the barrier for getting Linux to work is too high right now for a very large part of the population
My elderly (late 80s) parents have Windows on their laptops and it would be impossible for them to use it without my regular intervention. I might as well take the plunge and set them up with Linux.
So cynical … what makes you think “a startup aiming to broker paid licensing deals between publishers and AI companies” can’t be trusted implicitly?
I’m a school bus driver, and one of my weirder experiences is listening to a middle-school boy ripping on some middle-school girl for having “only” ten thousand followers.
c-suite
CEO, CTO, CFO etc. In a '90s Internet startup like the company I worked for, the “C” really stood for “clueless”.
giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases
Over-normalization is a database thing - a simple example of normalization would be a “People” table where instead of having the “Salutation” field just contain text like Mr, Mrs. etc., you have a separate “Salutations” table with all the possibilities listed and keyed with an ID (usually just a sequential number), and then the “People” table stores a Salutation ID for each entry instead of the actual text. It’s a valid and standard thing to do with database design, but it can be taken to extremes where absolutely every possible trivial thing that can be normalized is, producing an overcomplicated mess that is extremely difficult to work with programmatically.
Printing out this over-normalized mess of a database on multiple sheets of paper which are then taped to the wall is utterly useless.
How is a database a trick?
The printout is the trick - it fools the bosses into thinking you’re doing something amazing and productive when you’re really just fucking around. It only works on the technically incompetent, of which there was no shortage in '90s Internet startups (or today).
Yeah, BeOS was awesome. I remember a coworker showing it to me in 1996 - he also taught me how to wow the c-suite with giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases, a parlor trick that has served me well over the years.
As I recall, Gasse was offered something like $440 million for BeOS by Apple and he turned them down. Not sure it would have made any difference in anything by this point, but at least Objective-C wouldn’t have been littered with classes with the “NS” prefix.
Is BeOS still floating around?
They have the close, minimize and full screen buttons in the upper left corner instead of the upper right.
/s just in case.
They get taken over by sales & marketing types
Like Steve Jobs lol.
The year they both came out (1995) I was coding in Visual Basic 3. Ack.
My main experience using C++ was because I got stuck modifying an app written with Qt Creator, an utterly insane cross-platform framework that used (still uses? I dunno, only people in Finland ever used it in the first place) C++ for the under-the-hood processing and Javascript for the UI. For good measure, the application developers had modified all the C++ stuff with macros to the point where it was barely even recognizable as C++. Fortunately, it mattered not at all because the app’s customers were ISPs who just wanted a Skype clone so they could say they had one even though none of their customers ever used the damn thing.
“The band’s called Dogstar … because we’re Sirius.”
Seriously, what’s next? We’re going to talk about the keyboardist?
The one thing that stands out to me the most is that programmatic “neurons” are basically passive units that weigh inputs and decide to fire or not. The whole net is exposed to the input, the firing decisions are worked through the net, and then whatever output is triggered. In biological neural nets, most neurons are always firing at some rate and the inputs from pre-synaptic neurons affect that rate, so in a sense the passed information is coded as a change in rate rather than as an all-or-nothing decision to fire or not fire as is the case with (most) programmatic neurons. Implementing something like this in code would be more complicated, but it could produce something much more like a living organism which is always doing something rather than passively waiting for an input to produce some output.
And TBF there probably are a lot of people doing this kind of thing, but if so they don’t get much press.
Wait, chatgpt was convicted of multiple felonies?
there’s nothing left to do research.
There’s still military robots, unfortunately.
Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells.
As a programmer who has studied neuroanatomy and the structure/function of neurons themselves, I remain astonished at how not like real biological nervous systems computer neural networks still are. It’s like the whole field is based on one person’s poor understanding of the state of biological knowledge in the late 1970s. That doesn’t mean it’s not effective in some ways as it is, but you’d think there’d be more experimentation in neural networks based on current biological knowledge.
I feed my local crows peanuts every day. I really like crows, but I still find it incredibly amusing when the local bluejays - who are like 1/3 the size of the crows - chase them around and beat the shit out of them. It’s not even a numbers thing, I’ve watched a single bluejay chase off the whole family of five crows.
The crows do the same thing to red-tailed hawks whenever they show up, but it’s always five-on-one in those situations. Bluejays way more badass.
I feel like that’s the same underlying issue: The requirements are not understood upfront.
Actually on most of these failed projects the requirements of the original customer were pretty clear. But the developers tried to go far beyond those original requirements. It is fair to say that the future requirements were not well understood.
the alternative is building a prototype, which you’re allowed to throw away afterwards
Lol I’ve done many prototypes. The problem is that management sees them and says “oh, so we’re finished with the project already? Yay!”
Except for the other 1% who are trained and equipped to violently suppress the 98%. And if for whatever reason they fail to do the job, the killer robots will do it instead.