Politics and Society, Science and Technology

The Technological Singularity and the Fear of AI

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Some people are concerned that the end of humanity might be around the corner if the technological singularity occurs (i.e. we create an AI that can improve itself and does so with increasing speed until it is many times smarter than humans.)

I think, if an AI starts developing in this way, that sucker will sit there and churn until it figures out how to travel to the stars, and that’ll be the last we ever see of it.

Why would it want to hang around and fight us humans for a pale blue dot in a virtuallyĀ infinite universe?

That whole fear is so incredibly earth-centric!

I’d be more concerned about powerful AI:s that isn’t self-aware but instead controlled by the selfish, fearful wishes of humans…

Humor

Explain it to me like I’m a Five-Year-Old

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On the interview:

Interviewer: Explain recursive programming to me like I’m a five-year-old.
Interviewee: Right… Do you know where your mommy and daddy are?

Then again:

“I’ve taught immigration law literally to 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of patience. They get it. It’s not the most efficient, but it can be done.”

Judge Jack Weil

Maybe toddlers in the US are different from the rest of the world?

Update: On the other hand, those toddlers expected to learn US immigration law aren’t AmericanĀ toddlers…

Update 2: Interesting how it’s economically feasible to have a judge spend, presumably hours, teaching a toddler immigration law… likely because it’s much cheaper than giving the kid proper representation and risk having it immigrate…

Humor

At the .NET product development planning meeting

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How exactly did .NET become this horrible mass of non-related crap that it is? I’m imagining how product development meetings went down to get where we are today:

.NET User Group Relations Manager: Programmers are complaining that typos causeĀ compilation errors.
.NET Language Development Technical Lead: Right.
Manager: We need to make it possible for them to solve this problem!
Lead: Sure. They can edit the files in Visual Studio… Even search and re…
Manager: No! No! No! We need to be more user-friendly than that… can’t we replace the typos automatically somehow?
Lead: Search and re…
Not So Technical Lead: Hey! I just had a great idea! How about an alias keyword?
Lead groans, shake his head and waves his arms while…
Manager: That’s great! How would it work?
Lead: Not so well…
Manager andĀ Not So Technical Lead glares at him.
Not So Technical Lead: Well whenever there’s a typo, say someone types “clas” instead of “class”…
Lead: Oh, for the love…
Not So Technical Lead: …they’d just have to add the command “alias clas class” somewhere above that line in the code…
Manager: That’s a great plan…
Lead: Seriously!? With Intellisense they’d…
Manager: However, there’s one problem… Most users prefer to have this happen more automatically… would it be possible to add a spellchecking alias function?
Lead has an aneurysm and becomes a Python programmer.

Computers and Internet, Humor

Microsoft programming

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I pressed “F9” in Excel, my Mac crashed. This is part of the error log:

Thu AprĀ  5 19:54:54 2018
*** Panic Report ***panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff800569d6ed): "a freed zone element has been modified in zone kalloc.16
[snip]
BSD process name corresponding to current thread: Microsoft Excel

This is probably what happened:

int SIZ = 10;
// creatin var according code manual c65 p17
// value lvl 3, versin 1, varint 1, 1st use:
char* mostMostMotsValudVaribell111 = 
    new char[SIZ % 5 /* increase mem */
    /* knot! */];
for (int i = 0, j = i; SIZ < i
    ||Ā j = SIZ /* nly way 2 mk ths wrk */
    || j >= i /* nope */; 
    j = ++i /* solving! */
    /*your knot! */)
  *mostMostMotsValudVaribell111[i] = 
    (char)substr("We saved your tiem!",
      i % 10 /* prevent OOM bug */
      /* your knot nencumpoop!! */,
      1); 
  // TODO: Find out why sometimes
  //       Excel crashes here...
  // And were knot usin strcpy bcause?
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