putzdown

Hm, there's a lot to it. Maybe the best way to do this is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style of answer.

Do you want to know about...

1) the incredible complexity of MMO development and why nobody wants to make an MMO (though everybody thinks they do)? 2) the origin of Ultima Online as a small, skunkworks project that led to extremely awkward core engineering? 3) the even more awkward munging together of the Ultima IX and Ultima Online teams that led to a suddenly massive team trying to ship a massive game in six months (and succeeding!)?

Pick one.

As someone has said, the quality of your resume in the game industry (or film industry, I'm told) is only as good as the last game you worked on. Ultima Online was an attention getter for employers for many years; to a certain extent still is. That's unlike most games that are forgotten after a year or two: there are still a lot of old UO fans whose brains were pumped full of dopamine by this thing and will not let them forget it.

On the other hand, UO burned me on game development worse than any other game I ever worked on (though I have kept working on games since then). It was a miserable project. So the effect on the resume was good; the effect on the soul was awful. I never worked on another MMO again and never, ever would.

I was there on the UO team. Fun fact: this server closet also gained an optical scanner as its security system, due I think to the generosity/love-for-toys of Richard Garriott. The optical scanner didn't work very well, and was way overkill, but it was super neat. We all felt like spies. Despite actually being geeks.

I paid for it because it's valuable and deserves payment. I get paid for doing work in which I use it. I want its maker to continue to thrive and sustain it (a wish, I admit, that has not panned out as expected; development on Sublime Text is incredibly slow). All ethical logic says I should pay and so I did.

What makes you think that "nobody" pays for Sublime? Perhaps you mean, "I'm using this essential tool without paying for and I'd like to believe that lots of other people are also cheating its maker and would they please give me some rationalizations I can use to make myself feel better?" What's the question exactly?

The argument would be more compelling from a more compelling writer. The second sentence, "It’s one of the pieces of advice that I have always completely disregarded, as being obviously wrong..." contains a comma that hasn't appealed to the English eye since Jane Austen and is in any case unnecessary. Physician, heal thyself.

Oh, brother. The level of naivety behind these kinds of ambitions and speculations would seem impossible if it weren't so commonplace. There's a strange assumption afoot that technology—in this case, AI programming—can go anywhere and solve any problem. Show people an image or movie of what humanoid robots might be like, and their imagination soars. It must be conscious! It must have feelings! It must make moral judgments!

But where in any speck of the universe apart from minds do we see anything like moral feelings? And where in any speck of the universe have we ever seen any indication that minds in the full sense of the word consist entirely of machines or material? Until we understand what conscious minds are we will certainly never create machines that have them. And the assumption that if we just make a machine or program complex enough, a mind will magically pop into being, is amusing science fiction at best and science-become-religion at worst.

"Experts" should stop trying to make machines moral and see if they can make them open my garage door reliably.

It's true that C/C++ will never die. Not everyone loves them, but they're both good languages and they both have their place. Part of that place is due to mere tradition, mere established-ness, but part of it is real merit in terms of speed and directness.

It's true that Rust aficionados tend to come across as religious zealots. Most "up and coming" language advocates do. This is a case where zealotry is understandable and maybe necessary. When you've got a good thing that's an underdog in a world ruled by the familiar, the status quo, zealotry is the only way to break through the complacency.

It's also true that between awkward English, poor structure, and a lack of rigor in argumentation, this article comes across as drum-banging rather than thoughtful. I'd like to see an article that respects Rust, respects C/C++, and offers a measured, well-argued case for how they compare and what their prospects are in the long term when "establishedness" becomes less relevant (i.e. when Rust, through becoming more widespread, becomes less hampered by not having a large community or job base).

You know, there are some problems that are simply unsolvable. Star Trek-style teleportation, I'm inclined to think, will never happen.

I think "true" AI of the sort described in this article is, likewise a pipe dream. Not in a 100 million years of scientific effort could we create the hardware and software necessary to do this. If you think otherwise, that's because you have an enduring and overriding faith in the power of science to overcome all barriers and achieve all goals. But on what basis could you place that faith? Sure, science is generally good at solving problems and advancing technology, but there are some "technologies" that are simply not attainable: indeed, not even clearly definable.

I think that deep AI of this kind is one of those. We think we know what it would mean for a computer to think like a person. It's not so clear that we do. Given that we deeply don't understand how we ourselves not only think, but also feel, want, assess, moralize, and experience, we're unlikely to produce thinking machines.

