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It's not yet god-like, but if you were to attach a couple nuclear warheads to the game engine, then at least it would be badass. If the machine feels insulted by a particular move, or just gets tired of the game, bye bye Seoul!
Agreed. Mathematica is awesome, and I did research with it that would've not been possible with any other tool, but the day I had to contact the company for permission to transfer the license to another computer made me realize I didn't want to build any IP on top of their tech.
A language, unlike a complete environment like Mathematica, allows you to build your own programs whole-cloth. But if those programs ultimately require Wolfram's permission to run, I don't really care how awesome it is, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole, for fear of it becoming the next J++.
They can still make money by charging for printed manuals, support, or offering some sort of supercomputing back-end like EC2 for research institutions. But for a serious developer to invest their own time learning this tool, the risk of a closed ecosystem is too high.
Wolfram is going off into the weeds. The whole point of NKS is that the universe is digital. We live in a computational universe, therefore we are living and breathing and interacting with natural (not artificial) intelligence as a function of merely existing.
Assuming that by AI, Wolfram is referring to a computational device built by humans, the communication has already happened in the act of designing and constructing the machine. Real communication is over once you flip it on.
What Wolfram is proposing is to then run a Wolfram Language interpreter on top of this new machine and use that to communicate, presumably to ask it for the meaning of the universe. Instead of creating a lingua franca between man and machine, this will prove only that the machine can emulate a von Neumann computer and run the Wolfram interpreter on top. You are NOT communicating with the machine at that point, you are communicating with a parser and a nifty collection of mathematical routines.
Think of a parrot. You teach it to say "Polly want a cracker!" - and the parrot may even learn a few human words - but are you really communicating? Can the parrot express to you the thrill of flying, can it explain to you what a total mind-fuck it is for it to be stuck in a cage begging for crackers when it should be flying with its flock and living its life? No, the parrot can only ask you for a cracker, just the way you taught it.
Man will never have a relationship among equals with a machine, regardless of how much software he pours on top - the machine has a frame of reference that can never be communicated to a human, it's different at the electronic level, never mind the symbolic or linguistic. The machine will have a reality so different from that of the human that even if it could communicate something of substance, it would be as futile as asking your parrot to help you with a math problem - the parrot is not stupid, and in fact can do many things you would find highly mathematical, but it cannot help you with your homework because you are in two different mental universes, no human-invented language can bridge them.
You may know me as the founder of Aviato, from the hit TV show 'Silicon Valley'.
If you live on Planet Earth, American politics are relevant to you, as distasteful as that thought might be.
Anybody had espresso from a Mirage?
http://www.keesvanderwesten.com/mirage-special-features.html
Awesome use of a PID loop.
When the first game came out, it was written in Lua and they had embedded a runtime in the iOS application - interesting that Apple at first forbade that practice, to the point of scanning libraries for interpreters. It then became the #1 iOS game - goes to show, allowing companies to bring their own language to the platform allows for unexpected successes.
Hopefully Apple learned from that lesson.
All the same, 800 employees for a game seems excessive, but then we have 5000 employees at Facebook for a website..
Very interesting concept - this would allow the human and the compiler to actually work together from the same conceptual model, as opposed to the antagonistic process it is now.
Too bad the multi-billion dollar Facebook didn't actually produce any usable code to benefit the community, for a change.
There is a set of tools here that allow for a hyper-efficient lifestyle based on a new kind of wheat bread superfood:
But you can check out the SPIR-V IR spec which is almost finished:
https://www.khronos.org/registry/spir-v/
Not only the Vulkan API but new programming languages will target this IR, so far it appears to be an innovative architecture for concurrent software, that integrates graphics and compute, not a bolt-on like OpenCL.
and the paper is at http://www.dalboris.com/research/vac/vac.pdf
There is a priceless video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKPwZqUUrQo of the Gurdjieff movements, the dance at 3:24 is an expression of a computational process.
I've been looking for a parser generator in C (currently using AttoParsec in Haskell, but looking to reduce dependencies), so I'll check out both Hammer & Nail - right now Hammer is downloading scons and gettext dependencies while Nail is downloading 80M worth of Boost libraries.
Grr, whatever happened to plain C with no dependencies?
Ultimately you will need to either work for yourself or have an open-source project on the side that you work on at your natural speed without pressure from others. As others here have noted, technical debt is not something most managers are concerned about, because it's a future cost, and they are judged on shipping code.
As I move into my mid-40's, I am writing software I never dreamed possible 10 years ago, but the speed is much slower, sometimes a month will pass with only a couple lines of production code being written, then after a concept gels, everything comes together fairly quickly. I would have been fired long ago working for someone else at that speed.
Hacking culture and the crazy Wall Street valuations of technically indebted companies like Facebook have distorted where people see value in software, and what they consider a normal development cycle, but don't pay attention to that - envision perfect software and work every day to improve your skills, eventually you will close the gap and you will find yourself to be not mediocre any longer.
On a practical level, I gained a lot of productivity by learning Relax NG - formulating your data structures and relationships concretely before beginning to write code has saved innumerable wrong turns and helped avoid misunderstandings with my clients.
Never never trust the FBI. That's how they nailed DotCom, instructing him to let them collect 'evidence' against someone else, then they used it against him. Seems like you're in a hornet's nest, and you're not even making any money for your trouble.
"background of fairness" - very impressive, maybe social engineering is a science now!
This is BS - in a normal society, competence rises to the top on its own accord - people naturally out of laziness defer to those who know what they are doing, regardless of race.
In the US we are living in a social engineered bubble that does not reflect reality. Take a look at the current administration, (and the several before, to be fair) - competence is not even on the radar for consideration of a job - it's political connections and race first. And we see the results in the news every day.
