This is the beginning of Lem's short story "Automatthew's Friend," 1977, translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel.
A certain robot, planning to go on a long and dangerous voyage, heard of a most useful device which its inventor called an electric friend. He would feel better, he thought, if he had a companion, even a companion that was only a machine, so he went to the inventor and asked to be shown an artificial friend.
"Sure," replied the inventor. (As you know, in fairy tales no one says "sir" or "ma'am" to anyone else, not even to dragons, it's only with the kinds that you have to stand on ceremony.) With this he pulled from his pocket a handful of metal granules, that looked like fine shot.
"What is what?" said the robot in surprise.
"Tell me your name, for I forgot to ask it in the proper place of this fairy tale," said the inventor.
"My name is Automatthew."
"That's too long for me, I'll call you Autom."
"Autom's from Automaton, but have it your way," replied the other.
"Well then, Autommy my lad, you have here before you a batch of electrofriends. You ought to know that by vocation and specialization I am a miniaturizer. Which means I make large and heavy mechanisms small and portable. Each one of these granules is a concenntrate of electrical thought, highly versatile and intelligent. I won't say a genius, for that would be an exaggeration if not false advertising. True, my intention is precisely to create electrical geniuses and I shall not rest until I have made them so very tiny that it will be possible to carry thousands of them around in your vest pocket; the day I can pour them into sacks and sell them by weight, like said, I will have achieved my most cherished goal. But enough now of my plans for the future..."
I got a copy of Steer Madness as a gift a while back. It's pretty good. It's organized around missions and plays a lot like GTA, except it eases you into the world of protest against corporate interests. It really sucks you in. You start by putting up harmless stickers around town, and before you know it you're... well, you'll have to see for yourself. After playing for a while I realized that, while The Powers That Be make a big fuss about how awful GTA is, if they haven't seen this game, they really have no idea how subversive and insidious a game really can be. I recommend it for that reason alone.
I have a better chance winning the charity lottery for my local hospital than having my story posted here.
Unlikely. We accepted about 12% of the story submissions we got in 2005. In fact your own account shows we've accepted 2 out of the 10 submissions you've sent in, so you're almost twice as successful (or "accurate" or "in touch with Slashdot" or whatever) as the average Slashdot submitter.
The Beatles-Beatles person everyone is so concerned about, by the way, has had only 4.2% accepted. So B-B is substantially less successful than average. It's just that he/she does not give up. The B-B-specific issues aside -- as long as they're genuine efforts, we do not at all mind having to sort through 23 submissions that we don't think are right for Slashdot, to get to the 24th that we think merits posting. So please, keep sending in submissions.
It doesn't account for year-begin skew, either. The year's most successful submitter, 'prostoalex', got 52 (!) stories accepted in January and February and later tapered off (after August, just 10). There was a big fuss over that at the time, too, and probably today nobody remembers who prostoalex was.
I'm not sure that affects my main point, which is that the tail is very long, the head is very short, submitters' reputations have nowhere to go but down, and that is an unworkable reputation system since disreputable submitters will return to anonymity and start over.
This is correct. ScuttleMonkey takes a lot of night shifts (US Eastern time). Those happen to be the slowest period for submissions appearing in our bin. And that's when B-B submits stories. So at exactly the time we need submissions most, B-B is there. Kinda clever actually.
Around 92% of the B-B submissions were sent in between 5 PM and 1 AM. And around 80% of the time ScuttleMonkey has posted a B-B story, it went live between 5 PM and 4 AM.
I didn't actually know this until your comment prompted me to check the DB, but that's pretty clearly what's going on.
I think I understand where you're coming from - you don't want to clutter up the board with naval gazing; you don't want Slashdot to be about Slashdot. The problem is, by not addressing any of this, there's no theory except what the crackpots are able to come up with.
Correct; and, we do occasionally try to defuse the crackpots, it just doesn't usually work and it takes a lot of time. This story is one example!
As for users who spam for articles and drive up their linked-to stats, I would suggest you approach the issue as one about the integrity of your board. Are these people contributing to Slashdot, or are they simply attempting to use it for their own website?
Fallacy of the excluded middle. They are both making Slashdot better, and hyping their own site! The question is what we are to do when that happens. Ultimately the question here is: should we intentionally make Slashdot worse, because a lot of our readers think that Google's PageRank algorithm is broken?
