I'm pretty sure the concept was "light shining through windows" and then the marketing department started getting creative with ways to justify its existence.
Another way to looking at it is the upper-middleclass at google is riding a large wave of ad-tech/search money and have comfortable jobs for relatively little grind and risk compared to other companies.
It's not spin at all though. web devs and high bandwidth users think the world revolves around them since they consume the majority of traffic; but latency is a huge issue in multiplayer games and players and providers are absolutely willing to pay a premium for lower latencies. You sometimes see professional e-sports players actually relocating closer to the servers for better ping.
Young people don't understand that succeeding in college and succeeding in the real world are two different things. Nobody cares if you graduated from mit with a 4.0. We care if you can succeed at the job and are worth the king's ransom great developers get in this market.
It's a much more well understood problem now than it was when google was founded and the tools and platforms available to assist are light-years beyond what was available then. Many failed search startups have shown again and again that marginally better results are not the deciding factor in using a search engine, it's what's the installed default and how trusted the brand is.
Full brain electrical stimulation is an obviously barbaric primitive idea that certain medical community members very vocally defend and assert the merits of. Extremely targeted and sophisticated application of electrical currents might have a legitimate role outside of quack science in the distant future, but the technology isn't there yet.
An enthusiast looking at published benchmarks is going to have a very different idea about what "highly-tuned" really means than the guys in the trenches spending lots of time profiling and making hardware sing.
This isn't a computerization of the game, its a computerization of the recording of the game. Big difference and has nothing to do with computer chess engines. It could be used to detect cheating by comparing played moves to engine lines. Also a board camera isn't the the only way this could be implemented, rfid's in the pieces or a pressure sensitive board would both work. Players could still take their own game notes. It would also eliminate errors in the recording of the game and provide records for blitz and time pressure situations.
i think your excessively opposed to this. a simple solution that records all the games has obvious benefits. market is probably too small anyway though, i don't see carbon copies going away any time soon.
i don't see any signs of funding or enthusiasm letting up though, these types of posts are more reactionary and goal post moving "well its not really "strong" ai because x" never-mind that lots of people are finding real applications for ML. Processing power to support it is increasing and funding is still flowing.
Rated standard tournament chess involves a tedious process of annotating moves on a carbon copy as you play. One to give to the tournament director to enter the game into the database and one to review the game after. So there is a niche market for this.
This is an incredibly insightful post, YC companies are overhyped CRUD apps mostly. Meanwhile bitcoin and crypto has a a far larger market cap and is reshaping the entire economy. /s
Code that is easy to work with is usually that way because the author went out of their way to make it easy to work with, often this takes 2-3x as long to write as normal code that just works. Publicly exposed api's typically get this special attention and internal things get the normal spaghetti treatment.
No organization can work if normal communications are hijacked and spoofed by bad actors. This is a pretty severe security issue that no amount "social engineering awareness" training is going to fix. Most businesses can't operate if every decision of consequence needs a face to face meeting to verify authenticity.
Such pointless gatekeeping, if Carmack turns his attention and resources to AI he will be able to make contributions to the field. Will they be groundbreaking? Maybe not, but why is everyone so eager to immediately discourage him.