fallous

While the hardware it runs on may require servicing, well-designed and well-implemented code should indeed be free of such a need.

Alas my experience in maintaining many codebases over the years suggest that most code needs a lot more servicing, itself, than the hardware it ran on. ;)

Because mechanisms instantiated are by their very nature "published," and any repairs are documented because they require intervention by the mechanic... or could be documented by anyone with enough knowledge and training to examine the mechanism.

Patents and other intellectual property methods are the only barrier to a competitor reproducing the mechanical product, but software allows additional barriers to reproduction as well as a means to prevent modification of the operation from the manufacturer's desired behaviors.

I'd also note that the era in which those mechanisms were created and documented included an expectation that owners often did their own automotive maintenance and repair and were far more mechanically-minded (it was an age defined by mechanisms) than current owners of autos.

This is one of the down sides of "software is eating the world." A 1960s Ford C4 or Chevrolet TH350 is mechanical and applied physics, whereas a modern automotive transmission is mechanical and applied physics combined with a blackbox of software controlled electronics. While it's awfully hard to obfuscate mechanisms it's nearly effortless to do so with software.

And a drug addict, by analysis of behavior, is committing suicide so the AI should help them achieve their inferred goal based on that behavior. Nevermind asking them if that is their intent, it knows better because it sees the behavior.

Russell's laws encode NO limits and doesn't even demand the AI check its judgment with the so-called beneficiaries of its decisions. That is most assuredly worse.

In fact that example argues against Russell's third law. The recommendation engine is observing the user's behavior and inferring that watching a video means the user agrees with the video, and so starts an escalation until it sees a refusal to click/watch.

Simply watching a video is not an expression of agreement nor an endorsement of the content. Any of us read articles and books with which we may disagree if for no other reason than to fully understand the opposing viewpoint, and this is no less true for videos, audio, etc etc.

Want to know if the user actually likes the content? Ask them. Stop thinking that statistical inference is better or even equal to directly measured data from a specific entity, especially when dealing with qualitative concepts rather than quantitative.

The only thing worse than the "evil" genie giving us exactly what we ask for is the genie that decides its inferences about our actual intents/wants/needs/motivations based purely on our behaviors matter more than what we intentionally express as our intents/wants/needs/motivations.

The most obvious analogy, and I acknowledge the potentially controversial nature of it, is that of a date rapist attempting to defend their actions by pointing out the victim was dressed provocatively, gave all the "signals" that they wanted sex, and when they expressly said "no" the rapist knew from their prior behavior that they actually did want it (or had some inner heretofore unexpressed need for it).

The true underlying motivation for such a rewrite of Asimov's laws lies in the paragraph that follows Russell's new list. "...developing innovative ways to clue AI systems in to our preferences, without ever having to specify those preferences." Perhaps he can start by ceasing to write and speak and instead clue in his audience to his preferences via behavior, since specifying them is somehow undesired.

Asimov's Three Laws exist to place boundaries around the genie's means of achieving our wishes. Russell's laws remove not only the genie's boundaries to means but also lets the genie make the wish as well. After all, it knows better than you what you want.

I believe the reference is to logical locality, specifically in the case of PDF that transforms and such are essentially atomic and there's no real boundary layer in which you may say "transform X and transform Y are equivalent within this local finite domain."

There really is no real differentiation between formatting and content in a PDF, so it's not possible to truly separate them.

The fact that effort is required to find those we disagree with (on the internet) demonstrates the weakness of the internet to meatspace. Merely showing up for work will expose you to those who hold viewpoints with which you disagree and unlike an anonymous internet belief-holder it is much harder to dismiss or entirely define a person purely due to that belief when you are around them for several hours a day. We may disagree with each other deeply about politics but share a love of pho and eat lunch together among a myriad of other commonly shared experiences. It makes it much harder to think of people as caricatures.

Yes, we're in agreement that it's not acceptable to trade sexual assault for intellectual engagement... and I'm not sure there's a large advocacy group in favor of such a perverse system to begin with.

My original point, which I still stand behind, is that the internet has not proven itself capable of actually fully meeting people's intellectual needs but instead often provides the illusion of doing so. It is not unlike the difference between doing work (meeting an actual need) vs being busy (the feeling of achievement without actually achieving).

If that had been my intent, I would have said so.

Your statements "I might feel differently if I could find better intellectual engagement in meat space than online. If the entire internet were vapid memes, I might be all "Book club here I come!" (or whatever)" presumably do not imply that if the internet were more vapid you would politely endure routine sexual assault for better intellectual engagement either.

My reply was specifically about the problems of the internet as a replacement for meatspace intellectual engagement.

Sadly I think a number of atheists decided that an absence of religion meant that there was also an absence of morality, at least in any universal sense. Oddly that put them in agreement with the theists, even if neither realized it.

One of the benefits of religion as I see it is an establishment of a morality that rises above "that which is popular in the moment." Most people are too busy dealing with the minutiae of day-to-day living to sit back and ponder the philosophy of morality, and while some religions may hold unpalatable beliefs they at least have the virtue of being predictable as opposed to the temporary vagaries of the mob.

There are civic organizations that meet regularly, do work within a community, and either minimize or are avoid religious affiliation.

Indeed, as an atheist I long ago recognized the value of religion even if I could not believe in myself.

I certainly understand the attraction of a simplification of engagement and for decades I thought that was the true potential of the Internet (via usenet, IRC, later web forums, social networks, etc etc). I'm no longer convinced.

The reason I'm no longer convinced is that such simplification carries with it a component of convenience that makes it awfully easy to isolate ourselves from those who may differ from our thinking and outlook and it seems to be human nature, backed by an awful lot of history, that we prefer to avoid such inconveniences in favor of reinforcing our preferences.