The Beatles-Beatles user has sent us 4.8 submissions per day on average, since September or so. Would it really solve the problem if we forced him/her to send us only the 3.0 best submissions each day?
And, there's nothing stopping this person from creating as many user accounts as they want.
The problem with doing this for submitters is that there are too many of them. Think of the "long tail" graph. For the year 2005 we have 9 submitters who got a story accepted more than 3 times a month. After those 9 we have 4405 more submitters making up the "tail." And of those, 3558 (86%) only got 1 story accepted the entire year.
The only part of that graph that it would be useful to track a submitter's "reputation" is for those top 9 or so, the top 0.22%. And my guess is that the only tags readers would apply to them are negative: "I don't like this guy." But we already know they are decent at submitting stories to Slashdot, because they have done it successfully 3 times a month. So what does this tell us except that we (the editors) think they write interesting stuff, but some of the readers don't like them? And we know that already.
Anyway, those readers who dislike Beatles-Beatles don't really dislike the user account submitting the stories, you dislike the URL he/she links to. So what's to stop him/her from creating a new user account and linking to the same URL with slightly different text? Or a slightly different URL?
Moderation works for users because the bulk of it is positive: our posters work hard to build up a good rep as someone who has something to say, with the reward being that they get to speak a little "louder." As far as I can tell what you propose for submitters would work the other direction. I'm not saying a successful reputation system for this can't possibly be built. I just don't think this is the right direction to go in to build it. And it would be a lot of work and I question whether it would ultimately be worth it.
(BTW: Beatles-Beatles is not in that top 9, he/she had fewer than 2 stories a month accepted for 2005.)
Most of the replies to my comment are saying largely the same thing. I'm not sure which to reply to so I'll reply here. I'm probably not going to continue the conversation after this unless someone brings up a really good point, and this is all offtopic anyway, but... here's my commentary for what it's worth...
I guess if somebody wants to not believe me, that's fine. Everybody has the right to an opinion. But I'm trying to share the facts. Slashdot doesn't take money for posting stories to our front page, and if we did, we would make it obvious that we had. I work with these guys and I know.
Heck, if Slashdot ever does get to the point where we think it's OK to take money for secretly biasing editorial content, I'll quit. One of the things I like about working for Slashdot is the editorial integrity. That hasn't changed in the six years I've been here. I find the scenario of Slashdot's front page going pay-for-coverage to be highly implausible, but if it does, I have better things to do. And I doubt I'm the only one here who feels that way.
Plus, if we ever got to the point where we sold that integrity to some random guy who just wants us to link to his George Harrison site... uh, at that point we are obviously so hard up for cash that I probably wouldn't have a job for long anyway;)
As for rel=nofollow, yes, we do consider ways to make the submission process less gameable, like we constantly do for almost every part of the site. The policy has been for years that your reward for telling us about a story worth posting is 3 karma and a link to your homepage, and we don't want to change that without careful consideration.
Oh, and a number of people have pointed out (and I haven't checked this) that ScuttleMonkey has posted most of the Beatles-Beatles stories. Do y'all realize that this works against your theory? If we were getting paid wouldn't every editor be doing it? Just asking:)
Of course nobody's paying anybody. Seriously, what would make you think that? If there were paid stories, don't you think we would make that blatantly obvious? Since it was created, Slashdot has been one of the best sites on the internet as far as keeping up the wall between advertising and content.
Apparently this person submits a lot of stories that our editors think our readers want to read. That's all there is to it. Our editors review Beatles-Beatles submissions with the same skepticism (probably more) as any other.
I normally don't bother responding to paranoid threads like this because there is so much paranoia and no way for us to respond to it all. But lately the comment volume devoted to silly speculation is just out of control. I kind of doubt this response will help stem the tide but it's worth a shot...
Because continuing InnoDB development is critical to upcoming versions of MySQL, and development of a database engine requires more than simply GPL'd code. In the past, Heikki Tuuri's company Innobase has been eager to develop InnoDB specifically for MySQL's needs, because MySQL was in a sense the only "platform" it ran on. But that's not likely to be true in the near future, or at the very least, not necessarily true.
I do know there are at least several developers at MySQL AB who are intimately familiar with the InnoDB code, but I don't know if there are enough to fork the code and continue its development in the same vein as before. Frankly I will be surprised if this doesn't slow down 5.x development at least a little, while MySQL AB shuffles people around to get them up to speed.
