I keep seeing this, online and in schools. The people involved are doing it wrong. You do not talk to "top execs" about employment skills, it's like talking to lottery winners about how they earned their winning ticket. The vast majority of people aren't going to be top execs and are not going to work for them (directly). Most technical people will not ever be even in middle management, and *we don't want to be*! The money is good, the job is enjoyable and often you can see your family. You don't take the lobotomy until you're 50, and even then only if you are comfortable and have no way out. Similarly automation and AI are not going to be replacing engineering (of any kind), nor serious computer programming tasks any time soon. By the time they do, we aren't going to care anymore. It's way easier to automate a CEO than it is to automate an engineer.
If you come interview with me, at one of the top tier employers in the country, and all you have are softskills...you won't make it through the phone screen. If you interview with my boss's boss's boss's boss (VP I think? Who knows), you won't get the job. That guy has forgot more about semiconductors than most people will ever learn, and he's making billion dollar decisions. He wants facts, he wants you to do the hard technical work for him, and he's going to grill the hell out of you to figure out if you did it, and he can agree with your conclusions. He is then going to soft-skill it in the rarified air of the other top execs from marketing and sales. His boss's boss is the CEO. In a 100k person company, the sphere where soft-skills matter is perhaps 100-300 deep. Those are your odds of success with "soft skills".
If you are perpetually holding out for a senior exec position, then yes, work your soft skills and spend a lot of time networking with rich people. If you want to entrepreneur, soft skill it away, but be able to speak fluent geek. If you actually want to be an engineer or developer, forget it. Get your geek on, learn everything you can. Yes, you will have to work with people, but I promise you, they care way more about your technical acumen and that they can trust you, than your soft skills (to the point they may not trust you if you whip out power point). That's my advice to everyone, including my own children, and advice I follow myself that has kept me employed 20 straight years without ever being laid off or fired, and got me every job I applied for. It's also common sense.
Nothing in life is easy, there are no shortcuts. Soft-skills are a dime a dozen. I don't know if this is an America thing where everyone thinks you can just schmooze your way around and be employable, or if it's just universal laziness, but use your brain and ignore obvious lies. Put in the heavy effort to learn your livelihood or you will absolutely lose it.
It's all speculative until someone proves it in meat space, but seeing as the people involved are mathematicians they have little interesting in so doing.
Actually it says at the bottom of the article that this probably will never happen, in fact the particular style of black-hole that makes TFS claims true may not even exist. Further, there are a lot of questions I have about the term "observer" and "making your past not exist".
Because one way I interpret this is that you won't be destroyed, you will be unmade . Unless we ascribe some magic to my consciousness or even my macroscopic body that transcends physics, my "history" is nothing short of the history of every atom in my body, and how they all came to be at the same place at the same time. Unmaking that "history" seems like it would, most likely, dissolve me into a gas (with maybe a tiny, nearly imperceptable chance of me staying together unharmed). Similarly, a considerable amount of determinism is required to carry this meat-husk and it's thought processes forward from one moment to the next. From the sub-atomic level up there are various bonds and assemblages which require deterministic physics to stay together and keep me whole.
I'm pretty sure I won't be volunteering for this experiment.
At 40, like me, you would have learned to use a pencil first. We had Atari, we had Nintendo, we had C64, but they weren't quite as prevalent as smart-phones and iPads, which are what my kids grow up on.
My kids have definitely had issue with pencils and scissors in their early years. Of course, they got over it. These tests are designed to identify developmental disorders, and one failing one test in a series does not a developmental disorder make.
But, not shown are that kids are learning their letters and learning to read at a younger age. While my kids struggled a bit with using pencils, they both went in to pre-school, at 3 years of age knowing their alphabet and knowing how to read. My son in particular went in to kindergarten reading at a 7th grade level, he learned all of it from his iPad and learning to read to play games that he saw me playing.
So while kindergarten teachers may need to spend more time with pencils and scissors and developing hand strength, they will not need to spend as much time teaching the alphabet and reading, both of which are pretty much 90% of the kindergarten curriculum.
