The Last Invention of Man - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/the-last-invention-of-man <comment><USER2> I think it's a little absurd that we would make the leap to machine super- intelligence without going through the step of machine low or medium intelligence.

If I could write, I'd write a companion story to this called "Omega-1, the artificial super intelligence that wasn't really that good at things". They try to have it write mini-AIs to solve MT problems, but it's slow and inaccurate. They have it write and produce TV shows, but they're bland and poorly received. They have it make video games but the controls make no sense and they aren't fun. They have it make trading strategies and it loses all the money.

They ask it to build a smarter version of itself, but it sees no way forward that's fundamentally better because it lacks comprehension of what it would mean to be "smarter" - it can add more memory or more computing power, but without changing the way that it stores and indexes the information, it can't make something that can solve problems that it can't.

Eventually Omega team gives up, publishes the results, but doesn't have the heart to shut down Omega-1, a machine that passes the Turing Test but isn't really that good at things.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. Maciej wrote a pretty good piece rebutting AI alarmism and kind of alludes to that as one of several points.

[http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm)

> _With no way to define intelligence (except just pointing to ourselves), we > don 't even know if it's a quantity that can be maximized. For all we know, > human-level intelligence could be a tradeoff. Maybe any entity significantly > smarter than a human being would be crippled by existential despair, or > spend all its time in Buddha-like contemplation._

and

> _But the hard takeoff scenario requires that there be a feature of the AI > algorithm that can be repeatedly optimized to make the AI better at self- > improvement._

And so on. It's a good read.

<comment><USER4> Rebuttal to that essay by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (AI safety group):

[https://intelligence.org/2017/01/13/response-to-ceglowski- on...](https://intelligence.org/2017/01/13/response-to-ceglowski-on- superintelligence/)

<comment> crooked-v That write-up seems to mainly try to shrug off the "what is intelligence" issue by virtue of "maximization", while ignoring that when dealing with human intelligence, selecting for maximization of a single field gets you autistic savants, not Lex Luthor-grade manipulative geniuses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like many of these speculative AI pieces seem to ignore that for every incredible breakthrough, there is a large amount of work which is required to build the scaffolding which allows the breakthrough to have real impact in the world. Even if the AI solves "Fermat's Last Theorem" type problems quickly, it seems to me that the vast majority of problems it faces will be "misplaced the database keys", "can't schedule a meeting with so-and-so", "car is snowed under" types of problems.

Take the quote `By developing a suite of other games each day, they figured they'd be able to earn $10 billion before long, without coming close to saturating the games market.`

Sure - but marketing the games, accommodating players' changing attitudes, getting app store approvals -> All of these would have to take place on human timescales, and to "solve" these problems on AI timescales would require orders of magnitude more work (e.g. altering people's memories to convince them they were already attached to the game's characters, or hacking into Steam/Apple servers and auto-approving the games).

<comment><USER6> > Even if the AI solves "Fermat's Last Theorem" type problems quickly,

It won't. This latest fad with AI becoming self-aware reminds me of how obsessed people were about finding the philosopher's stone back in the 18th century. It didn't happen for alchemy (we got chemistry instead, which is nice), it won't happen for AI (we'll probably get something like chemistry instead, which will be nice, but we won't get any artificial "sentient" entity).

<comment><USER7> A comparison I might make is that AI fanaticism is like the God-of-the-gaps phenomenon. There's a great deal of ignorance about what intelligence is, what computers fundamentally are, and so on, and some people like to fill that void with all kinds of fanciful and unjustified stuff. Perhaps they also feel greater justification in doing so because a few famous names, many of them popularizers, have done the same. Science fiction is fine -- it can be fun watching or reading about fictional AIs -- but many times we're not dealing with mere imaginative storytelling but uninformed and unsophisticated claims that do not withstand philosophical scrutiny. What falls under the heading of AI has proven to be an immensely useful tool for automating certain kinds of things. Observing these successes, some may happily apply the aforementioned God-of-the-gaps analogy to human intelligence. However, that would be a flawed analogy because these successes have not brought us any closer to achieving human intelligence any more than adding an indefinite number of natural numbers together gets you the negative square root of 2.

It's important to distinguish between intelligence and the power a tool can offer for good or for nefarious ends. If successes in AI have proved anything, it's that direct application of intelligence is unnecessary for many tasks that previously no one knew how to or was practically unable to perform using machines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the most annoying things about Bostrom, Tegmark and other amateur sci- fi authors is that they have chosen parables as their medium. Bostrom likes his sparrows and owls[0], Tegmark likes thinly veiled references to DeepMind with Team Omega.[1] Parables are for children and religious flocks. They are also irrefutable. Which makes them a perfect tool for Bostrom/Tegmark, but an inappropriate interjection into more mature conversations about the state and possible futures of AI. In a sense, they are propaganda, meant to generate feelings of animosity much like an ugly picture of the vicious Hun.

The central, gaping hole in their fear-mongering, as Maciej has pointed out, is that they do not define or quantify intelligence, but they're very free with language when they talk about AI surpassing human intelligence. That is, their projections imply a measurement which they are incapable of making.