"Ah, but the Power of Science, may it be praised forever!" you say. "Science will help us to understand how we understand!" Yeah, maybe, nah, I don't think so. Just look at the construction itself. It's loopy. "Understand how we understand"? I doubt it's possible for any instrument to ever really comprehend itself; in other words, for any thinker to ever think accurately about how it thinks.

We should keep AI research within the realm of observable, measurable, useful utilities. "Comprehension" of any kind... it's never going to happen.

There I've said it. Now roast me at the stake, O ye of great faith.

Your twenties are the age of proving yourself. But this is a self-defeating goal: a person worthy of the respect and success you yearn for doesn't need them as badly as you do.

Your thirties expand and narrow your world: expansion into parenting (for many) and to richer relationships, if you can survive them, with spouses. But now you know your limits, and the sky is no longer it. There's a contraction of options, but the few options you have grow deeper.

By forty you know you have nothing to prove or, contrariwise, you've proven just how limited you are. You've made your bed and you're lying in it. For many this is a crisis and they struggle to break free, but there's no escaping it: you're older. You feel your own age in your mind and body (knees? back? eyes?) truly for the first time. But once you get over the shock, you realize that you're still young enough. You also realize, if you've stayed at the hard work of marriage and parenting and building skills and opportunities for a career, that you've got a lot to be confident about. You're humbler, but more powerful and capable, than ever.

I haven't reached 50 yet so I have to stop there.

My 16-year old son started driving a few months ago. I can identify with the gosling's parents.

"Managers should, on the whole, charge more than the value they add." But wouldn't that, trivially, make every managed fund always and inevitably less desirable than every unmanaged fund (assuming they aren't for other reasons)?

If I agreed that edible insects were a novelty today I might be persuaded that they'll be mainstream tomorrow. Since I believe that edible insects are a source of revulsion to most Westerners (at least) today, I'm doubtful that they'll be mainstream tomorrow. There's a general principle of argumentation here: if you want me to believe your apodosis, make sure we're on the same page with your protasis.

It's nice to know that people who fixate on making money not by building useful or beautiful things but by gaming the system are having a hard time too. I've seen enough obnoxious Acai Berry spam to know there must be money there. I'm thankful that the money was short-lived.

A pet peeve: The author sets his story "many years ago at Zynga." "Many years ago" speaks to me of long years past; like, decades—surely at least a decade. But Zynga was founded relatively recently, in 2007. Why do people in the tech industry tend to talk about what is really a few years ago as if it were ancient eons past? Is the author simply so young that < 8 years seems like "many years" to him?

It's a mistake to judge the actions of the past by the perceptions of the present.

Should we bomb civilians? No. Was the bombing of civilians a commonplace and accepted strategy in WWII? Yes.

So who is right--our present judgment of how civilians fit into warfare or the then-judgment of how civilians fit into warfare?

That is, I think, a reasonable and important question. The article's error is to assume that it knows the answer, perhaps even not to realize that the question is there to be asked or that it haunts the whole discussion. This oversight causes the author to write with pain, confusion, and a sense of indignation and to try to convey this pain, confusion, and indignation to us. Those of us who easily agree with the author's ethical perspective will comfortably join in the drum-beating and cry-rallying. But those who recognize that different times and cultures and situations raise real and serious questions about our perception of ethics will be slower to judge the past.

I'm thankful that we live in a time when we can tread carefully in how we wage war and can work hard to avoid civilian casualties. I agree that wherever possible, civilians--even enemy civilians--should be protected from violence. Killing innocents--even enemy innocents--is wrong. But I don't assume that every time is like ours. If you want to convince me that the bombing of Tokyo (or Dresden or anywhere else) is wrong, convince me that it was wrong by the lights of the people who did it, not be the lights of people who can sit comfortably in their air conditioned offices seventy years later, tapping our opinions into softly glowing screens.

I confess I've never paid much attention to GPL, and when I think about this I find one particular reason. I don't understand the harm. What bad thing happens when the GPL is not obeyed? I think I understand that the answer is that your generously donated code (Christoph's in the article) may then be taken into private hands and used to benefit a commercial company. Is that the harm? But if so, what's the harm? You donated your code, didn't you? I'm asking in all sincerity: what specific asset or benefit have you lost when someone takes your GPL code and uses it in their commercial product?

The article seems to get upset about this event: "They took Christoph's code from Linux and modified it to work with their own kernel without releasing source code of the resulting complete work." So that's the harm? But how is that harmful? How does that hurt Christoph or anyone else?

