working from home can become a way to hide things and avoid things. Same can happen in an office environment, it's just a little harder at the margins.
Also, the team has to be committed to working from home, you can't just wave a wand on it, they need to be actively on top of broadly communicating things. Otherwise you end up with "in" groups and people get cut out of the loop and everyone gets upset. Again, that can totally happen in an office environment, too, but in my experience it's SO much easier to happen accidentally in a mixed group. Sometimes something will get ironed out over lunch or a quick bull session, and nobody thinks to send the minutes to the offsite people. If that happens too often, the offsite people will find themselves routinely behind the curve, finding out about decisions after they're already being implemented, which can really chip away at their morale.
Lastly, it's really really hard to successfully add new people to a team who work from home. Basically, they need good referrals from trusted sources, and the team needs to really focus on integrating the new person.
Just to be really really clear - I'm not saying work-from-home cannot work or anything like that. I did it for a decade before getting a "real" job, and I quite enjoyed it, it really worked for me. But there were significant downsides, some of which I didn't realize until I had the opportunity to work with similarly-qualified networks of co-located people. I'd be very nervous about joining a group which was trying to set ambitious goals and also having most members working from home.
So if some site in Russia is posting divisive crap to try to manipulate American opinions, that's bad. But if some idiot in Boulder creates an opaque network of sites posting divisive crap to drive ad revenue, well that's just fine?
Some tools are just tools, and you need to look at the users to figure out if the tool is being used badly. The tools in question are DESIGNED to divide us and influence us to do things we wouldn't choose to do if we actually thought about it. Russia having access to these tools is a relatively minor problem in the overall scheme of things, but I guess it's easier to blame Russia, throw in some stupid "fixes" which don't address the underlying problem, and claim victory.
I guess they expect that the groups mining the high-quality nickel will serve the battery industry *and* all other nickel-using industries? Because that seems dumb, like even a middle-schooler could probably figure out that the high-end nickel will go to expensive high-end uses, and the prices of low-end nickel will rise because the high-end nickel is no longer available for low-end uses.
But that's just me, I'm some weirdo who doesn't even feel the need to tie nickel prices to illicit drugs for a headline.
I switched careers to something completely unrelated at 30-ish. After about 8 years, I felt like I was just fixing the same problems over and over again, and I wanted a bigger challenge.
Yeah, this is part of what helped decide me to take a break in my late 40's. Back in the 90's, it really felt like we were doing something. Now it feels like often we're just moving the furniture around for the sake of moving the furniture around. Or worse, we're taking a product which is quite functional as-is and trying to "increase engagement" for reasons outside of the user's needs.
That was the lamest thing I've seen all day. And to set the bar, I'm a middle-aged dad who just got back from a Pokemon Go raid.
The total number of people using computers will continue to rise dramatically, so that the percentage of people using keyboards will continue to fall over time. But the core set of people who were using keyboard for functional reasons will continue to use keyboards. For instance, programmers, or writers, or people who use spreadsheets, etc.
So the question is not "What will replace keyboards", the question is "What will people use computers for?" If they're using computers for virtual reality, then goggles probably _are_ the way to go. But just because a lot of people are using computers for virtual reality doesn't mean that people have to use virtual reality for other tasks.
This comes from the same strain of short-sightedness which leads to phrases like "iPhone killer" and "email killer". I have more confidence that I'll still be using email in 20 years than that I'll still have to drive my car.
Worse, chances are I'll still be using a keyboard to write something which looks a lot like C++ code.
At Google, for awhile I was very near a common area we called "the wine cave", because one section was decorated with the ends of wine barrels. Initially, it was a nice place to go chill out for a bit in the middle of the day. Over time, though, as employee density kept being ratcheted up, it became a campground for visitors and for locals who were trying to get some time away from their neighbors. So eventually it became overcrowded during the bulk of the workday, completely negating any value it previously added.
