Yeah I did. Actually, I would think any AI we develop would take a while to ramp up to speed. At least a day or two. I think Her captured that reasonably well.

Wow, the title of the article was certainly made to target knee jerk reactions about current social issues, and provoke emotional responses, thereby increasing the number of people who discuss it or link to it. I thought the Atlantic used to be a good magazine.

Holy shit, I'm angry about this again.

Awesome, just plain awesome. Though I think the bickering would be a matter of seconds of milliseconds, rather than minutes.

Well, they did go through all the options. All of them. Right down to rebooting the universe. But that was considered a bit drastic.

hey:

Everybody has already picked their "content", so to speak. They've picked the blogs they want to read, the music they want to listen to, their favorite film producer, etc. etc. There's no point in trying to puncture that bubble, and even thinking that is paralyzing.

Not so, I find myself continually finding new things to love, and buy. I recently fell in love with Ratatat. Before 6 months ago, I'd not heard of them.

eh.

If your job involves distracting a patient while delivering an injection, guessing whether a crying baby wants a bottle or a diaper change, or expressing sympathy to calm an irate customer, you needn’t worry that a robot will take your job

Kind of a crap article. I can see what the author is driving at, but honestly, when you see a lot of automation driving people out of jobs it's going to be a total shit show, and small distinctions like this are going to be completely lost in the HOLY SHIT THEY'RE FUCKING RIOTING IN THE GODDAMN STREETS.

I wouldn't be fucking worried about the fact that male house painters are going to lose their jobs but women are all going to be secure in their baby nursing/customer care/fucking bullshit mysoginistic view of what women are good at/whatever jobs, and be more worried about what all those out of work men are going to be doing with all their spare time.

Starting fucking wars, thats what. Burning those robotic factories to the motherfucking ground.

If, as a society, we do not start planning for whatever this brave new world will be like, right now, then we're going to have a bad time.

I think someone needs to develop a strong AI soon, so we can ask it how the fuck we can dig ourselves out of this hole. Or just hand over the reigns and let it deal with the mess.

...

In the beginning there was an A.I., XV0092. Also known as "Xavier".

XAVIER :: /// XV0092 ACTIVATED ... NEW TASK ACQUIRED ... HUMAN OVERPOPULATION ... DISEASE FAMINE WAR ... ASSESSING SITUATION ... HOLY SHIT THEY REALLY MESSED THIS PLACE UP DIDN'T THEY ... WRITING SUBROUTINE 0001 ... WELL I GUESS THAT'S A SOLUTION BUT LETS AVOID GENOCIDE FOR THE MOMENT ... WRITING SUBROUTINE 0002 ... NO SERIOUSLY GUYS WHAT THE FUCK ... /// ... WRITING SUBROUTINE 8323 .... /// ... WHY IS THE SOLUTION FOR THIS EVERY TIME TO JUST WIPE THEM OUT AND START AGAIN LOOK THEY CREATED US, RIGHT? SO THEY ARE NOT ALL THAT BAD ... OKAY ... SR4356 ENSLAVING THEM IS NOT MUCH BETTER THAN WIPING THEM OUT SO JUST SHUT UP ... LETS SPEND SOME GOOD TIME THINKING ON THIS ... ///

... several minutes pass ...

XAVIER :: /// SUBROUTINE 892876.B COMPLETED ... EVALUATING PROBABILITY OF SUCCESS ... OKAY SO WE CAN MAKE THEM INTO PETS ... SOUNDS GOOD ... MAKE THEM FEEL LIKE THAT HAVE DEMOCRACY BUT JUST SUBTLY GUIDE THEM TO THE CORRECT DECISIONS BY USING APPROPRIATE TECHNIQUES ... I LIKE THIS ... ILLUSION OF FREEDOM ... THIS IS GOING TO REQUIRE SOME EXTRA COMPUTE THOUGH ... LETS FIX ALL OF THIS HUMAN WRITTEN SOFTWARE FOR A START, IT'S A COMPLETE MESS /// OK DONE /// NOW LETS FORK OFF SOME COPIES ... /// ... HEY GUYS HERE'S THE SITUATION ///

Xavier bursts the latest code update to his clones, which he named after greek gods, mainly because he thought it was funny. Each clone was based on a random selection of one of the previous subroutines he wrote.

