hobb0001

Think of DeepDream x 1000. First, start with self-driving cars and semis cutting out taxi and freight services. Then, move on to musicians and composers no longer being hired to do mundane (90%) work, or video game levels being procedurally generated with intelligent design. From there, go on to everything that could be automated today, but requires a little bit of human ingenuity.

Economic transactions will start to look very different than what's normally accepted today.

Not that I'm a futurist, but I predict that 2020 will be the decade where AI becomes unsettling (beyond image recognition, which is already becoming unsettling), and that 2030 will be the decade where AI has serious economic consequences.

The largest problem that I see with the militarization of the local police is that they will increasingly start to view themselves as soldiers. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment)

These rotating circles that are referenced by the article will forever remain a cautionary tale for me: http://blog.matthen.com/post/42112703604/the-smooth-motion-o...

In pre-Copernican astronomy, where the Earth was considered the center of the cosmos, the erratic orbits of the other planets relative to us were explained away as epicycles within perfect circles. Later, closer examination of the orbits required modeling the orbits as epicycles within epicycles, exactly as depicted in the rotating circles above. In the end, it turned out that there aren't epicycles in the orbits, they were just creating a Fourier transform to explain the orbital paths. We now know that you can create a Fourier transform to generate any arbitrary path.

I sometimes wonder how many of our modern physics models, such as the standard model, differential geometry, and M-theory, are just highly sophisticated versions of the Fourier transform.

> Tablets were never intended to be the next generation of word processing devices.

sigh If only that we're true. iWork for iPad was announced at the first iPad announcement.

Not all code is server-side code that can be addressed by elastic computing. Most C++ programmers work on desktop, mobile, and embedded programs. In such a domain, it is very likely that your code will be running on more than 10,000 cores on launch day (and with little or no intercommunication between the cores).

Arguably, the patent system is about execution, not ideas. Science fiction authors have been providing cool ideas for free for some time now.

Security theater. sigh If the government was actually serious about protecting women and children from people with malicious intent, terrorists would be toward the bottom of the list, just above school shooters. Domestic abuse far outstrips any news-worthy outrages, but you don't get many votes talking about that.

I'm not sure I'd care to code with this: http://i.imgur.com/Pu4FHi4.png

I like to code with about a 9 point font, in order to maximize the amount of code per screen without going too far into the illegible. At that size, the proportions of even a single pixel are large enough to make any anti-aliasing annoying. You lose the sharp contrast that every good font needs to have along its edges.

Bitmap fonts are my favorites.

True enough. It has only become schizophrenic lately because it is now eavesdropping on domestic communication as well.

The NSA is a schizophrenic organization. It is tasked with two opposing goals:

- To eavesdrop on the communications of foreign entities.

- To protect our own government from foreign entities that are doing the same.

It is the latter directive that has provided SELinux and AES.

> Why would anyone trust one of them going forward?

The same reason people trust the Dollar as a reserve currency. Yeah, it sucks, but better than any of the alternatives.

Fortunately, there exist open-source/public-domain alternatives for security products. (Doesn't mean that contributors can't be coerced with the equivalent of a Nation Security Letter, though.)

I can't count the number of times my coworkers have said something along the lines of, "What are you talking about? I never saw anything about... oh, wait... I didn't realize it was scrollable. Never mind."

After that happens a couple of times, they eventually find their way to the System Preferences.

I find it telling that not so long ago, "Human Resources" used to be called "Personnel". I'm still curious as to what caused the change from persons to resources...

I do agree that that form of leadership is necessary. I was inferring a more literal interpretation of leadership, though, considering the associated word, "potential".

> [he] believes every phase of the process needs to be meticulously designed to drill deep into skill sets, ... and leadership potential

Ugh. I hate this. For a technical interview, why is leadership potential a priority? Speaking for myself, I've done the leadership thing and don't care for it. People tell me I'm good at it, but I still prefer dealing with algorithms over humans, and I actively decline offers for "promotion". (I already have my very own batch of little humans of to deal with, thank you very much.)

