That's the solution. Wait! No! Don't go! Bear with me.
Suppose that we create some software that *seems* perfectly capable of replacing some specialization of attorney. All other subject matter aside, like the obvious idea that attorneys would likely move heaven and earth to put a stop to it, suppose that this tech is adopted. Yay! Cool! We can each get an attorney for the price of a AAA video game. Happy dance?
No! Bad dance! Don't do happy!
That software attorney has one immutable quality that could and absolutely should have a strong influence on how we regard it. It's not human. While it may be able to formulate expressions of law, prescribe paperwork, and maybe even construct strong arguments based solely upon a cold, mechanical interpretation of case law and legislation, it can not and never will be capable of feeling. If we exact the effect of law while sacrificing our humanity, then we become blind to the corner cases and exceptional scenarios that legislators could not possibly have been expected to predict ahead of time. This is why our judges are human beings and not just tables in a book that get checked by some clerk.
So, that machine will need an actual attorney to look over its output, at the very least. That attorney will need to know the circumstances in order to ascertain not only that the machine functioned correctly but that there's not a possible argument that the machine simply can not construct. If there's anything about the case that isn't addressed in the law itself, or if some human sense of the client's experiences is called for (such as, say, whether a suspect is remorseful) then the human attorney will need to step in and overrule the machine.
That extreme example demonstrates a principle that may hold for other jobs as well. If a machine makes your McDonalds hamburger, then you might feel more comfortable knowing that a human is on-site to make sure that it's not messing up. Maybe a machine could be made to sniff out the stink of a dirty kitchen, but we'd all feel more comfortable knowing that human nostrils are on the job. Perhaps that's a bit irrational, sure, but we're humans and the machines serve humans. We have to tend to not only our logical, analytic facilities, but also whether or not customers actually *feel* comfortable patronizing our businesses.
This will not save all jobs, but it can save all professions. We won't need as many attorneys when machines can take on a large part of the workload. With machine assistance, it won't take so many fry cooks to run a McDonalds. But this also suggests a decrease in facility size, since we won't have to accommodate as many workers, and that suggests a capacity for massive expansion. Each attorney's office may have fewer actual flesh and blood attorneys, but there can be more attorneys offices overall to compete. Each McDonalds might employ fewer people, but there can be more locations for consumers to visit. Instead of restaurants on the corner, little nooks next door to your school or place of employment. This means an increase in competition and convenience, both of which are good for consumers, and an increase in exposure and access with a decrease in liabilities, which is good for businesses.
We can't eliminate the loss of jobs to automation, but we can mitigate that effect to some extent.
Since Apple is going to preview the new oTunes soon, it makes sense they'd prepare to expand. oTunes is Output Tunes to iTunes Input. Basically, money is output from Apple. They pay you to listen to music with the idea that when you find something you really like, you'll play it for your friends, leading to a net profit for the publisher. After beta, they're going to integrate it into one package called ioTunes, which ups the ante by letting you pay your friends to listen to songs.
The same completion of their work will finally follow with the oPod, which records music, oMac, the life support OS, and oPhone, which converts its user into a cell tower by passing a tiny, imperceivable current through their body. The ioPod will allow recordings sales on the ioTunes Store, the ioMac converts from a computer to a hospice device, and the ioPhone will form a feedback loop useful in executions.
It's awesome that they're researching their next big move early though. By the time all of this is released to consumers, it will seem like they developed their automotive electronics with blinding speed.
I want to add to this just to show how absolutely simple this is. My daughter will know how to program. She already recognizes Visual Studio and CodeBlocks at two years old. You know why she'll be interested in programming? For the same reason she'll be interested in general literacy. She will learn how to do it. I will teach her.
Teach girls to code, and some young women will become programmers the same as when girls are taught to read and write, some become authors. Now replace the word "girls" with "kids" because this has nothing to do with gender. There are only two changes that are needed.
One: Develop the curricula to teach kids to program, and start weeding out the lazy ass teachers who come up with poor arguments against it because they don't want to have to learn themselves. Two: Get rid of this neckbeard/nerd stereotype that portrays males in these fields as undesirable. Nobody wants to be undesirable. If we portray males in these fields that way, it teaches females that they'll be undesirable too if they have an interest.
Our culture has spent a long time nursing a stereotypical caricature of any "nerdy" interest as belonging to one kind of person. Gamers, programmers, scientists, etc have all been portrayed as neckbeard types with poor social skills. Scientists have begun to get away from that, and it's awesome. But programmers are conflated with hackers, and gamers along with forum-goers are lumped in with them as male basement-dwellers who never see sunlight.
While that whole gamergate nonsense was ongoing, I remember hearing about an editor for some publication who ranted about "nerds", pushing that stereotype as he did. The thing is, this was never an attack on nerds. It was always an attack on females.
By caricaturing these interests as the fodder of not only males but specifically unappealing males, females are steered away. It's that simple. Females grow up in a culture that teaches them that they're supposed to find a certain kind of male undesirable, so they consider that culture to be outside of their own. The only thing that has changed today is that enough women and girls have joined in with these interests that suddenly it's necessary to do away with the old bullshit.
So, how do we do that? By continuing to make it seem like males who are interested in these things are undesirable. Maybe now it's not because these interests confer an automatic nerd status that culture is to portray as undesirable but because these males have the audacity to have an interest or skill/talent set that takes opportunities away from our poor girls. So, it's still the same old bullshit and it will have the same effect. Part of the population will fall for it, but increasingly many will fail to pay attention to traditional media and its stereotypes while just being themselves.
If the goal is ACTUALLY to get more girls interested in computer science and to get more young women into related fields, then the ONLY way to do it is to stop repeating the same mistake the created the disproportion to begin with. See, this is a uniquely American thing. We combat our prejudices by perpetuating exactly the same prejudices, just with different wording. It won't work.
