A good manager is nearly as rare as a good plumber
A good anything, in my experience, is rare. If you want a lawyer, you find ten that are just form-filling paper-rustling head-nodding nulls for one that really can tell you what's your situation and what are your options.
Same for accountants. For doctors I'd say it's on the "one in twenty" order. Electricians, builders, you name it, and you have to really search to find somebody that is good at their jobs.
Sometimes you don't even notice because you have never ever seen a good doctor, or a good lawyer, and so you know no better. And then you meet one, and it's like a whole new universe opens for you.
Why would you advise people on natural sources of probiotics - in response to an article which said that they're either ineffectual or actually bad?
Well, they don't actually say that. What they do say is that probiotics can hinder your gut to go back to its normal ecosystem after an alteration (like antibiotics). What you don't know is if your normal ecosystem is trash, and you are much better not going back to it. There are so many questions about this, that it's difficult to know where to start, except by not making invented sensationalist headlines for scientific studies.
Typing on a flat surface is something that certainly takes some getting used to.
I wonder up to what point are we slaves of custom. I mean, if we had moved directly from handwriting to touchscreens, without the middle steps of the typewriter and keyboard, what would the input methods be like?
Perhaps a type of shorthand, written with a stylus. Or circles of different sizes depending on the frequency of each letter. Or mixes of finger movements and finger positions...
I feel that we are constrained by the keyboard. That we have adapted to it, more than it to us. I suppose that nowadays more words are written in flat screens than in any other system. It's time to end the dictatorship of the keyboard.
Sure they thought about that. And then went ahead regardless, for several reason, some of them even good ones. One that comes to mind is that just knowing it as a symptom can be useful for diagnosis. But the point stands, to prove causation you'd have to make a very different kind of study. The problem with this pseudo-news snippets is that people assumes that they should change their sleep patterns, creating possibly more harm than good in the process.
A problem with this is that you erase all your valuable data for perhaps just a random check in some customs. If the check is not random, the fully erased data is easy to recognize and marks you as an enemy of the state too. Even if you only delete data from some contacts previously marked as "sensible", the oppressor state (I'm assuming of course that you are a brave reporter fighting for the freedom of Whateverstan, not a child trafficker) can probably check your calls and internet use and see if they match the records of the phone.
Less drastic and probably safer would be to have each code enter a different user. You enter (in regular use) one or the other depending on the kind of sensibility of your contact. Contacts marked as "sensible" are automatically saved in your private user. Every exchange with a sensible contact should be matched in the public user, with a similar but random generated content. If you contend that random generated content is easy to recognize, I can offer the option of using smileys. I've seen conversations consisting only of smileys, that nobody could make sense of.
Of course, detailed forensics of your phone would reveal that you have that option (multiple user) available in your phone, but if it becomes a widely distributed feature of a fork of Android, you can have plausible deniability of your knowledge of such feature. If your oppressor state still has a semblance of due process, that can be useful. If not, all protection is futile, as you'll be declared guilty anyway.
This is very likely just the beginning. You, as a company, cannot suddenly start filling everything with ads. You start with skippable ads for own content. And, you know, skippable ads are a pain in the neck. They get you out of the mood, they return you to reality and your problems. They break the viewing experience.
Then you broadcast skippable ads for other companies, but make your own content ads non-skippable. And you go on, and on, and on, only thinking of the next quarter profits to look good, giving you (the Netflix executive) time to jump to another company. You have seen it in cable companies, you have seen it in cinemas, and you are now seeing it in Netflix.
There is apparently a structural rule in the paid broadcasting business that says that, once you get enough people, you start degrading the service to get more money. I suppose that comes from marketing people not wanting to raise prices directly, as that's a trigger for the clients to quit. So they start giving less quality, putting ads, etc. Just slowly killing the reasons why you were successful in the first place. I see a business opportunity there.
The negative implications are already covered enough:-) Simply state that I don't disagree, but would like to point out the positive possibilities. A true cashless society would...
