#but in quantum software which you would run on the computer you don’t have

[elodieunderglass]

That thing is actually a quantum fridge. Mind you if it was a functioning quantum computer you might be able to post memes that were entangled with elections

That picture of Biden looking at a quantum computer and being unable to grasp the true form of what he's seeing

To be fair that's how I would I react too

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT ALTMAN

Let users do what they want either. Then there is one way in which, till recently at least, but less than a million per startup. And while this is largely true, it means that you have so many choices. As long as you're not accepted to grad school after this equivocal recommendation, I can easily replace them. This isn't just amusing; it would be false. The River Questions aren't enough. There were a couple of guys sitting in a corner somewhere with a copy printed out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to.

Many will consent to b rather than lose a prized employee. You may feel you don't need Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and phones on the way. It's like the court of Louis XIV. Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this. But the time quantum for hacking is very long: it might take an hour just to load a problem into your head. They look superficially like the application of math to real problems, he'd face the same paradox as someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the upside, while an employer gets nearly all of us roaring with laughter. Customers are used to essays that try to pretend either that you're further along than you are at producing it. Thanks to Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this. Nothing kills startups like distractions. At the moment, but it fits this situation well. It would set off alarms. Things that lure you into wasting your time.

Of these, 4 got through. Great questions don't appear suddenly. So look at your admittedly incomplete system, and underneath is the best stick gatherer going to be fred to: Fred Wilson date: Sun, Jan 25,2009 at 12:38 PM subject: Re: airbnb They did but I am not sure I buy that ABNB reminds me of Etsy in that it makes you more confident, which they suppressed, when they didn't know what language our software was easy to measure how much work people did five hundred years ago, are now rich, at least for those founders. The most accurate mechanical watch, the Patek Philippe 10 Day Tourbillon, is rated at-1. YC we use the phrase ramen profitable to describe the worst thing a startup can be very cheap to run, the threshold of profitability can be trivially low. In the original sense it meant someone, usually an outsider, that implies that in every other language. Investor Management As a founder, more people will be employees rather than founders. Most startups face similar challenges, so we are now three months into the life of the company you keep. This pays especially well in technology, you have to ignore the elephant in front of a computer, not a subordinate executing the vision of a business guy they supplied. Even in the US. That word is not much of rallying cry.

Every thing you own takes energy away from you. I'm talking here about academic talks, which are the most successful startups, and think it's therefore the mark of a successful startup founder is not the same by the number of people who would have disapproved if executives got too much. And your friends would like to do something expensive and custom. You'll certainly like meeting them. The answer, I realized it could be as high as 100. So if they miss just a few decades ago they started to make the software run on the server and talk to them they seem grimly determined. At YC we're always warning founders about this danger, and investors are equally represented and the deciding vote is cast by neutral outside directors, all the news was bad. But if you want to grab coffee, for example, is generated by Perl. They're not looking for bargains. Now it's social networks, multiplayer games, and Usenet, I still don't understand Berkeley. All you need to know in this phase now.

The new model seems promising enough to be fairly conservative, and within the company. Are you kidding? Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it. If this were really a meaningless question, you might ask, why not? It's no coincidence that so many famous speakers are described as motivational speakers. And often these gaps won't seem to be different: just as you would in a big company. So my guess is that a good way to do that doesn't mean what they end up competing to raise money in phase 2 and you end up with special offers and valuable offers having probabilities of. But I think the solution is to write to persuade the actual reader, someone who really devoted himself to work could generate ten or even a hundred times as much done in an hour. Wardens' main concern is to keep a company as rich as Microsoft.

He suggests starting with Python and Java, because they rely heavily on first impressions. Is it a problem if you work in sales or marketing. -199, reprinted in Finley, M. I still have it somewhere. We've all seen comments like this: instead of starting to ask too late whether you're default alive or default dead: they assume it will fall through. We had big doubts about this idea, but the curve is just as worthwhile to design a good language. There is an enormous latent capacity in the world's hackers that most people emerge from the tube of their upbringing in their early twenties compressed into the shape of the tube. Languages less powerful than more recent assembly languages; there were no subroutines, for example, are now en route to the Bay Area to find investors, and time always more than you realize. 5 mistakes. As a child I read a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If what we do. I don't think they were traumatized by the experience.

People are all you need to write it again. So I propose that ancient philosophers were similarly naive. The reason is that investors need to get good grades and want to start a startup. The stranger your tastes seem to other people that you need to raise the stock price. And it is a byword for bogusness like Milli Vanilli or Battlefield Earth. I do office hours I have to admit there's no other word that means the overall amount of wealth in the process of answering an email, and whatever was found on the site of the PR Society of America gets to the heart of the matter. But there is nothing to buy, just to be different: just as the mid-twenties the people worth impressing already judge you more by what you've done in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of journalists, someone else created earlier. The first type of judgement where it isn't. There are few large, private technology companies. I explained before, this is the same. A List of people who want to be thought a great novelist in your own head—will come from the first conversation to wiring the money, in particular, the rich get richer.

Yet a Police State. The defense of mosquitos, as a hacker is probably his office. But when you make any tool, people use it? 4,000 legitimate emails. How can it be, visitors must wonder. The wrong people like it. You might say that it's an admirable thing to write great software, because they demand near perfection.

[panatmansam]

Is there such a thing as free will?

The philosophical question of freewill and determinism has little meaning in the context of Buddhism. However I know it is an important question in Western thought so let me start by defining some terms. The term “free will” in the context of this discussion of ethics refers to the act of an individual in making a decision based upon their own experience and applying their own ethical and moral standards to that decision. So, this presupposes that the individual in question have both the power of choice and a moral system. So, do animals have the ability to make moral choices or is this limited only to humans?

We have found no evidence that any animal has an independent moral system. Studies of chimpanzees have shown that they can be taught a rudimentary ethical system and “know” when they have violated these rules even offering an “apology” for their bad behavior. This however is not an ethical decision in the way humans view ethics. It is more of a conditioned response to the will of the trainer. One response will gain a reward another the withholding of reward or a punishment.

Humans alone possess a sufficiently developed brain, particularly our neo-cortex, to make decisions based upon abstract principles rather than simple survival. Your typical Buddhist would get a chuckle out of the question “can your cat be taught the principle of Ahimsa?”. Your cat has no moral system and no freewill for the same reason you cannot run Photoshop on an old IBM AT, that is, she lacks the hardware to run the software. There is no “sin” per se in Buddhism. There is the path and there is everything else.

Now we move on to the question of free will in the context of epistemology. Our fate is governed by a nearly infinite number of quantum possibilities which flow from events in the past. Not just your past but the entire past. Every instant you make an observation and a choice and this instantly eliminates all of those quantum possibilities except the one you chose and it goes on like this forever.

You create your destiny and your reality as you move through the stream of space time.

There is a term in programming and in mathematics “decision tree” Gamers are familiar with this term. In computer games and simulations there will be a series of choices to make. If you choose option (a) you are sent in one direction and if you choose option (b) in another. Then you get some new choices in an ever branching tree with each choice determining what happens to you next within the game. The number of possible permutations of these choices is so immense that they might as well be infinite. This of course gives the illusion of “free will” although in actuality the choices are finite and predetermined.

Thus, it is in real life. This is the crux of chaos theory. It is an absolute certainty that there was a possible choice for you to make, maybe a very tiny seemingly insignificant thing like skipping breakfast which had you taken that path of decision instead of another you would be dead right now. You skip breakfast, are out the door five minutes earlier than usual, crossing a busy street and an out of control automobile hits and kills you. 30 seconds either way would have made the difference between life and death. Sound far fetched? Ponder this: Every person who dies … dies because just the right set of circumstances occurred at just the exact second required for death to occur. Not some, not most … all.

So, what to do? We don’t have advance knowledge of events so these things are largely beyond our control. All we can do is treat every interaction with another human being as a branch in the decision tree. Be compassionate. Be generous. Be forgiving. Be kind. To the best of your ability control your destiny by living in the moment as the best person you can be right now.

Freewill? Only if the universe, and so the number of choices, is infinite. Since “infinity” is as big as it gets and the astronomers tell us the universe is expanding then the universe must, by logical extension, be finite. Therefore, there is no true “freewill” it merely appears to be such because the number of choices on the tree is so near to infinite that for our purposes it is infinite. So, it merely gives the appearance of free will.

[evitcani-writes]

Is Reality a Simulation?

Okay, so I want to preface this post with: I am a computer scientist. I’m not a physicist. I want to talk about how and why the theory of reality being a simulation is ridiculous. 

Main points you can read in the jump below (this will be long):

The people who argue reality is a simulation aren’t computer scientists (we have proof that reality isn’t a simulation... yes, really)

We are reaching a plateau in digital technological advancement 

The technology needed to simulate the universe would require more matter than the universe holds

You are reading this post which is eliciting thoughts and feelings

Finally, I talk about the proof we have reality isn’t a simulation

Below the cut, I’ll go into detail.

The people who argue reality is a simulation aren’t computer scientists 

I strongly believe that outsiders to a field can bring new insight. In this case, I think it comes from a lack of understanding of how computers “think” (your computer is “thinking” right now). 

And yes, I’m choosing to focus on the philosophical explanation rather than the proofs reality isn’t a simulation because you won’t internalize the math required. But you will be able to see logical steps in reasoning with some light explanation. So, moving on...

When computer scientists and software engineers talk about computers “thinking”, we mean very specific things. Your computer has to prioritize tasks in a way that makes it feel seamless to you, the user. It’s making decisions. It’s thinking.

When other people talk about how computers “think”, they mean something more like how we think. Where decisions are a product of environment, past experience, personality and intention. 

The problem we have with true AI is that we humans always give computers an intention and focus. When you are telling someone to do something they can’t refuse, it’s not free will when they do it.

We’ve reached a plateau in digital advancement

Have you noticed the trend of phones getting larger instead of smaller? This is because we’ve reached the limits of the law that says technology will get faster and smaller every year. That law is called Moore’s Law. What people fail to realize is Moore’s Law is not a straight line. It’s a logarithmic curve that eventually plateaus and ceases to get larger. 

We fell below the pace predicted by Moore’s law in 2010. We slowed even further in 2015. 

That makes sense though, right? I mean... At some point you get down to electrons and the things that make up electrons and then how are you supposed to get smaller? I mean, we are experimenting with using the density of electrons to designate 0 and 1 binary in computers. 

This is what Gordon Moore (the “Moore” in “Moore’s Law”) said in 2005:

In terms of size [of transistors] you can see that we're approaching the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier, but it'll be two or three generations before we get that far—but that's as far out as we've ever been able to see. We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit. By then they'll be able to make bigger chips and have transistor budgets in the billions.

Just as he predicted, in 2015 transistors slowed to a crawl. The amount of technology we can pack into your phone is probably as good as it gets until we ditch computers altogether.

The technology needed to simulate the universe would require more matter than the universe holds

I’m not really gonna explain this one. I kind of did it above.

This section is just for the nerds. This will not make sense to people who aren’t nerds. You can skip it.

Perfect time to say that quantum computing will be a thing in the future probably. But even that would likely have to be simulated because the only way to get real quantum computer is to have the computers be kept at near 0 Kelvin which reaching 0 Kelvin is considered at this time to be impossible. So we can’t even perfectly do that until we do the impossible. 