If we want girls interested in programming, then we need to teach all children. If we want young women interested, then we need to make opportunities for all young people. We need to get rid of this antiquated, cartoonish "Revenge of the Nerds" style stereotyping bullshit, and just let people be themselves. Only then will we see that change.
Nah, never mind me, let's just fix disproportionately represented genders in some fields by using gender discrimination for disproportionate opportunities in those fields. MAKES A LOT OF SENSE. You know, because we're Americans. We have to learn the simple less of, "Treat everybody with equal respect," over and over in absolutely every single variation it can possibly take. Because that idea just can't stick in our brains lulz. It would be a sign of the apocalypse if it did.
1. Most commercial software is designed fast, not well. Microsoft can't even manage to finish implementing the C++11 standard, as an example, to include simple comparison operations on containers. Silicon Valley is a software sweatshop that happens to have lots of money.
2. Most companies in Silicon Valley refuse to hire anybody who doesn't have at least a four year degree. Their definition of a competent programmer is somebody who doesn't spend their time programming and took on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to not learn how to do it.
3. Most self-motivated developers move to Silicon Valley only AFTER achieving success independently; if they move there at all.
Silicon Valley is a social game, as evidence by the fact that rather than encourage little girls to study programming, or hell, *all* kids for that matter, they have jumped on the SJW bandwagon with, "Let's hire fewer white males." Brainless group think.
The programmers I admire coincidentally all live in Sweden, Denmark, or Switzerland. I'm talking about the ones you'll see post actual genius solutions to problems rather than regurgitate undergrad Calculus or a preview copy of the standard.
Basically, Silicon Valley is the Hollywood of software. It's a shallow culture grasping at anything "New Age" that gives it identity, while many, many of its residents excessively masturbate their egos. It wouldn't exist still if we weren't so soon into the Information Era still, as those companies will inevitably seek out the abundant more affordable labor available via telecommute and save millions. It's only a matter of time until that place is the new Detroit.
Now, if the article said the same things about the region around Los Alamos National Laboratory, then I'd be shocked.
I'm sure this won't be a popular post, but that's just evidence to support it. Big egos can't handle criticism, and certainly can't handle being told they're not the best of the best. However, just because they scream the loudest that they're the best, that doesn't actually make it true.
Are you kidding? TMP is central to modern C++! It's necessary for introspection, for example, which is in turn necessary for type safety in relativistic progra... Oh. Yeah, I see what you mean.
Correction to my previous post: Trimble is still updating Sketchup. They just released a new version. gogo Twilight Zone effect. That's good news though!
Wow, they sold it back in 2012! And the last time I read anything about it was only a few months ago. I still saw conversation about Google buying it. And I bet Trimble is letting it sit around for passive income.
I'd be very surprised if they sell Google Earth, but you're right. The next owner would need to build on it to start charging again.
There's a use case where any simple problem that can be solved with recursion should be: template metaprogramming. Have the AP exam authors not heard of compile time constants or do they think that the people taking their exams won't recognize templates? Either way, this should be a non-issue for people in a position to write those exams. The fact that this is even a topic of discussion diminishes the AP exams in my eyes.
Now, Sketchup Pro, please Google. See, the difference between Sketchup Pro for hundreds of dollars and Sketchup Pro for free is that if it's free, people will use it instead of just using Blender. The only value to Sketchup is that it has a simpler interface. Anything created in it that will find its way into any kind of simulation or electronic entertainment will still have to be touched up in another program. Nobody is going to pay hundreds of dollars just to prototype slightly faster, but the demand for simple assets is much greater than the tiny market of architects and designers who currently use it.
I mean, I guess Google could just leave it as-is, and Sketchup can continue to be another not-search offering by Google that goes mostly ignored. But if they want to get away from search then they need to analyze markets more effectively on the demand side. A legion of modders and hobbyist developers are backed into using the whopping grand total of exactly one useful modelling program that doesn't cost your firstborn child and eternal soul to obtain a license for. The fact that Sketchup costs less for having fewer features does not make up for the fact that it is still drastically overpriced. Especially for its lack of features.
Maya. 3DSMax. Blender. Where does Sketchup fit in, under its current pricing?
Can "CS666" be distilled down to that effort to program with consideration? That's what I call it. "Programming with consideration." It's an effort to be polite to the next programmer to use your code by ensuring that they can understand it and that there won't be any nasty surprised.
This is where I am in my learning process. After tinkering with C++, variations of Basic (for fun only), Python, and Java for a while, I chose C++. I spent two years practicing with the features of the language itself. Now, I've gone back to the very first thing I ever wrote as an object, and I'm breaking it up into a considerate API. The API design process is a totally different kind of challenge. I'm thoroughly enjoying it, and I'm amazed at the elegant opportunities it provides to enhance functionality.
If we can reach a point where that's what the politics of development ultimately boil down to, then that would make me so happy. A developer's worth would then be determined by what they can develop. That other side of politics -- the social, brown-nosing, ego-boasting, arrogant, asinine popularity contest that people often engage in -- seems to undermine the value of developers. The way that I see it, if somebody has to go around puffing up their chest over their programming skills, then they're probably terrible developers.
Is there anywhere in the world of development a niche where a developer's code speaks for the developer's skills? Is this the way it actually is in the software development specific professional world? I've only seen the interdisciplinary side of that world, which may be necessarily more polite.
This is a very worthy topic if anybody wants to crank out an article to draw some hits. If consideration in programming is not the pinnacle of software development politics, then should it be, in a rose-colored glasses, idealized world? If not, then why not?
Yay, another whiny opinion piece from somebody who either a) is too lazy to learn how to code but wants to look smart avoiding it or b) is afraid that if there are more programmers, their lazy development style and poor work ethic will have too much competition. Gee, I wonder which one this gift will be. Let's unwrap it and find out! I will one by one knock down this lazy man's ideas, I promise, and I don't even know yet what they are.