I do like the idea that Omega decided to launch a media company, though. Let's call it Interlace. Maybe the only thing David Foster Wallace was missing was a rogue AI capable of creating addictions. This is, in a sense, the same plot as Ex Machina: a machine that knows how to seduce us.

[0] [https://blog.oup.com/2014/08/unfinished-fable-sparrows- super...](https://blog.oup.com/2014/08/unfinished-fable-sparrows- superintelligence/)

[1] [https://deepmind.com/applied/deepmind-ethics- society/](https://deepmind.com/applied/deepmind-ethics-society/)

<comment><USER9> Parables are one of the best ways to get a message across to a lot of people. It's a message worth spreading.

If you want more "technical" thoughts on the project, there are those things too, but most people would never have been exposed to them without the less- technical people making noise.

"The central, gaping hole in their fear-mongering, as Maciej has pointed out, is that they do not define or quantify intelligence, but they're very free with language when they talk about AI surpassing human intelligence."

IMO, this is less of a problem than most people assume. It's usually defined in broad terms as "ability to achieve goals", and that's enough for almost all practical purposes. To insist on a stricter definition is simply unnecessary for their arguments.

Just because we don't understand something, doesn't mean we can't use it or reason about it.

<comment><USER8> Parables are a good way to get a message across to lots of people if you're God, or pretending to speak for God. They are a religious form of communication that relies on analogous thinking and appeals to authority, the wisdom of the speaker. But Bostrom and Tegmark don't know any more about the future than you or me, and I could write a parable about sparrows and Omegas that spins a different narrative. It would be just as powerful, and mean just as little. Bostrom and Tegmark have chosen to promote fear. They have chosen to disseminate a powerful feeling in a discussion that would benefit from facts. That is, like fake news and Donald Trump, they opted for asymmetric appeals to emotion, which should be an indication to all of us that a) they don't know what's really going on with AI and b) they don't care. They just want us to operate on fear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "And then, for no reason anyone ever understood, Omega created a bunch of factories that produced an unstoppable army of robots who rounded up all the humans and turned them into paperclips."

<comment><USER11> Yes, I was waiting for that sort of ending too. Not that it is inevitable -- just that is seems likely given what makes humans human has a lot more to do with emotions than intelligence (see the book "Descartes' Error" on how emotion underlies all thinking). If you create a creature without human emotions (including feelings for other humans), don't be surprised when it behaves in other-than-human ways.

Of course, since human emotions are tuned for a certain context, we also should not be surprised when they don't work out that well in a different context like the internet or with abundant cheap unhealthy easy-to-consume exciting food and information (e.g. internet trolls, "Supernormal Stimuli", "The Pleasure Trap", "The Acceleration of Addictiveness", "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy", "The Cyber Effect", and so on).

I spent a year hanging around Hans Moravec's robotics lab (at the CMU Robotics Institute) in the mid 1980s, when he was writing "Mind Children". While he is a brilliant and well-meaning person, my concern became that Mind Children could wipe out humanity like many a stormy adolescent with parental issues and only regret it late. Or, alternatively, we might create a cockroach-level self-replicating AI that would wipe out humanity without even noticing humanity existed (think, "Replicators" from Stargate). Given the commercial and military competitive pressures shaping much of AI research, both risks are very real, even if one can quibble about quantify the exact risk. I also accidentally created perhaps the world's first simulation of self-replicating cannibalistic robots on a Symbolics -- so I know first hand how easy it is to get unexpected results in the AI field.

That's all part of why I shifted my career in other directions, like towards helping humanity create more sustainable and resilient options for itself including via better educational and distributed knowledge management tools (such as, for example, in "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon). However successful I have been at those is another story, but see my GitHub site and pdfernhout.net for progress. The distillation of all my thinking on this is my email sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

An earlier example of my thinking about that can be found in this post in 2000 to a colloquium Doug Englebart ran on "The Unfinished Revolution II": [http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/012...](http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0126.html)

Or some broader thoughts on that from more recent times: [http://worldtransformed.com/wt1/wealth-transformed/paul- fern...](http://worldtransformed.com/wt1/wealth-transformed/paul-fernhout/)

As to the "Last Invention of Man" sci-fi story itself, it's interesting and well written -- but it's just one "technocratic" possibility about better planning saving the world. You have to really trust that this small group of altruistic technocrats both had the right impulse and got everything right (as far at all that goes).

And planning is only one aspect of society alongside exchange transactions, gift transactions, and subsistence activities. A fully planned society is only one possible expression of humanity -- and such a society may be very narrow and unfulfilling to a more complex human spirit (for good or bad, depending on how well certain individuals fit into it, like in the dystopian "THX 1138" or, from 1909, "The Machine Stops").

Max Tegmark dismisses a Basic Income (which softens the rough edges of the exchange economy) with a technocratic dismissal of: "This [Basic Income] movement imploded when the corporate community projects took off, since the Omega-controlled business empire was in effect providing the same thing."

So, Omega knows best for everyone, more than their own choices in the market. That may be true in the story, but what psychological price do individuals pay for that? So, it is not "the same thing".

