I had to work remotely on some Macs on my last job, and only had a terminal interface via SSH. nano was my editor of choice. It was there, and reasonably simple to use for what I needed. So, yeah, I agree its ease-of-use is a bonus. I'll typically just fire up nano for editing small text or config files if I've already got a terminal open, but for actual programming work, I tend to use an IDE.
I'm not sure I understand the logic of people who argue about "efficiency" though, at least when it comes to programming. In my experience, writing good code isn't about furiously typing as fast as you can, so I've never felt motivated to learn a bunch of keyboard-only shortcuts.
That would be a prime (forgive the pun) example of "cutting off your nose to spite your face." This is bad for both companies. Google wants people to be able to trust their ads' safety, and Amazon doesn't want customers to fear clicking on links to their site.
No need to invent conspiracy theories when a mundane explanation makes far more sense.
Yep, plain-text passwords... damn, the level of incompetence that could lead someone to believing this is acceptable these days must be really something. This is not the year 2000 (the probable age of this system), where you might expect a few less-than-competent people haven't gotten the word on best industry practices. This isn't even storing password hashes with outdated crypto and without salt. If the report as implied is accurate, this is pants-on-head level stupidity. You really can't explain your way out of it.
Years ago I tried this out of curiosity. It would typically only take a single round trip to start being funny. After several round trips, you could barely tell what the original topic was. It's like a computerized version of the game "telephone."
It's pretty obvious to an English native speaker when a translation is gibberish. A native English-only speaker can't really affirm accuracy, as you stated, but could certainly tell when something is blatantly wrong. They could also at least judge the quality of the final translation's English.
Generally speaking, most translation programs do really horribly at translating idioms, or context-sensitive but otherwise ambiguous phrases. I'd think this is a perfect application for deep learning algorithms to thrive at. Also, kudos for the article summary and headlines for not breathlessly calling this "AI", but pointing out that the techniques are used in training AI systems.
So, basically, if you try to take advantage of the system, they'll call you on it. Not seeing the problem here. Sounds like someone trying to manufacture outrage as though the stores are trying to screw you over, but it sounds like they're just trying to protect themselves against a somewhat common type of fraud.
Or am I wrong here? If so, maybe someone can explain. I rarely shop retail these days, and I rarely return items.
I'd first ask them what sort of programming career they'd be interested in, and then tailor my recommendations from there. There are many industries which are heavily skewed towards particular languages. Which do you think would be the most important language in the following fields?
* Videogame programming * Web programming * Enterprise application programming * Mobile development * Scientific and engineering programming
The languages a programmer would want to learn is likely different for each one of these career paths. In the case of my particular career (videogames), you'd be offering terrible advice. C++ completely dominates AAA game development, followed by C#, and a smattering of also-rans.
Programming languages don't exist in a vacuum. They all have strengths and weaknesses, and trying to distill them into a generic popularity contest is a mistake, at least when it comes to career choices.
My 2005 car (4 door sedan) gets about that on average. It's measured at 22 city and 33 highway, if I remember correctly. I tend to average around 25 MPG since the bulk of my driving is on city streets.
It's silly to call someone a liar just because you happen to have a different experience than them.
I think most people understand that their job probably requires some degree of human-level intelligence. As such, they figure that their own job is safe until technology reaches that point AND costs less than their salary to rent such an AI. The only ones who really have to worry are those who know that a reasonably sophisticated algorithm could replace them.
But those same people who know their own job requirements probably have no idea what many other types of jobs entail, and I suspect they're likely to over-simplify them. As such, they're "good candidates for AI to replace."
At least, that's my hypothesis for the patterns of these answers.
I don't think this is actually a problem with a code-signing certificate. Or at least, I can't figure out how they could screw that up. There's nothing in your own code which checks for that. It's a function of the OS.
This sounds like something a bit different, like their own code is checking for a cert. But for what possible reason, I can't imagine. Maybe some sort of DRM or authentication system?
I don't have this hardware, but I'm sort of interested to hear what actually happened here. We might never really know the details, though.
This is what happens when a company believes that "move fast and break things" is a reasonable development model. Unsurprisingly, things tend to break fairly often.
Yeah... it's sort of hard to believe the bumbling that would allow a certificate to expire before realizing that it would shut down every single one of their users. I mean, I understand bugs slip through, but this is sort of astoundingly bad.
