seiji

The first part was a question and the second two parts were examples.

Writers can't be held responsible for the lack of reading comprehension exhibited by audience members.

isn't a computer limitation it is a physical one.

Assumes facts not in evidence. That could easily be a firmware (on-gate) vs. software (DHD) argument.

Carter said it is "impossible" due to physics

Potentially unreliable narrator.

also established that with enough raw power (e.g. blackhole, ancient device, etc) it could be kept open longer

Yup, cited above.

built their own DHD which presumably would have different computer limitations

firmware vs. software

when all DHDs in the universe died except theirs due to the malware

you're not doing devops unless you have one button that can destroy your entire infrastructure

Protip: don't take hundreds of millions of dollars from VCs if you care about your users.

Nice comparison!

But, more likely, it's just a play on a reason a Stargate (when unaided by some hostile energy source or time dilation field) just shuts off after 38 minutes with no explanation.

In Erlang you need to have explicit number of arguments and need to explicitly implement them.

Or, you know, just use lists as parameters. That's the standard Erlang pattern for unknown parameters lengths (e.g. io:format("debug ~s because ~p~n", [SomeString, SomeType]))

allocate a separate list node for each piece of data

So many programmers don't even consider "overhead" of data when writing things. But, most of the time it doesn't matter. Do you need a list of ten things? Great. Do whatever. Do you need a list of a billion things? Then you need to rethink everything from the bottom up.

when all you need is just a pointer to realloc

Wrong! https://github.com/Tarsnap/libcperciva/commit/cabe5fca76f6c3...

strong AI can be immortal

My grandfather was very racist and never changed as long as he lived. I'm glad most people aren't immortal. There's no guarantee a full AI wouldn't be tempted by evil and just become republican (or worse, a VC).

It can also recursively improve itself.

So can people (the more you know, the more you can learn), but most don't. It's important to remember "intelligence" isn't an abstract concept—intelligence is also embodied in personality—and personalities have wishes and goals and desires and loves and hates and that one song they can't get out of their head. A true "strong AI" will be fully conscious, not just algorithmic function bating.

Good luck telling a mildly strong godform to stop tripping on youtube videos and instead solve the global economic stability equation over lunch.

This advantage will lower the bar for strong AI even more.

That's kinda foofy conjecture. Being good at rectangular grid outcomes isn't necessarily a step in any direction towards a hands-off tax evaluating robot.

It feels really really good to talk about how AI will be a hundred billion trillion times smarter than the combined brainpower of all humans that have ever lived, but it feels good in the same way thinking dead people live again after they die feels good—it triggers that warm wishful thinking parietal lobe that removes a bit of reason for the sake of an overarching calmness.

Enthusiasm is great, but tempering with real expectations and less technopriesthood is better.

I do not understand how a business can understand OSS and implement the OSS core-only model

Whenever you see "open core," you should read it as "VCs said we need to do this to keep them happy."

VCs love the idea of how you can give part of something away for free then lock people in to auto-renewing subscription contracts for the whole banana (with fees increasing 7% to 17% every year for ongoing "maintenance"). Many VCs still actively recoil at the thought of giving away everything for free then just hoping the best will happen.

Nginx is a weird example because I'm not sure how well they are doing or who would buy "nginx pro" instead of haproxy+nginx or haproxy+varnish+nginx some other combination of already existing stuff.

MongoDB is an interesting example because they went with the "provide open software, but with really serious, game-stopping flaws, then force people to pay for support because nothing works" route. That's almost literally bait-and-switch (bait-and-support?). But, that hasn't ended up so well for them. From a recent WSJ article: Fidelity has cut its valuation of MongoDB in eight of the nine quarters since Fidelity made its investment in December 2013, valuing the shares 58% below what it paid.

Not really factitious. The whole "do things that don't scale (grit! be resilient! schlep!)" is pretty central to modern cult of pg startup dogma.

That's the holy grail of The Cloud: just write a description of what you want and what you want happens. DWIM programmatic casting.

I think pg originated his "sufficiently smart compiler" startup idea in his pycon talk. You can find it online somewhere. The other take away from his talk was: just lie to customers about it being automated, manually farm out the parallelize-all-the-code tasks to works/interns/turks while saying it's "automatic," then eventually figure out how to automate it yourself later so you don't need pesky humans in the loop.

It would fix a lot of things like e.g. San Francisco. Imagine if all those two story, single family homes were taxed at their land value (40 story condos! condos everywhere!) where 3,000 people could live in the space currently occupied by 2 to 6 people.

Living in a place shouldn't grant you the right to obstruct progress forever just because you got there first. In the same vein, just because you got somewhere first also shouldn't mean you get unlimited profit potential just because... you got there first.