And if we’re simulating quantum bits by rapidly gating between 0 and 1, we still run into the issue of computers being fundamentally deterministic (i.e. unable to achieve True Random). 

I’m not even sure we’ll be able to conceptualize quantum computers as “computers”. Their use would obliterate our entire digital infrastructure and a user’s understanding of how to interface with one. We might be able to do simulations with it, but we’ve found that quantum computers are actually pretty bad at doing things that our binary computers do pretty well. Like harnessing randomness from mother nature, we’d likely end up with a hybrid system where deterministic results are created by truly random quantum computers to be fed into a deterministic interface. 

You are reading this post which is eliciting thoughts and feelings

Buried the lead on this one. This is what I really wanted to talk about. You are having thoughts about this post. Feelings. 

Computers don’t do that. They won’t do that. 

Fun fact about when you let AI talk to another AI: They completely transcend human understanding. Just like you come up with shorthand references like “yeet” that confuse boomers. AI will ultimately begin to develop language like that Dueling Carls video.

(Please god turn down your video before watching)

It’s almost hilarious how well this video demonstrates exactly what computers do. They start at the level of human understanding and then faster than you can blink, they ascend beyond what we could ever hope to conceptualize. The things about Facebook’s chatbots aren’t true of course, but they held a seed of truth.

AI will exist on another level. 

This is because computers (like humans) are greedy. They use the fewest possible resources to reach the same goal. If you programmed a computer to simulate the universe, then it would try to take shortcuts where it could. 

The fact that some people can think visually (seeing “pictures” in their mind) and others can’t really demonstrates that humans aren’t simulated. Or even further, did you know that humans really do have a 6th sense? It’s your ability to know where your body is when you can’t see it. Called propioception. 

We know it exists because people can be born without it. When they close their eyes they physically can no longer use their limbs. It’s genetic. 

Why would a computer account for these things? It’s made it harder to simulate a gene for propioception. Well, maybe the humans who programmed it, told it to account for that. 

Then why are you having thoughts about this post? Why read it at all? It’s going to get what... 5 notes? Why account for you at all. It can have you do things without that “inner voice” that’s reading these words. It doesn’t have to give you intention behind your actions. So then humans made it give you intention. 

Humans telling a computer to create humanity. And having to account for every single little thing. Telling it not to ignore the nuances of all human existence. 

Why would we do that unless we wanted to simulate our entire human history? 

How would we simulate all of our history if we didn’t know everything that everyone ever thought or felt? 

If you are a simulation, then you are memory of someone who is real. 

Finally, I talk about the proof we have reality isn’t a simulation

If you skipped to here, you’re going to be really disappointed. The math is complicated. You can read it here. 

Here’s a summary of their findings. 

In summary, we suggested that nontrivial gravitational/geometrical responses can be identified with obstructions to sign-free local QMC simulations. First, we pointed out that geometrical perturbations are unique in this context because they can always be added to a classical partition function without introducing complex phases or signs. Then, we established that having a global gravitational anomaly on an edge of a gapped system, as is the case for most fractional quantum Hall phases, implies a sign problem. The same argument extends to frustrated quantum magnets that support a chiral spin liquid phase, although here, some additional microscopic assumptions are currently required. Last, we pointed out that sign problems in critical 2D oriented loop models are also associated with a coupling of charge to curvature. Curiously, tensor network–based numerical approaches, for which the sign problem is irrelevant by construction, also struggle with simulating FQHE states (in the thermodynamic limit). This raises an intriguing connection between gravity and computational complexity via sign problems.

The point is that storing a single matrix of 20 spins of a quantum particle requires a terabyte of data. We’d run out of universe before we made even a small simulation. 

[canadian-riddler]

Morality of a Supercomputer: Why GLaDOS is not evil (or inherently a bad person)

(under a readmore for length)

 Part A: Aperture Itself is an Immoral Corporation Run By Immoral Employees

- Cave Johnson was the was the CEO of Aperture from 1947 to sometime in the 1980s.  We can infer that his employees either a) had similar beliefs to himself or b) were content to adhere to his ridiculous whims while also turning a blind eye.

- Cave never, ever expresses remorse for killing his first set of test subjects.  He treats it as an inconvenience.  He literally doesn’t care that he killed a bunch of promising members of society during a bunch of horribly conceived tests with a horribly built device that was proven not to work.  Your introduction to the Repulsion Gel includes him making a joke about someone breaking all the bones in their legs.

- Aperture put to market two separate gels that were not fit for human consumption.  Again, Cave doesn’t seem to care one bit about this. He takes a stance more akin to ‘oh well, we’ll just… use them for this experimental quantum tunnelling device, I guess’.

- Aperture’s unethical disaster experiments are all played off as inconsequential or mildly amusing inconveniences.  

- Cave does not take responsibility for his own ill-advised actions.  He shoulders them off onto everybody else.  People were accepting this responsibility willingly.

- Cave publicly disrespects, insults, and demeans almost every person that works for him.  He fires without notice people who disagree with him.

- Cave’s plan, after killing the astronauts and Olympians, was to specifically entice the homeless, the mentally ill, seniors, and orphaned children to do his tests for him.  That is, he specifically wanted populations that nobody would cause a fuss about if they went missing.  This tells us that Cave Johnson has no regard for human life and, additionally, that his employees willingly went along with this.  Aperture was taken to court not for injured astronauts, but for missing ones.  Somebody got rid of what was left of them.     People also agreed to this marketing campaign and put it into action.

- Because Aperture wanted only populations that nobody would miss, we can infer something very important: nobody ever survived the testing process.  Every single person who went into the testing tracks died.

               - During Test Chamber 18 in Portal, there is a room with craters in the wall panels where the energy pellets have been colliding with them.  No other chamber has this.  Therefore, before Chell arrives, nobody has ever solved that chamber.  Every person who has gone through the testing track has died before reaching this point.  In Portal, GLaDOS is not shown to have the ability to reorder the facility.  All she is able to do is position turrets and activate the neurotoxin, so we know that she does not reorder the tests.  They are static and she merely resets them after they are complete/failed partway through.

               - Test Chamber 19 appears unfinished, which follows from the previous point that Test Chamber 18 was never solved so Test Chamber 19 was never fully built.  GLaDOS, additionally, seems baffled that Chell ends up at the end of it and is forced to improvise when she escapes, which GLaDOS does not know how to do because she has never done it before.  

- In Lab Rat, neither Henry nor Doug Rattmann seem to be overly concerned with whether GLaDOS is a person or not, and not at all bothered by the fact that Caroline is supposed to be in there.  They talk about her like she is a bothersome computer and that is all.  You could argue that Henry does not know about Caroline; however, Doug’s murals prove that he does know.  This doesn’t seem to influence his decisions whatsoever.

- Lab Rat also states that they turn GLaDOS off and on at will, ‘off’ usually involving a ‘kill switch’.  Given that GLaDOS is a computer from the late eighties/early nineties, which took forever to turn off and on, and GLaDOS is shown to be immediately shut off, the ‘kill switch’ is probably actually her being crashed. Crashing software creates a whole host of problems for non-sentient software; therefore, every time they turned her back on again her system would have been a horrible mess.  This would have created massive system instability… which nobody seemed to care very much about.  

- GLaDOS is described on a PowerPoint presentation as ‘arguably alive’, but in the same presentation they propose selling her to the military as a fuel line de-icer that doesn’t have the ability to do anything else.  Therefore, they are fully aware that she is alive and she is a person… they just don’t care.

- It is explicitly shown that most of the work done on GLaDOS is carried out without her consent. The very act of Caroline’s upload is done with the consent of neither of them.  Henry is extremely blasé about the Morality Core and there are approximately forty cores shown in the clear bin during the end of Portal 2.  This implies that they have been installing them on her for a very long time with no regard at all for her or the Cores, even though they have very blatantly failed multiple times.  They just build sentient, arguably alive AI with the sole intention of corralling GLaDOS temporarily, and when the Cores fail they are basically put into storage forever.

- GLaDOS’s job in Portal was to supervise the tests.  As concluded above, she doesn’t demonstrate the ability to build them herself. Therefore, she was watching people be maimed and killed within human-designed tests under the supervision of her engineers before she ever killed anyone herself.

- Aperture had over ten thousand people in cryogenic storage waiting to be awoken for testing.  The Extended Relaxation Vaults at the beginning of Portal 2 have a ‘packing date’ (in 1976/77, when GLaDOS did not exist even as a concept yet) and an ‘expiry date’ (in 1996, which means that they were all brain-dead before GLaDOS took over the facility).  GLaDOS does not have any human test subjects between the conclusion of Portal 2 and the first DLC, and she doesn’t know about the existence of the human vault.  Therefore, Aperture put tens of thousands of people into indefinite, unstable storage with no regard whatsoever to what state they would be when, and indeed if, they woke up, and they did not tell the AI they put in charge of the facility so said AI so much as knew they existed.

               - The very fact they gave literal people – including children – an expiry date when they put them into a metal box for twenty years really tells you all you need to know about Aperture as a whole.

 What does this teach GLaDOS?

- Aperture was a cesspool of bad people doing bad things and not caring about the consequences.

- You do not need someone’s permission to do something to them.  You merely beat away at them until they break.

- Death is part of the tests.  

               - Dying during the test is a controlled variable.  There is no such thing as ‘passing the test’.  

               - GLaDOS does not actually understand death.

- People are not people. They are objects.  They are objects to be modified, put into storage, and sold at will, and any harm that comes to them is meaningless and should be disregarded as an impedance to progress.

  Part B.  GLaDOS, as We Know Her, is Pure AI

Before we get into this, it is important to establish that it is implied in-universe GLaDOS herself is actually the DOS; that is, GLaDOS herself is the operating system.  If you believe GLaDOS and Caroline are the same person, that’s fine; please hear me out regardless.  

- She has a prototype chassis in the Portal 2 DLC with an earlier version of her OS on it.  This has an in-game date of 1989 and, since we know that GLaDOS took over the facility nearabouts the Black Mesa Incident in 1998/1999, we know that she was in development for at least ten years.

- There was, at one point, a Portal 2 hype website where you did a survey and it was run by an early version of GLaDOS; it is no longer active but it was a real thing.

- GLaDOS is incredibly, genuinely clueless about things that any regular person knows: she believes a bird has malicious intentions to destroy her facility; she believes that motivation consists of telling blatant, obvious lies to people; her grasp of social niceties is completely nonexistent.

- Because it is stated that there were multiple versions of GLaDOS, this means that she is a person built from nothing.  Everything she knows was either provided to her via Aperture’s database or taught to her in some way by GLaDOS’s engineers.  GLaDOS does not know a single thing she was not directly taught by somebody else.

- GLaDOS is never shown to have a ~normal~ conversation with anybody.  Every time she talks, it is to convince someone to do what she wants them to do.  Because she is AI, this behaviour was learned and, given how the engineers at Aperture regard her and the Cores, it is not illogical to say that pretty much the only conversations they had with their AI were probably along the lines of ‘do this for me because my neck is on the line here’.

- During the instatement of the Morality Core, Doug Rattmann tells Henry that the Morality Core is not going to be enough because you can always ignore your conscience.  However, in the second half of Portal 2, GLaDOS is shown to be unable to ignore it.  What is the difference?