More to the point, as you indicated, what the hell is an expiring certificate doing in their software anyhow? A normal code-signing certificate expires after a time, but the software that was signed with it does NOT expire. We now know that their device-critical software has a time bomb in it that only they can periodically reset, and they were already slipshod enough to miss the deadline once.
The FBI should come back to us when the government's three-letter agencies actually manage to keep a secret for more than a few years. Do they really think the public will trust them to keep these figurative "keys to the kingdom" secured, when we've seen time after time after time they can't keep their own secrets from leaking?
Technically speaking, it's pretty straightforward to design strong encryption that can be unlocked with multiple keys. The "magical pony" part is the human factor, which will inevitably leak those master keys and compromise hundreds of millions of devices in a single stroke. It's inevitable because of how insanely valuable those keys would be.
And very few outside of California call it that either, at least that I've heard. The most oft-heard substitute is typically "fucking California", accompanied by a head shake. See: Die Hard.
I think this is really nothing more than self-driving cars being in higher proportional density in California + San Francisco having a higher proportion of high-strung or near-insane people who would go up and physically assault driverless cars. In one case, as it was a taxi driver, you could perhaps attribute the actions to a man who feared his future livelihood was being threatened. Or maybe he was super impatient, since time is literally money for them. The other incident sounded like an insane person.
In a country with a few hundred million folks living together, you're going to have occurrences like this. This is only news because its happening with self-driving cars. Essentially, you can write new headlines:"______ occurs with self-driving cars" when it occurs for the first time.
In brilliant marketing fashion, the "S" stands for nothing at all, according to Microsoft. All it signifies is that the version of Windows you're using can only run Universal Windows Platform apps, making it largely useless for anyone who wants to use their computer for much more than e-mail and web surfing. Oh, and no web surfing with any browser except Edge. Whee.
Keep in mind that Uber is just a software and services company - there are many other examples of doing far more for far less. For comparison (since I'm in the videogame industry), they could have easily created 20-40 AAA MMOs with that budget (each written from the ground up), which are typically among the most expensive and complex games to make. It seems like an insane amount of money for some relatively straightforward software services to me, even allowing for their internal back-end services we can't see, and R&D projects.
I found Google's motivations here to be a bit interesting. They apparently wanted to use Clang across all their platforms.
I'm writing a cross-platform PC game using my own game engine. It runs natively on Windows desktop, UWP, Mac, and Linux. About 95% of it is written in portable ANSI C++, and the other 5% interfacing with native APIs. I actually use three different compilers, one for each OS, and I consider this a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. Compiling the same code against three compilers gives me a lot of confidence that when I hit a bug, it's because of my code, not some weird compiler-specific thing. The different compilers also have very minor differences in conformance to the standard, so again, I like having three different compilers check my code for conformance and correctness.
I understand that it may be nice to be able to use the exact same tools across platforms, but there are also some benefits to avoiding homogeneity.
Note: as to your question:
We conducted extensive A/B testing of performance. Performance telemetry numbers are about the same for MSVC-built and clang-built Chrome – some metrics get better, some get worse, but all of them are within 5% of each other. The official MSVC builds used LTCG and PGO, while the Clang builds currently use neither of these. This is potential for improvement that we look forward to exploring. The PGO builds took a very long time to build due to the need for collecting profiles and then building again, and as a result, the configuration was not enabled on our performance-measurement buildbots. Now that we use Clang, the perf bots again track the configuration that we ship.
None of those states' politicians bleating about supporting "net neutrality" actually know what the heck it is, except for the fact that Obama set up some regulations and the Trump administrations tore them down. This shows you can be right, but for all the wrong reasons. And this proposed legislation is the result.
Hilarious that they're talking about "patently offensive material." These days, I find many patents to be much more offensive than the vast majority of online pornography.
Fortunately, this is only proposed legislation. I doubt it really has a chance of passing. This seems more like a "look, we're going something about online porn" virtue signal to their uptight constituents who think porn is going to cause society's downfall.
It really depends on whether you're the type who masturbates to your car's silky smooth finish, or treats it like a machine to get from point a to b.
My 13 year old car has gone through automated car washes its entire life, and still looks nice and shiny. Sorry, I've got far more interesting things to do with my time than hand-washing my transportation to avoid putting a few abrasions in its clear-coat finish.
Funny, I thought the solution would be to engineer the sensors so they're not so damned fragile that I can't take them through the car wash. I also refuse to buy dishes or cookware that I can't throw in the dishwasher.
Are you asking "why can I compile and run locally-built apps?"