Perhaps the answer is: "Christoph worked so hard on it, and gave such expertise and so much time, and now his work is providing benefit to others with no further benefit to himself." I would certainly agree in general that if you work hard on something and someone else steals your work and benefits from it instead of you, then this is a clear and deplorable harm. But if you give your work away so that people benefit from it in general, then you have agreed that your sole benefit is not at issue and that you don't expect compensation for the work. If someone then uses the work for their own financial benefit, or modifies it without giving you the changes back, what has that deprived you of? Surely that's not taking away anything that would have been coming to you had they not done it. Is it?

Where's the harm?

"I think most of us, including my math-phobic Facebook friends, would find the second version easier to follow and understand." I guess I'm in the minority. I preferred the words (though the translation was a bit ungainly).

It's horrifying to me that such a beautiful piece of real-time rendering should be marred by herky-jerky camera movement. Please, people: life is too short to use gamepads to control first person games when you don't have to (i.e. on a desktop). Get a mouse+WASD going, crank up the mouse smoothing if it suits the mood of the piece (as it would here), and give us an elegant viewpoint to match the elegant environment.

Articles like this sadden me deeply. There are too many Java programmers who are misinformed about the merits of their language and the supposed weaknesses of other languages—especially C++. I've worked extensively with Java and C++ for nearly twenty years, so I know the ins and outs of each. I have never understood why people would say that the performance of Java has "caught up" with C++. It's not even close. When you use Java, you don't use it for speed. You want C++ for that. As for safety, C++ has made major strides in the last few years and is now, by virtue of features like std::shared_ptr<>, as safe as you want it to be. But that leads us to "simplicity." There's no question that Java wins here. C++ is an incredibly complicated language—a federation of languages, as Scott Meyers says. The benefit of C++ is that it can (as of C++11, anyway) marry both extreme speed and excellent safety—but to do so you either have to really know what you're doing or abide by a strict subset of the language. Java holds you to a stricter subset to begin with. There's a loss of power but a gain in simplicity.

Of course neither language is terribly safe as compared with a modern functional language, but that's not on the post author's radar.

Frankly, if I were choosing a set of languages to work with now I would not choose Java and C++. I'd choose C++ and Haskell, or some such highly pure language. Java provides a "blue collar" level of safety, but I find in general that the gains over modern C++ in this area are not worth the costs. If I really want a clearly safer language than C++ (or C), I want something a lot safer (and, preferably, faster) than Java.

But those whose careers are tied to Java will keep beating these drums. Sad.

Live and let live, people. [Programmers are trees.](http://www.jeffwofford.com/?p=915)

Or possibly anti-eugenics, right? "Smart people are getting together to breed more smart people, and that's unfair, so let's bolster the smart people who became that way...uh, magically... (and maybe put down the smart dynasties while we're at it)." At least that's how it reads to me.

It uses "brains" and "intellectual capital," which I think can be comfortably glossed as "intelligence."

I find this article rather bizarre. The opening paragraph sounds a note that the rest of the article fails to pick up. It seems to me newsworthy that so many of the presumed candidates for 2016 are attached to past presidents, and "aristocracy" in that sense is definitely worrying and worth public discussion. But that's not the subject of the article.

The subject of the article is the privilege ("aristocracy" even) of intelligence. The thesis is that intelligent parents beget intelligent children, and since intelligence tends to beget success and wealth, intelligence represents a sort of inheritable good, a "fortune," in effect, handed down through family lines. Since all such inherited benefits undermine equality (the claim goes), they are a societal evil and should be combatted. The article suggests that the best way to combat them is to promote the less-intelligent or the intelligent-without-parentage. This is soft-gloving the issue; if inherited intelligence really is a societal evil, surely holding down those who are intelligent would also be a valid strategy.

This is a wonky argument at best. A few of the holes:

In what way is this situation new? If the inheritance of intelligence gives a unfair advantage to the heirs, when in all of human history was this ever not a source of inequality?

Surely inequality (in this abstract sense) is not such a universal, unmitigated evil that it must be fought everywhere it appears. People are in fact different; some people have advantages; some of these advantages are inherited. Where's the evil, the danger, in that? "Equality" in the sense that democracies embrace and fight for has never been taken as encompassing personal traits. If I'm beautiful and my parents are beautiful, should I hide my face in shame in a democratic nation? If I'm a great pole vaulter and so was my mother, should I hide my skill or contribute extra funds to support the training of weaker pole vaulters? The article misunderstands the notion of equality and, consequently, misidentifies the "danger" or "unfairness" arising from differences in people's abilities.