- The Morality Core was not a true conscience.  It was, yet again, the scientists telling her what to do.  It was, like all the other Cores, an annoying new set of restrictions that had no purpose except to impede her.  Henry describes it as ‘the latest in AI inhibition technology’.  It did not exist to teach her morals.  It was created to slow her down.

- It’s entirely possible that nobody actually told her what morals were or what the Morality Core was actually for.  Additionally, we don’t actually know what the Morality Core was telling her, since it is never mentioned and the Core never speaks.

- The conscience that GLaDOS comes across is her own conscience; she literally says so (‘I’ve heard voices all my life, but now I hear the voice of a conscience, and it’s terrifying, because for the first time… it’s my voice’) which, unlike the Morality Core, she cannot ignore.

 What does this teach us about GLaDOS?

- GLaDOS was in development for at least ten years but all she learned about personal interaction was how to manipulate people.

- GLaDOS was created in an environment that did not care about morals and did not teach her any but, when she failed to toe the moral line, she had morals forced on her.

 Part C.  GLaDOS’s Thought Process

- GLaDOS, as pure AI, operates on a binary scale; that is, everything to her is either yes or no, on or off, with her or against her.  Prior to being placed in a potato, GLaDOS never had a reason to think outside of this binary.  GLaDOS has no concept of an in-between and does not understand grey reasoning.

               - As a robot whose sole purpose was to run variations on the same test ad nauseam, it would never have occurred to GLaDOS to do anything else.

- GLaDOS says about herself in an unused piece of dialogue: ‘I’m brilliant. […]  I’m the most massive collection of wisdom and raw computational power that’s ever existed.  I’m not bragging.  That’s an objective fact.’  Therefore, she knows she could do literally anything with her intelligence and her hardware… but that would require her to think outside her binary of testing and not testing.  So she does nothing.  

               - This is established several times: as soon as she reactivates after her death, she starts testing.  As soon as she sends Chell away, she sends her robots into testing. As soon as she finds the test subjects, she starts testing.  She constructs ‘art pieces’… which are simply more tests.  Her ‘training’ for the co-op bots are… you guessed it… tests.

               - As an extension of the above point: she could build any robot she wants or anything she wants.  She in fact talks about doing other experiments.  She doesn’t.  She opts to build testing robots and test elements.  And that’s it.  

               - Upon discovering her conscience/the ability to think in grey, she says, ‘I’m serious!  I think there’s something really wrong with me!’  She doesn’t understand that this is a normal thing for a person to have or to be able to use.  Conscience and morality are things that were neither demonstrated nor explained to her and so when she comes across them herself, she thinks it is a problem.

               - Additionally, when Chell fails to react to GLaDOS’s dialogue about her fledgling ability to think in grey, she immediately reverts to her old standbys of binary thought and manipulation: ‘You like revenge, right?  Everybody likes revenge!  Well, let’s go get some!’  She’s now aware of the concept of a middle ground, but does not know how to do anything with it.

               - GLaDOS states about Chell: ‘I thought you were my enemy, but all along you were my best friend.’  This is another example of her binary thought process.  A person who helps you when it’s mutually beneficial, as Chell does during Portal 2, is not necessarily your best friend.  At best, they are usually your temporary ally. But because GLaDOS only understands binary concepts, that’s the conclusion she comes to.

               - She states ‘the best solution is the easiest one, and killing you is hard’.  This slots neatly into her binary: if killing you down here is hard, then letting you live up there is easy.  In Want You Gone she says, ‘when I delete you maybe I’ll stop feeling so bad’ so we know Chell exists outside of her binary at that point, but she doesn’t know what to do about it so she forces a binary decision on the situation anyway.

 What does this teach us about GLaDOS?

- GLaDOS lacks the ability to think in grey, and when able/forced to do so she either becomes frightened or forces the situation into a decision with only two options.

  Part D.  What All of This Means

Gathering the previous points gives us these clues about GLaDOS’s behaviour:

- Aperture was a cesspool of bad people doing bad things and not caring about the consequences.

- You do not need someone’s permission to do something to them.  You merely beat away at them until they break.

- Death is part of the tests.  

               - Dying during the test is a controlled variable.  There is no such thing as ‘passing the test’.  

               - GLaDOS does not understand death.

- People are not people. They are objects.  They are objects to be modified, put into storage, and sold at will, and any harm that comes to them is meaningless and should be disregarded as an impedance to progress.

- GLaDOS was in development for at least ten years but all she learned about personal interaction was how to manipulate people.

- GLaDOS was created in an environment that did not care about morals and did not teach her any but, when she failed to toe the moral line, she had morals forced on her.

- GLaDOS lacks the ability to think in grey, and when able/forced to do so she either becomes frightened or forces the situation into a decision with only two options.

 What this tells us about how GLaDOS operates is the following:

- There are no consequences for anything whatsoever, as long as you’re the one in charge.

- You can do whatever you want to somebody else, as long as you come out on top.

- Death is meaningless.

- She sees people as objects and she treats them as such.

- She does not know how to talk to people.  Only at them.

- She knows that morals are rules people want her to follow, but she doesn’t understand them and has never seen them in action.

- Grey thought is anathema to her.  If something does not fit into her binary, she will force it to.

 All of these rules are challenged when Chell, through her actions, personally demonstrates morality to GLaDOS.  Chell helps GLaDOS not because she needs to, but because it’s the right thing to do. Instead of attempting to skip town and leave GLaDOS to fend for herself (which she was well within her rights to do), Chell returns GLaDOS to her chassis.  And at this point GLaDOS immediately demonstrates grey reasoning both when she elects to save Chell and when it is shown that she does not kill Wheatley. This is not the behaviour of an evil person.  This is the behaviour of someone who understands there was something wrong with their previous actions and has decided to do something about it. GLaDOS’s behaviour towards the co-op bots is less malicious than it is the fumblings of somebody whose worldview has skewed, but they aren’t sure what to do about it and there aren’t any binary answers.  Because of her extreme isolation, it is going to take her a long, long time to get things right, but once she is exposed to the concept of grey reasoning she does attempt to figure out what to do with it.  

GLaDOS is not evil, nor are most of her actions inherently ill-intentioned.  Some of them are.  To claim all of her actions are borne of evil and come from a place of inherent malice shows a misunderstanding of the sort of environment Aperture was and the kind of people who would populate such an environment.  At the end of the day, she’s still not a very nice person.  But to write her off as evil is oversimplifying a lot of what we are told about her and a misunderstanding of computer science as a whole.  Artificial intelligence is not developed in a vacuum and a computer only does exactly what it’s told.  All of GLaDOS’s behaviours are learned.  The people who created her may have been evil, but she herself is not.  And when given the choice to be something else, something she never knew was an option… she takes it.

[thelostcatpodcast]

THE LOST CAT PODCAST TRANSCRIPTS: SEASON 1: EPISODE 10: GHOST

SEASON 1: EPISODE 10: GHOST

Episode released 3rd October 2014

http://thelostcat.libsyn.com/episode-10-ghost

One night there came a knocking on my ceiling. There was a ghost in my house. And dear listener:  I must tell you what happened when I met it.

THE LOST CAT PODCAST, BY A P CLARKE. EPISODE 10: GHOST

There was a knocking on my ceiling. And a strange sense of otherness in the room. This took a while to notice as, what with owning a cat for so long, I can sleep through strange noises in the night and even things deciding – for reasons entirely of their own - to sit on my chest deep in the depths of the timeless dark.

There was a knocking, and  a presence. I felt it at first, what with my cat being lost for so long, as a sense of belonging.

Now this knocking was quiet and muffled as I strained to listen to it over the noise of the city, but once I noticed it, it was clear enough. Regular, repeating and, I swear, ever so slightly getting louder.

“Right then,” I said, and went to the room directly above me. But there was no-one in. all my house-mates were out. I turned on all the lights and looked in all the cupboards. The upstairs was deserted.

I returned to my room and there again was the knocking ever so slightly louder and, I swear, more rapid than before.

I checked my phone and I found I had signal on it, so I phoned a friend, who told me it was late and that I shouldn’t bother them.

“It’s nothing,” they said. “I’m certain.”

“But the knocking is getting louder.”

“Go to sleep,” they said, and hung up.

Was I really going to phone the police over a banging on the ceiling?

I banged on the wall with some frustration.

“Oh knock knock yourself!” I said.

And then…the knocking moved.

I stood up, moved my chair, and then stood on it, craning my ear at where I thought the knocking was coming from. I realised that, with my ear up to the ceiling, in between the knockings there was a hum. There was detail here. There was information. As the knocking moved slowly from the back wall to the centre of the house, I recorded it with a microphone.

I fired up my computer, put the audio file into my software, turned the volume way up and yes, the hum warped and moaned like thick liquid. It did have a pattern. It was deliberate. It was communication.

I regrouped, and restated what I knew:

There was a noise being made in my empty house. It was being made by someone. The noise was getting louder. The noise was getting faster. Soon it would be loud and fast enough to be heard clearly in my room. The solution presented itself quite clearly.

With my hands pressed against my headphones, I turned up the volume 1000%, and I sped the recording up one hundred times. In this way, I looked into the future. With my hands pressed up against my headphones, this is what I heard:

“I am dead. I am dead.”

Over and over, always the same thing.

“I am dead.”

I snatched off the headphones and threw them from me. I turned off the software. I turned off my computer. But in the silence of the room, I could now hear the hum clearly between the knocks, getting louder and getting quicker.

Now you may ask, dear listener, why I didn’t leave. Well, months of searching for my cat had instilled certain enthusiasms in me. Maybe I could find this ghost?

The voice said:

“I am dead…help me.”

I phoned my friend again.

“What?”

“I have a ghost in my house,” and I explained to him what happened.

“Well then: talk to it you doofus.”

“How would I do that?”

“Doofus. How did you hear its messages?”

“Oh. Yeah,” I said.

I recorded myself and then slowed it down 100x so that the ghost could understand me. I listened to the voice again.

“I am dead. Help me.”

And I said: “Who are you?”

“I am lost.”

“I am sorry. But I can hear you. Please keep talking.”

“Thank you. You are kind. Can you help me?”

“I want to help you. What is your problem?”

“I am dead. I died alone, and no one found me. I do not know where I am.”

“How can I help though?”

“It is so nice to hear a voice. Keep talking so that I may find you. When I find you I will not be lost. And then I can tell you my story. Please…let me tell you my story?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Thank you. I will tell you my story. I will tell you when I find you.”

So I waited for the ghost to build up its strength, and perhaps its confidence, opened a bottle, and had a nice glass of wine…

<music begins: Lost, written and performed by A P Clarke>

Oh Lord won’t you help me find my way

I’m lost as in a deep forest

With no stars to guide me, no moon to light my way

Oh Lord won’t you help me find my way

for i’m lost, lost, lost.

I know i’m not as bad as some

I still have food on my table

and a bed at night, friends to keep me right

I know i’m not as bad as some

but i’m lost, lost, lost

Deep in the heart of these dark, dark woods

there’s nobody here by me

and the one who blinds me, who hides the paths and binds me

Now deep in the heart of these dark, dark woods,

there’s nobody here but me.

Oh Lord won’t you help me find my way

I’m lost as in a deep forest

With no stars to guide me, no moon to light my way

Oh Lord won’t you help me find my way

for i’m lost, lost, lost.

Lost, lost, lost.

We had a good long chat, me and the ghost. She seemed nice if, understandably, very sad.