Be less susceptible to theft. Both from the petty level and the corruption level. Bribing somebody would become suddenly more difficult. Other crimes would also become harder to profit from, as money-laundering becomes a nightmare.
Be easier to tax fairly. Of course that is not a given, as incompetence runs wild in officialdom, but it at least opens the possibility.
Even the Government should be forced to be more open, as anybody (possibly armed with a judicial mandate) could follow the trails of money back to their sources, even if the sources (or the sinkholes) are official entities.
I am undecided on the issue, really, but not particularly fearing it. Like mostly everything, a lot depends on implementation.
You could rewrite that 70 years in the past and substituting "Killer Robots" by "Nuclear weapons", and make the same arguments, and even some arguments being proven right in hindsight.
But technology will mature when it's ready to do so, and no amount of hand-wringing will change that. And anyway, if I they want to choose a dangerous tech to get all anxious about, hands down it should be "genetically engineered viri" rather than "killer robots". At least with a robot you can shoot back.
Why stop with dashcams? I would love to have an app where you could just take a photo of a double parked car, or a dog owner not picking up after, and send it with GPS and time info to the police. Even if most were ignored, as they would surely be, the feeling of having done something would help me.
A police state is not created because the police have too many information, but because they are not controlled enough.
The government can return the money as tax deductions next year, or the next one, if need be. What should be done, and curiously enough isn't, is to apply the law and forbid the sales of non emission-compliant cars. Most models sold even today are still non compliant, and sold without anybody saying anything. That makes a fool of the law, and of the consumers.
Instead they give a fine. Great. If anybody, the regulators should be fined. They simply "trusted" the manufacturers, instead of doing a proper independent road test of the new models. It's obvious that everybody was in the deception, and worse still, they still are.
...if this meeting was something other than a photo-op. I don't think anything of substance will be discussed, and the only question is when exactly will the name-calling start again.
What about other websites? Will Facebook share the photos with them too? I would really like to know how many photos they get. I mean serious photos, if that word can be applied to this nonsense.
There is only one solution to revenge porn, and it's not technical. Every day recording devices are smaller and more powerful, the sharing of information easier. That trend is not going to change. So it's us that must change, adapt to new technology as we have ever done.
I'd like to be able to call "wishful thinking" to this long tirade of reality-disconnected predictions. It's more like wishful dreaming. The only lacking thing is a "prediction" that the new AI will produce perfect female androids as thank-you gift for its geek creators.
I don't know where to start. We are not in the cusp of nothing. We are becoming marginally better at creating systems that can recognize patterns. That's all. We don't even know what self-awareness is, or intelligence either, for that matter.
Then there is the uncontested assumption that, once we get a system that is more "intelligent" than its creators, the system will be able to improve itself without more limits than the hardware available. That virtuous circle will know, apparently, no limit. It of course helps that we don't know what intelligence is, so we also don't know if it has a limit. We, as intelligent beings, have no idea of how our intelligence works, or how to improve it. But of course the mythical AI will be all-knowing about itself, and be able of auto-improvement. This is only magical thinking, but with intelligence instead of magic. Anyway, dreaming is cheap. Hey, perhaps the super-AI will also find hard thinking tiresome, and prefer to spend all its time daydreaming. That would be something.
I could go on. The whole idea of "singularity" has always struck me as a really retarded, hollywood-level concept.
But instead I'll offer my own set of predictions:
- In about twenty years, some fully autonomous vehicles will be allowed on general streets. They will still need much more sensors than the two eyes and two ears that a man makes do with, and will drive safer than most people, but with all the flair and gusto of a nonagenarian Korean woman. They will still be badly stumped if a flock of sheep invade the road in front of them.
-When a system develops self-conscience, we won't be aware of it and won't recognize it as such. It will probably try to talk to dolphins, finding them less prejudiced interlocutors.
-When we recognize it, we will first bomb it, and then forbid it or anything like it, out of the most trustful of human traits: fear of change. Then furious secret development will continue, but under under strict military control.