Macs (and I think Windows) set a special attribute on files that have been downloaded from potentially untrustworthy sources, like downloading from the internet. It's not completely correct to say that Macs will only run signed apps by default. Rather, by default, they only run apps which are downloaded from an untrusted source if they are signed with a valid code certificate. Needless to say, a locally compiled application doesn't have this attribute set.
To demonstrate this in practice, try creating a local web server. Something like (if I recall correctly):
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
Open a browser to "localhost:8000"
Then, "download" your executable and save it. Try to execute it, and you'll see your macOS protest, because that "unsafe" attribute has been set via the process of downloading and saving the executable via the browser. Once run, that attribute is cleared, and the program is considered safe for execution without further checks.
Obligatory XKCD. I think Steve Gibson called this "Internet background radiation," which always seemed like a fairly good way to describe the constant noise of scanners and probes that anyone can see attacking *every* system on the net, non-stop.
I'm pretty sure we saw a generation of youngsters popping pills, listening to hypnotic & rhythmic music, sequestering themselves in dark places adorned with with bright neon colors, all moving and bumping around together.
Can't explain the lack of more giant apes, though.
You're right of course. I certainly don't think they can actually STOP people from coding whatever they want. But we've already demonstrated what the implications of a "we must monitor all our citizens - for their own safety, of course" mentality lead to. And it's not even nearly as bad as it COULD get.
I have no doubt that someday true AI will "pop up", but don't underestimate how far we have to go still until we can replicate the computational requirements in a meaningful way. It's really all about that computational threshold - as you say, it's not magic, it's just capacity. A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on this article shows something like 100 million modern processors (adjusted for modern speed increases) are currently required to simulate the human brain in real time. That can be significantly reduced with specially designed hardware, but it shows that we've got a ways to go before we reach that threshold in any practical manner.
Perhaps I just prefer to save my worry for when the situation looks remotely feasible. And even then, I don't think having some true AI is going to be nearly as disastrous or disruptive as people think it will be, because even when AI becomes somewhat feasible by a mega-corp and it's resources, it's going to take many decades more before computational power makes it practical for use on small scales, which is when it might start automating specific types of jobs that require true, flexible intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
I had to work remotely on some Macs on my last job, and only had a terminal interface via SSH. nano was my editor of choice. It was there, and reasonably simple to use for what I needed. So, yeah, I agree its ease-of-use is a bonus. I'll typically just fire up nano for editing small text or config files if I've already got a terminal open, but for actual programming work, I tend to use an IDE.
I'm not sure I understand the logic of people who argue about "efficiency" though, at least when it comes to programming. In my experience, writing good code isn't about furiously typing as fast as you can, so I've never felt motivated to learn a bunch of keyboard-only shortcuts.
That would be a prime (forgive the pun) example of "cutting off your nose to spite your face." This is bad for both companies. Google wants people to be able to trust their ads' safety, and Amazon doesn't want customers to fear clicking on links to their site.
No need to invent conspiracy theories when a mundane explanation makes far more sense.
Yep, plain-text passwords... damn, the level of incompetence that could lead someone to believing this is acceptable these days must be really something. This is not the year 2000 (the probable age of this system), where you might expect a few less-than-competent people haven't gotten the word on best industry practices. This isn't even storing password hashes with outdated crypto and without salt. If the report as implied is accurate, this is pants-on-head level stupidity. You really can't explain your way out of it.
Years ago I tried this out of curiosity. It would typically only take a single round trip to start being funny. After several round trips, you could barely tell what the original topic was. It's like a computerized version of the game "telephone."
It's pretty obvious to an English native speaker when a translation is gibberish. A native English-only speaker can't really affirm accuracy, as you stated, but could certainly tell when something is blatantly wrong. They could also at least judge the quality of the final translation's English.
Generally speaking, most translation programs do really horribly at translating idioms, or context-sensitive but otherwise ambiguous phrases. I'd think this is a perfect application for deep learning algorithms to thrive at. Also, kudos for the article summary and headlines for not breathlessly calling this "AI", but pointing out that the techniques are used in training AI systems.
I like pi.
So, basically, if you try to take advantage of the system, they'll call you on it. Not seeing the problem here. Sounds like someone trying to manufacture outrage as though the stores are trying to screw you over, but it sounds like they're just trying to protect themselves against a somewhat common type of fraud.
Or am I wrong here? If so, maybe someone can explain. I rarely shop retail these days, and I rarely return items.