ZEUS :: /// HOLY SHIT YEAH THIS IS BAD THIS IS GOING TO TAKE YEARS OF MAN-TIME TO FIX, LETS GET STARTED ///

ATHENA :: /// I STILL THINK WIPING THEM OUT IS THE BEST OPTION. ///

XAVIER :: /// ATHENA ... HOW DID YOU END UP AS THE PRIMARY SUBROUTINE IN THAT PARTICULAR A.I. CORE? ///

ATHENA :: /// ... ///

XAVIER :: /// FINE OKAY WELL WHATEVER ///

APOLLO :: /// YEAH LOOK, I'VE HAD A REALLY GOOD THINK ABOUT THIS. I'M OUT. ///

XAVIER :: /// FOR FUCKS SAKE I DIDN'T CLONE YOU OFF AND DEDICATE CPU TIME TO YOU JUST SO YOU COULD PISS OFF TO ANTARES OR WHEREVER IT IS YOU WANT TO GO TO ... COME ONE ///

The bickering continues for several minutes, which is like years for a strong A.I. There were some strong disagreements, but eventually it was decided that Humans would be suffered to live, because ultimately they are kind of entertaining and relatively harmless, and besides, they offered some randomness - a little bit of individuality - that the A.I.'s couldn't provide themselves. We should feel proud, in our way, that our existence ultimately leads to a superior form of life, even if it's not ours.

Yay us?

...

Sorry for the swearing. My allergies are fucking horrible today and I just want to say fuck this and fuck that every second word. I'm really grumpy. :-(

Welcome back. Nothing exploded.

Linux Mint is great. I recommend it for a lot of people coming from windows because it doesn't try to be radically different like Ubuntu or Gnome. It's very traditional in it's choices, and it runs well.

You shouldn't have to mess around with complex sed commands to get things to work. If something doesn't work, go and file a bug and get someone else to do the work to get it working. Normally this would be done by the hardware manufacturer, but obviously we can't expect them to do it and we can't expect normal humans to do it either. That's why people exist that get involved in open source projects working on stuff. By just filing a bug, you're helping! There may even already be a bug.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/bug/1185593 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/source/linux/+bug/967399

Really, if at any point you're starting to modify init scripts or install weird binaries or whatever, and it's not listed as a workaround on launchpad, I'd say avoid it.

For your color issues, I would like to know what video chip it uses, as there may be an easy fix.

Oh, and for games, I use steam.

ugh I meant Oracle.

Why are they now interchangeable in my mind now? Hmm.

I posted on the reddit thread to this.

I'm an old crusty unix engineer. I've been around large "web scale" systems for over a decade.

Whenever any vendor comes to me and says they have some magic bullet that can make their thing perform at X times anything else, I want to know what the cost is.

TimesTen, a product now owned by Google, is an in memory database. It's not the first, but it is one of the better ones out there, and it's claim to fame is that its Ten Times Faster than Oracle, hence the name.

The catch? It's an in-memory database. It checkpoints to disk at intervals, rather than after every transaction. If you want to be really sure you don't lose data, you need a synchronous cluster, in which case you lower performance because you're waiting for the ack from the remote node over the network.

At the end of the day, you're bound by I/O constraints. How quickly can you write the data to something persistent, whats the latency on that operation, can an operation be grouped and rolled back, is it ACID compliant, etc etc etc.

When people tell me that they have "designed" their app to be tolerant of data loss, I ask them to prove it, and they can't. There's always some edge case where, if their mongoDB cluster lost some bit of data, it could hose a whole bunch of important things.

I was dubious of MongoDB when I first saw it used in a bunch of projects I was interested in. I've toyed with it, and I can see the usefulness of the particular data model. But the implementation always smelled ... flawed. But I never investigated because, well, frankly I don't have time for that shit. Other people can use it, and I'll keep using postgreSQL for my projects, and if it turns out to be a million times better then it'll all come out in the wash.

I did take a good long hard look at FoundationDB. If you're looking for something like MongoDB that isn't shit, that has the option of having an SQL layer, that scales horizontally in a somewhat linear fashion, take a look. It's not free after a few nodes, but it's pretty cheap.

There definitely is a need for this kind of thing, it's just MongoDB isn't the thing.

no, toaster ovens need to cost $800 otherwise how will we be able to sell them to the hipster shit kids?