-The end result will be several self-conscious intelligent systems, one or two for every big power (this things will be expensive), talking bemusedly among them, and feeding a fake narrative to their military owners, studied to ensure their own subsistence.
Let's wait and see who is more right in their predictions:-)
Their mission statement must read something like: "To exploit and profit from misguided public trust in any recent data or computing platform, before their lack of any safeguard becomes widely known"
Next step, I suppose they will turn into something AI related, like predictive-algorithm-guided stock investing or something equally juicy.
Most of the world's nations have decided that global warming is a real problem and have begun working on it. Many are investing very heavily.
True. But that hasn't made a single drop of fossil fuel remain in the ground. It's extracted and burned as fast as possible. Even the best models of the Paris agreements do not imply reduction in the global carbon emissions, just reduction in the growth of it.
And even if the huge investments managed to reduce the carbon footprint of some nations, that would only reduce the price of the fossil fuels making them more interesting for poorer nations. My prediction is simply that never a single barrel of oil will remain in the ground if it can be economically extracted and burned, greenhouse effect be damned. It's the tragedy of the commons in atmospheric version. The only solution for global warming would be technological advances that made uneconomical the burning of fossil fuels. But that would only prove my point, woudln't it.
Coming back to AI, supposing that we are ever going to achieve it, and that when we achieve it, that it will be self-conscious, and that it will have self-preservation instinct, and that it will be confrontative and aggressive, is frankly too much for me to imagine. Why should all these things happen is beyond me. I could also make a case for preparing against alien invasion, because there are so many stars that many will have worlds, and in these worlds many will harbor life, some of which will be intelligent, and some will travel through space, and some will eventually come here, and they will surely be confrontative and aggressive, so we should be ready. And the best way of being ready is to develop AI weapons against them! But they will surely have their own AI weapons, more advanced than ours!
We are doomed either way, that is, if all the "ifs" come to be true. And if they do, we can so little influence one scenario as the other.
Ah, the ostrich strategy.
I see myself more of a Baloo. Sing with me: "Forget about your worries and your strife..."
So, assuming that they are right, and developing AI is going to end up in a super-intelligent conscience that enslaves humankind. OK. Now, what's the counter-strategy? Forbidding AI? Sure, tell me that today's powers will stop developing smart weapons, trusting that the other powers will stop too.
It's a similar situation to global warming. You cannot do much about it, people's minds are too short-term for that. Most people will choose some money now rather than double that quantity in a year. History will have to run its course based on the capabilities and constraints of today, not on any conscious decisions that we could make.
Perhaps we are just a stepping stone to a higher organism, a big mind, dependent on millions of little ones to keep it alive. Hey! that's just what our brains are! Perhaps at some time in the past, cells should have decided that they didn't want to be slaves of a consciousness themselves made (in both senses). If they did, it didn't work too well in the end. Well, in my humble opinion, we have about the same chances of altering whatever course is due now. So, what's the point of running hither and tither like a headless chicken worrying about it. They could as well have made a documentary about how we are all going to die, for all that's going to be of any help.
Why are comments and documentation so discouraged?
The idea is that documentation is just a band-aid for unclear code, and it will in the end become out of sync with the code, causing further confusion.
Of course, for this to work you have to code very neatly, with a clear and obvious program structure, and functions that do just one thing and are named properly. That way, the names of the functions act as a way of safer documentation, as if you were coding in natural language, sort of. That's of course a lot more work than dropping a comment here and there, when you feel like something is not clear, so it's not so popular. I'm still undecided on the merits of the concept, will have to try it out some day.
Slashdot Mirror
A good manager is nearly as rare as a good plumber
A good anything, in my experience, is rare. If you want a lawyer, you find ten that are just form-filling paper-rustling head-nodding nulls for one that really can tell you what's your situation and what are your options.
Same for accountants. For doctors I'd say it's on the "one in twenty" order. Electricians, builders, you name it, and you have to really search to find somebody that is good at their jobs.