The actual history had a number of people also writing their own API because Khronos was too slow. ATI had mantle, NVidia had CUDA (which is perhaps similar but not exactly the same), and even MS was pushing some DirectX changes all with the same concept. It's not a surprise Apple made Metal at all, OpenGL was not keeping up with games or low power designs.
But they got a kick in the pants, and Vulkan got fast(er) tracked. Now it seems like those other APIs are redundant, I'm not sure yet if that's true, but I trust that everyone is going to push their proprietary stuff as long as they possibly can.
That's not exactly what they were designed to do. Most of the data structures and semantics between metal and vulkan are the same or very similar, no extra state will need to be kept, and none of the heavy weight render state changes that made OpenGL and earlier DirectX's a dog will be in the way.
Of course, Apple could kill this if they release metal bindings for C/C++, rather than locking it all in to Swift.
Or, we stop our worship of the false God Nature, and start realizing that our bodies are no longer adequate to the task at hand. Instead of punishing ourselves for living how we want to live, we start figuring out how to live how we want to live without the consequences (or alternately, change the instinct driving our motivation). Chemicals are one such help.
We don't go outside because obviously we don't want to. It's dirty, the weather is unpredictable, there are animals & insects carrying disease, too hot/too cold, too bright/to dim. Etc. Wherein we have a plethora of technologies to fix these problems in small space indoors. We may have created some problems in so doing, we need to determine what they are and design them out. If we need more UV exposure, we have product for that. If indoor air quality is low, we have product for that.
We eat poorly primarily due to what our body is telling us about food, and why it is telling us these things. The drive for more fat and more starches is not surprising if you consider that starvation was a major concern in our evolution, and managing it was key to survival. Fat and starch cravings push the unformed mind to make good survival choices. We're well past that now in most of the world, and what our bodies are demanding is no longer optimal for our health. We either need to suppress these instincts or deal with the symptoms. It seems like suppression is probably the way to go, the other side is mostly whack-a-mole.
Sleep is a tougher nut to crack. Losing 33% of our day (or more, depending on who you talk to) is a huge imposition. It seems unlikely that we're soon going to turn in to a society that can simply sleep when it wants, nor that we will actually want it if given the choice. We probably should be focusing on ways to get the most out of what little sleep we get. It seems we understand all of this very little right now. Other choices might be that since we are no longer held to a farmer's schedule, maybe work schedules based on rising with the sun are not necessary or ideal.
In the meantime, while we bake actual solutions up, things that treat the symptoms seem fine. Provide the side-effects are known and the users are free to do the cost benefit analysis. I personally stay away from anti-depressants, not because I do not need them (I am fairly certain I do), but the side effects are sketchy.
Of course he would say this, so much of Microsoft's R&D has been outsourced to Chinese and Indian interests of very dubious quality and oversight, the idea of Microsoft ever being able to build a secure enough operating system to make the Fed nervous is laughable. So instead, embrace the fetid wreck that is Windoze and look for an angle!
Only the richest man in the world need not fear a government's invasions, for that government works for him. But the idea of his MSFT shares eroding... that's scary.
If it's the video's I see my 5yo stumble on, it's usually not the act of sharpening knives. Usually it's more of an itchy and scratchy type cartoon venue, where there's some implied intent or even cartoon violence.
I've seen quite a few of these sorts of things pop up, I'm not really sure what I think about them except that they're fairly dark. I usually grab the steering wheel at that point and go back to my little pony. But the trick is that if you let youtube do it's thing, it will inevitably lead back to the problematic content.
I guess I'm not horribly worried about her mental well being after seeing this stuff, it's fairly juvenile and I don't think she's that impressionable and she has a clear understanding of real/not real. I just wonder how youtube makes these connections.
The nature of the memo would be more obvious if instead of "Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign" they used "spies from the planet Gnarlax".
To which one would ask after every single talking point "But did this really happen? It doesn't sound credible". And the answer is of course "you can't prove it didn't".
Then after having read that, you can ignore it as obvious troll. I don't know what the DNC did or might do, and I certainly do not hold them in high regard, but I know the set of things they may have done, or they may do is much, much larger than the set of things they actually did. They actually suppressed Bernie Sanders, that happened and there's plenty of documentation. I have not seen any to support this memo though, this sounds like smoke and mirrors.