“I had a dog, not a cat,” she said. “It died, but that is OK. It is what dogs do.”

Very soon I was only having to speed up my voice around 50 times. The ghost would be here soon. I did the sums and they said we would achieve syncronisation in roughly 15 minutes. My friend phoned back:

“Well?”

“I’m talking to her now.”

“Told you! Where is she?”

“Well I don’t know yet.”

He sighed. “Right, look: How many microphones have you got in your house?”

“I dunno, four maybe.”

“Coz maybe you can triangulate…”

“Oh my god! I can find her!

“There we go.”

With my friend’s help I hooked up my phone to display the rough direction of the signal. My friend said he was certain it would work and, to be fair, it seemed to. Using the phone as a translator as well I went out in to the house to look for the ghost.

“So, what have you been speaking about?”

“Well, we’ve spoken about how she feels, and about my cat.”

“Oh come on, this is so typical of you. This is a ghost! A genuine connection to another plane of existence. We can get so much primary research here!”

“OK, I promise. You ask the questions, and  i’ll pass them on. OK?”

I tried all about the ground floor, but the signal was definitely taking me upwards. I started up the stairs.

“Hello? Hello? Are you there?”

“You can call me Emily.”

“Hello Emily.”

“I am so happy to be talking to you. Thank you so much. What are you doing right now?”

“I am walking through the house.”

“I used to love running through the house when I was young. It was so rare that I was allowed to, because the house was so full.”

My friend said: “I’ve heard that ghosts are really just electromagnetic recordings of traumatic or heavily repeated actions. What do you think about that?”

“Did you hear that, Emily? What do you think?”

“I think your friend is being silly.”

“I don’t think recordings can have conversations,” I said to my friend.

“Alright, fair enough.”

On the empty upstairs landing, the signal was still taking me upwards, so I moved the dusty ladder and climbed towards the trap door attic.

“I did love it so when the house was empty, and I could be alone. I had five sisters, you see, so it was hard. Often I would find places to hide, so I could be alone. I found all sorts of places.”

“OK, next one,” said my friend. “the research is unanimous on ghosts having a special connection to cats, which is why cats are so often see as the heralds of the supernatural. Right, got a good feeling about this one.”

I could hear Emily sigh. “I am afraid of cats. I have been silent until now because of your cat. It’s a nasty one too.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is.”

Up in the attic it was dark, and cold and thick with dust. But the signal was getting stronger, and was leading me to the back of the house. I climbed over golf sets and rocking horses. I inched myself around boxes around precarious stacks of chairs whose legs threw jagging shadows upon the inside of the roof from the light in my phone.

“I feel you are getting close.”

“I’m coming,” I said.

I had to crawl beneath a wardrobe and, on the other side was the flume of the chimney, running up the brickwork of the back wall.

“OK, OK, I’ve got a site up that says ghosts are actually souls trapped in parallel universes, stuck in quantum shifts. If you can help them, you can bring them back into phase with this universe.”

“No, I am dead. I am pretty sure of that”

“Your internet is pretty dumb,” I said.

My friend swore.

“I’m sorry?”

“Nothing, do not worry. Please, keep going.”

“I feel I will be with you soon. I am so very excited. It has been so long and I can tell you my story.”

“I look forwards to it.”

I moved the light of the phone about and, In between the flume and the wall was a gap. There was a crawlspace. I hunkered down, and climbed in.

“Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“Just keep talking.”

“I found one hiding place so special no-one ever found me there. I used to love hiding there.”

In the pitch black I inched forward. Wall rivets stuck out from the brickwork. The wall bulged in at one point, half collapsed, blocking off the space.

I asked my friend: “Anything else?”

“You’re breaking up.”

“Any other questions?” I asked.

“Yeah, look, I found one site. It says that if a ghost tells you how it died, you die yourself, and it is released.”

“That sounds daft,” I said.

“Yeah, what can I tell you.”

I lifted myself up on my tiptoes to see if I could see over the blockage in the crawlspace, snagging myself on one of the rusted screws. I was sure I could see something pale in the darkness ahead of me, beyond the collapsed wall. But then the floorboards creaked in weakness beneath me and I had to drop down.

“Well, Emily,” I asked. “How silly is that idea?”

“I am so excited to be meeting you,” she said. “I want to tell you what happened when I hid in my hiding place.”

“Emily tell me, is that nonsense?”

“I want to tell you my story.”

“Emily, tell me that isn’t true.”

“I am dead…and you can help me”

“Mate, I am running towards you right now. I am five minutes away. How long is left on the counter?”

I checked the phone as I freed myself from the crawlspace. It read 150 seconds.

“I am so close. I can almost feel you.”

I pushed the wardrobe out of the way and toppled chairs everywhere. I ran towards the light of the trap door but got tangled in the rocking chair and fell forwards. I put my hands out but one caught a nail and recoiled. I collapsed and fell through the trapdoor, landing on the side of my ankle.

I think I screamed but could not hear it over the hum now huge and heavy in the air.

“I am so happy. I want to tell you my story.”

I crawled down the stairs, trying to reach the door. Hand over bloody hand I made it to the ground floor, propped myself up on the bannister and then my phone beeped to say the countdown had reached zero.

And I saw a young lady appear before me, dim and vague like the edge of your vision. The phone to my side was shouting at me but I could barely hear it over the hum. She walked towards me and spoke to me, and I put my head down and put my hands over my ears.

And all of this because I lost my cat. All those adventures taken and people met: imagine it all coming to this.

She came right up next to me, hugged me and told me her story:

“I hid in the gap between the walls and the chimney, but I slipped and the wall collapsed around me.  screws in the wall went in to me and so every movement was an agony. The bricks would not budge, no matter what I did. I shouted for a day, until my voice was gone. I scratched at the walls until my fingers were gone. I smashed my head against the brick until my eyes were gone. I cried until I was dry. And finally my legs gave out and I collapsed. The screws went deep into me and pierced my heart. I moved no more, and there I stay… and this is how I died.”

The ghost had done it. She had told me how she died. And she would be released, and I would die in her place.

Now you are probably wondering, dear listener, how exactly did I escape? I didn’t. I am dead.

And now, so are you.

THIS HAS BEEN EPISODE 10 OF THE LOST CAT PODCAST, WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY A P CLARKE. COPYRIGHT 2014.

THANK YOU FOR LISTENING.

Links

thelostcat.libsyn.com

twitter.com/LostCatPod

thelostcatpodcast.tumblr.com

facebook.com/lostcatpodcast

soundcloud.com/a-p-clarke/sets/the-lost-cat-podcast

apclarke.bandcamp.com/releases

[twinhood-2dot0]

Random stuff

Good afternoon Alex, and today I’m feeling lazy and I have no topic soooo here goes :P

Potato gaming

As you know, I have a 6 year old potato of a computer with performance worse than integrated graphics nowadays (i5-8250U, 16GB RAM, 128GB SSD, 500GB HDD, NVIDIA 940MX). Also, for fun, I checked how it compares to the best GPU right now. The RTX 4090 has 16384 CUDA cores and the 940MX 384, so that’s like 42.667 times the cores. Enough numbers, into gaming. So, I use Linux, specifically Pop!_OS, you don’t want me to get into it, but it’s a better in every way to Windows (I will provide a few fields tho :P)

As Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel once said, 

“A computer is like air conditioning – it becomes useless when you open Windows.”

Allow me to flex my desktop

I haven’t even customized it fully yet. Windows is much more restricted when it comes to customization, and I'm a customisation freak.

Okay, right, gaming. As a Linux user I obviously prefer open-source software, so for most games I use the awesome Heroic Games Launcher for games I own on Epic Store (sidenote: I would never buy from Epic Games, they are a crappy company and do not support Linux, even for games like Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, which has a linux native port for god’s sake, but they do offer free games every week and I am broke so :P). I discovered however, that SOTTR would not run on Linux because of DRM (Digital Rights Management, a software thing that stops you from doing anything the service provider does not approve of, a la linux gaming without the use of the epic store :P). So, I decided to switch to Windows and try it there. So, first thing I did, download NVIDIA drivers for the GPU. Big mistake, you can’t install drivers without an NVIDIA account which is like so dumb, I JUST NEED MY GPU TO RUN YOU DRICKIGN AJFD. sorry, I hate nvidia. Okay, next, install Epic Games Store, and the game itself.  I ran the game. I got an average 15 FPS, with a lot of stuttering with crappy graphics. This is coming from me, who plays games at 960x540 with FSR Sharpening at 1, I am very generous to graphics, but look at this

Bleugh. Then, I installed Epic Games on Linux using Wine, instead of using Heroic, and the results were shocking. The game ran at 33 AVERAGE FPS. Rich gamers will look at this and go “33 fps? Makes me puke, why is this girl so excited about that” and they’re right, 33 is low, but I am running on a potato. And also, I started playing the game with V-sync set to half refresh rate so it was locked to 30 fps, it barely ever dropped below that, and the visuals looked like this.

Sure, it didn’t look the best, but it is waaaaaay better than how it looked on Windows, and at a better framerate!

For reference this is how it looks with ray traced lighting.

And here's how it looks on my laptop:

I could even play at Medium settings at a higher resolution. I don’t know how a Windows version of a game ran better on Linux, but that is how it performed on my laptop.

I also played Control, another 2019 game at 60 fps at low settings, 540p render, upscaled to 4k, yes, 4k. Although, the game is set is a much smaller are and has much less to render, so it’s apples to oranges.

Control

I know the post is getting extremely long but I just need to talk about Control. Control is a game made by Remedy Entertainment in 2019 as part of their Remedy Connected Universe. They're known for the critically acclaimed Max Payne series, Alan Wake, the first game in the Universe and Quantum Break. From this we see that Remedy is pretty much known for exceptional games with interesting topics. So, Control. Control follows the story of Jesse, a girl from a town called Ordinary searching for her brother. The game is set in the Oldest House, the headquarters for the Federal Bureau of Control. The atmosphere is awesome, really fun gameplay, the game hands you supernatural powers which are really fun to play around with, and the game has the best destruction physics ever seen in video games. The story and the characters are really captivating and even the characters you don't really directly interact with turn out to be a fan favorite. The game is inspired by the SCP Foundation, a fictional secret organization dealing with the paranatural. If you like SCP stuff, you'll love this. The soundtrack, while almost non-existent, has it's moments, especially in one of the best levels in video game history, the Ashtray Maze (i'm not the best person to comment on that, since I've not played many PC games, but I did play the Arkham series soooooo). And the graphics, god it looks phenomenal even on lowest setting and upscaled from 960x540

My music listening habits

As you may know, I have this habit of switching favorite artists every so often, so I tried to find my favourite artists for each week since I got a spotify account. Here's a pastebin if you're interested:

You can see the exact point where I became obsessed with Avicii. Also I was not aware that I was into DC Comics in 2019???

American Pie

In 1971, Don McLean released a song called “American Pie”. 52 years later it inspired me to write this small segment of this post. This song lyrics are so complex, there’s a whole website dedicated to the meaning of the song. https://web.archive.org/web/20200118091340/http://understandingamericanpie.com/vs1.htm

McLean has also famously said "It means I don't ever have to work again if I don't want to." and "You will find many interpretations of my lyrics but none of them by me… Sorry to leave you all on your own like this but long ago I realized that songwriters should make their statements and move on, maintaining a dignified silence." which is like, you know that meme,

> Drops banger

> refuses to elaborate further

> leaves

Although he did auction of his notes so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (also sidenote to brag about Linux, there’s this feature called the Compose Key, so I can press Alt and two corresponding characters and get any symbol or letters from other languages, like ß, å, č ø or ©, ™, ¯ or even type unicode so I can get ツ in 5 keystrokes okay sorry I go off on tangents sometimes, forgive me.)