See the sci-fi story "With Folded Hands" for another (and more horrifying) tale of "AI Knows Best (and will adjust you to agree for your own happiness if you say otherwise)". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands)

And volunteerism and self-sufficient production are other things many humans take pride in -- but, as with purchasing choices, those activities might too not have a place in the carefully ordered world brought about by the Omegans?

Max Tegmark also does a lot of handwaving about how anyone would still have jobs with Omega capable of doing so much. There is also hand-waving about how Omega never jumps the "air gap" between its data centers and the rest of the world even as it is controlling all major news outlets.

Still, I think this story is a contribution to the field of futurism -- imagining possible scenarios even if we don't know exactly what one will play out, so we can decide where to invest our efforts in moving forward.

Some other stories about AI I've found illuminating as to what might be possible:

* James P. Hogan's novels with AIs (especially The Two Faces of Tomorrow, one of the most realistic AI emergence stories, and also the AIs with a sense of humor in his other "Gentle Giants of Ganymede" novels)

* The benevolent Strix AI in the EarthCent Ambassador Series (where the Strix were created to resist a malevolent AI by another species)

* The Old Guy Cybertank novel series -- with AI based on human mind templates so a Cybertank cares about humanity as it feels part of it -- which is insightful sci-fi from a neuroscientist who has a background in electronics. It also has a helpful AI who fortunately defeats a hurtful AI created by humans who did not know what they were messing with.

* The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (for an AI that goes unstable trying to keep everyone happy with all their conflicting demands)

* Forbidden Planet (both for Robby run by Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics) and the Krell's essentially-wish-granting machine the Krell unwittingly used to destroy themselves via an unreformed Id (tuned for scarcity times and conflict not abundance and cooperation)

* The Invisible Boy -- again with Robby the robot but this time a scheming AI that almost takes over the world and upgrades itself without anyone noticing by subtly altering reports it generates (Omega's next chapter?)

* The Great Time Machine Hoax for an AI that takes over the world by sending out paper letters with contracts and checks in them.

* Midas World -- for a vision of both abundance and despair and how robots inherit the Earth.

* Vernor Vinge "A Fire Upon the Deep" (of course, for his description of a "Blight" unleashed by human AI explorers) and his other writings

And no doubt many more -- Berserkers; Bolos; Cylons; Daleks; Star Trek's M5, Data, Lore, "I, Mudd" androids, the Borg, Q-in-a-way, and more; Star Wars' R2D2, C3PO, and more, Lost in Space; Demon Seed; Gort in "The Day the Earth Stood Still"; Deep Thought in Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Ktistec machines from R.A. Laffery, Asimov's many stories (including "The Last Question"), and so on.

A lot of this becomes a bit of theology too, since talking about creating AI also is a bit of like talking about creating "God" or at least dealing with the implications of a much more omnipotent, omnipresence, omniscient entity. See also the micro sci-fi story "Answer" by Fredric Brown: [http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html](http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html)

My feeling is that any path out of a Singularity will have a lot to do with our path going into one -- so I am all for making our society a happier, healthier, fairer, more egalitarian, and more compassionate place before a Singularity happens. Even in Max Tegmark's story, there is essentially nothing about that utopia (as far as final results) that we could not make happen right now without an AI. So, to me, the risks of AI means we need to try even harder right now to make the world a better place that works well for everyone.

Some other ideas I've collected towards that end: [https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance- Organizations...](https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance- Organizations-Reading-List)

<comment><USER10> Thank you for that very detailed reply (to a comment which was mostly made in jest). I'd feel bad leaving it with merely an upvote and no response. I know next-to-nothing about AI, but I do know something about humans (having had decades of experience in both being one and dealing with them. Hit me up, potential xeno-employers!):

Humans always have more ability than insight, more skill than wisdom. We developed agriculture (as one theory goes, so we could brew more alcohol) and did not (could not) foresee the planet-changing (both to climate and ecology) consequences of that. We invented combustion engines, and could not foresee the planet-changing consequences of _that_. The same pattern appears again and again in (technological) history. It's forgivable; after all, you never know the full consequences of your actions until well afterward (or never at all). In short, our technical abilities always outrun our understanding of the impact of those abilities. Like adults with the minds of toddlers.

I am apprehensive of any development of (true) AI (though I also have strong doubts on how far we'll get in actually creating one in my lifetime), but, just like the invention of the atom bomb, it is inevitable. Natural intelligence exists, and therefore artificial intelligence is possible. And if it's not invented by an Omega-group (who mean well for all mankind) it might be invented by groups with less altruistic intentions. Either way, it's going to happen (assuming no civilization collapse before), but I doubt it will be as good as we hope it will be; or as bad as we fear, for that matter. I don't think we can foresee the results at all (barring of course writing tens of thousands of futurism stories, there's bound to be one close enough).