I can completely see why a workplace would not optimize to make your workspace so perfect that you never wanted to leave it. That's probably too far past the point of high-cost-low-returns. But if people's working space sucks to the point where alternative venues become a requirement, you are doing it wrong, and it's unlikely that an employer like that would then turn around and provide enough alternative spaces to meet the actual need.
Dick, though, holds up really well, despite being a lot older. So if you're a freak like me who questions the premise of this article, and you haven't read his stuff, give it a shot :)
FALSE! After 35 years of reading science fiction and fantasy, I saw that the new Blade Runner movie was coming out, and realized "You know, I've not read much PKD, I should fix that." So I ordered some material and collections, and got to work.
Some stories like "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" are fine, minor dated bits, but the core story is strong. But other stories have a lot of uninspected misogyny which makes them hard to read - not like he's been mean or anything, it reads more like a young man trying to impress someone (same issue I have with lots of Heinlein). The theories on autism and mental illness read like someone decided to knock out a science fiction story based on pattern-matching some Scientific American articles, the theories are so grossly wrong, even somewhat offensive. And the drug stories ... I pushed on with "Through a Scanner Darkly" to the end because I felt like reputation-wise it was warranted, but it was a slog, the story was too obviously working hard to support his point.
I'll keep reading, because there's obviously a "there" there, but at this point I'm definitely not willing to make a blanket observation about how PKD holds up really well.
There is no viability to Pro or Con studies for this. We simply would not be capable of knowing if we're simulated as our own thought processes would in fact be governed by the same rules of the system we're attempting to prove or disprove. You're trying prove a proof by using the proof as proof. It's just an exercise in futility as any civilization or system capable of creating such a complete simulation will undoubtedly have put in to place provisions for "what if the simulation starts questioning reality".
I think the goal with something like this is to disprove that we incidentally live in a simulated universe - where the basic rules were put in place and someone pressed "Start", and later everything had evolved to this point.
In theory, there are infinitely many potential points where a universe could be simulated between there and the notion that you're just a brain in a box that is being told what to think, like maybe the simulation is at the atomic level but quarks and lower are just implied, and they edit us to make it all work. But we already know that having an understanding of many of the basics of a system does not lead directly to understanding of higher-order effects of the system. So someone simulating the universe at such a low level is really unlikely to be able to simultaneously retcon the perceptions of all of the entities in that universe to keep things consistent. It's easier at that point to assume that everything goes to the other extreme, it is a simulation with a single consciousness in it. Whether you yourself are a simulation is impossible to falsify, because the simulation has direct access to your means of perception.
I hate people who ask rhetorical questions like this. Not "Convince me to spend $1,000 on a phone", but "I'm not willing to spend $1,000 on a phone, what's wrong with me?" Why do you even care? That's the entire point of having different price points, some people only want a $350 phone, some people only want a $25 flip-phone. In fact, you can get by without any phone at all.
I own a car which cost $17k when new. While I sometimes think maybe I should have gotten something a bit more roomy and comfortable, there's no way I'd want to spend $100k and more on some fancy vehicle. The fact that some other people do doesn't matter at all - they can go ahead and spend their money however they please, I don't need to justify what they spend on their vehicle for myself.
Perhaps you are missing the point. Machines can already play chess better than humans, but those chess players are not losing their jobs to machines.
While I realize this area might be a bit niche, that's just one of the only areas where computers have actually already surpassed humans in ability. Perhaps there's other variables that are at play in determining whether we will pay a human being to do something than simply skill and cost?
If there were a situation which needed millions of high-level chess players, would we start schools to create them organically, or would we just point computers at the problem?
The reason computers haven't displaced chess players is because computers playing chess against computers is not at all interesting to anyone. People play chess against people because people like to pay chess against people, and insofar as there is money in it, people like to watch people play chess against people. In many other pursuits, the people involved are a detriment to the ability to meet the customer's self-professed needs, so automation isn't held up (few people go to McDonalds for the witty banter at the counter).