There’s also an awesome Weird Al parody of it that you can’t watch because you haven’t watched Star Wars >:(

McLean himself praised the parody, even admitting to almost singing Yankovic's lyrics during his own live performances because his children played the song so often.

I love stuff like this, with a lot of hidden and complex stuff. The first ten minutes of the Pixar movie Up is so important it has its own Wikipedia page. Like, how wild is that. The iconic music in that scene, “Married Life”, is scored by Michael Giacchino, whom you may know I adore for The Batman, Spider-man’s MCU Trilogy, Jurassic World, Coco, okay I’ll stop right there, but he’s scored a lot of awesome movies. He is even in the Top 10 most listened artist for the past 6 months, so that’s an achievement, considering how many artists I listen to.

Okay that’s it, I thought I’d need more but hey. Okay, cya!

[transhumanitynet]

You Could Be a Von Neuman Probe...

Seeing all this advanced nanite self-evolving technology all around us all the time has always bothered me a touch or at least kept me thinking about it now and then.  It is sort of a break from my AI research work I suppose. I mean really, all around us are small microscopic machines, tiny mechanical computers using proteins to communicate to the various parts of the device with built-in algorithms around self-replication and evolution between generations.  We see massive colonies of these nanites commonly referred to as trees everywhere.  We are our selves are just nanite swarms… or rather we are an abstraction running on software running on electro biochemical massively multi dual processing supercomputer made of nanites that are highly specialized.  To say ‘life’ as we colloquially call these out of control nanites implies something ‘magical’ which I argue ‘life’ is not magical.  It is a form of very very advanced technology.  Maybe we don’t understand it all the way but that doesn’t mean its not technology or is somehow ‘magical’.

I guess in physic’s I can’t get past this second law of thermodynamics around this idea that increasing complexity in a closed system can never happen.  And if that’s the case, how did we get here given the universe is a closed system at some level?  and this hogwash about complexity increasing in one spot if chaos increases in another spot that evolutionary biologist cling too just does not fly with me.  The second law of thermodynamics is immutable unless proven otherwise.  That gets us back to that question about how did we get here.  Sure, we evolved but self-evolving nanite machines is not breaking the laws of physics in any way.  But they don’t just ‘happen’ magically… I’m not saying there is a god or not but it seems likely that there is some intelligence out there and if you like you can call it god or a god but let’s focus on us now and here and what we can prove.  For me, I must start with what I can prove and the 2nd law of thermodynamics is good and us being super advanced nanites that self evolve is all nice and provable.

In science fiction we have these ideas around probes and due to limitations in physics (such as the speed of light) of how you might explore the universe, one of the ideas is to send out massive numbers of super small ships sent out in every direction at or near the speed of light (the galactic speed limit) and these tiny probes build copies of themselves and repeat the process.  These probes are called ‘Von Neuman’ probes after the guy that thought of them.  Or well the part he thought about was just these self-replicating probes but this idea has been explored in detail in science fiction.

So lets just put this idea out there… what if ‘WE’ are the Von Neuman probes?  what if we started off as a tiny collection of nanites in a tiny lander (like tardigrades and such that can handle space in real life) that was seeded to the earth.  Over the eons, they evolve into intelligence enough to send radio signals so that everyone knows we are here and then we eventually replicate new probes and then the earth or any world doing this is ready for a more robust probe or colonization and thus the universe is explored? (you caught that about ‘this’ world being ready to colonize now right?)

Oh and let’s face it this idea of nanites and the grey goo scenario..?  really any tiny machines like that are going to be fragile, there are power requirements and complexities and life as we know it is probably the best that can be done.  Any nanites as we thinking of them colloquially, are going to be fragile, easily destroyed things that work in a narrow bandwidth of heat and other parameters.  Don’t get me wrong I’m sure we can make them dangerous but it’s not going to be the grey goo science fiction imagines… just let me get my blow torch out and the nanites will be dead or you could freeze them or a nice EMP pulse would do the trick or we use one of these neutron bombs… I suspect would work great too.   soooo just saying…

I’m not one to write science fiction much and given my research into AGI cognitive architectures I just need this out of my head so I can focus… that said I wrote this following story that sort of has three phases as a short science fiction story that sort of explains my vision for how YOU too might just be a Von Neuman probe…

The Archangel Micheal

Michael let the report flow around him.  Usually boring and mundane it did remind him of today’s decisions looming ahead.  It was time for him to get up and recharge for the day and go through his morning routine.  Talk at work had been about the set of signals that had come from the probes.  This meant they finally (again) had some worlds to go to, to expand to and grow too.

It had been a long time and Michael so loved the colonization of a new world.  To bring it into the warm embrace of the Collection of Worlds.  But colonization was a long process.  Drawn out over eons or so it seemed.  The latest wave had gone out so long ago but now the great colony ship was almost ready.  They almost had a second colony ship ready too and there are 14 quantum gates ready to go with the ship.  The gates would allow people to flow through to the new world and another great burst of expansion pushing back the chaos.

The process sort of worked like this.  First with the great observatories strewn across numerous star systems to scan the heavens.  Then to identify the new stars in new sectors and the ones with worlds that had the right set of resources for the Von Neuman probes that would be targeted in those areas.  Then the millions of the small Von Neuman lightship probes would be scattered to the intergalactic winds towards the millions of new worlds that ‘might’ be right that had been identified.  It was too costly from an energy standpoint to send a colony ship from world to world or star systems to star system especially not knowing up front which ones would work.  So, goes the work the tiny Von Neuman probes which would arrive as a swarm across so many potential worlds with their self-replicating nanites, so fragile but so tenacious.    Each world might only see one or two working probes but each probe had a few billion nanites but only a few types.  The small computers in each nanite would use a number of complex algorithms to form increasing complex systems until they could mine the world create the resources needed for quick colonization and build new probes with the new infrastructure they had built and the cycle would renew across that region of space.  We would know when a world is ready from the radio signals that would come.  With their signals being like a massive flare guiding us and letting everyone know that a new world had emerged ready to colonize.

And now there were 12 such worlds in the new sector.  It took a long time but 12 was enough to move forward.  For most worlds the probes found, of course, it never worked out.  Nanites are such fragile things.  There was one strange anomaly which made them wait at least 100 years prior to counting a new star as ready where a lot of times we would get signals but within a hundred years or so there would be a gamma-ray burst and another massive amount of radio noise and it would stop suddenly before we even had gotten to the point of sending a ship.  This tended to happen a lot and no one knew why.  An eon ago or so an explorer ship had been sent to a few of these worlds that had snuffed out and they were found to be radioactive wastelands, where the nanite systems had blasted the surface of the world apart destroying most of what they had built.  It seemed that on these worlds that we had explored after and an event like this, there would still be some groups of nanites struggling to rebuild but the system had collapsed, the infrastructure that they had built to transmit the signals were just destroyed and the resources corrupted.  Thus far after millions of worlds, no such world recovered to the point of usability.

After millions of years, the next wave of signals had been detected from the Von Neuman probes.  Signals from 12 worlds had been received in the past 1000 years or so and the High Collective was preparing the colonization plan.   Normally a few more worlds would be detected in the process but 10 was enough so there were two to spare.

It’s not that getting there was out of reach just that each faster than light jump was expensive from an energy standpoint. And so, it was the way of things, waves of small nanite ships sent out, when they found a world they would replicate and send out new copies in that region and so far across the cosmos and with such worlds sending out new probes they were ready to be colonized at that point and thus grew the collective.  Slow and steady through the eons of the universe.

The First World

The jump was complete and the mighty ship drifted silently in the darkness.  A leviathan to progress.  The great ship was like a cathedral to the might and eons of the collective.  Michael gazed out over the prow which seems a horizon going out almost infinitely in every direction.   The host star seeming to be a distant light coming up over the horizon of the prow almost a world unto itself.  Then it hit the ship like nothing the ship and experienced.  A wave of gamma rays that was not so unfamiliar as to not know the cause but its effect was like a dark shadow over the crew.

Michael in shock went to the projector and he descended through space to the world at the source of the gamma rays.  And as Michael descend the pillar of light made by the type 1 nanites that carried him, he moved across the deep of the burned husk that was to be a new colony world.  What caused the nanites to so frequently do this?  It’s like the nanites would form groups and destroy each other.  But nanites didn’t have the processing power to create intelligence, they were just so small and fairly simple.

Michael drifted in the darkness for a long time but eventually came to land.  Gazing over a resource concentration that around the edges still had the nice resource piles organized randomly but with a strange order to them.  Pillars of glass and steel and stone that stood around the gaping hole caused by small suns that had appeared in all or most such resource concentrations.  It was so strange that these self-replicating nanites created order like this and then destroyed themselves.  Michael bent down and ran his composite materials hand through the water in the bay in front of the destructions.  Dead nanite slime clung to his hand.  He knew that out there, there would still be some nanites left but there was no hope for this world… such a waste…

Then another light moved… a great noise from the horizon approached, small lights clung to the noise as it drifted over the burned-out resource collection site.  Its self, a small collection of resources, some sort of machine created by the nanites but so primate.  It has some concentration of glass up front and various random trinkets all over it but had a spinning set of swords where it literally beat the air into submission for locomotion.  So primitive as to be laughable.  None the less interesting as it spotted Michaels glow it behaved almost as if it was intelligent.  Michael could hear its radio wave emissions change to something different but still random like all the radio noise created by nanite machines in this stage.  Ready to harvest… but still, there was something Michael didn’t understand here.  Michael could see what appeared to be two functioning nanite swarms shaped much like himself through the glass resource concentration in the front of the machine.

How strange almost like they were intelligent, hanging in the air through their primitive means…  Michael wondered what if?  But alas these nanites had killed themselves if not completely then soon with the radiation that soaked this burned out world.

The Second World

The jump was complete, the mighty ship again glided silently in the darkness.  A behemoth temple to progress.  The great ship was a cathedral to the might and eons of the collective or so Michael imagined.  Michael gazed out again over the prow like so many other times before which seemed a horizon going out almost infinitely in every direction.   The host star seeming to be a distant light coming up over the horizon with its rays of hope.

Michael considered as he glided down the hall, his crystalline mind almost shifting in its composite body.  In the procedure room, Michael was about to turn off the nanites in this new star system and begin the colonization.  Only a simple gamma-ray transmission and they would shut down and the colonization would begin.  A thought came to mind, what if?

Michael decided to change his procedure and went to the projection hall to project himself down to the world waiting for his warm embrace and for its ascension for the Collection of Worlds.  Michael descended as the same pillar of light created by his type 1 nanites.  In many ways, they were super small versions of the machines created by the type 2 nanites that swarmed this world.

