Posts by Michael Wojcik 12348 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2007
To be fair, nothing says autonomous vehicles couldn't be rented, and indeed we already have such on offer in some places.
So it's really a contest between "vehicle driven by a person that you own or rent" and "vehicle driven by a machine that you own or rent". I personally find the latter concept tiresome, but I admit arguments can be made for it. I'm not yet convinced they're compelling.
the 10mph difference works out timewise as being 8 minutes per hour
A reasonable consideration for a one- or two-hour trip, provided you can safely go 10 MPH slower than most of the surrounding traffic. In the US that's often risky – even the semis are typically cruising at or above the posted limit if they can.
For a 15-hour drive, where the difference means 17 hours instead, it's less appealing.
This is broadly correct, for the US. "Puffery" – advertising or marketing claims that would be understood as hyperbole or subjective ("the best-tasting floor polish money can buy!") by a reasonable consumer of ordinary knowledge – are not actionable under deceptive-advertising laws.
That said, there's nothing to stop the DoJ from pursuing charges; then it falls on Tesla to settle (no doubt with no admission of guilt) or try their luck in court.
And the DoJ could go after Musk personally, based on the public claims he made about Autopilot on Twitter and the like, where he was not acting in his capacity as an officer of the corporation.
I am curious about Arcan – and a bit about Durden, though after using GUIs for nearly 40 years my observation is I don't really like any windows managers except ones I've written myself, or at least hugely customized. Might get all of this running in a VM over the holidays or something, just to poke at it a bit.
If the autocomplete of Lash#Cat9 annoys me, I imagine it can't be that hard to find it in the code and turn it off. That's the point of having the source, yeah?
And of course the nice thing about UNIX and Linux is that they've always been comfortable with providing multiple "forwards", and letting users pick which ones they liked.
And here we have another one. It really doesn't matter whether I like it, or you like it, or Liam likes it. What matters is whether enough people find it to their taste to keep it viable. I'd be happy to see that happen, regardless of whether I ever use it.
Yup. And I have to say that once I've gone through every single option and setting in Visual Studio, and installed VsVim, it's pretty close to a real development environment. Just hugely bloated and slow and unstable, and lacking 95% of the command-line tools available under UNIX and Linux. And a lot less flexible. But aside from all that, it's nearly usable.
(The same is probably true of Eclipse, but I've only used Eclipse for a few hundred hours or so in total, so I've barely scratched the surface of its eccentricities.)
Autocomplete is for when you _don't_ know what you want to type. If it's someone else's code, for instance, and you didn't name the functions, or they are from libraries or foundation classes created by whole external teams of people. You didn't pick the order the parameters go in, and which parameters you must supply, in which order.
...
It's to help find what you _don't_ know because you have not memorised the thousands of function names, with a dozen parameters each. Nobody can memorise all that stuff *and they shouldn't have to*.
No, what you should do is look it up, because the documentation or (code) definition may have important information that autocomplete does not show you. Needing autocomplete is a sign that you may not understand what you're writing well enough.
Autocomplete is dangerous. I've seen more than a few bugs introduced by Autocomplete Pilots letting the IDE write code for them. It's the local version of StackOverflow.
how does touch typing fare when mixed in with plenty of arcane punctuation and, often, moving around the screen and between files rather than having a linear character flow?
Depends on the typist and actual work flow, of course. I can often touch-type most of the code I write (but of course I try to minimize how much code I write, via prefactoring and reuse and the like, because code volume contributes to maintenance cost). And I use vim as my editor, so a lot of the "moving around the screen" can be touch-typed too, with various navigation and search operations.
But I've spent decades learning to do it – I learned to touch-type (also on a manual typewriter) in school but didn't really touch-type most code until years later. And it's definitely sensitive to things like programming language and coding style, so I'm more likely to touch-type if I'm maintaining code I wrote than if I'm in someone else's, for example.
Well, it can be both, can't it? I too hate intrusive UIs, and I haven't even looked at Lash#Cat9 because realistically it won't be an option for work,1 and I have too much going on in my personal life to spend a lot of time experimenting with software on my own machines.