I think it's amazing that what people believe, and by people I mean the average joe who knows nothing about AI, is relevant. Anyone who has worked with actual AI, not the sci-fi stuff in the movies, would be less worried.
With any automation, jobs will be lost, that's literally the point of technology - reduce human effort. But new jobs will be created, and with any luck, some things that have been closed to humans becomes open. One thing that comes to mind is that presently we have more intellectuals and creative types than the world can support. Each one is capable of driving products and ideas that employ thousands of people, the bottleneck is on the labor. Reduce that labor bottleneck and the world opens to more creative impulse.
I think back then we had motivation to beat them. Today our independently wealthy citizens who own the republican party want to JOIN them, or at least set up a corrupt system like theirs.
They are a "communist" dictatorship. The "communist" is very sketchy, but the dictatorship is real.
The fact that they are a good trade partner has helped us avoid a war, cold or otherwise. But they're definitely an enemy, and we should be very concerned about them. Their economy has gone through a rapid expansion but is cooling off, but their living conditions and government has not changed much. This is likely going to cause us problems down the road as they struggle to keep the peace and blame their problems on the US.
At least when I worked for them, they did not do much work in China, and what work was done required some pretty significant security. They were definitely not equal partners. Meanwhile the "labor" was on US soil or in Malaysia.
Telling Lenovo about a security hole isn't entirely surprising, they are a good high-volume consumer of Intel products. I would probably notify Lenovo, HP, Dell at the same time. Alibaba is a little more confusing, combined with the knowledge that telling a Chinese corporation anything is essentially the same as telling the Chinese government. Whereas telling a US corporation anything is almost guaranteed secrecy from anyone for liability reasons.
Regardless the "globalism" movement's fatal flaw is that there continue to be over a hundred independent countries who do not get along, and we should probably have laws in our own country regulating and prohibiting certain things.
No not really, I still code in C. I don't see it going away any time soon. I'm not releasing UI layer applications, and not terribly concerned with first to market.
It frustrates me that C#/Swift/etc. are being pushed so hard at the application layer and forcing C coders to do a lot of undocumented and probably shadier stuff than they were doing before, just to use OS API calls to functions that we all know were coded in C to begin with.
Code like a beast Bro! Bro that code into shape! Be awesome! Beer at noon. Pointers? What are you a nerd? Memory management? That's like for the CPU to deal with, bro, be bro! Efficient code? BRO! They keep making faster CPUs! Mutilate that code!
There is no question in my mind, that if we could somehow undo the glut of psychology and sociology majors that plague society, that reports on our unhappiness would decrease tenfold. I predict similar reductions in rates of autism, AD(H)D in children, SAD, PTSD and video game induced violence.
The difficulty is what do you do with a group of people whose skillset seems primarily concerned with witchcraft and magic, without turning them to religion, in a society that is replacing cashiers and fast food workers with computers? Our best option is sanitation, and perhaps we turn into a society with really clean streets.
Most large companies get into this and never leave. I think the writing was on the wall with the alphabet thing. That was a sign that wall st. wanted more control (i.e. rape and pillage) of the investment.
The good news is that a replacement for google doesn't seem to be on the horizon, so there's that. But the bad news for engineers and developers who want to do their jobs is that they're going to be working on increasingly incremental and micromanaged products that will often not make sense or be informed by more compelling technology that hasn't been tried out in the industry by someone else.
I don't think it's worth a press release. Quit and find a new job that is more exciting, it happens to everyone sooner or later. Employment isn't for life for anyone.
Why would he rely exclusively on Twitter when there's an entire industry whose job it is to disseminate information?
We really need to consider IQ tests for government officials. I can think of a half dozen better ways of getting this information out immediately to keep people from shitting themselves and panicking, without putting down my sandwich.
Honestly twitter is the last the last tool on my mind since I still do not know anyone who has twitter.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep seeing this, online and in schools. The people involved are doing it wrong. You do not talk to "top execs" about employment skills, it's like talking to lottery winners about how they earned their winning ticket. The vast majority of people aren't going to be top execs and are not going to work for them (directly). Most technical people will not ever be even in middle management, and *we don't want to be*! The money is good, the job is enjoyable and often you can see your family. You don't take the lobotomy until you're 50, and even then only if you are comfortable and have no way out. Similarly automation and AI are not going to be replacing engineering (of any kind), nor serious computer programming tasks any time soon. By the time they do, we aren't going to care anymore. It's way easier to automate a CEO than it is to automate an engineer.