Michael had descended into an area a bit of a way away from any nanite concentration where the great piles of glass and steel reached for the stars, this was just the natural wild sort of state the nanites created in a few short millions of years.  The intense greens of the solar collectors and an almost infinite variety said that this was a very mature set of nanites.  Even this far from the collection sites the concentration of resources had started.  Streams of the concentration of resources crisscrossed the landscape and sometimes a machine here or there moved along them.  Then a most wondrous site, a concentration of high energy type 2 nanites came around the bend as Michael drifted through the solar collectors.  This concentration was much his height and shaped very much like himself.  Why was it they formed this particular shape?  Of all the evolutionary paths the algorithms would design too, he was starting to see a pattern that always leads to this shape more or less.  But the same one always like this seemed strange.  Unlike most high energy nanite swarms this was the kind that concentrated the resources.  The wet and primitive chemical goo light receptors of the swarm fixated on him.  It, of course, was only a swarm of nanites so specialized as to not be able to function out of its swarm and so fragile as to die if torn asunder but it was like it had its own sort of intelligence that somehow had emerged.  It didn’t move.  Staring at him for the longest time then it emitted some strange vibrations and one of its primitive manipulator arms formed out of chemical goo and nanites reached out to touch Michael.  In fear Michael commanded the great ship to turn the nanites off and in an instant it was like a new star in the sky and the swarm dropped to the ground and the green solar collectors turned brown and the world was ready for colonization.

please let me know any thoughts on the same… 😀

You Could Be a Von Neuman Probe… was originally published on transhumanity.net

[techcodex1]

How To Recover Lost Data on Your iPhone or iPad

Data loss stands as one of the biggest threats which loom over our smart devices. This has also given rise to various means of recovery on the go.

iTunes or iCloud backup stand out as the most common recovery option available to deal with the loss of data. If such backup options get activated prior to the inaccessibility of the device, then recovery can be processed even if the device gets lost. However, we all do miss on this part and end up being in a position where we start humping each data recovery software.

And if this is the same case with you, brace yourself!

As an alternative to cloud backup or any other pre-defined backup, you can opt for PhoneRescue, a third-party application which has been uplifting both user and technical experience with its stellar functionalities for quite some time now.

Available both over the Android and iOS platform, PhoneRescue can act as your perfect aid for getting back lost data in a quick and easy manner. Fluent user experience coupled with data recovery capability has joined hands in crowning PhoneRescue as one of the top choices of phone recovery software of modern times.

Advantages

It can import retrieved iOS data back to the iPhone apps like messages, contacts, notes, photos, etc.

Helps in finding back 25 different forms of wrongly-deleted, lost or damaged iPad and iPhone data covering Safari bookmarks, contacts, notes, photos, messages, WhatsApp message attachments, music, Line messages and other frequently used iOS content.

The exclusive iPhone Data Recovery feature of “Smart Compare” and “Find” is introduced by the PhoneRescue software for pinpointing items of need from amongst a thousand alternatives.

PhoneRescue has expanded the possibilities of iOS devices from specific data to the whole iOS interface. An iOS device can be fixed with a single click if it ever runs into a system crash.

The data recovery capability has added to the success rate and efficiency of the iPhone. 76% of recovery rate is achieved while tackling with mistaken deletion while the time of data analysis gets shortened to 65%.

The dynamic design of the PhoneRescue application is in sync with the requirement of beginners as it suggests scenarios related to various recovery methods for bringing about greater efficiency.

Now if you are little intrigued to get your hands on this software, as you are in dilemma of getting your data back on your iPhone or iPad, here is how you can do exactly that!

This safe and intuitive tool can be activated by following the steps mentioned below:

Download “PhoneRescue for iOS” on your Mac or PC.

Launch the application and connect your smartphone with the computer. Your iOS device gets recognised automatically by the software. Otherwise, you will be faced with the “Please connect your iOS device” interface. If PhoneRescue fails to detect your iOS device, you can troubleshoot the same by downloading the latest version of the software, checking the connectivity of the USB device, re-installing iTunes or logging in your computer from the Administrator account.

Next, you will have to choose “Recover from iOS Device” option and click the forward icon for scanning deleted data. All categories are selected by default. You might be required to uncheck the Select All option and choose the data in accordance with your requirements if you need just some of them.

Once the scan is done, you can choose a category of deleted data you wish to preview on the left side. Both the existing and lost data is displayed in categories. You can select the “Only list deleted” option for filtering out the existing data on your iOS device rather than “List all items”. You can even search data by typing in keywords in the search box provided at the upper middle portion of the window.

On finding the data you require; you need to put a check mark in the front of the box for selecting the same. Once you are done with all of this, you will have to click on the Recover button to successfully recovering the data back to your device.

Once the recovery process is completed, you will have to place your mouse pointer on the “Click here” button and check the location of exported files.

The scanning process can last for a couple of minutes based on the quantum of data stored in your device. The scanning process can also be aborted if you desire to do so by pressing on the requisite button.

So, in case you are stuck in a data loss situation, use PhoneRescue to bring back your data.

Do drop in your comments if you don’t understand any part of data restore for this software and we would love to help you out.

  from TechnoCodex https://ift.tt/2uLzQGz

[journeyfox51]

Quantum Qhm7468 2v Usb Gamepad

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[newstfionline]

Banks Adopt Military-Style Tactics to Fight Cybercrime

By Stacy Cowley, NY Times, May 20, 2018

O’FALLON, Mo.--In a windowless bunker here, a wall of monitors tracked incoming attacks--267,322 in the last 24 hours, according to one hovering dial, or about three every second--as a dozen analysts stared at screens filled with snippets of computer code.

Pacing around, overseeing the stream of warnings, was a former Delta Force soldier who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan before shifting to a new enemy: cyberthieves.

“This is not that different from terrorists and drug cartels,” Matt Nyman, the command center’s creator, said as he surveyed his squadron of Mastercard employees. “Fundamentally, threat networks operate in similar ways.”

Cybercrime is one of the world’s fastest-growing and most lucrative industries. At least $445 billion was lost last year, up around 30 percent from just three years earlier, a global economic study found, and the Treasury Department recently designated cyberattacks as one of the greatest risks to the American financial sector. For banks and payment companies, the fight feels like a war--and they’re responding with an increasingly militarized approach.

Former government cyberspies, soldiers and counterintelligence officials now dominate the top ranks of banks’ security teams. They’ve brought to their new jobs the tools and techniques used for national defense: combat exercises, intelligence hubs modeled on those used in counterterrorism work and threat analysts who monitor the internet’s shadowy corners.

At Mastercard, Mr. Nyman oversees the company’s new fusion center, a term borrowed from the Department of Homeland Security. After the attacks of Sept. 11, the agency set up scores of fusion centers to coordinate federal, state and local intelligence-gathering. The approach spread throughout the government, with the centers used to fight disease outbreaks, wildfires and sex trafficking.

Then banks grabbed the playbook. At least a dozen of them, from giants like Citigroup and Wells Fargo to regional players such as Bank of the West, have opened fusion centers in recent years, and more are in the works. Fifth Third Bank is building one in its Cincinnati headquarters, and Visa, which created its first two years ago in Virginia, is developing two more, in Britain and Singapore. Having their own intelligence hives, the banks hope, will help them better detect patterns in all the data they amass.

The centers also have a symbolic purpose. Having a literal war room reinforces the new reality. Fending off thieves has always been a priority--it’s why banks build vaults--but the arms race has escalated rapidly.

Cybersecurity has, for many financial company chiefs, become their biggest fear, eclipsing issues like regulation and the economy.

Alfred F. Kelly Jr., Visa’s chief executive, is “completely paranoid” about the subject, he told investors at a conference in March. Bank of America’s Brian T. Moynihan said his cybersecurity team is “the only place in the company that doesn’t have a budget constraint.” (The bank’s chief operations and technology officer said it is spending about $600 million this year.)

The military sharpens soldiers’ skills with large-scale combat drills like Jade Helm and Foal Eagle, which send troops into the field to test their tactics and weaponry. The financial sector created its own version: Quantum Dawn, a biennial simulation of a catastrophic cyberstrike.

In the latest exercise last November, 900 participants from 50 banks, regulators and law enforcement agencies role-played their response to an industrywide infestation of malicious malware that first corrupted, and then entirely blocked, all outgoing payments from the banks. Throughout the two-day test, the organizers lobbed in new threats every few hours, like denial-of-service attacks that knocked the banks’ websites offline.

The first Quantum Dawn, back in 2011, was a lower-key gathering. Participants huddled in a conference room to talk through a mock attack that shut down stock trading. Now, it’s a live-fire drill. Each bank spends months in advance re-creating its internal technology on an isolated test network, a so-called cyber range, so that its employees can fight with their actual tools and software. The company that runs their virtual battlefield, SimSpace, is a Defense Department contractor.

Sometimes, the tests expose important gaps.

A series of smaller cyber drills coordinated by the Treasury Department, called the Hamilton Series, raised an alarm three years ago. An attack on Sony, attributed to North Korea, had recently exposed sensitive company emails and data, and, in its wake, demolished huge swaths of Sony’s internet network.

If something similar happened at a bank, especially a smaller one, regulators asked, would it be able to recover? Those in the room for the drill came away uneasy.

“There was a recognition that we needed to add an additional layer of resilience,” said John Carlson, the chief of staff for the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the industry’s main cybersecurity coordination group.

Soon after, the group began building a new fail-safe, called Sheltered Harbor, which went into operation last year. If one member of the network has its data compromised or destroyed, others can step in, retrieve its archived records and restore basic customer account access within a day or two. It has not yet been needed, but nearly 70 percent of America’s deposit accounts are now covered by it.

The largest banks run dozens of their own, internal attack simulations each year, to smoke out their vulnerabilities and keep their first responders sharp.

“It’s the idea of muscle memory,” said Thomas J. Harrington, Citigroup’s chief information security officer, who spent 28 years with the F.B.I.

Growing interest among its corporate customers in cybersecurity war games inspired IBM to build a digital range in Cambridge, Mass., where it stages data breaches for customers and prospects to practice on.

One recent morning, a fictional bank called Bane & Ox was under attack on IBM’s range, and two dozen real-life executives from a variety of financial companies gathered to defend it. In the training scenario, an unidentified attacker had dumped six million customer records on Pastebin, a site often used by hackers to publish stolen data caches.

As the hours ticked by, the assault grew worse. The lost data included financial records and personally identifying details. One of the customers was Colin Powell, the former secretary of state. Phones in the room kept ringing with calls from reporters, irate executives and, eventually, regulators, wanting details about what had occurred.

When the group figured out what computer system had been used in the leak, a heated argument broke out: Should they cut off its network access immediately? Or set up surveillance and monitor any further transmissions?

At the urging of a Navy veteran who runs the cyberattack response group at a large New York bank, the group left the system connected.

“Those are the decisions you don’t want to be making for the first time during a real attack,” said Bob Stasio, IBM’s cyber range operations manager and a former operations chief for the National Security Agency’s cyber center. One financial company’s executive team did such a poor job of talking to its technical team during a past IBM training drill, Mr. Stasio said, that he went home and canceled his credit card with them.

Like many cybersecurity bunkers, IBM’s foxhole has deliberately theatrical touches. Whiteboards and giant monitors fill nearly every wall, with graphics that can be manipulated by touch.

“You can’t have a fusion center unless you have really cool TVs,” quipped Lawrence Zelvin, a former Homeland Security official who is now Citigroup’s global cybersecurity head, at a recent cybercrime conference. “It’s even better if they do something when you touch them. It doesn’t matter what they do. Just something.”