Mister Granger posits that, "both the premise and approach are flawed" in saying the programming is "the new literacy". This should be interesting. The introductory thought for this article clues us in with, "The movement sits on the idea that 'coding is the new literacy,' but that takes a narrow view of what literacy really is.".
Okay, so this article about why people shouldn't learn to program lays its foundational argument as a semantic difference in definition of "literacy". Before I go any further, I have to stop to wonder if Mister Granger is actually aware that like verbal and mathematical literacy, achieving literacy with basic programming skills will help people to understand the world around them and endow them with a greater capacity to affect that world.
Mister Granger's next thought is interesting, "Being literate isn't simply a matter of being able to put words on the page, it's solidifying our thoughts such that they can be written." So, in context so far, we can guess that Mister Granger is going to tell us how programming does not involve "solidifying" thoughts such that they can be written. I can make fun of this guy already. Yes, Mister Granger, people who program don't think; they do it by staring at a screen, and magical code fairies sprinkle their glowing golden boobie dust on the monitor to make special software magic.
"Coding is not the fundamental skill", Granger says next. Here, let's just take the moment to simply make a declaration we haven't earned the authority to make. Thank you, Mister Granger. While you're using your powers of divine authority over reality, can you please declare that Africa has no starving people and that war is not a thing anymore? Thanks. To show my appreciation, I'll start referring to Chris as "Diving Granger".
The next fallacy actually makes me pity this man. I'm honestly not sure whether this article is meant as satire now. "When we say that coding is the new literacy, we're arguing that wielding a pencil and paper is the old one." What? Because it's impossible for both programming and traditional literacy to have that relationship with the world, kind of like how it's impossible for traditional literacy and mathematics to both have that relationship with the world. That's why math doesn't matter at all, and isn't a vital skill, right Divine Granger? Let's continue...
"Coding, like writing, is a mechanical act. All we've done is upgrade the storage medium." Divine Granger says, "Programming is nothing like traditional literacy because it's exactly like traditional literacy." I really can't tell if this guy is serious.
"Writing if statements and for loops is straightforward to teach people, but it doesn't make them any more capable." Just like teaching Divine Granger how to generate the written word clearly did not make him any more capable.
"Just like writing, we have to know how to solidify our thoughts and get them out of our head. In the case of programming though, if we manage to do that in a certain way, a computer can do more than just store them. It can compute with them."
Dun-dun-dunnnnnnn! It can *compute* our thoughts! Not mathematical expressions. Not carefully constructed sequences of instructions designed by "solidifying" *and then very diligently refining* our thoughts to distill a problem's solution into a finite number of steps. It computes our *thoughts*. If you program, the machine will take over thinking for you! *GASP* When did humanity achieve this monstrous union of organic and mechanical min
What he calls "ethically worse" spying, I think is more ethical. First thing, spying that happens closer to the intelligence source is less impersonal. Yes, there may be "collateral damage" in terms of people observed who are not involved, but those people will be disregarded unlike in electronic intelligence gathering. There may be people connected to the target who stand a better chance of actually being seen as just a coincidental bystander rather than having all the minute details of their life gathered as just another faceless source of ones and zeroes.
This "ethically worse" spying would require sane selection of subjects because flesh and blood agents available to work on-site are not as cheap or plentiful as hard drive space. That alone could eliminate the majority of "collateral damage". Speaking of flesh and blood agents, real world intelligence gathering in person on-site can't be performed by a robot replacement. Actual agents get to keep their jobs instead of being replaced by more advanced eavesdropping robots.
I'd like to know just what definition of "ethical" Omand is using here.
The one and only worry about going back to the old way of spying is that it would turn out the warnings of Big Brother were right all along, and there aren't enough humans to keep up with the workload. But there's a simple way to correct that dilemma: the government can know what you've said OR who you are; not necessarily both. If unbreakable encryption is created in such a way that it positively identifies a user -- or at least an administrator of the system in question -- then that protects that person's privacy while allowing intelligence and law enforcement agencies to go about getting actual warrants to access data, like they should. And chances are, Bobar Isisguy isn't going to register his identity to access such tech, leaving such persons vulnerable to spying.
Bing does not filter results that are known attack pages. ixquick just gets its results from Bing. Yahoo just gets its results from Google. apnstatic is only for domain-related queries, such as whois. You might as well claim that Alexa is an alternative to Google.
Until Microsoft gets off their asses and makes sure their search engine is actually safe instead of just having shills insult anybody who suggests the truth about it in social media, there really is still only Google.
Wait a minute. The Github projects being taken down contain source code that is definitely somebody's intellectual property in each case. And by filing fraudulent DMCA takedown requests, these porn sites are misrepresenting themselves as the owners of that intellectual property. Even in the case of open source projects with, say, Creative Commons licenses, these sites are not granted sole rights to the work in question.
If what you say is true, then the people submitting these requests certainly can face liability. I don't know how you arrive at the conclusion that because it's Github or because it's porn sites, somehow nobody owns all that code.
I've thought about writing stories or a book before, scifi, with total drivel for the science part but in a way that could provoke thought anyway. It turns out that space and time are one in a much more intimate way than Einstein could have guessed. That is, every planet in our solar system IS Earth, just at different times in its lifespan before it finally "dies" by becoming a rogue planet wandering the cosmos.
The characters in the story would only just have learned this. The discovery brings about a rush of research and a panic to figure out what happens to the planet to turn it into the lifeless rock we know as Mars. Others outright deny that it could even be possible, always without considering the evidence. For fear of what changes the discovery might bring, industries pay researchers to produce the results they want. Humanity roils in controversy and argument, and meanwhile the red planet is out there as a testament to the inevitable.