...the America I grew up in -- the America of the 1950's and 1960's -- was a middle-class society, both in reality and in feel. The vast income and wealth inequalities of the Gilded Age had disappeared.... But that was long ago. The middle-class America of my youth was another country. We are now living in a new Gilded Age, as extravagant as the original.
vast quantitative increase in performance would allow a atomic-level simulation of brain
Giving me pen and lined paper would "allow" me to write a symphony.
Actually, even that is too generous of an analogy. "Write a sympony" is incredibly well-defined compared to the process of creating a human-like intelligence. After decades of research we really have no idea how to go about starting that task. Yet Kurzweil and others assume that just because computers get a billion times faster, the task will be accomplished. Silly.
Ray Kurzweil is dead wrong. I respect his work but his impossibly optimistic projections are misleading. Here's one numerical example. Kurzweil has
claimed
"human life expectancy" was increasing by "150 days, every year," and that shortly, increases in life expectancy would be beating Nature in the footrace:
with the revolutions coming in genomics, perdiomics, therapeutic cloning, rational drug design, and the other biotechnology revolutions, within 10 years we'll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy. So, if you can hang in there for another 10 years, (don't spend all of your time in the French Quarter!), this will be the increase in human life expectancy. We'll get ahead of the power curve and be adding more than a year every year, within a decade.
The accompanying graph is staggering but only shows five points of data. Its top point shows a life expectancy of 77 years in 1999 or so, which of course is not human life expectancy. Human life expectancy is about 65, ranging from about 43 in poor countries to 79 in the richest country. Kurzweil's statement only applies to the wealthy; in much of Africa, life expectancy fell dramatically during the 1990s.
And since he's clearly talking about life extension, the reader should be aware that there is no exponential curve at the top of the lifespan. His numbers gained mostly from improvements in child nutrition and antibiotics, and there aren't any continued improvements to be made in those (quite the opposite, actually). If we look at the average continued life expectancy for Americans aged 75, between 1980 and 1985 they gained 0.2 years; 1985-1990, 0.3 years; 1990-1995, 0.1 years; 1995-2000, 0.4 years; 1997-2002, 0.3 years. This is good. But it's not exponential lengthening of lifespan.
Oh, and the "decade" within which he promised we'd be ahead of the curve is now half over. The above quote is from 2000.
The main logical error Kurzweil makes is simply that he thinks computers will get smarter because they get faster. Readers who believe the one has anything to do with the other need to go back to Dreyfus' 1972 classic What Computers Can't Do. From there, start reading over the painful history of what is now called "strong A.I.", and what used to be just called "A.I.", to see how necessarily limited our efforts have become. Kurzweil elides over this distinction in the worst way. He starts by saying that computers are now as smart as an insect -- which is unrefutable because nobody can quantify what that means -- and proceeds to predicting that they will be as smart as people once they get n times faster. No, I'm sorry, all that means is that they will be as smart as n insects. Whatever the hell that means.
Mostly I wouldn't care. Fantasy is fun. Except that Pollyannaish predictions of paradise-yet-to-come persuade people that the problems we create for ourselves are irrelevant. If you think the Rapture or the Singularity is going to make all currently conceivable problems laughable, little things like massive extinction and global warming turn into somebody else's problem. They're not -- and our grandchildren, with their very fast and non-sentient computers, and their non-300-year lifespans, are going to be kind of ticked that you and I spoiled the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called humor...
This is the beginning of Lem's short story "Automatthew's Friend," 1977, translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel.
Taking Liberties
Your internet connection has been traced. Agents will be arriving at your door shortly. Please surrender quietly.
Today is, not coincidentally, Percival Lowell's 151st birthday.
I got a copy of Steer Madness as a gift a while back. It's pretty good. It's organized around missions and plays a lot like GTA, except it eases you into the world of protest against corporate interests. It really sucks you in. You start by putting up harmless stickers around town, and before you know it you're ... well, you'll have to see for yourself. After playing for a while I realized that, while The Powers That Be make a big fuss about how awful GTA is, if they haven't seen this game, they really have no idea how subversive and insidious a game really can be. I recommend it for that reason alone.