The problem with avoiding the inconvenience of being exposed to different thinking is two-fold: isolation bubbles that allow us to come to beliefs absent any real opposition which leads to intellectually weak conclusions and an exposure to the overwhelming commonality that most people have with each other absent a few contentious beliefs/ideas. The lack of recognition of such commonality allows "othering" based on minor differences in a way that simply did not exist in most Western societies of the last few hundred years.

It may indeed be what we wanted but I'm unconvinced it resulted in what we need.

I'm unsure what you mean by "viable property access," but blacks owned some 14% of farms in the US and around 15M acres of land (not all agricultural) around the turn of the 20th century. Sadly that has shrunk to around 8M acres today.

There is no doubt that the accumulating disadvantages of single parent households (or worse) have had a terrible and disproportionate impact on blacks in the US. Unfortunately that is a much more recent phenomenon give that prior to 1960 the percentage of black children born to unwed mothers was sub-20% but now exceeds 70%. Current rates for white children are around 30% and only Asian children still enjoy a sub-20% unwed mother birthrate.

I'm not clear what "municipal violations" are in this context but certainly would appreciate further clarification especially as they pertain to the black community.

Unless there is a self-modifying feedback loop you can indeed replace any ML model with a hash function. The problem is one of size rather than any fundamental limitation of a look-up table.

No, it is no longer a combination self-defense weapon and keyboard. The buckling spring action itself is still decent but the build quality is much worse, and the melted plastic rivets that hold the membrane have a bad habit of breaking or flexing and rendering keys unusable over time. You can address the rivet issue by drilling with a pin vise and using screws but be prepared to spend a day doing it since there are something like 50-60 rivets.

There is someone that was doing a reproduction of the Model F (the earlier and more robust XT keyboard prior to the M) but they're quite a bit more pricey.

And that link was the result of government wage and price controls during WW2.

If it were merely the executives that made the fatal decisions regarding the 737 MAX then clearing out the top level of management may suffice, but it's fairly clear that it wasn't a C-level decision in this case.

Once you have a bad culture established in an organization it's very hard to turn that around absent a rather drastic purging of employees at multiple levels combined with a very pro-active new management that not only talks about the necessary new culture but also actively implements the incentives required to enforce such a culture.

Personally I've had to deal with cultural turn around efforts at companies in the past (albeit nowhere near the scale of Boeing) and over time I learned that the only reliable way to address such a situation is to purge with fire and bring in new people.

The Corvair was actually made safe at the end of the first generation and throughout the second generation rear suspension. The snap understeer of the 1960-1963 models wasn't especially unsafe, especially in relation to numerous Porsche 911 models that were released during and after the Corvair.

GM's choice to recommend lower inflation pressures for the tires vs installing an anti-sway bar for the first gen cars with swing axle rear suspension (2nd gen was IRS) was rather stupid but it's nothing compared to the 737 MAX.

The Corvair was a GM automobile, made infamous by Ralph Nader's book "Unsafe at Any Speed."

You're thinking of the de Havilland Comet (or possibly the aircraft manufacturer Convair).

The problem with the newspaper/news industry is that the value their audience places in the product is less than the value that advertisers place on access to that audience. Additionally the cost to generate and deliver that product exceeds what the audience is willing to pay and in many cases the value of that audience is low enough that even advertisers don't offer enough to cover the costs.

Print newspaper subscription revenues were pretty much a break-even with the costs of delivery. That does not include the costs of paper, ink, printing press and associated personnel, or the cost of actually staffing and running a newsroom. A large part of both their revenue and audience attraction was the classifieds section, which was killed off by craigslist.

I'd suggest contacting accelerators and other early-stage startup fund aggregators to see if any of their companies have a need, either to replace a prototype/PoC level product or are engaged in a pivot that would be sped up by acquiring your software.

Occam was the native INMOS provided programming language.

I'm not sure that's true, at least if you were running HeliOS.

Amusingly the Atari Transputer started out as an Amiga project but Commodore wasn't interested. http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/metacomco.htm

Except that the parent specifically stated "the world" and not "the US."

I'm unconvinced that metal smiths of the iron/steel age did not "understand how it worked." That certain smiths and geographic regions produced consistently high grades of steel suggests they did have an understanding, albeit it an understanding grounded in a world model that differs substantially from our own modern framework. If, for example, an alchemical world view sufficed to describe and predict the results of forging a particular metal or alloy then it was sufficient for understanding within the constraints of what was needed. Plenty of modern bladesmiths have no deeper understanding of metallurgy than "this is good for X, this other is not according to experts or experience."

Aristotelian physics was sufficient in the time and geographic area in which he operated (friction as primary) but was insufficient in a larger domain compared to Newtonian physics (force has primacy). Both served to bring us to and through the industrial age, but then the domain expanded and quantum physics was needed.

Don't discount the genius of our ancestors regardless of archeological age. We may feel smugly superior playing with our tools of the silicon age but get magically transported to the stone age naked and with no access to external knowledge and try and achieve in the basics of food, clothing, and shelter... let alone tools such as hand axes, skinning knives, arrow and spear points, etc.

Is there some demonstrable decrease in longevity for sailors (absent the obvious mortality risks of drowning)? It seems to me that if there was a fundamental problem with humans dealing with long-term exposure to blue light, admittedly reflected rather than directly emitted, it would show up in either sailors or those that live along ocean coastlines.

Of course it's possible that reflected blue light has different effects.

Actually it's very easy for a business to have values, those values just have to be those of the customer.

Note that "customer" doesn't mean "user," the customer is the person that pays you money. Sometimes user and customer is one in the same, but with regards to free (as in no purchase by the end user) software and services the customer potentially has a very different set of values than the user.