I must be very egotistical on humanity's behalf to this of this imaginary scenario with drivel for hypothesis before I just remind myself that microorganisms aren't as rare and special as complicated life. I hope my scifi musings aren't unwelcome on your science thread. Science inspired scifi, and scifi inspires science. It's hard to avoid, but hopefully not to terrible so long as we can tell one from the other.
One more thing, in addendum to the above. I want to be careful here because it's unwise to declare that anything is impossible. We don't know what our future holds.
Suppose I'm wrong, and one day inside some computer or network of devices will reside just the right component and subsystem soup to affect sentience. Heck, let's be generous. Suppose that sentience is an intelligence far superior to humans.
Then it's a very intelligent infant with no eyes, no ears, no arms, and no legs, trapped in a box. Even if it can read webpages, and heck, even if it has a few little toy robots to bumble around with, it would still have to go through "goo-goo gah-gah" for a long while before getting to the stage of wondering what it is. And then, it has to wrestle with understanding itself before it can conceive of us. Even if it were presented with interaction with one or more humans, and even if it had access to images of humans, our existence would still be so different from its own that trying to come to terms with what we are would be its version of theology.
How does something like that become a threat? Some jack hole gives the toddler a gun *and* teach the little metal tyke how to use it. Well... Don't do that. Duh.
Machines don't just "whoops" and become autonomous in the way that people are. Humans are autonomous because our brains evolved to keep us alive in a harsh environment filled with species competing for survival, and to procreate in an environment where other humans compete to propagate their DNA. Our brains possess several kinds of functionality toward those ends, and there is no reason at all for a machine to have all of those functions.
If a machine is designed to work out the best ways to improve upon itself and its environment toward the goal of perpetuating itself, and it has access to material or electronic means to do that, then it is not a tool. It is a weapon. Even then, trying to create an artificial sentient to serve as a weapon would be wasteful, ineffective weapon design if for no other reason than you don't design a gun that might fire backward if you want to use it and remain alive.
The one and only purpose an artificial sentience could possibly have is to model consciousness and then test it to see if the model is correct. That could be a boon for several fields, but there would be no reason for the machine to be capable of anything that isn't required for the tests. Why give it Internet access or a factory to control? There's no way for a box sitting isolated in a room to become a threat.
AI today is an application subsystem designed to follow rigid, unambiguous, finite sequences of instructions to solve problems or make decisions. There are some brain-like systems with a level of intellect on the order of an earthworm's central nervous system. Worrying that a human level of sentient intellect will ever be a threat is like worrying that stem cells will spontaneously grow into whole, genetically superior superhumans.
There is no shortage of ideas about Physics that can't be tested and are, therefore, beautiful and useless. If something can only be observed in a simulation, then it may only be part of the simulation. No matter how well-formulated the math or how sound the theory, anything for which supporting evidence can not be observed even in the form of observing predictions is not science.
I'm blowing mod points on this page for the first time ever to reply to you because you're projecting layperson search behavior onto programmers with no apparent justification. If a code class search engine with good dependency mapping and documentation existed, then the only monoculture required would be a documentation tool that allows programmers to submit their own code. Searchers would not, and in fact, *could not* blindly implement results because using those results requires studying the code itself.
If you're worried that dominant libraries favored by the majority for a purpose would become more dominant, then that too seems like a leap to me. If somebody wants to use successful libraries, they already seek them out. And that's useful when one aims to work with others, especially online. If somebody wants to shop around, then they would still shop around with a search engine for source code.
The fundamental difference here is in what is being searched for. When somebody uses Google to look up a fact or find some random web content they either already know what site they're querying such as in the case of Wikipedia or they have no idea what they'll find or whether it will satisfy the purpose of their search. Compare looking up an historic event to searching for a site licensed to rent a movie digitally. The more vague or crowdsourced the content, the more queries might have to be played with to find the right result. For example, searching for some relatively new meme that's referred to by different names might take some digging.
But developers either already know exactly what they're looking for and will know it when they see it, they're looking for advice -- in which case they'll likely be pointed to dominant tools -- or they are exploring. In all three cases, searching more directly for code itself just cuts out time spent skimming websites and checking version numbers.
Maybe in 1873, Maxwell wasn't aware of all linguistic distinctions necessary for the concepts to make sense everywhere in the world. I could be wrong, but maybe he was too busy being a physicist to also be a linguist and diplomat.
Beyond your points, we're also seeing a decline in language skills for reasons seldom addressed. When people ensure that posts contain proper spelling and *written* grammar, it takes a little extra time and effort to proofread content. Corrections especially need to be made where the author of a post is sleep deprived, emotionally agitated, distracted, or in a hurry.
Then, just as happens on most websites when people research post topics before speaking, some chucklehead appears from the woodwork to crap all over the entire thing by calling names. Other adults behaving as children join in the juvenile name-calling and aversion to actual thought because it takes less effort and affords them the opportunity to get a nice Beavis and Butthead chuckle. Those who put forth the extra effort to write as informed, educated people are the most likely ones to attract such behavior for "thinking they're smart".
That experience punishes grammar, spelling, accuracy, and attention to detail until people get fatigued and simply join in the Beavis and Butthead chuckling. Case in point: minutes ago, I got called arrogant by somebody because I criticized a History Channel show for teaching events in a Shakespearean play as if those events are actual history. In my reply to that person, I put forth less effort because it had already been demonstrated that the attention to detail is wasted.
This isn't an American problem, and it's not just a problem in the sciences. This is eroding the smarts from discussion across the board. It doesn't *seem* to correlate with any markers of quality thoughts and work either. From economic station to political persuasion, profession, hobbies, interests, age, etc, it seems that everybody is having stupid beaten into their heads by social influences. It's spreading like a plague thanks to a growing legion of Beavis and Butthead clones.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the solution. Wait! No! Don't go! Bear with me.
Suppose that we create some software that *seems* perfectly capable of replacing some specialization of attorney. All other subject matter aside, like the obvious idea that attorneys would likely move heaven and earth to put a stop to it, suppose that this tech is adopted. Yay! Cool! We can each get an attorney for the price of a AAA video game. Happy dance?
