dogprez

Ignoring the AI question. I wish people could have put this much thought and energy in considering our doom before the AI question brought this all up. As it stands now, the future without AI seems pretty doomed too.

Wouldn't it just be better to make a new shell that has this syntax?

I think you are considering RT journalism, it's not. It is not free to report fact. If it were free to do so I'd agree with you that it is valuable for understanding and for having dialog with Russia. We know RT is not free because of the crackdown of real Russian independent media. The way RT is now just reflects the desires of an autocracy whose stated goals are in opposition to the world order and whose tools are misinformation, violence and terror. Giving them a platform is not helpful.

Yea, I read through this thread a bit. I think everyone is mixing up skills and "thinking and reasoning". A game that is exercising a skill will be transferable to other times you use that skill, like mental math from Monopoly. However "thinking and reasoning" isn't a skill. I'm not sure how you improve them but I imagine it's a factor of [natural talent, diet, sleep, gut fauna, cardiovascular health, diversity of experience, self-esteem, sense of security, etc].

I thought the idea that games can improve thinking and reasoning was debunked? Dedicating your life to chess doesn't mean they can put you in the general's chair and you'll be a military genius, just means you'll be good at chess.

But emulating the CPU is probably the least interesting part about writing an emulator for a video game system. Writing the other hardware components and getting them to work together is the interesting part imo. I'd say skip writing your own CPU emulator and just start with someone else's.

Right, your point was that legislation is superior to unions. My point is that unions can lead to legislation, as was the case of the 40hr workweek.

Right, it's my understanding that the situation described in the article can exist for SWEs as well. It matches what was described to me from a SWE at a subsidiary of Alphabet. In their words they were doing the same work at a fraction of the pay without an avenue for conversion since they were engaged through a 3rd party.

Bay Area SWE from Flint, MI here.

> on paper it seems like a good idea to fight the rich company to give employees a bigger share of the profit

That is explicitly a non-goal of this union.

> Just look at what unions did to the people of Detroit

Let's say for argument's sake that the UAW wasn't formed, the Great Sitdown Strike just lead to policy changes (hard to imagine after how they were treated). Do you think the auto companies would have been as successful without the quality of life the UAW afforded its members? Anecdotally, my uneducated grandfather immigrated to the states for one of those jobs. Do you think that the auto companies still wouldn't have moved production overseas to maximize their profits? Even without the UAW, a job in Mexico still paid a fraction of an American job in the 70s.

> Also they can leave

If your gripe is that your work is now being used in a context you find ethically wrong (like Project Maven), moving companies doesn't solve the problem. Voting with your feet doesn't make any positive change, it just leaves you at the least problematic workplace.

> Twisting the arm of the boss to give you more, when has that worked in the long run ?

I don't know. I guess when it resulted in political action like the 40hr 5dy workweek? Honestly, I don't know though.

I can't speak the the intent of the union in the article but after all of those things you listed you might want to know that your colleagues are getting treated fairly as well. For example, how would you feel about all your benefits if you learned there were contractors that did your same job that didn't have access to the same benefits that you have and haven't been given an avenue to earn those benefits? (https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2019-11-08...)

Or, how would your feel if the product you worked on was being produced with slave labor? (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/29/lens-te...) Would it be enough to just say, "I'm not ok with that, I'll work somewhere else." or do you think you should have some say about how your work is used?

> The other challenge with unions, is that while one can succeed it leaves everyone else that is outside of the union at other companies completely unprotected.

The 5 day 40 hour workweek was championed by the trade unions but everyone got the advantage of that eventually.

Neat, I didn't know about seL4. Can you point me to how they define the proof for it?

This might be worth checking out: https://flutter.dev/showcase Also this if you want to dig deeper: https://flutter-dashboard.appspot.com/benchmarks.html

That's not a Google only problem. It's a cultural problem in Silicon Valley (ex drive to disrupt) and America (ex not respecting stay-at-home parents).