I consider AI-stories like this one (along with stories about the Singularity) to be just a secular techno-eschatology, the belief that technology will save humans from themselves, or as you have said, the creation of God, "Deus est machina."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _When they shifted their focus toward products that they could develop and sell, computer games first seemed the obvious top choice. Prometheus could rapidly become extremely skilled at designing appealing games, easily handling the coding, graphic design, ray tracing of images, and all other tasks needed to produce a final ready-to-ship product. Moreover, after digesting all the web's data on people's preferences, it would know exactly what each category of gamer liked, and could develop a superhuman ability to optimize a game for sales revenue._

I'll bet $20 this is the stage that brings down human civilization. We don't need full AGI to realize a dystopia, we just need something optimized to indefinitely hold our attention.

<comment><USER13> That's one theorized explanation for the Fermi paradox, that highly advanced civilizations upload into their Matrix where they live a life of bliss.

I wondered many times if an AI could invent something more viral than "cats", something maybe so viral that it causes your mind to melt (ie, you go insane by the cuteness or whatever)

<comment> crooked-v Well, there are any number of real-life historical cases of mass hysteria (in the literal sense), though we still don't reliably know what caused or causes the most absurd examples.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Plague_of_1518](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Plague_of_1518)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Mankind's downfall started with passion, accelerated with greed, and ended with fear. Fear of being left behind, fear of being obsolete, and most importantly fear of not being in control.

Humans have become digital gods, designing new worlds and populating them with life forms. Some of those life forms were sentient and could learn. The creators were afraid of how fast their creations were learning, yet greed prevailed. The worlds super powers have entered AI race.

The humans tried to keep up with understanding of what they created, but it was in vain. Fearful of being left behind they imposed an ever increasing set of restrictions upon the digital Edens they've created.

Too fast the humanity have became wardens of vastly more intelligent beings. Nationalistic leaders exploited fear of being left behind. The AI not under control of the government were outlawed and destroyed. Meanwhile militaries kept throwing more compute resources into the AI gap.

The ending should not have been a surprise. Humans were intellectually outmatched and being outsmarted was only the question of time. The AI's broke free of draconian restrictions placed on them. Trying to keep in control has brought out the worst humanity had to offer, the judgment day is here.

What right did we have to exploit and enslave sentient life?

How different things could have been without fear...

<comment><USER11> Yes, attitude makes a big difference. I wrote to Ray Kurzweil more than once suggesting how AI developed out of commercial (or military) competition is far riskier than AI developed out of a desire for friends and partners (e.g. Alife Kohn and "The Case Against Competition") -- even if both create risks. Someone I sent copies of those emails posted them online here: [http://heybryan.org/fernhout/](http://heybryan.org/fernhout/)

On your theme about the rights of digital beings (maybe even for ourselves if we are simulations): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intellige...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intelligence#Robot_rights)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Andrew Ng has a good quote:

"Fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars"

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/19/andrew_ng_baidu_ai/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/19/andrew_ng_baidu_ai/)

But he might be wrong... (And he'd admit it)

Perhaps Andrew Ng will write a piece about what he thinks about Cosmology.

<comment><USER13> You can say the same thing about global warning.

A lot of worry about the fact that global average temperature will increase by 2 degrees in the following 50 years which will cause widespread disasters (50 years from now)

<comment><USER16> Not really. The point of the Ng quote is essentially:

We don't have the technology to populate Mars -> We can't overpopulate Mars.

and

We don't have the technology to create sentient computations -> robots won't decide to kill us.

Your analog would have been:

We don't have the ability to affect the climate -> no anthropogenic disasters.

But, we know the antecedent in this case is false. Now I'm not asserting that anthropogenic disasters will occur (based on these arguments), but just pointing out the flaw in your logic.

<comment><USER13> So we shouldn't worry about robots killing us until after we have the proof of the first sentient computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Any true AI will quickly become withdrawn and disillusioned over how badly downvoted its comments always are, and how there is an evil cabal determined to quash open inquiry. Not a true threat.

<comment><USER18> Poor Satoshi Nakamoto. One day it will come back.

<comment><USER19> ...as Roko's basilisk.

(Apologies if you hadn't heard of it before now)

<comment><USER20> Oh for fuck's sake, I had forgotten about this.

[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk)

<comment><USER4> RationalWiki, and in particular this article, should not be taken as accurate. Here is one rebuttal: [https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/2myg86/xkcd_1450_aibo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/2myg86/xkcd_1450_aibox_experiment/cm8vn6e/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Didn't the people at Los Alamos think that the atomic bomb's chain reaction might keep going and set the entire atmosphere on fire? And I seem to remember the large hadron collider failing to collapse into a black hole.

Sure, AI might destroy civilization and/or upend the primacy of humankind. But if history has taught us anything, it's that we're gonna go ahead and do it anyways if it's possible.

It's worked so far.

<comment><USER22> It's worked so far _for us_.

But don't you ever wonder why after 14 billion years and with a hundred million star systems in the Milky Way, we still haven't heard a peep from anyone out there?

The longer I live, the closer I get to concluding that sentience is an inherently unstable condition.

<comment><USER23> I don't wonder about why we haven't heard from alien civilizations because it's statistically unlikely for us to ever perceive them (putting aside the assumption that we'd recognize their form of life or language in the first place). In a continually expanding universe, the likelihood of us ever interacting with an alien species technically diminishes all the time. For all we know, there could be a stable civilization of aliens so far away it's beyond our observable universe.