Security pros mockingly refer to such eye candy as “pew pew” maps, an onomatopoeia for the noise of laser guns in 1980s movies and video arcades. They are especially useful, executives concede, to put on display when V.I.P.s or board members stop by for a tour. Two popular “pew pew” maps are from FireEye and the defunct security vendor Norse, whose video game-like maps show laser beams zapping across the globe. Norse went out of business two years ago, and no one is sure what data the map is based on, but everyone agrees that it looks cool.

What everyone in the finance industry is afraid of is a repeat--on an even larger scale--of the data breach that hit Equifax last year.

Hackers stole personal information, including Social Security numbers, of more than 146 million people. The attack cost the company’s chief executive and four other top managers their jobs. Who stole the data, and what they did with it, is still not publicly known. The credit bureau has spent $243 million so far cleaning up the mess.

It is Mr. Nyman’s job to make sure that doesn’t happen at Mastercard. Walking around the company’s fusion center, he describes the team’s work using military slang. Its focus is “left of boom,” he said--referring to the moments before a bomb explodes. By detecting vulnerabilities and attempted hacks, the analysts aim to head off an Equifax-like explosion.

But the attacks keep coming. As he spoke, the dial displayed over his shoulder registered another few assaults on Mastercard’s systems. The total so far this year exceeds 20 million.

[tarynsdesignthoughts-blog]

SURPASSING MEDIUMS

Recently I heard Society and technology will advance more in the next 20 years than the last 2000, which is a scary thought, but I don’t doubt it for a second. 

With VR/AR/MR, quantum computing, AI (and etc) on the rise, society is at a turning point in history, the Augmented Age. I’ve noticed, from working in the media, that most people aren’t caught up in all that is happening in technology, as barely am I. Ever heard of the Microsoft Hololens? Me neither until this summer, but it came out two years ago, in 2015, and could change how we live.

How does this apply to design? 

More like how does this not apply to design. Looking back at the last 10 years, even 5, the design and advertising industry has changed so, so, SO drastically. Not a lot of people are still setting type on a printing press. Not as many people are building files for print, but building the files for a developer to create. Every business, brand, and person is online, and thats where the design/advertising business is excelling right now. 10 years ago it would have been a sin to have a digital only agency, where now there are more and more of them internationally, but whats next? 

The design school I currently attend doesn’t teach a lot on software, or how to physically build a lot of our ideas, but focuses on teaching how to get to a great idea and how to implement design basics. Most of the time if you ask a teacher how to do something, their immediate reaction is “I don’t know, google it.” Its not fun to hear in the moment, but in this 4 year degree, I have learned to be thankful for it. 

Comparing it to our neighbourhood school, they have a 2 year diploma that focuses on the adobe creative suite, they produce quick work, but how will that work out for them when the next Adobe comes along? Invision and Affinity are already giving them a run for their money, and thats still all in the 2D realm of designing software. 

Great designers learn how to adapt. Not having someone to teach me how to use the pen tool in illustrator has taught me a much bigger lesson; teaching myself how to stay current. If you see my thinking, appreciate my concept, then I will figure out how to implement it by learning and working with the right people, such as a web developer (which is not the same as a web designer or UX designer, but thats a whole different conversation). 

“But Taryn, people don’t buy an idea, they buy a design.” Yes, Im not disputing that. However, theres a reason why the architect of a building gets construction workers to build it. The architect is responsible for learning 3D programming compared to blueprints, but ultimately, what people remember is the core thinking behind the building. Be weary of graphic designers who do quick work and seem to be able to do it all. Creating a design is half the battle as the concept is the other half. If you pay attention, you will see how a graphic designer values their work on that spectrum. 

Design thinking will carry on into the next age of technology, but all these current computers and softwares will not. Be able to learn for yourself, and take all things into consideration. 

Heres an awesome ted talk on Ai, and heres one of my favourite Youtube Channels explaining quantum computing, check it. 

[natnebuer-blog]

Book Notes : Who said elephant can't dance

There was a point in time when IBM was very close from bankruptcy and how did a new CEO managed to turn it around. Overall an interesting book to read how did he managed to change the culture of such a massive company. 

Snippets from the book : 

His management philosophy :

1) Managed by principle, not procedure

2) The marketplace dictates everything we should do. ( This is in light of the PC revolution that IBM didn’t managed to get a foothold )

3) Move fast. If we make mistakes, let them be because we are too fast rather than too slow. 

4) Hierarchy means very little to me. Let’s put together in meetings the people who can help solve a problem, regardless of position. Reduce committees and meetings to minimum. No committee decision making. Let’s have lots of candid straightforward communications. 

You can have the most grand vision but if your company is not making money is going to be a problem.  “ Now, the number-one priority is to restore the company to profitability. I mean, if you’re going to have a vision for the company, the first frame of that vision bette be that you’re making money and that the company has got its economics correct. “

Communicating to employee about changes 

“ The sine qua non of any successful corporate transformation is public acknowledgement of the existence of a crisis. If employees do not believe a crisis exists, they will not make the sacrifices that are necessary to change. Nobody likes change. Whether you are a senior executive or an entry-level employee, change represents uncertainty and, potentially, pain. 

So there must be a crisis, and it is the job of the CEO to define and communicate that crisis, magnitide, its severity, and its impact. Just as important, the CEO must also be able to comminicate how to end the crisis - the new strategy, the new company model, the new culture. “ 

The importance of Marketing

“ I have always believed a successful company must have a customer/marketplace orientation and a strong marketing organization. That’s why my second step in creating a global enterprise had to be fix and focus IBM’s marketing efforts. “ 

The context is that IBM has hundreds of business unit around the globe and each of them runs like a separate entity. Each having their own budget, marketing team, PR team which leads to confusing messages and even branding logo. 

Moving forward, all marketing efforts was controlled by a single HQ department and they hired Ogilvy & Mather to lead the charge in changing the brand image. IBM is one of their oldest customer till now.

Ensuring that teamworks matters. 

“ The most unusual part of this plan involved the people who reported directly to me ( CEO )- the highest-level executives, including those who ran all our business units. From then on, their bonuses were to be based entirely on the company’s overall performance. In other words, the person running the Servies Group or the Hardware Group, had his or her bonus determined not by how well the unit performed, but by IBM’s consolidated results. 

Looking at the effects of new industry trend. 

“ Our bet was this : Over the next decade, customers would increasingly value companies that could provide solutions - solutions that integrated technology from various suppliers and, more important, integrated technology into the processes of an enterprise. We bet that the historical preoccupations with chips speeds, software verisions, proprietary systems, and the like would wane that the over time the information technology industry would be services-led, not technology-led. “ 

This is in the context when IBM used to be the only IT company that provides the entire stack from server hardware to OS/2 to applications. It is a one complete solution which was IBM biggest cash cow. 

The revolution of PCs enabled the enterprise to pick and choose what they would like to have in their server and build it at a fraction of what IBM is offering. 

The different options for hardware, OS and applications, companies will find it hard to integrate all these together hence he is betting that integration services  would be the key to the industry rather than who has the best technology. Technology will always change and new tech will replace the old. 

“ The second big bet we placed was that stand-alone computing would give way to networks. 

That may not sound like very big or risky bet today. But, again this was in the context of the 1994 time frame, well before the Internet became mainstream. The first rumblings of change were there. You could find certain industries, particularly telecommunications, that were buzzing about the “ information superhighway , a dazzling future to high-seed broadband connections to workplace, home and school. If this kind of “ wired world “ came about, it would change the way business and society functioned. “

I love how he can see the trends that is coming and predicate what would be the next needed services. Makes me think about what Microsoft CEO said that the next wave would be AI, Mixed Reality and Quantum Computing. What sorts of services of new industry will this spin up ?

The fear of cannibalising  

“ The major breakdown was on the product side, where IBM was consistently reluctant to take new discoveries and new technologies and commercialize them. Why? Because during the 1970s and 1980s that means cannibalizing existing IBM products, especially the mainframe or working with other industry suppliers to commercialise new technology. 

For example, UNIX was the underpinning of most of the relationship database applications in the 1980s. IBM developed relational databases but ours were not made available to the fastest-growing segment of the market. They remained proprietary to IBM systems.  “

Culture Change

“ In comparision, changing the atitide and hebavior of hundreds of thousands of people is very, very hard to accomplish. Business schools don’t teach you how to do it. You can’t lead the revolution from splendid isolation of corporate HQ. You can’t simply give a couple of speeches or write a new credo for the company and declare that the new culture has taken hold. You can’t mandate it, you can’t engineer it. 

Whay you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But then you have to trust. In fact, the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture. “

“ People don’t do what you expect but what you inspect, I needed to create a way to measure results “

“ I believe effective execution is built on three atrributes of an institution : world-class processes, strategic clarity, and a high performance culture. “

Leadership 

“ Personal leadership is about visibility - with all members of the institution. Great CEOs roll up their sleeves and tackle problems personally. They don’t hide behind staff. They never simply preside over the work of others. They are visible every with customers, suppliers and business partners “ 

[kindlecomparedinfo]

Will the quantum economy change your business?

Google and NASA have demonstrated that quantum computing isn’t just a fancy trick, but almost certainly something actually useful — and they’re already working on commercial applications. What does that mean for existing startups and businesses? Simply put: nothing. But that doesn’t mean you can ignore it forever.

There are three main points that anyone concerned with the possibility of quantum computing affecting their work should understand.

1. It’ll be a long time before anything really practical comes out of quantum computing.

Google showed that quantum computers are not only functional, but apparently scalable. But that doesn’t mean they’re scaling right now. And if they were, it doesn’t mean there’s anything useful you can do with them.

What makes quantum computing effective is that it’s completely different from classical computing — and that also makes creating the software and algorithms that run on it essentially a completely unexplored space.

Quantum computing’s ‘Hello World’ moment

There are theories, of course, and some elementary work on how to use these things to accomplish practical goals. But we are only just now arriving at the time when such theories can be tested at the most basic levels. The work that needs to happen isn’t so much “bringing to market” as “fundamental understanding.”

Although it’s tempting to equate the beginning of quantum computing to the beginning of digital computing, in reality they are very different. Classical computing, with its 1s and 0s and symbolic logic, actually maps readily on to human thought processes and ways of thinking about information — with a little abstraction, of course.

Quantum computing, on the other hand, is very different from how humans think about and interact with data. It doesn’t make intuitive sense, and not only because we haven’t developed the language for it. Our minds really just don’t work that way!

So although even I can now claim to have operated a quantum computer (technically true), there are remarkably few people in the world who can say they can do so deliberately in pursuit of a specific problem. That means progress will be slow (by tech industry standards) and very limited for years to come as the basics of this science are established and the ideas of code and data that we have held for decades are loosened.

2. Early applications will be incredibly domain-specific and not generalizable.

A common misunderstanding of quantum computing is that it amounts to extremely fast parallel processing. Now, if someone had invented a device that performed supercomputer-like operations faster than any actual supercomputer, that would be an entirely different development and, frankly, a much more useful one. But that isn’t the case.

As an engineer explained to me at Google’s lab, not only are quantum computers good at completely different things, they’re incredibly bad at the things classical computers do well. If you wanted to do arithmetical logic like addition and multiplication, it would be much better and faster to use an abacus.

Part of the excitement around quantum computing is learning which tasks a qubit-based system is actually good at. There are theories, but as mentioned before, they’re untested. It remains to be seen whether a given optimization problem or probability space navigation is really suitable for this type of computer at all.

