Is the .NET version actually spawning any threads at all? It uses Tasks to collect the results, but all the work is done in the main thread by the looks of it.
116 karma · joined May 25, 2015
What do we mean by "human level" anyway? Last time I got talking to an AI expert he said current research wouldn't lead to anything like a general intelligence, rather human level at certain things. Machines exceed human capacities already in many fields after all...
This makes everyone vulnerable to J. Random Cybercriminal when those same flaws are finally discovered by the non-secret services.
Being a victim of an identity thief is a lot less terrifying than being in the middle of a automatic weapon massacre, but it's a lot more likely to happen.
The framing of the debate as "encryption = only used for evil" is not only wrong, but very dangerous from that point-of-view.
I don't have any easy answers that keeps everyone happy. But neither does anyone else.
But notwithstanding the above, there are logical holes in the rest of the article. I won't even mention that slight on high-tech work by equating it to "plugging away at a spreadsheet".
The biggest flaw was the assumption that the automation to make the aforementioned spreadsheet obsolete would be done without those people. In reality, any person highly-paid to "plug away" at a spreadsheet would be paid due to their domain/industry knowledge and skills rather than purely Excel skills and would still be employed operating a new system, or even directly involved in building and maintaining such systems.
This pattern is repeated throughout the article. Technology will obsolete low-tech grunt work first, mainly because contrary to the central premise of that article, technology is a people business. It's not a people business in the same was sales or marketing is, it's not about who's got the biggest set of contacts[0], but you'll never build a successful product without understanding the world it fits in to; building good technology requires a good deal of listening and empathy, both toward the customer, but also to the system as a whole and your fellow engineers.
In the short-to-medium term, any acceleration in automation will also increase demand for engineers in that field. And any such systems will only be as good as those who made them, even knowledge-workers not in the automation business will still be required to operate/design/improve such systems. Maybe in smaller numbers...
What happens after that, no one knows. The effects on the economy would be difficult to predict. And one day in ten, fifty, a hundred, several thousand years from now, fully autonomous AI will be here... and all bets are off. Long-term predictions would be foolish.
[0] - except for the sale and marketing of a technology business, of course, it's not a binary situation.
Both of those two issues bizarrely affected iTunes only, and not the Apple Music app on iOS.
The complete silence on product issues from Apple only adds to the frustration. That plus there doesn't seem to be a way of reporting Apple Music bugs yet, I went looking only to find iTunes Store was the only thing you could report a specific issue about.
It is such a poor product, it makes me think less of Apple generally, is this the sort of enterprise I trust to make payments? Also, this is made worse by the gap between the iOS and OS X experience, it just highlights how little focus OS X gets these days, not that it was in much doubt.
I might keep trying it occasionally until the three month trial expires, but no more than that, I'll be very surprised if this can all be fixed by then.
An arms race in blocking ads designed not to be blocked would be interesting to watch. While it would be very easy to introduce text/images/video in such a way that hides the fact it's an advert (there will be heuristics, of course); I suspect it'll be more difficult to measure the viewership/click-through-rate of such ads, as that's what will give the game away and make signal the presence of an ad.
Ultimately it might come down to old-fashioned offline measures, similar to how billboards/magazines use third-parties to measure the reach of an advert without any tracking on the advert itself.
This would make small content producers suffer the most. While everyone knows and trusts the reach of a newspaper site, a blog that suddenly gets 20,000 HN visitors in one afternoon, what's that worth?
It's only where both the left and right-hand side are in external crates that would be a problem.