But I'm glad that someone's trying something a bit different. I'm not convinced that it's really all that different, since pretty much everything Liam mentions in the article seems like something I used to do routinely when I was using UNIX workstations.2 But as I said I haven't looked at it myself, and in any case, sure, let's have a UI option that makes that sort of thing a first-class operation.
It doesn't have to be for me.
1I have to run Windows natively on my work machine. Over the years I've massaged Cygwin into an acceptable environment; I'm not going to devote a lot of time to getting something else (even WSL) working. For my Linux and UNIX work, I'm ssh'ing into remote systems, most of them on another continent, so command line is the only feasible option (which is fine by me).
2It's not hard to interact with X11 and the window manager from the command line, if you run a sensible window manager. Maybe you end up writing a few windowless X11 clients to help; that's fine, libx11 is not a difficult API. And running multiple foreground text-mode programs is just "xterm -e ...".
An old machine is more likely to be used to pivot to something more interesting. Many IT-crime gangs have a bot army probing addresses for a whole collection of vulnerabilities, and there's no real incentive to remove old vulns from that, so on older machine might well turn out to be exploitable. When a bot breaks into it and notifies its C&C server, the next step will be for someone to see if anything more interesting is reachable from the compromised system – like a SCADA system, for example.
That's the danger of having old equipment on the public Internet. It's potentially a route into your private network.
If the rental market is tight, they have more to gain by remaining. Renting isn't like selling a single good; it's a largely-inflexible market with a relatively long-term income stream. Unless you have a lot of units sitting empty, there's no advantage to lowering the rent.
What the hell's a rental license? You need a quantity-restricted permit to engage in a contract?
Yes, in many jurisdictions, for the obvious reason that renting property has external social costs, so the public and state have an interest in regulating it.
Renters use public services. They may create a public nuisance, which for a remote landlord is an externality. Liability needs to be hedged with insurance. Rental properties need to be maintained to within standards (residential building codes, fire codes, etc.), and again for many landlords these are externalities. All of these things create a public interest.
If you're renting a ranch house out in the middle of nowhere, no one's going to care and no one's going to check (except maybe the IRS). But if you're renting out property in a municipality, damn right they ought to be regulating it.
For that matter, collusion can take place when determining what price to advertise, before it is published. The fact that price is later published doesn't prove there wasn't a cartel determining it in the first place.
Regulations enforcing more transparency in residential-property rental rates might help. Then renters and regulators could see if similar properties were charging different rates, how much rates increased over time, and so on.
This is exacerbating the already, short supply of low and middle income housing.
Unfortunately, in places where tourism is high, short-term rentals (mostly via that abomination Airbnb) are displacing long-term rentals, so housing for residents who can't or don't want to buy is similarly short. We see a lot of that here around the Mountain Fastness.
Clamping down on short-term rentals may help. In particular, enforcing lodging regulations increases the cost of running a short-term rental, while providing other social goods – adequate insurance, for example, and code-compliance inspections.
Indeed. The point of the Scientific Literacy movement isn't to turn everyone into scientists; it's to spread some knowledge of basic scientific ideas, and spur interest in the sciences. It's not perfect, but it's better than not making science popular and accessible to casual audiences.
The same can be said for any field, really. Give people a taste. Those with the inclination and aptitude may pursue it further; others will at least get a bit of mental exercise.
... in part because of the War on Bezels, which has caused nitwit designers to put them at the bottom of the screen, rather than the top, giving you a horrible perspective.
Though, frankly, the premise of this article baffles me. I do a lot of videoconferencing, and picture quality has never been an issue. I don't mean that it's good; I mean that it doesn't matter. Most people don't need very high resolution to interpret others' facial expressions.
There was a time when I routinely watched 200-scan-line black&white television programming, on noisy analog broadcasts. I didn't have any trouble figuring out what the actors were expressing. When I first started using videoconferencing for working, each participant's image was 320x240 with 8-bit color. It worked just as well as anything else has since.
I've been doing it for years and know just how important it is to meet customers and colleagues in person on a fairly reasonable basis.