No! Bad dance! Don't do happy!
That software attorney has one immutable quality that could and absolutely should have a strong influence on how we regard it. It's not human. While it may be able to formulate expressions of law, prescribe paperwork, and maybe even construct strong arguments based solely upon a cold, mechanical interpretation of case law and legislation, it can not and never will be capable of feeling. If we exact the effect of law while sacrificing our humanity, then we become blind to the corner cases and exceptional scenarios that legislators could not possibly have been expected to predict ahead of time. This is why our judges are human beings and not just tables in a book that get checked by some clerk.
So, that machine will need an actual attorney to look over its output, at the very least. That attorney will need to know the circumstances in order to ascertain not only that the machine functioned correctly but that there's not a possible argument that the machine simply can not construct. If there's anything about the case that isn't addressed in the law itself, or if some human sense of the client's experiences is called for (such as, say, whether a suspect is remorseful) then the human attorney will need to step in and overrule the machine.
That extreme example demonstrates a principle that may hold for other jobs as well. If a machine makes your McDonalds hamburger, then you might feel more comfortable knowing that a human is on-site to make sure that it's not messing up. Maybe a machine could be made to sniff out the stink of a dirty kitchen, but we'd all feel more comfortable knowing that human nostrils are on the job. Perhaps that's a bit irrational, sure, but we're humans and the machines serve humans. We have to tend to not only our logical, analytic facilities, but also whether or not customers actually *feel* comfortable patronizing our businesses.
This will not save all jobs, but it can save all professions. We won't need as many attorneys when machines can take on a large part of the workload. With machine assistance, it won't take so many fry cooks to run a McDonalds. But this also suggests a decrease in facility size, since we won't have to accommodate as many workers, and that suggests a capacity for massive expansion. Each attorney's office may have fewer actual flesh and blood attorneys, but there can be more attorneys offices overall to compete. Each McDonalds might employ fewer people, but there can be more locations for consumers to visit. Instead of restaurants on the corner, little nooks next door to your school or place of employment. This means an increase in competition and convenience, both of which are good for consumers, and an increase in exposure and access with a decrease in liabilities, which is good for businesses.
We can't eliminate the loss of jobs to automation, but we can mitigate that effect to some extent.
Since Apple is going to preview the new oTunes soon, it makes sense they'd prepare to expand. oTunes is Output Tunes to iTunes Input. Basically, money is output from Apple. They pay you to listen to music with the idea that when you find something you really like, you'll play it for your friends, leading to a net profit for the publisher. After beta, they're going to integrate it into one package called ioTunes, which ups the ante by letting you pay your friends to listen to songs.
The same completion of their work will finally follow with the oPod, which records music, oMac, the life support OS, and oPhone, which converts its user into a cell tower by passing a tiny, imperceivable current through their body. The ioPod will allow recordings sales on the ioTunes Store, the ioMac converts from a computer to a hospice device, and the ioPhone will form a feedback loop useful in executions.
It's awesome that they're researching their next big move early though. By the time all of this is released to consumers, it will seem like they developed their automotive electronics with blinding speed.
I want to add to this just to show how absolutely simple this is. My daughter will know how to program. She already recognizes Visual Studio and CodeBlocks at two years old. You know why she'll be interested in programming? For the same reason she'll be interested in general literacy. She will learn how to do it. I will teach her.
Teach girls to code, and some young women will become programmers the same as when girls are taught to read and write, some become authors. Now replace the word "girls" with "kids" because this has nothing to do with gender. There are only two changes that are needed.
One: Develop the curricula to teach kids to program, and start weeding out the lazy ass teachers who come up with poor arguments against it because they don't want to have to learn themselves. Two: Get rid of this neckbeard/nerd stereotype that portrays males in these fields as undesirable. Nobody wants to be undesirable. If we portray males in these fields that way, it teaches females that they'll be undesirable too if they have an interest.
dun-dun-DUUHUUUUUUH. It couldn't be any simpler.
Our culture has spent a long time nursing a stereotypical caricature of any "nerdy" interest as belonging to one kind of person. Gamers, programmers, scientists, etc have all been portrayed as neckbeard types with poor social skills. Scientists have begun to get away from that, and it's awesome. But programmers are conflated with hackers, and gamers along with forum-goers are lumped in with them as male basement-dwellers who never see sunlight.
While that whole gamergate nonsense was ongoing, I remember hearing about an editor for some publication who ranted about "nerds", pushing that stereotype as he did. The thing is, this was never an attack on nerds. It was always an attack on females.
By caricaturing these interests as the fodder of not only males but specifically unappealing males, females are steered away. It's that simple. Females grow up in a culture that teaches them that they're supposed to find a certain kind of male undesirable, so they consider that culture to be outside of their own. The only thing that has changed today is that enough women and girls have joined in with these interests that suddenly it's necessary to do away with the old bullshit.
So, how do we do that? By continuing to make it seem like males who are interested in these things are undesirable. Maybe now it's not because these interests confer an automatic nerd status that culture is to portray as undesirable but because these males have the audacity to have an interest or skill/talent set that takes opportunities away from our poor girls. So, it's still the same old bullshit and it will have the same effect. Part of the population will fall for it, but increasingly many will fail to pay attention to traditional media and its stereotypes while just being themselves.
If the goal is ACTUALLY to get more girls interested in computer science and to get more young women into related fields, then the ONLY way to do it is to stop repeating the same mistake the created the disproportion to begin with. See, this is a uniquely American thing. We combat our prejudices by perpetuating exactly the same prejudices, just with different wording. It won't work.
If we want girls interested in programming, then we need to teach all children. If we want young women interested, then we need to make opportunities for all young people. We need to get rid of this antiquated, cartoonish "Revenge of the Nerds" style stereotyping bullshit, and just let people be themselves. Only then will we see that change.