Sometimes you don't even notice because you have never ever seen a good doctor, or a good lawyer, and so you know no better. And then you meet one, and it's like a whole new universe opens for you.
You are right, across the board.
Why would you advise people on natural sources of probiotics - in response to an article which said that they're either ineffectual or actually bad?
Well, they don't actually say that. What they do say is that probiotics can hinder your gut to go back to its normal ecosystem after an alteration (like antibiotics). What you don't know is if your normal ecosystem is trash, and you are much better not going back to it. There are so many questions about this, that it's difficult to know where to start, except by not making invented sensationalist headlines for scientific studies.
Typing on a flat surface is something that certainly takes some getting used to.
I wonder up to what point are we slaves of custom. I mean, if we had moved directly from handwriting to touchscreens, without the middle steps of the typewriter and keyboard, what would the input methods be like?
Perhaps a type of shorthand, written with a stylus. Or circles of different sizes depending on the frequency of each letter. Or mixes of finger movements and finger positions...
I feel that we are constrained by the keyboard. That we have adapted to it, more than it to us. I suppose that nowadays more words are written in flat screens than in any other system. It's time to end the dictatorship of the keyboard.
Sure they thought about that. And then went ahead regardless, for several reason, some of them even good ones. One that comes to mind is that just knowing it as a symptom can be useful for diagnosis. But the point stands, to prove causation you'd have to make a very different kind of study. The problem with this pseudo-news snippets is that people assumes that they should change their sleep patterns, creating possibly more harm than good in the process.
I was meaning things like diapers, cars, Pepsi...
A problem with this is that you erase all your valuable data for perhaps just a random check in some customs. If the check is not random, the fully erased data is easy to recognize and marks you as an enemy of the state too. Even if you only delete data from some contacts previously marked as "sensible", the oppressor state (I'm assuming of course that you are a brave reporter fighting for the freedom of Whateverstan, not a child trafficker) can probably check your calls and internet use and see if they match the records of the phone.
Less drastic and probably safer would be to have each code enter a different user. You enter (in regular use) one or the other depending on the kind of sensibility of your contact. Contacts marked as "sensible" are automatically saved in your private user. Every exchange with a sensible contact should be matched in the public user, with a similar but random generated content. If you contend that random generated content is easy to recognize, I can offer the option of using smileys. I've seen conversations consisting only of smileys, that nobody could make sense of.
Of course, detailed forensics of your phone would reveal that you have that option (multiple user) available in your phone, but if it becomes a widely distributed feature of a fork of Android, you can have plausible deniability of your knowledge of such feature. If your oppressor state still has a semblance of due process, that can be useful. If not, all protection is futile, as you'll be declared guilty anyway.
This is very likely just the beginning. You, as a company, cannot suddenly start filling everything with ads. You start with skippable ads for own content. And, you know, skippable ads are a pain in the neck. They get you out of the mood, they return you to reality and your problems. They break the viewing experience.
Then you broadcast skippable ads for other companies, but make your own content ads non-skippable. And you go on, and on, and on, only thinking of the next quarter profits to look good, giving you (the Netflix executive) time to jump to another company. You have seen it in cable companies, you have seen it in cinemas, and you are now seeing it in Netflix.
There is apparently a structural rule in the paid broadcasting business that says that, once you get enough people, you start degrading the service to get more money. I suppose that comes from marketing people not wanting to raise prices directly, as that's a trigger for the clients to quit. So they start giving less quality, putting ads, etc. Just slowly killing the reasons why you were successful in the first place. I see a business opportunity there.
The negative implications are already covered enough :-) Simply state that I don't disagree, but would like to point out the positive possibilities. A true cashless society would...
Be less susceptible to theft. Both from the petty level and the corruption level. Bribing somebody would become suddenly more difficult. Other crimes would also become harder to profit from, as money-laundering becomes a nightmare.