See the artwork of Mierle Laderman Ukeles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mierle_Laderman_Ukeles

You may find it interesting that in Finland academics doesn't start until age 7. They emphasize play / arts in preschool and by age 15 outperform most countries. What has this child lost by encouraging academic pursuits at such a young age? Will they ever recover, and what was at risk by having them wait a few years?

source: https://www.npr.org/2014/03/08/287255411/what-the-u-s-can-le...

My guess at a computer analogy: Start program -> Delete program -> Crash process -> Resurrection of process impossible.

The program being the bootstrapping mechanism that is present in a baby's brain. The process being consciousness.

Even if the bootstrapping mechanism was still present in the brain, we might not know how to call it and even if we did we would lose everything that was in memory at the time of the crash.

Reminds me a bit of the story of Charles de Gaulle. A war hero, a powerful man of his time that overstayed his welcome when the world changed around him.

I was given advice in 2001 not to study CS because I was too much of a people person. Good thing I didn't take advice at that age.

I think the mismatch is that I never developed websites, think games, media tools, developer tools. Anytime there was a dependency on a web component I was using a cloud service, external or internal. Internal cloud services were operated by different BU's like a separate business. Software was distributed via boxed CD or 3rd party web stores. I've never looked into the eyes of someone that configures routers or even heard them mentioned in all my years. They were always essentially in a different company.

I've worked for a Fortune 500 company for the past 5 years, still nope.

The article is lost on me too. ~15 years professional experience as a software developer and I never had to deal with an "Operations" team. My understanding is that it's the people that would be doing Amazon's job if you were trying to not use AWS or some other cloud service?

"Devops" means not fighting with those people??? haha

Same, my daughter was 1.5. The people there were really nice, playing with her while I was geeking out. Sometimes my daughter would come and sit on my lap to watch what I was doing. It's really a special place and a very fond memory.

Or they are true but we are the first to reach this technology level.

'Lingua franca' is a Latin borrow phrase that literally mean "Frankish Tongue". It has a specific meaning and nuance in English, it doesn't mean Italian:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca

Did you get a chance to read the Atlantic's "The Birth of a New American Aristocracy?" That's one of the paradoxes of inequality: as inequality increases, the value of your money decreases. It also increases the anxiety of the rich as the fall from their lofty perch is more dramatic.

It might be possible, but is it a future you want to live in? How do you want to spend your time, effort and money, fighting it or preparing for it?

I aspire to write a novel at some point despite the fact I haven't done much writing. When I did try to write prose I found it was much more different that writing emails for work. With email I obsess about being clear and concise, editing the same few lines over and over again. Everything I read about writing, like Stephen King's On Writing, suggest you need flow and to create a rough draft in order to get anything good. So, in order to get perfection you have to (temporarily) embrace imperfection.

I think they are overselling Google's contributions a bit. It was more "Web 2.0" that shook Microsoft's dominance in tech. Google was a big curator and pushed state-of-the-art. Google was built on a large network of commodity hardware, they were able to do that because of the Open Source Software. Microsoft licensing would have been prohibitive to such innovation. There was some reenforcement that helped Linux gain momentum in other domains like Mobile and Desktop. Googled helped curate "Web 2.0" with developments / acquisitions like Maps and Gmail. When more of your life was spent on the web, the operating system meant less and that's also why Apple was able to make strides with their platforms. People weren't giving up as much when they switched to Mac as they would have previously.

Microsoft was previously the gatekeeper to almost every interaction with software (roughly 1992 - 2002). I don't know of good books on it but Tim O'Reilly wrote quite a bit about Web 2.0.

I played around with Forth last year and found it very fun. Similar to Lisp it has a simple ruleset with which you can build up abstractions that almost look like a DSL. I'd say it sits somewhere between Assembly and C. It's like writing assembly but you don't have to worry about register assignment.

One way is if you have embedded agents and they are specifically getting instructions.