I've been working from home for a quarter-century, and I often go years between face-to-face meetings with colleagues and customers. I have colleagues I work with daily whom I've never met in person. This has never, ever been a problem.
Different people are different.
The goal of a firm like Jasper isn't to create useless baubles for gullible tulip-traders. They want to automate the functions of marketers, graphic designers, and similar jobs, so their customers can get rid of relatively-expensive flesh units and replace them with social-media-drivel-on-demand services.
Stable Diffusion is already plenty good enough to generate things like advertisement background images, backgrounds for video games, and so forth. People are successfully selling SD-generated images as original art. We've had algorithmic generation of financial and sports news pieces for a while now, and we have ML systems that can generate competent, if unsurprising, genre fiction. Icon Publishing has been selling machine-written non-fiction books on demand for decades, at a healthy profit.
Jobs like marketing/communications, graphic design, and animation are in near-term peril. They won't all be wiped out immediately, but the market will shrink significantly. It will be harder for new writers to break into genre-novel publishing, which is where most of the money is for fiction writing. I don't see any barrier to automating the writing of most television and movie scripts, because 95% of them are already just "take a concept and run it through the Save the Cat! machine, with a final pass through the Joss Whedon Dialog filter".
The later 2020s are looking like a grim time for workers in the "creative" industries.
And, yeah, the same scythe is swinging for the less-demanding sort of programming jobs.
I take your point, but this is historically inaccurate. Most of the accused lived in Salem Village, which was a distinct settlement; the trials and executions were mostly in Salem proper. And the accusations were organic, with townsfolk accusing one another. It snowballed from a feud between two families into a general "let's get rid of anyone unusual" and then into a mini-Reign-of-Terror situation where players in the early trials were then accused themselves.
The whole thing would have been petty foolishness if it hadn't cost people their lives.
And that said, witch-hunting in the US never came close to what went on in Europe. But we took indigenous genocide and plantation slavery to a whole other level, so that's points for both teams in the horrible acts competition.
Some organizations seem to have made the "no time tracking" approach work, according to a couple of pieces I've read. You do need to continue to evaluate employees based on productivity – and we all know measuring that is difficult, though it can be done with the right sort of structure and managers who actually do the job – and you have to be willing to tell under-performers to shape up or ship out (or verify they're under-performing for a good reason and they're worth investing in).
But certainly if you're going to let people work when they feel like it, you have to give them a reason to feel like it.
It's a bizarre metric anyway. Does Lee really believe that salary reflects talent? And that salaries are directly comparable worldwide in that regard? Even within an organization, salaries are often adjusted based on local cost of living, which does not correlate to ability in any way.
I mean, the "100 top universities" metric is clearly rubbish, but at least it might sound reasonable to the hard-of-thinking. The salary thing doesn't make any sense at all.
Pedagogy will have to adapt, just as grade-school mathematics classes had to adapt to successive generations of calculators.
For example, we're going to need to shift from "write a program" assignments to "explain a program" ones. This is the programming equivalent of "show your work". Literate programming1 is one possible approach: students turn in a combination program and essay, with interwoven text and code, explaining what they've done and why.
"Flipped class" approaches – where students read or watch lecture material for homework, and work on assignments in class, individually or in groups – can also help reduce cheating, particularly if the instructor/student ratio is reasonable so instructors can spend time with each student on a regular basis.
Frankly, pretty much every academic discipline is going to need to address this. When I was last in academia doing digital rhetoric, I presented some research on machine essay generation, and pointed out that soon traditional essay assignments would be completely useless. (They already more or less are, for students with the resources to make use of "paper mills" or benefiting from the collections of papers maintained by various student organizations.) Composition long ago largely switched to a show-your-work model with students turning in multiple drafts and revising them based on peer-group and instructor feedback, and will have to continue in that direction. So will every other course of study that involves most sorts of unsupervised intellectual labor.
1Though using something less arcane and cumbersome than Knuth's WEB system. Love the guy, but he has a fondness for eye-bleeding syntax.
Well, and this is one of the major problems with grammar/usage/mechanics/style "checkers": even when they analyze text correctly, they're applying an extremely coarse and dubious set of heuristics. They can help some writers in some circumstances, but returns diminish rapidly for authors who are well-trained or attentive to matters of usage and style, or for writing situations with conventions that don't match the assumptions of the team that built the checker.