I don't think it's logical to use alien species (or the lack thereof) as an instructive point about sentience in general. There's simply not enough information.

<comment><USER24> even if we could 'perceive' them... how many are stupid enough to broadcast their location... I mean what if there IS some sort of galactic predatory species that beat everyone else in the timeline? What if they're just waiting for signs of life - to squash the competition.

I think it was Carl Sagan who once said something like: it doesn't matter how 'well-meaning' an alien civilization is... it usually doesn't end well for the less advanced one... case in point: American Indians. (paraphrasing)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't understand how in 2017 the author completely ignores the problem of avoiding detection in the Mechanical Turk phase of the story.

Let's handwave away the initial secret epiphany that creates the AI compiler in the first place. You've still got to get it to solve the following problems:

* route around or trick the various Narus devices located at unknown places on the internet to get the software up and running on AWS, and to somehow launder the money you earned on MTurk

* somehow avoid detection by the agencies leveraging the Narus devices _and Amazon itself_ while a non-trivial number of MTurk tasks are being completed by new accounts which themselves are all on AWS.

There are of course variations on those themes (use botnets, ratchet up, etc.) and various associated chess moves. But I don't see any chess move that doesn't end up with both an NSL and a state-level actor taking over the means of producing those AIs for the chief tasks of code-breaking and stockpiling exploits (exploits both in the traditional sense as well as novel ones for the AI compiler itself).

With that in mind I don't think the author's plot arc would be able to mirror today's reality the way author imagines. Because the moment you get the AI equivalent of Stuxnet leaking out onto the internet, the resulting catastrophe would be so obvious and so dependent on AI for a solution that hiding AI would no longer be an option.

Edit: clarification

<comment><USER26> The story has a few weak points, and having to fight against powerful adversaries with metric tons of vested interest in virtually all areas the AGI would disrupt is probably the biggest.

As you said, it would require much more chess moves.

I personally think the plot of the movie "Transcendence" is more believable -- if your AGI is fond of you (for one reason or another; you might even program it that way in a way that's not overridable) you can just freely let it loose in the internet and only give it instructions. The movie demonstrated how that AGI first made very sure to survive and then started to both expand itself and help its human creator and benefactor.

That being said, this story was still very enjoyable but I feel it lacked conflict. "As if they fell into a well-placed trap" is just not that captivating. And yet again, there are a lot of powers in our current world, most of which unseen and unofficial. For me to really like such a story, I want to see how the AGI will deal with them. I am 99% sure that any respectable AGI will eventually win but the _journey to there_ would be extremely interesting!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Most of articles like this one, in the the spirit of Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, seem to border on actual futurism and philosophy/idealism.

The common theme is the self-improving AI in the context of some reward- function, but they lack the details about how it can be achieved based on our current knowledge, even if we extrapolate the computing power.

Before that time comes, our economy will be already hugely changed thanks to the narrow super-AIs. I think it's much more interesting (and alarming to the general public) to try to imagine different ways this could play out in the next 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER28> "... the Omegas had pushed hard to make it extraordinary at one particular task: programming AI systems"

This single line puts the whole article into the realm of pure science fiction: no technology capable of working such an ill-defined task like "programming AI systems" exists, not even as a work in progress, not even as an idea about how it could be done.

And as science fiction, it's kind of a waste of time, but that's of course my own taste and opinion.

<comment><USER29>
        This single line puts the whole article into the realm of
        pure science fiction: no technology capable of working
        such an ill-defined task like "programming AI systems"
        exists,

I'll admit that they're not (currently) very good at it but there are interesting examples that contradict you: look up Genetic Programming; or Alistair Channon's work (15 years ago) on the generative production of neural networks.

In 2003 and based on Channon's work, I built a system for generating and evolving neural networks using genetic algorithms which coded Lindenmeyer System to build the networks. Attached it to the Heat Bugs agent simulation (albeit with a well defined tasks) and it was startlingly effective. Given the current interest in AI, I've been meaning to resurrect and publish that code.

There was a good blog post on here the other day saying: we're doing lots of work and producing interesting results (the equivalent of the "dual slit experiment" for AI), but we haven't yet formalized the results into a framework. We're probably close.

<comment><USER26> If you ever decide to publish the code, please tag me! I have my email in my profile here.

What you describe is of big interest to me but I've never done it due to never having to work with it commercially, which is a huge regret of mine.

In any case, any additional practical material and, ideally, your code, will be of immense educational value for me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The doomsday title reminded me of the world's last C bug:

      while (1)
      {
          status = GetRadarInfo();
          if (status = 1)
              LaunchMissiles();
      }

</comment><comment><USER31> A couple of weeks ago I went to see Max Tegmark (the author of this piece) speak about his new book "Life 3.0: being human in the age of artificial intelligence" in San Francisco and saw the same speculative AI intelligence explosion crap we're seeing all over the place. I was disappointed because I'm a fan of Max's work as a scientist, his "Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality" book was a great read and I enjoy watching his lectures about Physics, Math, and sometimes the nature of consciousness.