If you come interview with me, at one of the top tier employers in the country, and all you have are softskills...you won't make it through the phone screen. If you interview with my boss's boss's boss's boss (VP I think? Who knows), you won't get the job. That guy has forgot more about semiconductors than most people will ever learn, and he's making billion dollar decisions. He wants facts, he wants you to do the hard technical work for him, and he's going to grill the hell out of you to figure out if you did it, and he can agree with your conclusions. He is then going to soft-skill it in the rarified air of the other top execs from marketing and sales. His boss's boss is the CEO. In a 100k person company, the sphere where soft-skills matter is perhaps 100-300 deep. Those are your odds of success with "soft skills".
If you are perpetually holding out for a senior exec position, then yes, work your soft skills and spend a lot of time networking with rich people. If you want to entrepreneur, soft skill it away, but be able to speak fluent geek. If you actually want to be an engineer or developer, forget it. Get your geek on, learn everything you can. Yes, you will have to work with people, but I promise you, they care way more about your technical acumen and that they can trust you, than your soft skills (to the point they may not trust you if you whip out power point). That's my advice to everyone, including my own children, and advice I follow myself that has kept me employed 20 straight years without ever being laid off or fired, and got me every job I applied for. It's also common sense.
Nothing in life is easy, there are no shortcuts. Soft-skills are a dime a dozen. I don't know if this is an America thing where everyone thinks you can just schmooze your way around and be employable, or if it's just universal laziness, but use your brain and ignore obvious lies. Put in the heavy effort to learn your livelihood or you will absolutely lose it.
I would say, having experience in the matter, "bathroom activities".
We already did.
And we were really cruel about it.
It's all speculative until someone proves it in meat space, but seeing as the people involved are mathematicians they have little interesting in so doing.
Actually it says at the bottom of the article that this probably will never happen, in fact the particular style of black-hole that makes TFS claims true may not even exist. Further, there are a lot of questions I have about the term "observer" and "making your past not exist".
Because one way I interpret this is that you won't be destroyed, you will be unmade . Unless we ascribe some magic to my consciousness or even my macroscopic body that transcends physics, my "history" is nothing short of the history of every atom in my body, and how they all came to be at the same place at the same time. Unmaking that "history" seems like it would, most likely, dissolve me into a gas (with maybe a tiny, nearly imperceptable chance of me staying together unharmed). Similarly, a considerable amount of determinism is required to carry this meat-husk and it's thought processes forward from one moment to the next. From the sub-atomic level up there are various bonds and assemblages which require deterministic physics to stay together and keep me whole.
I'm pretty sure I won't be volunteering for this experiment.
At 40, like me, you would have learned to use a pencil first. We had Atari, we had Nintendo, we had C64, but they weren't quite as prevalent as smart-phones and iPads, which are what my kids grow up on.
My kids have definitely had issue with pencils and scissors in their early years. Of course, they got over it. These tests are designed to identify developmental disorders, and one failing one test in a series does not a developmental disorder make.
But, not shown are that kids are learning their letters and learning to read at a younger age. While my kids struggled a bit with using pencils, they both went in to pre-school, at 3 years of age knowing their alphabet and knowing how to read. My son in particular went in to kindergarten reading at a 7th grade level, he learned all of it from his iPad and learning to read to play games that he saw me playing.
So while kindergarten teachers may need to spend more time with pencils and scissors and developing hand strength, they will not need to spend as much time teaching the alphabet and reading, both of which are pretty much 90% of the kindergarten curriculum.
The actual history had a number of people also writing their own API because Khronos was too slow. ATI had mantle, NVidia had CUDA (which is perhaps similar but not exactly the same), and even MS was pushing some DirectX changes all with the same concept. It's not a surprise Apple made Metal at all, OpenGL was not keeping up with games or low power designs.