NGDP level targeting says during economic downturns, the government should fill the gap between the downturn and the previous economic output level (creating jobs, buying things, paying people to do things, etc). Basically, don't let an economic downturn interrupt people's lives—always give them something to do and opportunities to grow.

land value tax comes from the idea nobody should be able to "own" land, you should rent land. When there's a more profitable use for your land than you are current exploiting, you must give the land up. The UK enjoys things like 99 year leases on land instead of in the US where you "buy" land and own it until the heat death of the universe.

negative wage taxes is like basic income if you make the "negative wage limit" really high. The government pays you because you don't make enough (maybe for reasons outside your control, like all jobs you are qualified for are now done by robots).

Singapore has free computerized centralized healthcare that doesn't cost a million dollars a person-year like in the US.

Estonia lets you get something resembling a "mini passport" with no international recognition (perhaps some cross-EU identity recognition, but no residency benefits), but with legal ties to an Estonian "e-residency" so you can verify your identity online electronically (chipped smart cards verified by government records, etc).

before the Friendly AI problem has been solved.

That's like saying they aren't telling us how to make time travel because the grandfather paradox hasn't been solved.

They aren't withholding some unique secrets of the universe because we have unsolved problems... they are just slightly crazy people who can turn a phrase and pivoted that ability into an endless series of "grants" as to avoid needing to get real jobs contributing to GDP.

The output of their work is amusing, but just because someone runs around with veracity of purpose doesn't mean what they say is part of a ground truth reality.

Read it for enjoyment, but don't read it for belief.

If Tesla employees can address individual cars with no oversight or audit trail or "2+ man rule" in place, that's a huge lapse of professional responsibility.

We need something like Certificate Transparency to log ACL hits for all these "connected, but proprietary" things in our lives.

Do we have any guarantees a rogue tesla employee can't just tell your car to drive off a bridge while you're inside it?

Somewhat uncharacteristic for him.

But probably perfectly characteristic of the design firm he hired to do it for him.

holy run on sentence batman

I posted this yesterday if it helps: https://matt.sh/heroin

Would you fix a software bug by editing the code on a running server and tell yourself that you will add it to the repository later?

Absolutely yes in the right circumstances (have you seen how this website works?).

Not every service needs to be written as "scale out to a billion nodes" architecture with eight layers of checks and balances between idea to production.

We can't globally say "everybody must use a 16 step verifiable app development pipeline" when some people run 3 servers and others run 3 million.

(Plus, not all services are stateless! Redeploying stateful servers is painful—you'll be killing user experience. Updating code live on a running server while maintaining internal continuity of state can maintain sessions/caches/game-state without annoying users by kicking out of their current flows.)

access to several other acquired founders who helped us ultimately navigate

That's founder code for "we actually failed, but we know rich people, so our failure is really our success—suck it, everybody else who fails without millionaire friend safety nets."

Rarely. It's mostly a game of "i'm too chicken to make decisions on my own."

VCs love love love the joke of "We're supposed to be all about new unproven dynamic ventures and insight into the future, but we're so risk averse! lol!!!!"

Everything falls after launch. Everything.

It's relatively easy to get the "hey look over there!" viral bump, but beyond that it turns into a game of retention with ugly words like "drip campaign."

People are always interested in "new," but they need a reason to keep returning. That's what makes a business run.

(kinda like how, for movies, the opening weekend gets all the news, but not so much the 22nd weekend.)

VCR repair too.

The big thing nobody talks about (or some people even brag about) is how Tesla records your entire driving history to improve their future products. It's kinda creepy and you have no option but to obey if you want the Tesla Experience.

Other companies are trying to "catch up" in this way too like how Google Android Auto Car Integration requires manufactures allow Google Android Auto Car Integration to send live, real-time individual car performance data back to Google HQ so they can also analyze it all for their own purposes.

There's basically no legitimate reason why a 3rd party music player app requires your car to transmit real time acceleration data, sensor data, fluid levels, and seat positions back to Google.

trying to distill the activity of 7+ billion people

Yeah, it's slightly disingenuous, but we still need some models. It's like when people take the total revenue of Google and divide by the total number of Google employees (including assistants and chefs and tech support and the PMs and artists and designers and all the actual engineers too) to reach a "revenue per employee" number.

It's not perfect by any means, but anytime you divide one number by another, you get to call your result a metric (then you get to write insights about your new discovery too).

In which case accumulation of units does not imply the long-term ability to use them; instead, there will be a long-term incentive for participants to maintain a good reputation.

There's an important distinction here: the score of your peers versus the score of your government/authority.

It's possible your peers love you while your government hates you. Maybe you do great work, but are a pain to the power structure. In that case, you end up with high peer ratings, low "political office" ratings.