This is no innocent error. If we truly believed, as a society, that smart/beautiful/talented/gifted people posed a danger to society, represented a form of inequality, and formed an "aristocracy," we would be motivated to perpetrate the grossest sort of manipulations (at best) and atrocities (at worst) to equalize them with us ordinary folk. The result would be horrific, evil, and destructive to the utmost, not only for those unfortunates who were subjected to "equalization" but also for society itself.

Attack the privileged, if you must, when their possessions or powers pose a threat to the wellbeing of members of society in general. Do not attack those who simply have great abilities, even if their parents did too, or you'll achieve nothing but spite against your own face.

It's an interesting article, but its use of "tool" is spurious. It appears in the title and is plunked down in front of us on the last line, but nowhere is the case made that dogs' greater social acceptance of humans amounts to anything like tool use. Great article; too bad about "tool."

Stuhlinger's letter expresses a basic optimism toward science that was characteristic of the modern era in general and the middle of the 20th century in particular, and which has tarnished a great deal since then. Their faith held that science has a sort of generalized power to produce good; more specifically, that given a relatively small cost investment (in terms of money, time, effort, attention, education, etc.) in scientific endeavor, a very large and concrete benefit is likely to eventually result. His story of the lens grinder captures that expectation.

Without arguing the case, I think it's fair to say that a much smaller proportion of the people in Western societies (at least) now hold this faith as strongly. The costs of modern "progress" have become more apparent over time: cures often harbor severe side effects; machines have their wastes and their dangers; knowledge that seems sure at first often proves less sure with further study. Our confidence that the costs of science are as low as we once thought they were has weakened; our confidence that the benefits are as great or as inevitable has also declined.

His argument that reapportioning money from science to humanitarian causes is not as simple, in a democratic, bureaucratic country, as it seems it should be is still as strong as it was when he gave it, if not more so.

But the underlying assumption that, "If we just do something ambitiously scientific, vastly great goods for humanity will result," is harder to sell than it was. We no longer accept that a manned voyage to Mars (for example) will result in concrete benefits for humanity in a way that is remotely analogous to the support of a lens grinder at the dawn of optics.

Proponents of space exploration must continue to both show the rest of us the concrete benefits of investment and, at the same time, limit their expectations. It will never again be like it was in the 60s and early 70s.

If the EFF thinks developers are unwise to agree to this contract, they should carefully, logically, and constantly explain to developers why that is. They should persuade developers. They should not treat the contract as if it were or should be illegal or a violation of "rights." Appeal to developers, don't petition against the contract.

Does anyone know how the support for C++11 is looking in this version? It would be pretty great if Microsoft could finally close [the gap](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2014/06/11/c-11-14-fe...) on C++11 support a mere four years after GCC and Clang completed their support for the standard. That would also give some hope that Visual Studio might have full support for C++14 in a year or two (which GCC and Clang have today). Is there an updated support chart somewhere?

Well but the key word there is "somebody." If there was a single, all-encompassing, global world government that forced all fishermen to do this, then yes, we'd have a problem. If the United States (for example) caused its fishermen to do this, then the people of the United States would be well-advised to change this law, else they'll soon be out of fish. But even if they didn't, it's still not a question of "forcing" or "rights." Fishermen would simply fish elsewhere; at great cost, perhaps, with a loss of opportunity, no doubt, but it's still a question of choice.

Yes but which Doctor Who championed hand-washing and briefly saved lives?

This is illogical and amateurish. The title of the petition claims that Apple (1) tramples free speech and (2) innovation. Yet the detailed verbiage of the complaint gives no evidence that they trample free speech, and if their contract terms trample innovation it is a matter of interpretation. Apple's developer agreement bans developers from talking about the developer agreement. A bit draconian, perhaps, but hardly a trampling of "free speech", and actually quite common within contracts generally. The other complaints are simply silly. What's wrong with Apple insisting that developers not jailbreak their devices? What's wrong with Apple approving their own security updates? And we can debate about the morality of DRM, but if you want to see the difference between a DRM-protected environment and an unprotected environment, look at the difference between the App Store and Google Play. Profitability for developers, quality of software, absence of viruses... DRM does accomplish some positive results. And whether it does or doesn't, in no sense are anyone's "rights" quashed here.

It's a contract, people. It can say whatever the parties to the contract agree it should say. If you don't agree with it, don't bang free speech drums and shout yourself hoarse about "rights." Just don't sign it.