there would be nothing to prevent the 99% from rightfully rising up against the 1%
Except for the other 1% who are trained and equipped to violently suppress the 98%. And if for whatever reason they fail to do the job, the killer robots will do it instead.
We survive because they’re tiny. If my cat were lion-sized, I’d be dead or at least missing an arm or two. It also helps that she’s opposed to firearms … and anti-nuke.
I’m a school bus driver, and one of my weirder experiences is listening to a middle-school boy ripping on some middle-school girl for having “only” ten thousand followers.
c-suite
CEO, CTO, CFO etc. In a '90s Internet startup like the company I worked for, the “C” really stood for “clueless”.
giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases
Over-normalization is a database thing - a simple example of normalization would be a “People” table where instead of having the “Salutation” field just contain text like Mr, Mrs. etc., you have a separate “Salutations” table with all the possibilities listed and keyed with an ID (usually just a sequential number), and then the “People” table stores a Salutation ID for each entry instead of the actual text. It’s a valid and standard thing to do with database design, but it can be taken to extremes where absolutely every possible trivial thing that can be normalized is, producing an overcomplicated mess that is extremely difficult to work with programmatically.
Printing out this over-normalized mess of a database on multiple sheets of paper which are then taped to the wall is utterly useless.
How is a database a trick?
The printout is the trick - it fools the bosses into thinking you’re doing something amazing and productive when you’re really just fucking around. It only works on the technically incompetent, of which there was no shortage in '90s Internet startups (or today).
Yeah, BeOS was awesome. I remember a coworker showing it to me in 1996 - he also taught me how to wow the c-suite with giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases, a parlor trick that has served me well over the years.
Nothing drives me as crazy as my phone constantly putting in “thus” instead of “this”. Nobody fucking ever uses the word “thus” in a text message.
Take WWII for instance, being neutral kind of says yeah we are cool with both sides.
Being literally surrounded by the Third Reich meant their choices were neutrality or actually joining up with Hitler, so they really can’t be criticized for choosing neutrality. They can be criticized for their actions during and after the war in helping the Nazi leaders squirrel away the wealth they stole from the Jews, something that was not necessary for a neutral nation to do.
I’d rather rip on Sweden which at least had some possibility of joining the Allies but instead supplied Germany with the high-quality iron ore they absolutely needed to keep their war machine running - the exact same thing they did in WWI. They also supplied Germany with much-needed ball bearings, but at least they sold them to the Allies as well.
As I recall, Gasse was offered something like $440 million for BeOS by Apple and he turned them down. Not sure it would have made any difference in anything by this point, but at least Objective-C wouldn’t have been littered with classes with the “NS” prefix.
Is BeOS still floating around?
They have the close, minimize and full screen buttons in the upper left corner instead of the upper right.
/s just in case.
They get taken over by sales & marketing types
Like Steve Jobs lol.
In sixth grade camp one of the counselors had us all gather up edible plants and shit from the forest and he made a big salad that we all had to sample. I still remember the trash can stacked over the top with paper plates filled with that salad, even despite the fact that he soaked it in Italian dressing. Real salad is better, but not by all that much.
The year they both came out (1995) I was coding in Visual Basic 3. Ack.
My main experience using C++ was because I got stuck modifying an app written with Qt Creator, an utterly insane cross-platform framework that used (still uses? I dunno, only people in Finland ever used it in the first place) C++ for the under-the-hood processing and Javascript for the UI. For good measure, the application developers had modified all the C++ stuff with macros to the point where it was barely even recognizable as C++. Fortunately, it mattered not at all because the app’s customers were ISPs who just wanted a Skype clone so they could say they had one even though none of their customers ever used the damn thing.
One Boeing 737 MAX = 6.5 million avocado toasts. You’d have to go without avocado toast for … uh … two weeks?
It stands for “piled”.
The one thing that stands out to me the most is that programmatic “neurons” are basically passive units that weigh inputs and decide to fire or not. The whole net is exposed to the input, the firing decisions are worked through the net, and then whatever output is triggered. In biological neural nets, most neurons are always firing at some rate and the inputs from pre-synaptic neurons affect that rate, so in a sense the passed information is coded as a change in rate rather than as an all-or-nothing decision to fire or not fire as is the case with (most) programmatic neurons. Implementing something like this in code would be more complicated, but it could produce something much more like a living organism which is always doing something rather than passively waiting for an input to produce some output.
And TBF there probably are a lot of people doing this kind of thing, but if so they don’t get much press.
Wait, chatgpt was convicted of multiple felonies?
there’s nothing left to do research.
There’s still military robots, unfortunately.
My ancient macbook has a cd drive, but it stopped recognizing the drive years ago and of course there’s no physical eject button. It Just Works!