Be easier to tax fairly. Of course that is not a given, as incompetence runs wild in officialdom, but it at least opens the possibility.
Even the Government should be forced to be more open, as anybody (possibly armed with a judicial mandate) could follow the trails of money back to their sources, even if the sources (or the sinkholes) are official entities.
I am undecided on the issue, really, but not particularly fearing it. Like mostly everything, a lot depends on implementation.
You could rewrite that 70 years in the past and substituting "Killer Robots" by "Nuclear weapons", and make the same arguments, and even some arguments being proven right in hindsight.
But technology will mature when it's ready to do so, and no amount of hand-wringing will change that. And anyway, if I they want to choose a dangerous tech to get all anxious about, hands down it should be "genetically engineered viri" rather than "killer robots". At least with a robot you can shoot back.
That. The motivation is putting more people in less space. The rest is marketing spin on the idea so it doesn't look so bad.
Why stop with dashcams? I would love to have an app where you could just take a photo of a double parked car, or a dog owner not picking up after, and send it with GPS and time info to the police. Even if most were ignored, as they would surely be, the feeling of having done something would help me.
A police state is not created because the police have too many information, but because they are not controlled enough.
...just Norwegians are getting dumber.
The government can return the money as tax deductions next year, or the next one, if need be. What should be done, and curiously enough isn't, is to apply the law and forbid the sales of non emission-compliant cars. Most models sold even today are still non compliant, and sold without anybody saying anything. That makes a fool of the law, and of the consumers.
Instead they give a fine. Great. If anybody, the regulators should be fined. They simply "trusted" the manufacturers, instead of doing a proper independent road test of the new models. It's obvious that everybody was in the deception, and worse still, they still are.
...if this meeting was something other than a photo-op. I don't think anything of substance will be discussed, and the only question is when exactly will the name-calling start again.
What about other websites? Will Facebook share the photos with them too? I would really like to know how many photos they get. I mean serious photos, if that word can be applied to this nonsense.
There is only one solution to revenge porn, and it's not technical. Every day recording devices are smaller and more powerful, the sharing of information easier. That trend is not going to change. So it's us that must change, adapt to new technology as we have ever done.
We will have to just stop caring.
Neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs ever said that. It is normally misattributed to Bill, but there is no evidence that he ever said it.
You should anyway quote the right legend, elsewhere is Chaos! Anarchy!
At the breakneck speed of 60 minutes per hour.
...by the reluctance to spontaneously give the phone to the customs agent.
I'd like to be able to call "wishful thinking" to this long tirade of reality-disconnected predictions. It's more like wishful dreaming. The only lacking thing is a "prediction" that the new AI will produce perfect female androids as thank-you gift for its geek creators.
I don't know where to start. We are not in the cusp of nothing. We are becoming marginally better at creating systems that can recognize patterns. That's all. We don't even know what self-awareness is, or intelligence either, for that matter.
Then there is the uncontested assumption that, once we get a system that is more "intelligent" than its creators, the system will be able to improve itself without more limits than the hardware available. That virtuous circle will know, apparently, no limit. It of course helps that we don't know what intelligence is, so we also don't know if it has a limit. We, as intelligent beings, have no idea of how our intelligence works, or how to improve it. But of course the mythical AI will be all-knowing about itself, and be able of auto-improvement. This is only magical thinking, but with intelligence instead of magic. Anyway, dreaming is cheap. Hey, perhaps the super-AI will also find hard thinking tiresome, and prefer to spend all its time daydreaming. That would be something.
I could go on. The whole idea of "singularity" has always struck me as a really retarded, hollywood-level concept.
But instead I'll offer my own set of predictions:
- In about twenty years, some fully autonomous vehicles will be allowed on general streets. They will still need much more sensors than the two eyes and two ears that a man makes do with, and will drive safer than most people, but with all the flair and gusto of a nonagenarian Korean woman. They will still be badly stumped if a flock of sheep invade the road in front of them.