But they got a kick in the pants, and Vulkan got fast(er) tracked. Now it seems like those other APIs are redundant, I'm not sure yet if that's true, but I trust that everyone is going to push their proprietary stuff as long as they possibly can.
That's not exactly what they were designed to do. Most of the data structures and semantics between metal and vulkan are the same or very similar, no extra state will need to be kept, and none of the heavy weight render state changes that made OpenGL and earlier DirectX's a dog will be in the way.
Of course, Apple could kill this if they release metal bindings for C/C++, rather than locking it all in to Swift.
Or, we stop our worship of the false God Nature, and start realizing that our bodies are no longer adequate to the task at hand. Instead of punishing ourselves for living how we want to live, we start figuring out how to live how we want to live without the consequences (or alternately, change the instinct driving our motivation). Chemicals are one such help.
We don't go outside because obviously we don't want to. It's dirty, the weather is unpredictable, there are animals & insects carrying disease, too hot/too cold, too bright/to dim. Etc. Wherein we have a plethora of technologies to fix these problems in small space indoors. We may have created some problems in so doing, we need to determine what they are and design them out. If we need more UV exposure, we have product for that. If indoor air quality is low, we have product for that.
We eat poorly primarily due to what our body is telling us about food, and why it is telling us these things. The drive for more fat and more starches is not surprising if you consider that starvation was a major concern in our evolution, and managing it was key to survival. Fat and starch cravings push the unformed mind to make good survival choices. We're well past that now in most of the world, and what our bodies are demanding is no longer optimal for our health. We either need to suppress these instincts or deal with the symptoms. It seems like suppression is probably the way to go, the other side is mostly whack-a-mole.
Sleep is a tougher nut to crack. Losing 33% of our day (or more, depending on who you talk to) is a huge imposition. It seems unlikely that we're soon going to turn in to a society that can simply sleep when it wants, nor that we will actually want it if given the choice. We probably should be focusing on ways to get the most out of what little sleep we get. It seems we understand all of this very little right now. Other choices might be that since we are no longer held to a farmer's schedule, maybe work schedules based on rising with the sun are not necessary or ideal.
In the meantime, while we bake actual solutions up, things that treat the symptoms seem fine. Provide the side-effects are known and the users are free to do the cost benefit analysis. I personally stay away from anti-depressants, not because I do not need them (I am fairly certain I do), but the side effects are sketchy.
Not having to interact with anyone is worth some cash.
Of course he would say this, so much of Microsoft's R&D has been outsourced to Chinese and Indian interests of very dubious quality and oversight, the idea of Microsoft ever being able to build a secure enough operating system to make the Fed nervous is laughable. So instead, embrace the fetid wreck that is Windoze and look for an angle!
Only the richest man in the world need not fear a government's invasions, for that government works for him. But the idea of his MSFT shares eroding... that's scary.
You just described school, pre-internet. Possibly also, life.
I guess you want to drop an anvil on them, right?
Pinkie Pie> It's bear season.
Cheer Bear> It's pony season.
PP> BEAR SEASON!
CB> PONY SEASON!
PP> PONY SEASON!
CB> NO IT'S BEAR SEASON NOW SHOOT!
*BLAM!*
If it's the video's I see my 5yo stumble on, it's usually not the act of sharpening knives. Usually it's more of an itchy and scratchy type cartoon venue, where there's some implied intent or even cartoon violence.
I've seen quite a few of these sorts of things pop up, I'm not really sure what I think about them except that they're fairly dark. I usually grab the steering wheel at that point and go back to my little pony. But the trick is that if you let youtube do it's thing, it will inevitably lead back to the problematic content.
I guess I'm not horribly worried about her mental well being after seeing this stuff, it's fairly juvenile and I don't think she's that impressionable and she has a clear understanding of real/not real. I just wonder how youtube makes these connections.
The nature of the memo would be more obvious if instead of "Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign" they used "spies from the planet Gnarlax".
To which one would ask after every single talking point "But did this really happen? It doesn't sound credible". And the answer is of course "you can't prove it didn't".
Then after having read that, you can ignore it as obvious troll. I don't know what the DNC did or might do, and I certainly do not hold them in high regard, but I know the set of things they may have done, or they may do is much, much larger than the set of things they actually did. They actually suppressed Bernie Sanders, that happened and there's plenty of documentation. I have not seen any to support this memo though, this sounds like smoke and mirrors.