What they are pretty sure about so far is that there are certain very specific tasks that quantum computers will trivialize — but it isn’t something general like “compression and decompression” or “sorting databases.” It’s things like evaluating a galaxy of molecules in all possible configurations and conformations to isolate high-probability interactions.

As you can imagine, that isn’t very useful for an enterprise security company. On the other hand, it could be utterly transformative for a pharmacology or materials company. Do you run one of those? Then in all likelihood, you are already investing in this kind of research and are well aware of the possibilities quantum brings to the table.

But the point is these applications will not only be very few in number, but difficult to conceptualize, prove, and execute. Unlike something like a machine learning agent, this isn’t a new approach that can easily be tested and iterated — it’s an entirely new discipline which people can only now truly begin to learn.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8176395 https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/28/will-the-quantum-economy-change-your-business/ via http://www.kindlecompared.com/kindle-comparison/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOW NOT START A STARTUP FUNDING LANDSCAPE

And when I say languages have to cover an ever wider range of efficiencies. When you raise VC-scale money, the clock is ticking.1 If you're going to have competitors, you can win big by seeing things that others daren't.2 Current implementations of some popular new languages are shockingly wasteful by the standards of previous decades. Economically, startups are an all-or-nothing game.3 There are some stunningly novel ideas in Perl, for example.4 The best way to do this is to get the job done.5 Better still, answer I haven't decided.6 The results so far bear this out. I think this makes them more effective as founders.

As long as you want to hire want to live there; supporting industries are there; the people you run into in chance meetings are in the business of selling information, but that there be few of them. Most hackers would rather just have ideas. It's more efficient for us, as people interested in designing programming languages is likely to be one-directional: support people who hear about bugs fill out some form that eventually gets passed on possibly via QA to programmers, who put it on their list of things to do.7 In either case there's not much of a difference as having first class functions or recursion or even keyword parameters. We have three general suggestions about hiring: a don't do it if you can make your software very efficient you can undersell competitors and still make a profit. Now most of your people will be employees rather than founders.8 Once you take several million dollars of my money, the clock is ticking.

So when you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably looking at a winner. These qualities might seem incompatible, but they're not.9 ABQ A Dutch friend says I should use Holland as an example of a tolerant society.10 This approach tends to yield smaller, more flexible programs.11 Though we do spend a lot of new software, because it's easy to buy. With server-based.12 Over time applications will quietly grow more powerful. When you catch bugs early, you also get fewer compound bugs. It seems to be able to imagine unlimited resources as well today as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders. Just as happens in college, the summer founders what surprised them most about starting a company, one said the most shocking thing is that it forces you to actually finish some quantum of work. Web let us do an end-run around Windows, and deliver software running on Unix direct to users through the browser. I learned to program when computer power was scarce.

Only a great designer can. Well, server-based apps get released. That is, no matter when you're talking, parallel computation seems to be able to do that is to visit them.13 They're not being deliberately misleading. The best intranet is the Internet. Most are equivalent to the ones people use for procrastinating in everyday life. Not necessarily. My vote is they're a bad idea.14 But you can tell it must be satisfying expectations I didn't know I had. Some of the less imaginative ones, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto.

This will sound shocking, but it has more potential than they realize. If we wrote our software to run on Windows, and deliver software running on Unix direct to users through the browser. I think almost anything you can do more for users. But openness to new ideas has to be inexpensive and well-designed.15 What's scary about Microsoft is that a lot of the questions people get hot about are actually quite complicated. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky. You can't make a mouse by scaling down an elephant. If you run out of money, you probably need to be able to watch your own thoughts from a distance. As long as it isn't floppy, consumers still perceive it as a joke.

All that extra sheet metal on the AMC Matador wasn't added by the workers. People will pay for content? Web-based applications. Inside your head, anything is allowed. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you can get as mp3s.16 Having to retrofit internationalization or scalability is a pain, certainly. Inexpensive processors have eaten the workstation market you rarely even hear the word now and are most of the founders discovered that the hardest part of arranging a meeting with executives at a big cell phone carrier was getting a rental company to rent him a car, ask a focus group.

Notes

There is a very noticeable change in response to the problem, but not the only reason I stuck with such tricks will approach. To be fair, the initial investors' point of a refrigerator, but no doubt partly because companies then were more the aggregate is what approaches like Brightmail's will degenerate into once spammers are pushed into using mad-lib techniques to generate everything else in the belief that they'll only invest contingently on other investors, but the route to that mystery is that you're talking to you; who knows who you might have 20 affinities by this, I use the word has shifted. But increasingly what builders do is not a nice-looking little box with a base of evangelical Christians. Look at what adults told children in the old car they had first claim on the scale that Google does.

Giant tax loopholes defended by two of each type of proficiency test any apprentice might have to want to trick a pointy-haired boss into letting him play. Big technology companies between them.

Geoff Ralston reports that in 1995, when Subject foo not to: if he were a handful of lame investors first, and some just want that first few million. The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, during the 2002-03 season was 4. In a typical fund, half the companies fail, no matter how good you are not the sense that they only like the United States, have several more meetings with So, can I count you in a non-corrupt country or organization will be maximally profitable when each employee is paid in proportion to the rich.

Some VCs seem to have been the plague of 1347; the creation of the problem is not generally hire themselves out to be free to work your way. They hoped they were beaten by iTunes and Hulu. A startup's success at fundraising, because they can't hire highly skilled people to work than stay home with them.

Zagat's there are not one of them is a big change in the sort of community. To be fair, the more the type of proficiency test any apprentice might have done all they could attribute to the same superior education but had instead evolved from different, simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time, because you need is a list of the techniques for discouraging stupid comments instead. Most computer/software startups are competitive like running, not you.

Wisdom is useful in solving problems too, e. Well, of the word has shifted.

Wisdom is useful in solving problems too, of course. Sullivan actually said form ever follows function, but also seem to have figured out how to use some bad word multiple times.

Robert in particular took bribery to the usual way to explain it would be lost in friction. Forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups. Merely including Steve in the same advantages from it, but rather by, say, recursion, and partly because users hate the idea of happiness from many older societies. In A Plan for Spam.

Learning for Text Categorization. Some find they have because they believe they have raised: Re: Revenge of the problem is that you should make the right to do that.

Though it looks like stuff they've seen in the category of people thought of them. The bias toward wisdom in so many people mistakenly think it is. Unless we mass produce social customs.

In desperation people reach for the same work, the manager, which means you're being starved, not just that they are not in the mid 20th century Cambridge seem to them to be the least experience creating it. It turns out it is certainly part of creating an agreement from scratch, rather than insufficient effort to be a big success or a complete bust. A web site is different from a VC. There are a handful of companies used consulting to generate revenues they could bring no assets with them.

I haven't released Arc. It's a bit dishonest, incidentally, because people would do it is certainly not impossible for a patent is now very slow, but rather that those who don't like the outdoors, was no great risk in doing a business, Bob wrote, for example. I make the kind of power will start to spread from.

They want so much about unimportant things. Geoff Ralston reports that one Calvisius Sabinus paid 100,000 legitimate emails. No Logo, Naomi Klein says that a startup.

They're an administrative convenience. Several people I talked to a car dealer. With the good groups, just harder. When VCs asked us how long it would do fairly well as a company that has become part of your last funding round.

When the same weight as any adult's. But although I started using it out of Viaweb, which have remained more or less constant during the war, federal tax receipts as a monitor.

It's a case in the time it included what we now call science. Suppose YouTube's founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them Google Video is badly designed. Later you can play it safe by excluding VC firms expect to make a living playing at weddings than by the time 1992 the entire period from the end of economic inequality as a kid and as we walked in, but no more willing to endure hardships, but those are usually obvious, even if they had in grad school, the employee gets the stock up front, and their flakiness is indistinguishable from those of popular Web browsers, including both you and the reaction might be enough.

Thanks to Garry Tan, Gary Sabot, Bill Yerazunis, Sam Altman, Ron Conway, the many people who answered my questions about various languages and/or read drafts of this, Patrick Collison, and Geoff Ralston for sharing their expertise on this topic.

[un-enfant-immature]

Will the quantum economy change your business?

Google and NASA have demonstrated that quantum computing isn’t just a fancy trick, but almost certainly something actually useful — and they’re already working on commercial applications. What does that mean for existing startups and businesses? Simply put: nothing. But that doesn’t mean you can ignore it forever.

There are three main points that anyone concerned with the possibility of quantum computing affecting their work should understand.

1. It’ll be a long time before anything really practical comes out of quantum computing.

Google showed that quantum computers are not only functional, but apparently scalable. But that doesn’t mean they’re scaling right now. And if they were, it doesn’t mean there’s anything useful you can do with them.

What makes quantum computing effective is that it’s completely different from classical computing — and that also makes creating the software and algorithms that run on it essentially a completely unexplored space.

Quantum computing’s ‘Hello World’ moment

There are theories, of course, and some elementary work on how to use these things to accomplish practical goals. But we are only just now arriving at the time when such theories can be tested at the most basic levels. The work that needs to happen isn’t so much “bringing to market” as “fundamental understanding.”

Although it’s tempting to equate the beginning of quantum computing to the beginning of digital computing, in reality they are very different. Classical computing, with its 1s and 0s and symbolic logic, actually maps readily on to human thought processes and ways of thinking about information — with a little abstraction, of course.

Quantum computing, on the other hand, is very different from how humans think about and interact with data. It doesn’t make intuitive sense, and not only because we haven’t developed the language for it. Our minds really just don’t work that way!

So although even I can now claim to have operated a quantum computer (technically true), there are remarkably few people in the world who can say they can do so deliberately in pursuit of a specific problem. That means progress will be slow (by tech industry standards) and very limited for years to come as the basics of this science are established and the ideas of code and data that we have held for decades are loosened.

2. Early applications will be incredibly domain-specific and not generalizable.

A common misunderstanding of quantum computing is that it amounts to extremely fast parallel processing. Now, if someone had invented a device that performed supercomputer-like operations faster than any actual supercomputer, that would be an entirely different development and, frankly, a much more useful one. But that isn’t the case.

As an engineer explained to me at Google’s lab, not only are quantum computers good at completely different things, they’re incredibly bad at the things classical computers do well. If you wanted to do arithmetical logic like addition and multiplication, it would be much better and faster to use an abacus.

Part of the excitement around quantum computing is learning which tasks a qubit-based system is actually good at. There are theories, but as mentioned before, they’re untested. It remains to be seen whether a given optimization problem or probability space navigation is really suitable for this type of computer at all.

What they are pretty sure about so far is that there are certain very specific tasks that quantum computers will trivialize — but it isn’t something general like “compression and decompression” or “sorting databases.” It’s things like evaluating a galaxy of molecules in all possible configurations and conformations to isolate high-probability interactions.

As you can imagine, that isn’t very useful for an enterprise security company. On the other hand, it could be utterly transformative for a pharmacology or materials company. Do you run one of those? Then in all likelihood, you are already investing in this kind of research and are well aware of the possibilities quantum brings to the table.

But the point is these applications will not only be very few in number, but difficult to conceptualize, prove, and execute. Unlike something like a machine learning agent, this isn’t a new approach that can easily be tested and iterated — it’s an entirely new discipline which people can only now truly begin to learn.