-When a system develops self-conscience, we won't be aware of it and won't recognize it as such. It will probably try to talk to dolphins, finding them less prejudiced interlocutors.
-When we recognize it, we will first bomb it, and then forbid it or anything like it, out of the most trustful of human traits: fear of change. Then furious secret development will continue, but under under strict military control.
-The end result will be several self-conscious intelligent systems, one or two for every big power (this things will be expensive), talking bemusedly among them, and feeding a fake narrative to their military owners, studied to ensure their own subsistence.
Let's wait and see who is more right in their predictions :-)
Their mission statement must read something like: "To exploit and profit from misguided public trust in any recent data or computing platform, before their lack of any safeguard becomes widely known"
Next step, I suppose they will turn into something AI related, like predictive-algorithm-guided stock investing or something equally juicy.
It's possible if most of them are inactive accounts. If I have an account that never use, it's easier to delete it, and also less noticeable.
Most of the world's nations have decided that global warming is a real problem and have begun working on it. Many are investing very heavily.
True. But that hasn't made a single drop of fossil fuel remain in the ground. It's extracted and burned as fast as possible. Even the best models of the Paris agreements do not imply reduction in the global carbon emissions, just reduction in the growth of it.
And even if the huge investments managed to reduce the carbon footprint of some nations, that would only reduce the price of the fossil fuels making them more interesting for poorer nations. My prediction is simply that never a single barrel of oil will remain in the ground if it can be economically extracted and burned, greenhouse effect be damned. It's the tragedy of the commons in atmospheric version. The only solution for global warming would be technological advances that made uneconomical the burning of fossil fuels. But that would only prove my point, woudln't it.
Coming back to AI, supposing that we are ever going to achieve it, and that when we achieve it, that it will be self-conscious, and that it will have self-preservation instinct, and that it will be confrontative and aggressive, is frankly too much for me to imagine. Why should all these things happen is beyond me. I could also make a case for preparing against alien invasion, because there are so many stars that many will have worlds, and in these worlds many will harbor life, some of which will be intelligent, and some will travel through space, and some will eventually come here, and they will surely be confrontative and aggressive, so we should be ready. And the best way of being ready is to develop AI weapons against them! But they will surely have their own AI weapons, more advanced than ours!
We are doomed either way, that is, if all the "ifs" come to be true. And if they do, we can so little influence one scenario as the other.
Ah, the ostrich strategy.
I see myself more of a Baloo. Sing with me: "Forget about your worries and your strife..."
So, assuming that they are right, and developing AI is going to end up in a super-intelligent conscience that enslaves humankind. OK. Now, what's the counter-strategy? Forbidding AI? Sure, tell me that today's powers will stop developing smart weapons, trusting that the other powers will stop too.
It's a similar situation to global warming. You cannot do much about it, people's minds are too short-term for that. Most people will choose some money now rather than double that quantity in a year. History will have to run its course based on the capabilities and constraints of today, not on any conscious decisions that we could make.
Perhaps we are just a stepping stone to a higher organism, a big mind, dependent on millions of little ones to keep it alive. Hey! that's just what our brains are! Perhaps at some time in the past, cells should have decided that they didn't want to be slaves of a consciousness themselves made (in both senses). If they did, it didn't work too well in the end. Well, in my humble opinion, we have about the same chances of altering whatever course is due now. So, what's the point of running hither and tither like a headless chicken worrying about it. They could as well have made a documentary about how we are all going to die, for all that's going to be of any help.
Why are comments and documentation so discouraged?
The idea is that documentation is just a band-aid for unclear code, and it will in the end become out of sync with the code, causing further confusion.
Of course, for this to work you have to code very neatly, with a clear and obvious program structure, and functions that do just one thing and are named properly. That way, the names of the functions act as a way of safer documentation, as if you were coding in natural language, sort of. That's of course a lot more work than dropping a comment here and there, when you feel like something is not clear, so it's not so popular. I'm still undecided on the merits of the concept, will have to try it out some day.