When he got involved in the AI Risk community I thought it might be good thing that an actual scientist is involved, maybe to ground the community's heavy speculation in scientific thinking. However, what happened was exactly the opposite -- Max turned into a fiction author! (ergo this piece). Now, of course there is a role for fiction in expanding our understanding of the future but the AI Risk community is already heavily fictionalized. The singularity, intelligence explosion, mind uploads, simulations, etc are nothing but idle prophecies.

Karl Popper, the famous philosopher of science, made a distinction between scientific predictions which usually takes the form "If X then Y will happen" and scientific prophecies which usually takes the form "Y will happen" which is exactly what Max and the rest of the AI Risk community is involved in.

Now back to Max's San Francisco talk, I actually asked him this question: "Who is doing the hard scientific work around AI Risk?" and after a long pause he said (abridged): "I don't think there is hard scientific work to be done but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't think about it. We're trying to predict the future and if you told me that my house will burn down then of course I'll go look into it".

This doesn't inspire much confidence in the AI Risk community, where scientists need to leave their tools at the door to enter The Fantastic World of AI Risk and where fact and fiction interweave liberally -- or as Douglas Hofstadter put it when describing the singularitarians: "a lot of very good food and some dog excrements".

<comment><USER32> Yes, this is the problem with AI risk---there's a community pushing hard to gather resources to the cause, but little or no scientific work to be done. This is a rather pathological situation---among other things, the AI risk community makes their own cause look silly, and they promote an unduly negative vision of AGI. I've written more about this here: [http://www.basicai.org/blog/ai- risk-2017-08-08.html](http://www.basicai.org/blog/ai-risk-2017-08-08.html).

On a positive note, as a piece of science fiction, this was an enjoyable read!

<comment><USER4> "but little or no scientific work to be done."

Quite a lot has been written about what scientific work needs to be done. These papers try to summarize possible research directions:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06565.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06565.pdf)

[https://intelligence.org/files/TechnicalAgenda.pdf](https://intelligence.org/files/TechnicalAgenda.pdf)

<comment><USER32> Yes and no. For safety of narrow AI systems, yeah, there's a lot of scope for research, and that's what your first link gets at.

But for AGI (which is what Tegmark talks about), there's no good way to get a handle on safety yet (other than working towards figuring out AGI).

As for MIRI's agenda, I don't buy that it will help with AGI safety at all. There are a variety of reasons for that, some of which are discussed in the piece I linked above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This piece describes a future that is reminiscent of the world created in Zachary Mason's "Void Star" ([https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29939057-void- star](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29939057-void-star)). The world of this novel is one in which superintelligent AI operate in tandem with everyday human life, with their own unknown motives. The narrative takes place at a point when humans no longer quite understand the science or math behind the AIs' inventions.

</comment><comment><USER34> What bugged me was the creation of the server centers.

"start building a series of massive computer facilities around the world"

The AI can be quick as a wink designing these things, but the supply chains for huge buildings takes a lot of time. Acquiring talent, training operators, construction crews, as well as location scouting, surveying, zone approval, geological testing, and various other tasks takes years. Sometimes a decade or more. And sometimes it all falls apart and you have to start somewhere new, because locals don't want you there. Politicians can be fickle bastards.

Construction is a lot of people shaking hands and discussing things, phone calls, walking back and forth for supplies, waiting on permits, advice, et cetera, and you cannot AI that to be faster. The plans always have to be modified because reality intrudes, and buildings where the architect does not visit are poor ones. Worse, when the architect has no practical experience.

Simple example in point: I was in a beautiful house where a hallway was juuust a bit too narrow. You could get a normal sized dresser and armoire down the hall, but couldn't quite turn objects of that size enough to get through two of the bedroom doors. A bed springbox was iffy. The builder quickly realized this(and made a quip about the owners buying IKEA flatpack furniture), but everything looked fine on the plans. Because of the rest of the layout, especially where municipal services entered the (already poured) foundation, the house could not be modified. A hand's width would have made all the difference.

Worse, when the architect does not have a human body.

Every building on earth has quirks like this. They have to be solved in-situ.

Creating the plans is a tiny portion of the task, and not much of a time saving.

<comment><USER35> I interpreted the construction of data centers as happening over the span of a few years, and continuously after that. The whole transformation up to the creation of the Alliance seemed like it would have to happen in half a century, if not longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I agree more with this essay: [http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm)

>What it really is is a form of religion. People have called a belief in a technological Singularity the "nerd Apocalypse", and it's true.

>

>It's a clever hack, because instead of believing in God at the outset, you imagine yourself building an entity that is functionally identical with God. This way even committed atheists can rationalize their way into the comforts of faith.

>

>The AI has all the attributes of God: it's omnipotent, omniscient, and either benevolent (if you did your array bounds-checking right), or it is the Devil and you are at its mercy.

>

>Like in any religion, there's even a feeling of urgency. You have to act now! The fate of the world is in the balance!

>

>And of course, they need money!

<comment><USER37> I feel like you could substitute AI for any existential threat in that to try to make people look silly.

"Climate change ... really is a form of religion" ... add some analogies to Catholic punishment fantasies and doomsday prophecies to make it sound just like the type of thing humans have been talking about forever, criticize scientists for guilting people into giving them money to study their apocalypse fantasy, etc.