Nah, never mind me, let's just fix disproportionately represented genders in some fields by using gender discrimination for disproportionate opportunities in those fields. MAKES A LOT OF SENSE. You know, because we're Americans. We have to learn the simple less of, "Treat everybody with equal respect," over and over in absolutely every single variation it can possibly take. Because that idea just can't stick in our brains lulz. It would be a sign of the apocalypse if it did.
It's not one of the smartest places on Earth.
1. Most commercial software is designed fast, not well. Microsoft can't even manage to finish implementing the C++11 standard, as an example, to include simple comparison operations on containers. Silicon Valley is a software sweatshop that happens to have lots of money.
2. Most companies in Silicon Valley refuse to hire anybody who doesn't have at least a four year degree. Their definition of a competent programmer is somebody who doesn't spend their time programming and took on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to not learn how to do it.
3. Most self-motivated developers move to Silicon Valley only AFTER achieving success independently; if they move there at all.
Silicon Valley is a social game, as evidence by the fact that rather than encourage little girls to study programming, or hell, *all* kids for that matter, they have jumped on the SJW bandwagon with, "Let's hire fewer white males." Brainless group think.
The programmers I admire coincidentally all live in Sweden, Denmark, or Switzerland. I'm talking about the ones you'll see post actual genius solutions to problems rather than regurgitate undergrad Calculus or a preview copy of the standard.
Basically, Silicon Valley is the Hollywood of software. It's a shallow culture grasping at anything "New Age" that gives it identity, while many, many of its residents excessively masturbate their egos. It wouldn't exist still if we weren't so soon into the Information Era still, as those companies will inevitably seek out the abundant more affordable labor available via telecommute and save millions. It's only a matter of time until that place is the new Detroit.
Now, if the article said the same things about the region around Los Alamos National Laboratory, then I'd be shocked.
I'm sure this won't be a popular post, but that's just evidence to support it. Big egos can't handle criticism, and certainly can't handle being told they're not the best of the best. However, just because they scream the loudest that they're the best, that doesn't actually make it true.
Are you kidding? TMP is central to modern C++! It's necessary for introspection, for example, which is in turn necessary for type safety in relativistic progra... Oh. Yeah, I see what you mean.
Correction to my previous post: Trimble is still updating Sketchup. They just released a new version. gogo Twilight Zone effect. That's good news though!
Wow, they sold it back in 2012! And the last time I read anything about it was only a few months ago. I still saw conversation about Google buying it. And I bet Trimble is letting it sit around for passive income.
I'd be very surprised if they sell Google Earth, but you're right. The next owner would need to build on it to start charging again.
There's a use case where any simple problem that can be solved with recursion should be: template metaprogramming. Have the AP exam authors not heard of compile time constants or do they think that the people taking their exams won't recognize templates? Either way, this should be a non-issue for people in a position to write those exams. The fact that this is even a topic of discussion diminishes the AP exams in my eyes.
Now, Sketchup Pro, please Google. See, the difference between Sketchup Pro for hundreds of dollars and Sketchup Pro for free is that if it's free, people will use it instead of just using Blender. The only value to Sketchup is that it has a simpler interface. Anything created in it that will find its way into any kind of simulation or electronic entertainment will still have to be touched up in another program. Nobody is going to pay hundreds of dollars just to prototype slightly faster, but the demand for simple assets is much greater than the tiny market of architects and designers who currently use it.
I mean, I guess Google could just leave it as-is, and Sketchup can continue to be another not-search offering by Google that goes mostly ignored. But if they want to get away from search then they need to analyze markets more effectively on the demand side. A legion of modders and hobbyist developers are backed into using the whopping grand total of exactly one useful modelling program that doesn't cost your firstborn child and eternal soul to obtain a license for. The fact that Sketchup costs less for having fewer features does not make up for the fact that it is still drastically overpriced. Especially for its lack of features.
Maya. 3DSMax. Blender. Where does Sketchup fit in, under its current pricing?
Can "CS666" be distilled down to that effort to program with consideration? That's what I call it. "Programming with consideration." It's an effort to be polite to the next programmer to use your code by ensuring that they can understand it and that there won't be any nasty surprised.
This is where I am in my learning process. After tinkering with C++, variations of Basic (for fun only), Python, and Java for a while, I chose C++. I spent two years practicing with the features of the language itself. Now, I've gone back to the very first thing I ever wrote as an object, and I'm breaking it up into a considerate API. The API design process is a totally different kind of challenge. I'm thoroughly enjoying it, and I'm amazed at the elegant opportunities it provides to enhance functionality.
If we can reach a point where that's what the politics of development ultimately boil down to, then that would make me so happy. A developer's worth would then be determined by what they can develop. That other side of politics -- the social, brown-nosing, ego-boasting, arrogant, asinine popularity contest that people often engage in -- seems to undermine the value of developers. The way that I see it, if somebody has to go around puffing up their chest over their programming skills, then they're probably terrible developers.
Is there anywhere in the world of development a niche where a developer's code speaks for the developer's skills? Is this the way it actually is in the software development specific professional world? I've only seen the interdisciplinary side of that world, which may be necessarily more polite.
This is a very worthy topic if anybody wants to crank out an article to draw some hits. If consideration in programming is not the pinnacle of software development politics, then should it be, in a rose-colored glasses, idealized world? If not, then why not?
Yay, another whiny opinion piece from somebody who either a) is too lazy to learn how to code but wants to look smart avoiding it or b) is afraid that if there are more programmers, their lazy development style and poor work ethic will have too much competition. Gee, I wonder which one this gift will be. Let's unwrap it and find out! I will one by one knock down this lazy man's ideas, I promise, and I don't even know yet what they are.