No, the "25 to Life" story was a sectional story. There was a different story in the future. I think. At least that's how it was supposed to work.
You misspelled "reeks."
You failed to capitalize "Perhaps," and the noun "read-through" is hyphenated.
Unlikely. We accepted about 12% of the story submissions we got in 2005. In fact your own account shows we've accepted 2 out of the 10 submissions you've sent in, so you're almost twice as successful (or "accurate" or "in touch with Slashdot" or whatever) as the average Slashdot submitter.
The Beatles-Beatles person everyone is so concerned about, by the way, has had only 4.2% accepted. So B-B is substantially less successful than average. It's just that he/she does not give up. The B-B-specific issues aside -- as long as they're genuine efforts, we do not at all mind having to sort through 23 submissions that we don't think are right for Slashdot, to get to the 24th that we think merits posting. So please, keep sending in submissions.
It's open source -- go for it :)
It doesn't account for year-begin skew, either. The year's most successful submitter, 'prostoalex', got 52 (!) stories accepted in January and February and later tapered off (after August, just 10). There was a big fuss over that at the time, too, and probably today nobody remembers who prostoalex was.
I'm not sure that affects my main point, which is that the tail is very long, the head is very short, submitters' reputations have nowhere to go but down, and that is an unworkable reputation system since disreputable submitters will return to anonymity and start over.
This is correct. ScuttleMonkey takes a lot of night shifts (US Eastern time). Those happen to be the slowest period for submissions appearing in our bin. And that's when B-B submits stories. So at exactly the time we need submissions most, B-B is there. Kinda clever actually.
Around 92% of the B-B submissions were sent in between 5 PM and 1 AM. And around 80% of the time ScuttleMonkey has posted a B-B story, it went live between 5 PM and 4 AM.
I didn't actually know this until your comment prompted me to check the DB, but that's pretty clearly what's going on.
Correct; and, we do occasionally try to defuse the crackpots, it just doesn't usually work and it takes a lot of time. This story is one example!
Fallacy of the excluded middle. They are both making Slashdot better, and hyping their own site! The question is what we are to do when that happens. Ultimately the question here is: should we intentionally make Slashdot worse, because a lot of our readers think that Google's PageRank algorithm is broken?
Two thoughts.
The Beatles-Beatles user has sent us 4.8 submissions per day on average, since September or so. Would it really solve the problem if we forced him/her to send us only the 3.0 best submissions each day?
And, there's nothing stopping this person from creating as many user accounts as they want.
The problem with doing this for submitters is that there are too many of them. Think of the "long tail" graph. For the year 2005 we have 9 submitters who got a story accepted more than 3 times a month. After those 9 we have 4405 more submitters making up the "tail." And of those, 3558 (86%) only got 1 story accepted the entire year.
The only part of that graph that it would be useful to track a submitter's "reputation" is for those top 9 or so, the top 0.22%. And my guess is that the only tags readers would apply to them are negative: "I don't like this guy." But we already know they are decent at submitting stories to Slashdot, because they have done it successfully 3 times a month. So what does this tell us except that we (the editors) think they write interesting stuff, but some of the readers don't like them? And we know that already.
Anyway, those readers who dislike Beatles-Beatles don't really dislike the user account submitting the stories, you dislike the URL he/she links to. So what's to stop him/her from creating a new user account and linking to the same URL with slightly different text? Or a slightly different URL?
Moderation works for users because the bulk of it is positive: our posters work hard to build up a good rep as someone who has something to say, with the reward being that they get to speak a little "louder." As far as I can tell what you propose for submitters would work the other direction. I'm not saying a successful reputation system for this can't possibly be built. I just don't think this is the right direction to go in to build it. And it would be a lot of work and I question whether it would ultimately be worth it.
(BTW: Beatles-Beatles is not in that top 9, he/she had fewer than 2 stories a month accepted for 2005.)
Someday :)
The idea reminds me of The Straight Story, which was a really charming, honest, pensive film.
At some point the question becomes: which of Bush's TLAs is not illegally spying on us?
I guess if somebody wants to not believe me, that's fine. Everybody has the right to an opinion. But I'm trying to share the facts. Slashdot doesn't take money for posting stories to our front page, and if we did, we would make it obvious that we had. I work with these guys and I know.