Even style guides written by human experts are problematic. Richard Ohmann's classic "Use Definite, Specific, Concrete Language" punched a hole in the style-guide concept in 1979, and most people have yet to get the memo.
Computer science degree programs are going to differ among institutions, and the current accreditation guidelines here in the US are somewhat outdated and not really suitable for ensuring program quality or results – they're more about providing a baseline and providing a bit of credibility to distinguish between real and junk degrees.
And students vary widely, and the courses of study they choose, within their degree programs, vary widely.
Baccalaureate CS degrees (in the US) don't claim to denote any particular ability to understand complex algorithms. It's a general degree in the area of computing theory, computer technology, and programming. I've known people with CS bachelor's degrees who were not computer scientists in any way but excellent software developers, and I've known others who couldn't write code worth a damn but were off to a good start in theory.
Now, it would be reasonable to hope that a CS PhD would have some facility with algorithms; but even at that level there will be considerable range, and there are plenty of research fields in CS which are not oriented to understanding algorithms.
That said, people who work in CS education and care about it – Mark Guzman, for example – are certainly in agreement that CS pedagogy needs a lot of work, and that most departments and teachers aren't paying a lot of attention to the extant research and curriculum development. Some academic fields are relatively sensitive to pedagogical concerns (in the US, at the university level, composition and ESL are examples); others are less so, prioritizing other kinds of work.
what we generally refer to as logic (e.g. propositional calculus)
I don't think that propositional logic is what most people refer to as "logic". It might be what some specialists have in mind, but the majority of the population seem to use "logic" to mean something like "conscious reasoning" but following certain patterns which include informal versions of conjunction, disjunction, and implication; and for some people other aspects of informal logic such as logical fallacies and rhetorical theory.
And propositional logic is only the tip of the logic iceberg. After that there are existential predicates (first-order logic), second- and higher-order logics, doxastic logic, modal logic (of which doxastic can be considered a particular case, though doxastic is of special interest because in itself it's a complete formal system), and so on.
is a branch of mathematics
Yes, formal logics are very definitely part of mathematics. That is, they are formal abstract systems for expressing and manipulating sentences which are tautologically equivalent.
The article did raise that possibility, though it didn't discuss it at length. I don't know if it comes up in the paper by Berger et al. (haven't read it).
This was already a problem with, for example, the simplified code fragments used for illustration in programming textbooks, which often omitted input sanitization and error checking for clarity; with open source, from which a certain type of developer would habitually crib; and with resources such as StackOverflow.
I agree, though, that more automation exacerbates the problem. The easier it is to find a solution, the less likely some developers1 are to search for a good solution.
1As always, this is a question of economics. With any sort of labor, if you want quality, you have to provide an incentive for it. That includes, on the one hand, rewarding it – often by inculcating a culture of quality so the reward is at least partly intangible – and on the other not penalizing it, for example by over-rewarding short time to completion or other naive measures of productivity.
Also having a camera on means you at least need to shower, comb your hair and have a shave, that puts you in a bit of more a working mood.
Perhaps that's what it means to you. I'm in meetings every day where most participants have the camera on (though if someone leaves it off, no one hassles them), and none of us are concerned about shaving and the like beforehand.
It's a cultural thing, and cultures differ among organizations. Here camera use is casual, and when we have them on, it's generally because we all know one another (even when we've never been in the same place physically) and are collegial. I wouldn't particularly mind getting polished for videoconferences myself, but due to time differences my meetings are often 7AM or earlier local time, and I prefer not to disturb my wife's sleep.
never make a phone call
What, and starve? Around here, that's the only way to order takeaway, if you want it to be ready in a decent amount of time after you arrive to pick it up.
(Some area restaurants have some ancient website built by one of those "we create websites for restaurants!" companies that features the menu in a barely-readable form, a phone number for the restaurant, and information about open hours which probably wasn't correct even when the site was created 15 years ago. I don't believe any of them have online ordering, and I wouldn't trust it if they did.)
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