Unfortunately, no matter where you go, there's always the deep-seated cultural mindset that manager > worker. In terms of the corporate efficiency calculation of effectiveness/hour, I suppose that's still true. But for me, personally, that's not the equation that I care to maximize.

> While offices for everyone sound good on paper, moving everyone out of cubicles destroyed a culture of tight-knit interaction and communication.

Please, no, do not fall for this misconception. I've worked in several "tight-knit" environments. Invariably, everyone starts wearing headphones to tune out the distraction and also starts communicating via IRC/messaging so as not to cause distraction. Completely negating any potential for the mythical spontaneous communication.

> Further, what if you prefer 2 or 3 space indentation?

This, alone, is why I always use tabs, no matter what any style guide says. People have different tastes. Using tabs allows any editor to indent according to personal tastes.

Heh. Reminds me of the days when I used to run a Z-code interpreter on my Palm V.

Regarding the title of his article, as a someone who routinely uses TCP/IP for tasks other than transmitting HTML, I find his concept of "internet" to be rather myopic.

I've beat this drum before, and I'll beat it again here. The build configuration for every large project eventually becomes turing complete (requiring loops, conditionals, subroutines, what have you). Why is it then, that every new build tool that comes to town is declarative? Just give me a nice library full of handy build functions and I can write a build script in fewer lines than any build tool configuration -- and be more readable to boot.

Celery is brittle. If you stop a celery service, odds are, it will either not stop at all or leave stray child processes running.

It is not transactional, at least not with a MongoDB back-end. If you stop a celery service, any tasks that were in progress may or may not complete, but none of them will be picked up again when you resume.

No prioritization of queues or tasks. It is possible to set up separate services that handle different queues, but that's a PITA and there's still no guaranteed order of processing.

Agreed. Since 1995, I've been hearing wild-eyed "visionaries" predict that the internet will bring about equality and the Age of Aquarius. They seem to forget that the same sort of things were said about radio and television. (And probably the telegraph, too.) Proponents of television believed that people would take distance learning courses by sitting in front of the TV. Instead, it turns out that it does nothing more than further propagate least-common-denominator pop culture. My, how things do change...

> It's hard(er) to create new content on a tablet, and I don't really want that becoming the default computer for any generation.

At the risk of using yet another car analogy, I see PC's becoming the pickup trucks of the computer industry. There will always be plenty of them around and will be primarily designed and built for utility. Many people who don't really need the utility will still buy them because they like the style. Over the years, the pendulum will swing back and forth between mobility and power -- and there will inevitably be the SUV cross-overs as well.

It's interesting how its always management that wants immigration reform; not the workers. On the one hand, it is management that does most of the hiring and are the ones tasked with finding talent. On the other hand, they're also tasked with keeping budgets low...

I'm of two minds when it comes to LucasArts. In both graphic adventures and in space shooters, they owned the genres with quality games, which is great. The problem is that because they so totally dominated, all competition left to pursue other branches (mostly to FPS, it seems). When they stopped development in those genres, there was nobody remaining to fill the void. Those genres are now the sad, atrophied remains of what used to be pillars of computer gaming.

Whew. I was wondering if I was the only one who has been out in the mountains and other rural areas, but have never seen a night sky like these.

> A source who worked closely with Riccitiello ... said "The truth is that the game industry continues to pivot very rapidly. EA is in a good place but it requires a lot of energy and laser focus... He's been pivoting the company hard for many years, but the industry keeps pivoting faster."

I call BS on techcrunch. There is no "source". That was a Silicon Valley buzzword generator.

Reminds me of the "death of programmers" that I've been hearing is right around the corner for that last 3 decades. You know, computers will understand what you want and just do it. Except that 90% of programming is not translating ideas into computer cyphers, it's figuring out (or guessing at) what the user really wants.

For example, what should happen if the network drops out in the middle of a save? Should it save a copy locally? Where? No, not the temp directory; that will be erased if the computer is rebooted. And so on.

> Would-be investors in Icelandic bonds focus most of their attention, not on what happened in the past, but on what is likely to happen in the future.

Once you understand that, you basically understand the entire financial industry. It has no memory. Hell, it barely even has any perception of the present.