I think it's amazing that what people believe, and by people I mean the average joe who knows nothing about AI, is relevant. Anyone who has worked with actual AI, not the sci-fi stuff in the movies, would be less worried.
With any automation, jobs will be lost, that's literally the point of technology - reduce human effort. But new jobs will be created, and with any luck, some things that have been closed to humans becomes open. One thing that comes to mind is that presently we have more intellectuals and creative types than the world can support. Each one is capable of driving products and ideas that employ thousands of people, the bottleneck is on the labor. Reduce that labor bottleneck and the world opens to more creative impulse.
As long as i get to be the sex toy.
I think back then we had motivation to beat them. Today our independently wealthy citizens who own the republican party want to JOIN them, or at least set up a corrupt system like theirs.
It's easier to shake them down than to actually fix broken tax laws. This is the shake-down.
How is China a US enemy?
They are a "communist" dictatorship. The "communist" is very sketchy, but the dictatorship is real.
The fact that they are a good trade partner has helped us avoid a war, cold or otherwise. But they're definitely an enemy, and we should be very concerned about them. Their economy has gone through a rapid expansion but is cooling off, but their living conditions and government has not changed much. This is likely going to cause us problems down the road as they struggle to keep the peace and blame their problems on the US.
At least when I worked for them, they did not do much work in China, and what work was done required some pretty significant security. They were definitely not equal partners. Meanwhile the "labor" was on US soil or in Malaysia.
Telling Lenovo about a security hole isn't entirely surprising, they are a good high-volume consumer of Intel products. I would probably notify Lenovo, HP, Dell at the same time. Alibaba is a little more confusing, combined with the knowledge that telling a Chinese corporation anything is essentially the same as telling the Chinese government. Whereas telling a US corporation anything is almost guaranteed secrecy from anyone for liability reasons.
Regardless the "globalism" movement's fatal flaw is that there continue to be over a hundred independent countries who do not get along, and we should probably have laws in our own country regulating and prohibiting certain things.
No not really, I still code in C. I don't see it going away any time soon. I'm not releasing UI layer applications, and not terribly concerned with first to market.
It frustrates me that C#/Swift/etc. are being pushed so hard at the application layer and forcing C coders to do a lot of undocumented and probably shadier stuff than they were doing before, just to use OS API calls to functions that we all know were coded in C to begin with.
Code like a beast Bro! Bro that code into shape! Be awesome! Beer at noon. Pointers? What are you a nerd? Memory management? That's like for the CPU to deal with, bro, be bro! Efficient code? BRO! They keep making faster CPUs! Mutilate that code!
Bro, it's got what your body craves.
There is no question in my mind, that if we could somehow undo the glut of psychology and sociology majors that plague society, that reports on our unhappiness would decrease tenfold. I predict similar reductions in rates of autism, AD(H)D in children, SAD, PTSD and video game induced violence.
The difficulty is what do you do with a group of people whose skillset seems primarily concerned with witchcraft and magic, without turning them to religion, in a society that is replacing cashiers and fast food workers with computers? Our best option is sanitation, and perhaps we turn into a society with really clean streets.
Most large companies get into this and never leave. I think the writing was on the wall with the alphabet thing. That was a sign that wall st. wanted more control (i.e. rape and pillage) of the investment.
The good news is that a replacement for google doesn't seem to be on the horizon, so there's that. But the bad news for engineers and developers who want to do their jobs is that they're going to be working on increasingly incremental and micromanaged products that will often not make sense or be informed by more compelling technology that hasn't been tried out in the industry by someone else.
I don't think it's worth a press release. Quit and find a new job that is more exciting, it happens to everyone sooner or later. Employment isn't for life for anyone.
Why would he rely exclusively on Twitter when there's an entire industry whose job it is to disseminate information?
We really need to consider IQ tests for government officials. I can think of a half dozen better ways of getting this information out immediately to keep people from shitting themselves and panicking, without putting down my sandwich.
Honestly twitter is the last the last tool on my mind since I still do not know anyone who has twitter.