dare944

In the controversy over AI and intellectual property rights, the notion of asymmetrical enforcement of those rights is presently an active and dynamic rhetorical position. If you suppress responses espousing that position, how am I to judge the breadth of the position in the debate?

When I see a lot of the responses, even cliche ones, it tells me people are passionate about the issue. Right now I think that's an interesting piece of information.

I feel the exact opposite. I feel that the documents I've collected but only lightly recall form an extension of my mind. I routinely collect electronic copies of technical documentation and white papers which I broadly organize by topic. To me they represent an accessible knowledge base that I can draw upon when I need to.

I suppose my tendency to collect and organize documents is a coping mechanism for my notoriously insufficient memory. I retain far less than my peers, and will often vaguely remember having read something on a topic but have no recollection of the details or where I read it. Even topics that I go deep on and write about extensively in notes or communication will be largely gone from my mind in months to a year. So my document collection forms a kind of artificial replacement for the memory I never had.

Did you miss the 'prepare' in the title?

Well, a large swath of both sides are wrong in that they insist theirs is the only valid perspective.

It is also the story of something larger: how powerful people and institutions failed, one after another, to keep their AI ethics promises in the face of pressure.

I've worked at Google. These weren't promises, they were deceptions.

Google, like many companies, maintains the focus and motivation of their workforce via a stream of carefully orchestrated disinformation and half-truths. One of those half-truths is "We listen to our employees". They listen when it has no business consequence and they can tout themselves as being "good" or on the side of the workers. They don't whenever the politics or economics of the situation presents even the slightest resistance.

Kudos to the author for fighting for change. But the dark patterns in Google run too deep for them to be uprooted by a polite exchange of white papers and emails.

I don't see much confusion

People have settled on the term DSL to identify those languages whose domains are highly constrained as compared to more general purpose or broad domain languages. This usage exists whether or not you think the term itself is stupid.

it suggests that these tools might actually be better at delivering the perception to the user of increased productivity while real productivity gains are lower, or maybe zero, or maybe negative in some cases.

Or that the gains are in niche applications (like the GP's) that don't translate at scale.

Lol, no. We discourage her from using the computer because she's been scammed* so many times. Generally speaking AI is not uniformly perceived as this awe inspiring boon to those of her generation. Often it invokes fear - fear of instability, fear of discrimination, a simple fear of the unknown. These people lived through a lot of scary technological advancements in their day. The last thing they want is another thing they can't understand.

People who don't get this display a lot of ageism.

*- "Microsoft" telling her her computer's been infected and she needs to call this number asap! Luckily a bank teller stopped her before she completed the transaction.

You would expect only people who have a very high opinion of themselves to not feel the need to use AI.

Please explain why my 82 year-old mother-in-law needs to use AI. Is it just so you won't consider her arrogant?

Ex-googler here as well. I'm not sure the distortion was worse outside of the core business. In the peripheral businesses (if one can call them businesses), I think you had more of an opportunity to ponder the larger implications of your actions. As an early Nester I argued vociferously for designs that would specifically dis-empower Google as a central service, in deference to the end user and as barrier to future misuse. Of course many of these ideas were not accepted. But my sense was, had I been part of the core Ad business, many of these ideas would have been third-rail topics, subject to immediate shutdown. Whereas within the Nest org I was able to foster discussions on the topics at multiple levels.

Indeed, my impression was that people within the core Ad business were more adept at maintaining an air of integrity while doing substantively the opposite for the goal of optimizing revenue. I suspect that the closer you got to Google's "center of gravity" the more distorted your reality and motivations became.

You mean as a distraction from the point being made?

I said "harkens". Of course that structure never appeared on a punched card, and was designed with the unix block size in mind.

The code, but not the function, occurred in multiple places in the V6 kernel and userland.

Yep. The code is essential given the design of the direct structure, which harkens back to the fixed-width data fields of punched cards.

No other data structure works like this. You can't mess this up in an array, because no function that manipulates arrays is just going to keep going until there is a null.