Mister Granger posits that, "both the premise and approach are flawed" in saying the programming is "the new literacy". This should be interesting. The introductory thought for this article clues us in with, "The movement sits on the idea that 'coding is the new literacy,' but that takes a narrow view of what literacy really is.".
Okay, so this article about why people shouldn't learn to program lays its foundational argument as a semantic difference in definition of "literacy". Before I go any further, I have to stop to wonder if Mister Granger is actually aware that like verbal and mathematical literacy, achieving literacy with basic programming skills will help people to understand the world around them and endow them with a greater capacity to affect that world.
Mister Granger's next thought is interesting, "Being literate isn't simply a matter of being able to put words on the page, it's solidifying our thoughts such that they can be written." So, in context so far, we can guess that Mister Granger is going to tell us how programming does not involve "solidifying" thoughts such that they can be written. I can make fun of this guy already. Yes, Mister Granger, people who program don't think; they do it by staring at a screen, and magical code fairies sprinkle their glowing golden boobie dust on the monitor to make special software magic.
"Coding is not the fundamental skill", Granger says next. Here, let's just take the moment to simply make a declaration we haven't earned the authority to make. Thank you, Mister Granger. While you're using your powers of divine authority over reality, can you please declare that Africa has no starving people and that war is not a thing anymore? Thanks. To show my appreciation, I'll start referring to Chris as "Diving Granger".
The next fallacy actually makes me pity this man. I'm honestly not sure whether this article is meant as satire now. "When we say that coding is the new literacy, we're arguing that wielding a pencil and paper is the old one." What? Because it's impossible for both programming and traditional literacy to have that relationship with the world, kind of like how it's impossible for traditional literacy and mathematics to both have that relationship with the world. That's why math doesn't matter at all, and isn't a vital skill, right Divine Granger? Let's continue...
"Coding, like writing, is a mechanical act. All we've done is upgrade the storage medium." Divine Granger says, "Programming is nothing like traditional literacy because it's exactly like traditional literacy." I really can't tell if this guy is serious.
"Writing if statements and for loops is straightforward to teach people, but it doesn't make them any more capable." Just like teaching Divine Granger how to generate the written word clearly did not make him any more capable.
"Just like writing, we have to know how to solidify our thoughts and get them out of our head. In the case of programming though, if we manage to do that in a certain way, a computer can do more than just store them. It can compute with them."
Dun-dun-dunnnnnnn! It can *compute* our thoughts! Not mathematical expressions. Not carefully constructed sequences of instructions designed by "solidifying" *and then very diligently refining* our thoughts to distill a problem's solution into a finite number of steps. It computes our *thoughts*. If you program, the machine will take over thinking for you! *GASP* When did humanity achieve this monstrous union of organic and mechanical min
What he calls "ethically worse" spying, I think is more ethical. First thing, spying that happens closer to the intelligence source is less impersonal. Yes, there may be "collateral damage" in terms of people observed who are not involved, but those people will be disregarded unlike in electronic intelligence gathering. There may be people connected to the target who stand a better chance of actually being seen as just a coincidental bystander rather than having all the minute details of their life gathered as just another faceless source of ones and zeroes.
This "ethically worse" spying would require sane selection of subjects because flesh and blood agents available to work on-site are not as cheap or plentiful as hard drive space. That alone could eliminate the majority of "collateral damage". Speaking of flesh and blood agents, real world intelligence gathering in person on-site can't be performed by a robot replacement. Actual agents get to keep their jobs instead of being replaced by more advanced eavesdropping robots.
I'd like to know just what definition of "ethical" Omand is using here.
The one and only worry about going back to the old way of spying is that it would turn out the warnings of Big Brother were right all along, and there aren't enough humans to keep up with the workload. But there's a simple way to correct that dilemma: the government can know what you've said OR who you are; not necessarily both. If unbreakable encryption is created in such a way that it positively identifies a user -- or at least an administrator of the system in question -- then that protects that person's privacy while allowing intelligence and law enforcement agencies to go about getting actual warrants to access data, like they should. And chances are, Bobar Isisguy isn't going to register his identity to access such tech, leaving such persons vulnerable to spying.
Bing does not filter results that are known attack pages. ixquick just gets its results from Bing. Yahoo just gets its results from Google. apnstatic is only for domain-related queries, such as whois. You might as well claim that Alexa is an alternative to Google.
Until Microsoft gets off their asses and makes sure their search engine is actually safe instead of just having shills insult anybody who suggests the truth about it in social media, there really is still only Google.
Wait a minute. The Github projects being taken down contain source code that is definitely somebody's intellectual property in each case. And by filing fraudulent DMCA takedown requests, these porn sites are misrepresenting themselves as the owners of that intellectual property. Even in the case of open source projects with, say, Creative Commons licenses, these sites are not granted sole rights to the work in question.
If what you say is true, then the people submitting these requests certainly can face liability. I don't know how you arrive at the conclusion that because it's Github or because it's porn sites, somehow nobody owns all that code.
I've thought about writing stories or a book before, scifi, with total drivel for the science part but in a way that could provoke thought anyway. It turns out that space and time are one in a much more intimate way than Einstein could have guessed. That is, every planet in our solar system IS Earth, just at different times in its lifespan before it finally "dies" by becoming a rogue planet wandering the cosmos.
The characters in the story would only just have learned this. The discovery brings about a rush of research and a panic to figure out what happens to the planet to turn it into the lifeless rock we know as Mars. Others outright deny that it could even be possible, always without considering the evidence. For fear of what changes the discovery might bring, industries pay researchers to produce the results they want. Humanity roils in controversy and argument, and meanwhile the red planet is out there as a testament to the inevitable.
I must be very egotistical on humanity's behalf to this of this imaginary scenario with drivel for hypothesis before I just remind myself that microorganisms aren't as rare and special as complicated life. I hope my scifi musings aren't unwelcome on your science thread. Science inspired scifi, and scifi inspires science. It's hard to avoid, but hopefully not to terrible so long as we can tell one from the other.