Very good point, too many people consider AI to be a completely distinct entity that will appear fully formed in a lab one day. The reality is more fluid. Kevin Kelly calls it the Technium, as he sees it, it's a completely new kingdom that is being co-created - initially by man, and increasingly by itself.
This new intelligence is indeed a hybrid - it is not Twitter, it is millions of people and machines tweeting, it is not an iPhone, it is millions of people and software interacting with it and through it, it is not Google, it is billions of people exchanging information with it and through it.
To understand where this is going, we must ask, like KK does, what does technology want? Certain things are obvious - silicon and electrons are its flesh and blood, so the activity and interest of this new life form will be centered around semiconductor manufacturing and sources of electricity. How does a machine make sure it will always be fed? It must provide something useful to man so that it keeps getting plugged in and recharged.
So what is useful to man? At this moment in history the largest use of computation appears to be communication, and the machines have made themselves indispensable in this area - but at a cost. The machines demand our attention in exchange for revealing the messages we crave.
Stephenson uses the swordplay terms 'Actor' and 'Patient' to describe the initiator and the subject of an attack. Witness a person's reaction to their iPhone beeping with an incoming message - between man and machine, who is the Actor in this interaction? We jump at the sound and interrupt our work in order to service the machine, which then gives us our reward, our tweet, and in gratitude we place it back in its charger.
Digital viruses are where we can see the forefront of a new relationship emerging - a digital virus is more intelligent and more efficient than its host, the Operating System, so we have a very straightforward Darwinian process playing out between an 'old' species, the OS, and a new, small, intelligent interloper - its electricity is paid for by its host, another machine, therefore the virus does not have the host's social contract with the person who owns the computer - it has a different calculus for its survival, it owes only its creator, the virus writer.
Like the coming 'water wars', the new digital wars will be rooted in a struggle for limited resources such as human attention, electricity, and habitable areas of silicon.
This is an interesting experiment in moving the computation to the endpoints of a namespace. I would suggest a variant where instead of a VM you place a Fossil file
https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/fileform...
Using that you can store a whole filesystem at the URL instead of one file, and you also get synchronization mechanisms built in, so your endpoints can communicate with each other in a structured way that you control.. vs the undefined communication you will get between VM's if you try this with the VM architecture.
Automated discovery and exploitation of architectural flaws is merely the next step in the evolution of software. For the past few years we have been witness to a 'whack-a-mole' type of dynamic in the field of computational security. Exploits are published, a day later they become a Metasploit module, and a day after that anybody in the world can use it on everyone else in the world at the click of a mouse. If you are a full time sys-admin plugged into all the advisory mechanisms you may, for a time, be able to keep your systems patched, but the machines never sleep, they never blink, they never forget, and apparently, they never die.
In the race against time, it is fair to say at this point that the machines have won. It may not be completely obvious yet, in the way that a tidal wave out at sea is only a small hump under your individual ship, but when it comes ashore, when the confluence of terrain and massive liquid power becomes manifest, then, of course, it is obvious.
What appears to be happening is a kind of terra-forming activity, a new software layer is spreading, one that has the keys to everything - our social lives, our morning cup of coffee, our cars.. our nukes.
This has an end condition, of course - and that is the total loss of control over our technological infrastructure.
Hacker culture is dangerous.
We are living in a technological Cambrian explosion, and it is certainly very exciting to see the many types of hardware, software, and techniques that have emerged in a few short years.
The power that can be wielded by tying together a few components is enormous. Unfortunately the 'Hacker Way' is to glue components together and declare success if the whole thing 'works'. The glue is normally a scripting language of some sort, and the pieces can be enormously powerful, such as an EC2 cluster or an IP messaging framework.
There was a study a while back called 'The Cloud Begins With Coal'. While some may dispute the specifics, the main point is this- computation requires energy. When you integrate components without regard for how much energy is required to exercise them, you can end up with an enormous and inefficient or dangerous system.
Consider Facebook, a case study of the dangerous effects of a hacker system coupled with large amounts of money. They have built an enormous computational infrastructure to automate the task of sharing pictures over a network. Thousands of engineers and large amounts of electricity are being consumed to execute a process that has no clear social benefit, and for which few of the 'customers' would be willing to pay, other than the surveillance agencies.
Why is that? I propose it is due to non-systems thinking, nobody sat down at the beginning to engineer the end-to-end process (much less the business model). A properly engineered system would require a central piece of telecom equipment, say a typical Ericsson switch, and a git-like protocol that stored content on the client side. Boom, no data center required.
Somebody a few days ago demonstrated the ability to delete arbitrary content from the Facebook data center using a Raspberry Pi. Hacker vs. Hacker.
Another example of hacker culture is the NSA - nobody there thought of the world as a complete system, they just hacked together a whole slew of tools to accomplish one part of their mission (SIGINT) without regard for their ultimate customer, the American people.
We need to declare hacker culture a clear and present danger to society.
I'm glad the page is getting a design refresh, as it needed it, however it may have swung too far in the direction of the latest web scripting language du jour. The 'try it now' box is appealing to the short attention span scripter and not to the engineer. Already you are having to mention IO actions which is a subject that can't be properly explained through a web form.
As for the image, I don't know why it would be interesting to see a picture of a bunch of people at a conference, especially if you go back to the page frequently. Why not some original Haskell art like the Diagrams factoring image?
Regarding the 20 years in development, I agree this fact should be front and center, this is a serious tool that has had a lot of work by very high level thinkers, it is a world away from the origins of Java as far as engineering integrity.