If the goal is "orderly citizens," then the political ratings become more viral (as in, the people you associate with get boosted or discounted based on your Official Political Office Rating) and try to reinforce people conform to how The Political Office wishes people would behave.

We can even make this local to HN. HN has secret "political rankings" on accounts to restrict the reach of people the "HN establishment" doesn't like (HI DANG), but the public vote counts are more peer-oriented rankings (which still aren't perfect because HN has 3 to 5 distinct sub-cultures fighting against each other, so a +100 from the "VCs are evil bastards" subculture in the morning gets canceled out in the afternoon once SF wakes up and you get -200 from the "VCs are genius darlings and we should all kiss their feet" subculture).

Why aren't there any traces of exponentially growing all-consuming machine civilizations anywhere?

I'm a fan of the zoo hypothesis. Everything else is just sufficiently "hidden" from observation currently. I mean, if you had a planet full of humans, would you want to talk to them?

The zoo hypothesis seems to breaks down into two underlying reasons for non-contact though: captivity vs. captivating. Either it's a star-trek like "non-interference" thing keeping us isolated for future self-directed development/destruction — or — we are just so frigging boring/hostile/dumb it isn't even interesting to consider engaging us.

(those two reasons do assume intent and purpose on the all-consuming machine civilizations, which we have zero priors for. are there clusters of grey goo out there mindlessly absorbing galaxies as they travel? are there megamind clusters trying to do... something? is this all just a simulation? will the real slim shady please stand up?)

I'm with you on this, and I logged in just to upvote your comment.

Thanks! :)

shouldn't we step back and question this Promethean effort? is feasible to stop technological progress is a separate question.

The only way to stop it would be to classify GPUs as weapons of mass destruction. But, that's a non-starter because all our fabs aren't US based, so if we restricted domestic GPU usage, then fer'ners would just use them all and create god forms in their own image.

Isn't it amusing how when people think "friendly AI," the "AI" always seems to have the motivations and personality of a 25 year old startup scene white guy living in San Francisco? What if the AI is made by a fanatic in a marginalized country? That's the "friendly-vs-not-friendly" dichotomy, but there's no way to force one way or the other (without restricting hardware access).

Over all, global capitalism doesn't really allow for holding anything back for the sake of "a better world." We stand on the broken backs of others so we, ourselves, can rise taller, thereby proving we are better than the unwashed masses. We are special individuals because we have the vision, audacity, power, to exploit the rest of the world en masse. Tremble before our bank accounts, mansions, and political connections.

then shouldn't he or she do everything they can to stop it?

Thought experiment: what if "what comes next" is better than humanity? Industrial-scale human civilization so far hasn't been great for other life on this planet.

What if "regular" apes had the forethought to kill the antecedent human mutated apes because it would eventually be bad for the planet? Would restricting advancement have been a better plan than letting new intelligence be birthed, even if it destroyed all the old ways?

The question ends up being: do we commence a Butlerian Jihad or do we admit we are imperfect meat machines and, perhaps, tens of billions of meat forms aren't ideal citizens of anything given a long enough time horizon?

The problem seems to be there are two AI tracks: practical and science fiction. Most people (especially enthusiastic novices, even well-funded enthusiastic novices) don't distinguish the difference.

The current practical approaches are all kinda non-AI stuff that's been co-opted into "AI" by marketing/branding. Nobody looks at a Toyota factory robot and screams "AI!!!" But, every day day people look at image/speech recognition and do scream "AI!!!"

In the long run, the science fiction approach is of some concern, but the trick is how long is long run here. The enthusiastic novices think fully self-aware computer brains will control the world within 3 years, but those same people also are pretty much ignorant on current research (outside of popularizing articles). They can't really tell you about any details of practical progress that could result in a chain of events between the present day and their "computational apocalypse" science fiction future.

(and other things of concern like "friendly AI" are just so silly to be... silly. we can't even make "provably friendly" people, and you expect systems more powerful than people will fall under people control? good luck with that.)

take a deep breath. slow your irrational exuberance. stay in the present. work towards a better tomorrow. the future isn't going to make itself.

And what about home owners that couldn't keep up with rising taxes after purchasing their home?

Taxes are legal obligations. If you can't afford your taxes, you don't get to keep your house.

Automatic brace insertion program with helper scripts: https://matt.sh/howto-c#_formatting

It is never an error to insert braces, and the rules for inserting braces are fully deterministic in C.

Except the go standard is awful, so a language-wide formatting requirement with bad defaults makes the language basically unusable (since programs are made to be read, not run).

The problem is: interviews shouldn't be a mini-GCSE. If I have 20 years of experience and you want to ask me about something I did 10 years ago, I probably can't reproduce it on the spot, but does that mean I'm incompetent?

The idea of "do your homework" for interviews trivializes professionals down to meaningless data points where real experience and past accomplishments are all rendered as null.