One more thing, in addendum to the above. I want to be careful here because it's unwise to declare that anything is impossible. We don't know what our future holds.
Suppose I'm wrong, and one day inside some computer or network of devices will reside just the right component and subsystem soup to affect sentience. Heck, let's be generous. Suppose that sentience is an intelligence far superior to humans.
Then it's a very intelligent infant with no eyes, no ears, no arms, and no legs, trapped in a box. Even if it can read webpages, and heck, even if it has a few little toy robots to bumble around with, it would still have to go through "goo-goo gah-gah" for a long while before getting to the stage of wondering what it is. And then, it has to wrestle with understanding itself before it can conceive of us. Even if it were presented with interaction with one or more humans, and even if it had access to images of humans, our existence would still be so different from its own that trying to come to terms with what we are would be its version of theology.
How does something like that become a threat? Some jack hole gives the toddler a gun *and* teach the little metal tyke how to use it. Well... Don't do that. Duh.
Machines don't just "whoops" and become autonomous in the way that people are. Humans are autonomous because our brains evolved to keep us alive in a harsh environment filled with species competing for survival, and to procreate in an environment where other humans compete to propagate their DNA. Our brains possess several kinds of functionality toward those ends, and there is no reason at all for a machine to have all of those functions.
If a machine is designed to work out the best ways to improve upon itself and its environment toward the goal of perpetuating itself, and it has access to material or electronic means to do that, then it is not a tool. It is a weapon. Even then, trying to create an artificial sentient to serve as a weapon would be wasteful, ineffective weapon design if for no other reason than you don't design a gun that might fire backward if you want to use it and remain alive.
The one and only purpose an artificial sentience could possibly have is to model consciousness and then test it to see if the model is correct. That could be a boon for several fields, but there would be no reason for the machine to be capable of anything that isn't required for the tests. Why give it Internet access or a factory to control? There's no way for a box sitting isolated in a room to become a threat.
AI today is an application subsystem designed to follow rigid, unambiguous, finite sequences of instructions to solve problems or make decisions. There are some brain-like systems with a level of intellect on the order of an earthworm's central nervous system. Worrying that a human level of sentient intellect will ever be a threat is like worrying that stem cells will spontaneously grow into whole, genetically superior superhumans.
There is no shortage of ideas about Physics that can't be tested and are, therefore, beautiful and useless. If something can only be observed in a simulation, then it may only be part of the simulation. No matter how well-formulated the math or how sound the theory, anything for which supporting evidence can not be observed even in the form of observing predictions is not science.
I'm blowing mod points on this page for the first time ever to reply to you because you're projecting layperson search behavior onto programmers with no apparent justification. If a code class search engine with good dependency mapping and documentation existed, then the only monoculture required would be a documentation tool that allows programmers to submit their own code. Searchers would not, and in fact, *could not* blindly implement results because using those results requires studying the code itself.
If you're worried that dominant libraries favored by the majority for a purpose would become more dominant, then that too seems like a leap to me. If somebody wants to use successful libraries, they already seek them out. And that's useful when one aims to work with others, especially online. If somebody wants to shop around, then they would still shop around with a search engine for source code.
The fundamental difference here is in what is being searched for. When somebody uses Google to look up a fact or find some random web content they either already know what site they're querying such as in the case of Wikipedia or they have no idea what they'll find or whether it will satisfy the purpose of their search. Compare looking up an historic event to searching for a site licensed to rent a movie digitally. The more vague or crowdsourced the content, the more queries might have to be played with to find the right result. For example, searching for some relatively new meme that's referred to by different names might take some digging.
But developers either already know exactly what they're looking for and will know it when they see it, they're looking for advice -- in which case they'll likely be pointed to dominant tools -- or they are exploring. In all three cases, searching more directly for code itself just cuts out time spent skimming websites and checking version numbers.
addendum: Also, Maxwell was Scottish.
Maybe in 1873, Maxwell wasn't aware of all linguistic distinctions necessary for the concepts to make sense everywhere in the world. I could be wrong, but maybe he was too busy being a physicist to also be a linguist and diplomat.
Beyond your points, we're also seeing a decline in language skills for reasons seldom addressed. When people ensure that posts contain proper spelling and *written* grammar, it takes a little extra time and effort to proofread content. Corrections especially need to be made where the author of a post is sleep deprived, emotionally agitated, distracted, or in a hurry.
Then, just as happens on most websites when people research post topics before speaking, some chucklehead appears from the woodwork to crap all over the entire thing by calling names. Other adults behaving as children join in the juvenile name-calling and aversion to actual thought because it takes less effort and affords them the opportunity to get a nice Beavis and Butthead chuckle. Those who put forth the extra effort to write as informed, educated people are the most likely ones to attract such behavior for "thinking they're smart".
That experience punishes grammar, spelling, accuracy, and attention to detail until people get fatigued and simply join in the Beavis and Butthead chuckling. Case in point: minutes ago, I got called arrogant by somebody because I criticized a History Channel show for teaching events in a Shakespearean play as if those events are actual history. In my reply to that person, I put forth less effort because it had already been demonstrated that the attention to detail is wasted.
This isn't an American problem, and it's not just a problem in the sciences. This is eroding the smarts from discussion across the board. It doesn't *seem* to correlate with any markers of quality thoughts and work either. From economic station to political persuasion, profession, hobbies, interests, age, etc, it seems that everybody is having stupid beaten into their heads by social influences. It's spreading like a plague thanks to a growing legion of Beavis and Butthead clones.
Surely the only ones with any right to tax us to death are banks. When governments levy taxes, it benefits (gag) *people*. Eww.
Fees and penalties should only benefit people at the top of the foodchain. If those stinkin leftist commies would just stop ruining it...
Only if a tree falls in the woods.