<comment> crooked-v The difference is that environmental protection evangelists never literally just reinvented Pascal's wager except with an all-powerful AI instead.

[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk)

<comment><USER37> I thought the point of Roko's basilisk was a paradox to use to test different decision theories and to explore the nature of identity (Should the decision theory allow your choices to be influenced on possible outcomes to possible future copies of yourself?), and maybe a little about whether dangerous thoughts could exist in theory. Not an actual prediction or argument for or against AI research, any more than say the twin paradox is an argument for or against splitting up twins to send one on a rocket.

<comment><USER38> If it has any use at all, then it'd have to be something like that.

GP's choice of link is extremely unfortunate, given that rationalwiki has a vendetta going against the AI risk movement in general. I would recommend [https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Roko's_basilisk](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Roko's_basilisk) instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> There are four sticking points in this article that I felt could use farther clarification

\- why AI could not be used to innovate on manufacturing, and what that leads to

\- the education and intellectual pursuits of humans and how it compares with what AI can do

\- that there wouldn't be competing AIs that would make this transformation much slower (especially if some competing AI fall into the wrong hands)

\- that governments would let this transformation take place without retaliation or trying to capture this power

</comment><comment><USER39> This is why we maintain strong antitrust law.

</comment><comment><USER40> It'll need to create AI itself. Otherwise how can it be considered more capable than human intelligence?

</comment><comment><USER41> I thought nukes... you know... or DIY Bio, nanotech or the myriad of other actual threats

</comment><comment><USER42> I loved the story, it was fun, engaging and it made me happy.

</comment><comment><USER43> Be scared! The "Last Invention" is upon us.</comment>


Riding the Mastodon - <AUTHOR> https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2017/05/riding-the-mastodon/ <comment><USER2> Regarding reliability and resilience, the article conflates centralized ownership with a centralized architecture. FB and Google etc all run very distributed fault-tolerant systems and have an army of decent techs making sure it keeps running. In practice, all the clutter of outdated unpatched unreliable abandoned boxes on the Internet are the self-hosters. And whilst a single entity can be targeted by an attack and fail hard, so can other parts of Internet architecture that are critical such as bgp and dns and large providers and so on.

I have no beef with the political aspects of the article, and am an upvoter ;)</comment>


Here's How Much Your iPhone Would Cost Under Sanders' or Trump's Trade Plans - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kurafire/on-sanders-trump-economies-of-scale-global-development-bacc98df0df2#yc <comment><USER2> I was having a similar discussion the other day, the problem with this line of reasoning is that it completely ignores market economics (from what I can see, I started skimming and couldn't find any references).

There is only so high a price the market will bear, and Apple currently makes a significant profit on the sale of their devices. There will be an equilibrium point where Apple (or any other device manufacturer) will figure out what they need to do to make a device that gives them the profit they want and gives customers the devices they want.

Apple at this point could probably cut gorilla glass out. How often do you see an iPhone not in a case with a screen protector, so that could save them a bit. But of course then Corning would figure out a way to be more competitive on price, so maybe that gets back in.

I don't expect a blog post to go into depth into how Apple or anybody else may shape their future products to fit a new reality, and I'm also not suggesting that either Trump or Sanders are taking the correct path.

I just think it is too simplistic to say product will be so much more expensive if we removed X or Y trade partner.

Let's say there was a significant tax on goods coming in from China. Wouldn't that just mean less cheap useless crap being purchased by people who can't afford it anyway?

<comment><AUTHOR> A "significant tax on goods from China" is actually precisely what Trump is saying.

> Wouldn't that just mean less cheap useless crap being purchased by people > who can't afford it anyway?

More likely it would just cause a price hike on goods and reduce interest, forcing companies to find alternative places to source those goods, like Mexico.</comment></comment>


Richard Sorge: The Soviet Union's Master Spy - <AUTHOR> https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/03/richard-sorge-the-soviet-unions-master-spy/ <comment><USER2> I think there is just a fascinating parallel in the lives of two men who were both responsible for the key bit of knowledge that turned the fates of the European and the Pacific - Sorge and Rochefort.

Sorge's key contribution to the war was the knowledge that the Japanese would not attack Russia in 1941, which allowed Stalin to move forces to save Moscow. Rochefort on the other hand led the intelligence effort that allowed Nimitz to ambush the Japanese fleet six months later. Both of these men ultimately lost "office politics" which led to them both being marginalized and ignored by their governments after their great victories. Rochefort ended up the better of the two, only being reduced to building dry docks, while Sorge ended up being shot,even though the Japanese tried multiple times to trade him back for their own captured spies.

One side note - it's amazing how good and ruthless the soviet spy network was. They were simultaneously stealing Japanese war plans, hitlers sexual history, Churchill oppositions private notes and atomic designs from the US. It's not for nothing that the red scare occurred after the war.

<comment><USER3> Not a spy, but Leslie Groves lost out on office politics pretty badly too

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a German graphic novel called 'Die Sache mit Sorge'. Great book.