Heck, if Slashdot ever does get to the point where we think it's OK to take money for secretly biasing editorial content, I'll quit. One of the things I like about working for Slashdot is the editorial integrity. That hasn't changed in the six years I've been here. I find the scenario of Slashdot's front page going pay-for-coverage to be highly implausible, but if it does, I have better things to do. And I doubt I'm the only one here who feels that way.
Plus, if we ever got to the point where we sold that integrity to some random guy who just wants us to link to his George Harrison site... uh, at that point we are obviously so hard up for cash that I probably wouldn't have a job for long anyway ;)
As for rel=nofollow, yes, we do consider ways to make the submission process less gameable, like we constantly do for almost every part of the site. The policy has been for years that your reward for telling us about a story worth posting is 3 karma and a link to your homepage, and we don't want to change that without careful consideration.
Oh, and a number of people have pointed out (and I haven't checked this) that ScuttleMonkey has posted most of the Beatles-Beatles stories. Do y'all realize that this works against your theory? If we were getting paid wouldn't every editor be doing it? Just asking :)
Of course nobody's paying anybody. Seriously, what would make you think that? If there were paid stories, don't you think we would make that blatantly obvious? Since it was created, Slashdot has been one of the best sites on the internet as far as keeping up the wall between advertising and content.
Apparently this person submits a lot of stories that our editors think our readers want to read. That's all there is to it. Our editors review Beatles-Beatles submissions with the same skepticism (probably more) as any other.
I normally don't bother responding to paranoid threads like this because there is so much paranoia and no way for us to respond to it all. But lately the comment volume devoted to silly speculation is just out of control. I kind of doubt this response will help stem the tide but it's worth a shot...
I do know there are at least several developers at MySQL AB who are intimately familiar with the InnoDB code, but I don't know if there are enough to fork the code and continue its development in the same vein as before. Frankly I will be surprised if this doesn't slow down 5.x development at least a little, while MySQL AB shuffles people around to get them up to speed.
Giving me pen and lined paper would "allow" me to write a symphony.
Actually, even that is too generous of an analogy. "Write a sympony" is incredibly well-defined compared to the process of creating a human-like intelligence. After decades of research we really have no idea how to go about starting that task. Yet Kurzweil and others assume that just because computers get a billion times faster, the task will be accomplished. Silly.
The accompanying graph is staggering but only shows five points of data. Its top point shows a life expectancy of 77 years in 1999 or so, which of course is not human life expectancy. Human life expectancy is about 65, ranging from about 43 in poor countries to 79 in the richest country. Kurzweil's statement only applies to the wealthy; in much of Africa, life expectancy fell dramatically during the 1990s.
And since he's clearly talking about life extension, the reader should be aware that there is no exponential curve at the top of the lifespan. His numbers gained mostly from improvements in child nutrition and antibiotics, and there aren't any continued improvements to be made in those (quite the opposite, actually). If we look at the average continued life expectancy for Americans aged 75, between 1980 and 1985 they gained 0.2 years; 1985-1990, 0.3 years; 1990-1995, 0.1 years; 1995-2000, 0.4 years; 1997-2002, 0.3 years. This is good. But it's not exponential lengthening of lifespan.
Oh, and the "decade" within which he promised we'd be ahead of the curve is now half over. The above quote is from 2000.
The main logical error Kurzweil makes is simply that he thinks computers will get smarter because they get faster. Readers who believe the one has anything to do with the other need to go back to Dreyfus' 1972 classic What Computers Can't Do. From there, start reading over the painful history of what is now called "strong A.I.", and what used to be just called "A.I.", to see how necessarily limited our efforts have become. Kurzweil elides over this distinction in the worst way. He starts by saying that computers are now as smart as an insect -- which is unrefutable because nobody can quantify what that means -- and proceeds to predicting that they will be as smart as people once they get n times faster. No, I'm sorry, all that means is that they will be as smart as n insects. Whatever the hell that means.
Mostly I wouldn't care. Fantasy is fun. Except that Pollyannaish predictions of paradise-yet-to-come persuade people that the problems we create for ourselves are irrelevant. If you think the Rapture or the Singularity is going to make all currently conceivable problems laughable, little things like massive extinction and global warming turn into somebody else's problem. They're not -- and our grandchildren, with their very fast and non-sentient computers, and their non-300-year lifespans, are going to be kind of ticked that you and I spoiled the planet.