I'd first ask them what sort of programming career they'd be interested in, and then tailor my recommendations from there. There are many industries which are heavily skewed towards particular languages. Which do you think would be the most important language in the following fields?
* Videogame programming
* Web programming
* Enterprise application programming
* Mobile development
* Scientific and engineering programming
The languages a programmer would want to learn is likely different for each one of these career paths. In the case of my particular career (videogames), you'd be offering terrible advice. C++ completely dominates AAA game development, followed by C#, and a smattering of also-rans.
Programming languages don't exist in a vacuum. They all have strengths and weaknesses, and trying to distill them into a generic popularity contest is a mistake, at least when it comes to career choices.
My 2005 car (4 door sedan) gets about that on average. It's measured at 22 city and 33 highway, if I remember correctly. I tend to average around 25 MPG since the bulk of my driving is on city streets.
It's silly to call someone a liar just because you happen to have a different experience than them.
I think most people understand that their job probably requires some degree of human-level intelligence. As such, they figure that their own job is safe until technology reaches that point AND costs less than their salary to rent such an AI. The only ones who really have to worry are those who know that a reasonably sophisticated algorithm could replace them.
But those same people who know their own job requirements probably have no idea what many other types of jobs entail, and I suspect they're likely to over-simplify them. As such, they're "good candidates for AI to replace."
At least, that's my hypothesis for the patterns of these answers.
I don't think this is actually a problem with a code-signing certificate. Or at least, I can't figure out how they could screw that up. There's nothing in your own code which checks for that. It's a function of the OS.
This sounds like something a bit different, like their own code is checking for a cert. But for what possible reason, I can't imagine. Maybe some sort of DRM or authentication system?
I don't have this hardware, but I'm sort of interested to hear what actually happened here. We might never really know the details, though.
This is what happens when a company believes that "move fast and break things" is a reasonable development model. Unsurprisingly, things tend to break fairly often.
Yeah... it's sort of hard to believe the bumbling that would allow a certificate to expire before realizing that it would shut down every single one of their users. I mean, I understand bugs slip through, but this is sort of astoundingly bad.
More to the point, as you indicated, what the hell is an expiring certificate doing in their software anyhow? A normal code-signing certificate expires after a time, but the software that was signed with it does NOT expire. We now know that their device-critical software has a time bomb in it that only they can periodically reset, and they were already slipshod enough to miss the deadline once.
The FBI should come back to us when the government's three-letter agencies actually manage to keep a secret for more than a few years. Do they really think the public will trust them to keep these figurative "keys to the kingdom" secured, when we've seen time after time after time they can't keep their own secrets from leaking?
Technically speaking, it's pretty straightforward to design strong encryption that can be unlocked with multiple keys. The "magical pony" part is the human factor, which will inevitably leak those master keys and compromise hundreds of millions of devices in a single stroke. It's inevitable because of how insanely valuable those keys would be.
And very few outside of California call it that either, at least that I've heard. The most oft-heard substitute is typically "fucking California", accompanied by a head shake. See: Die Hard.
I think this is really nothing more than self-driving cars being in higher proportional density in California + San Francisco having a higher proportion of high-strung or near-insane people who would go up and physically assault driverless cars. In one case, as it was a taxi driver, you could perhaps attribute the actions to a man who feared his future livelihood was being threatened. Or maybe he was super impatient, since time is literally money for them. The other incident sounded like an insane person.
In a country with a few hundred million folks living together, you're going to have occurrences like this. This is only news because its happening with self-driving cars. Essentially, you can write new headlines:"______ occurs with self-driving cars" when it occurs for the first time.
In brilliant marketing fashion, the "S" stands for nothing at all, according to Microsoft. All it signifies is that the version of Windows you're using can only run Universal Windows Platform apps, making it largely useless for anyone who wants to use their computer for much more than e-mail and web surfing. Oh, and no web surfing with any browser except Edge. Whee.
Keep in mind that Uber is just a software and services company - there are many other examples of doing far more for far less. For comparison (since I'm in the videogame industry), they could have easily created 20-40 AAA MMOs with that budget (each written from the ground up), which are typically among the most expensive and complex games to make. It seems like an insane amount of money for some relatively straightforward software services to me, even allowing for their internal back-end services we can't see, and R&D projects.
I found Google's motivations here to be a bit interesting. They apparently wanted to use Clang across all their platforms.