This is patently false. Sentinel markers are used widely in array types. Consider GNU's getopt_long() function, a mainstay in GNU tools:

The argument longopts must be an array of [struct option] structures, one for each long option. Terminate the array with an element containing all zeros.

strncpy appears somewhere around the Unix v7 time frame, however only as function in the standard C library. It is not used in the v7 kernel itself.

You can spread propaganda and poorly sourced zeitgeist and be among friends but if you try to have a genuine conversation about programming languages you are made to be unwelcome immediately.

Indeed. And the ignorance of computing history in this discussion is particularly disturbing.

The context of this particular thread is "zero terminated string is ... computing's biggest mistake". This completely ignores the situation on the ground when C was developed. At the time, people were striving for a system programming language that sat above the level of assembly but was compact enough to run within the limited resources of the then emerging mini-computer systems. The PDP-11 on which C was developed was certainly not the first mini-computer, but it was among the earliest to have a regular enough instruction set and addressing model to make a general purpose, high-level system's language possible. These systems were extremely limited in memory; the PDP-11's instruction set is limited to directly addressing at most 64KiB (code and data) and many systems of the era were hardware limited to less than that. (Indeed, I regularly run an early version of Unix, including an early C compiler, on my PDP-11/05 which is maxed out at 56KiB [of actual core]). There was no way that even a brilliant engineer like Dennis Richie was going to be able to shoe-horn in "optional" types, or the mechanics of length-value strings into a compiler that has to run in such limited space, and produce code (e.g. the Unix kernel) that has to run in even less. The fact that strings and arrays are thin abstractions on top of pointers is both a brilliant compromise in design as well as a nod to then-prevalent assembly practice. It was the exactly kind of pragmatic decision that was needed to move computing along at the time. Of course the designs from this era are antiquated now. But they were not mistakes.

For many people who live in bad days, the thing that passes is their life.

IP licensing and certification are entirely separate from access to standards documentation. Of course certifying conformance to a standard is going to have a cost. But publishing documentation that has already been written is effectively free.

... not intended to mislead users, for example, generating an image of a living room to showcase a sofa,

So it would be okay for AI to rescale a sofa to appear proportionate to other furniture in a typical room, even if the actual sofa is much larger, or (more likely) much smaller than depicted?

AI just makes it easier to get the information people were already consuming.

This is clearly false. By now it's evident that AIs can hallucinate in ways that contradict their training data. That means that, beyond any errors or misinformation present in their input, AIs also naturally introduce their own level of error on top.

Beyond this, of course, AIs are much easier to manipulate during training, much more so than the Internet at large. So they represent yet another source of intentional deception aimed at the user.

Rather like the people crafting the submissions to your 5 day old account

Oh ffs. How does one draw a line from Dennis Richie, Ken Thompson, Steve Wozniak, Bill Joy, even Linus Torvalds to 'terrifying overlord'? The fact is that those people who were closet 'terrifying overlords' weren't actually nerds to begin with, because they lacked the essential quality of humility.

There's no "supposed to" here. Humans, (including governments) are inclined to do bad things; both law and technology are necessary to restrain those tendencies.

Arguably more like soft wired CPU logic, since the contents of the plugboards were not uniformly addressable words.

Absolutely. The real moral liability here rests with any organization still using SSNs as a form of secret or authenticating credential. Spend the legal fees to go after these people and the problem will be truly solved.

Over the course of the next 5 days, they sent me 5 onboarding marketing emails and I could not opt out of any of them.

Such consternation, all for the want of an email filter.

Lol, I had a similar thought as well, but more along the lines of "We're coming for you next, JavaScript!"

But the effort is certainly an exquisite rearrangement of the deck chairs, no?

Right? Just gross...

I'm creating a new OS image for UniBone/QBone based on BuildRoot and a streamlined kernel. My goal is sub-five second boot time so you can get to using the host PDP-11 pretty much right away.