I'm writing a cross-platform PC game using my own game engine. It runs natively on Windows desktop, UWP, Mac, and Linux. About 95% of it is written in portable ANSI C++, and the other 5% interfacing with native APIs. I actually use three different compilers, one for each OS, and I consider this a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. Compiling the same code against three compilers gives me a lot of confidence that when I hit a bug, it's because of my code, not some weird compiler-specific thing. The different compilers also have very minor differences in conformance to the standard, so again, I like having three different compilers check my code for conformance and correctness.
I understand that it may be nice to be able to use the exact same tools across platforms, but there are also some benefits to avoiding homogeneity.
Note: as to your question:
We conducted extensive A/B testing of performance. Performance telemetry numbers are about the same for MSVC-built and clang-built Chrome – some metrics get better, some get worse, but all of them are within 5% of each other. The official MSVC builds used LTCG and PGO, while the Clang builds currently use neither of these. This is potential for improvement that we look forward to exploring. The PGO builds took a very long time to build due to the need for collecting profiles and then building again, and as a result, the configuration was not enabled on our performance-measurement buildbots. Now that we use Clang, the perf bots again track the configuration that we ship.
None of those states' politicians bleating about supporting "net neutrality" actually know what the heck it is, except for the fact that Obama set up some regulations and the Trump administrations tore them down. This shows you can be right, but for all the wrong reasons. And this proposed legislation is the result.
Hilarious that they're talking about "patently offensive material." These days, I find many patents to be much more offensive than the vast majority of online pornography.
Fortunately, this is only proposed legislation. I doubt it really has a chance of passing. This seems more like a "look, we're going something about online porn" virtue signal to their uptight constituents who think porn is going to cause society's downfall.
Only plebes use automated car washes.
It really depends on whether you're the type who masturbates to your car's silky smooth finish, or treats it like a machine to get from point a to b.
My 13 year old car has gone through automated car washes its entire life, and still looks nice and shiny. Sorry, I've got far more interesting things to do with my time than hand-washing my transportation to avoid putting a few abrasions in its clear-coat finish.
Funny, I thought the solution would be to engineer the sensors so they're not so damned fragile that I can't take them through the car wash. I also refuse to buy dishes or cookware that I can't throw in the dishwasher.
I like time-saving first-world amenities.
Are you asking "why can I compile and run locally-built apps?"
Macs (and I think Windows) set a special attribute on files that have been downloaded from potentially untrustworthy sources, like downloading from the internet. It's not completely correct to say that Macs will only run signed apps by default. Rather, by default, they only run apps which are downloaded from an untrusted source if they are signed with a valid code certificate. Needless to say, a locally compiled application doesn't have this attribute set.
To demonstrate this in practice, try creating a local web server. Something like (if I recall correctly):
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
Open a browser to "localhost:8000"
Then, "download" your executable and save it. Try to execute it, and you'll see your macOS protest, because that "unsafe" attribute has been set via the process of downloading and saving the executable via the browser. Once run, that attribute is cleared, and the program is considered safe for execution without further checks.
Obligatory XKCD. I think Steve Gibson called this "Internet background radiation," which always seemed like a fairly good way to describe the constant noise of scanners and probes that anyone can see attacking *every* system on the net, non-stop.
Has anybody asked him why the pacman generation
I'm pretty sure we saw a generation of youngsters popping pills, listening to hypnotic & rhythmic music, sequestering themselves in dark places adorned with with bright neon colors, all moving and bumping around together.
Can't explain the lack of more giant apes, though.
You're right of course. I certainly don't think they can actually STOP people from coding whatever they want. But we've already demonstrated what the implications of a "we must monitor all our citizens - for their own safety, of course" mentality lead to. And it's not even nearly as bad as it COULD get.
I have no doubt that someday true AI will "pop up", but don't underestimate how far we have to go still until we can replicate the computational requirements in a meaningful way. It's really all about that computational threshold - as you say, it's not magic, it's just capacity. A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on this article shows something like 100 million modern processors (adjusted for modern speed increases) are currently required to simulate the human brain in real time. That can be significantly reduced with specially designed hardware, but it shows that we've got a ways to go before we reach that threshold in any practical manner.
Perhaps I just prefer to save my worry for when the situation looks remotely feasible. And even then, I don't think having some true AI is going to be nearly as disastrous or disruptive as people think it will be, because even when AI becomes somewhat feasible by a mega-corp and it's resources, it's going to take many decades more before computational power makes it practical for use on small scales, which is when it might start automating specific types of jobs that require true, flexible intelligence.