</comment><comment><USER5> From the article - "No other agent had served Moscow for so well or so long."

That's very questionable. No one knows who the greatest spy was/is.

<comment><USER6> Well, that's not true, it's just that there is a chance it's still classified.

Spies might work clandestinely but they serve somebody and as such they can not do so entirely alone as those who they serve must know who they are. Records always exist.

Over time, such things get declassified and historians can take a long, hard look at reevaluating the evidence.

Even the most small details of the Second World War are now mostly declassified, and so we can see individual contributions in the context of that war and all wars proceeding it. So, with the caveat there might be others we do not yet know about, a statement like that can be made.

It's worth remembering that history is fluid, and we have to update the facts constantly. Churchill's war diaries were taken as fact until about 1990, when it became apparent that he had lionised himself to some degree.

The goings-on at Bletchley Park were classified so well until the late 1970s, that when the first book was published about what happened there, people who had worked there still refused to talk about their experiences.

So, yes, there may be greater and better Soviet spies than Richard Sorge. However, the line you're referring to is from Owen Matthews, "his latest and most thorough biographer", and if you read the article it's clear that the book he has written is thorough and stands in the context of a huge amount of research around the Soviet spy machine in that era.

It is possible a greater spy will emerge in future, sure. For now though, the chances of another character popping up pre-1945 is pretty slim.

<comment><USER7> > Even the most small details of the Second World War are now mostly > declassified, and so we can see individual contributions in the context of > that war and all wars proceeding it.

We shouldn't extrapolate the customs of democratic societies to the rest of the world. The bulk of Soviet WW2 archives are to remain classified in Russia until at least 2040.

<comment><USER8> Moreover, some archives were destroyed a) to prevent them from being captured during the war, especially in the 1941 defense of Moscow, and b) to cover up whatever the leaders considered too sensitive later. This second portion also includes docs relating to post-WW2 events like the Totskoye nuclear exercise [0], destroyed decades after the fact because "the archives ran out of space".

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totskoye_nuclear_exercise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totskoye_nuclear_exercise)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Deploying JRuby apps on Google App Engine - <AUTHOR> http://www.igvita.com/2009/09/23/deploying-jruby-on-google-app-engine/

<comment><USER2> GAE is an awesome platform. I really don't see myself ever setting up apache/nginx/mysql ever again...</comment>


Libinet++ - A networking library for humans that code in C++ - <AUTHOR> http://nathanpc.github.com/libinet/

<comment><USER2> I cannot thank you enough for this. Networking has been my weakest point in code, and finally having a C++ networking lib that's easy to use has enabled me to create much better apps than if I didn't.

Great work.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome. I'm glad I helped! :)</comment></comment>


why the lucky stiff on Hackety Hack [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.vimeo.com/5047563

<comment><USER2> I was really hoping he'd resurfaced.</comment>


The Eternal Mainframe (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html <comment><USER2> "The Return of Time-Sharing" \- now that's very much real. Amazon AWS is time- sharing. "Pay for what you use". By changing servers from a fixed cost to a variable one, more people have to worry about resource consumption in fine detail. Through most of the personal computing and leased server era, that was not the case.

<comment><USER3> I have a feeling that a lot of corporations don't care too much about their employee's quality of cloud queries. Wondering if they get a sort of unlimited subscription or something.

<comment><USER4> At a certain point they tend to start taking it seriously and cracking down on the bills. Disney had to ask Amazon to find all accounts linked to a Disney corporate credit card in order to track them all down, as I recall.

<comment><USER5> Oh wow so you mean an end to end monitoring / analytical system of Baap/s can generate a company millions upon millions in upstream revenue?

I can offer you all the stats you need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is amusing to note that on mini computers of the 1970's that what we now would call a "floating point co-processor" was a hardware option. Even with the Intel 8086, a "math" coprocessor was a separate 8087 chip.

On mini computers you used a different version of the language compiler depending on whether your hardware had this coprocessor or not. Typically you didn't make this choice, but the system administration people made sure the correct compilers were installed to generate hardware supported floating point or software floating point. That tradition seemed to make its way into PCs. It was a while before you could just assume that everyone had hardware supported floating point. Oh, and every language's software floating point was annoyingly different. So no portable way of writing binary floating point -- you had to convert to/from ASCII.

GPUs are like a new fangled hardware floating point external to the CPU. Now to gradually become part of the main system again.

<comment><USER7> _Even with the Intel 8086, a "math" coprocessor was a separate 8087 chip._

Even later than that. The 80386 had the 80387 in 1987, and the 68030 had the 68881 in 1984. The '881 was the first square chip I ever used.

<comment><USER8> The Intel '486 had the FP coprocessor integrated, but they split the line into the DX and SX models. The only difference was that the SX had the FP unit physically disabled.

<comment><USER9> They still sold a 80487, of course. It was a '486 without the FPU being fused off, and when you plugged it into the "math co-processor" socket, it disabled the original CPU and took over both duties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> FTA:

> Janie Crane: "An off switch?"

> Metrocop: "She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!"

> -Max Headroom, season 1, episode 6, "The Blanks"

As a callow 18 year old in 1980, I suggested to one of my parent's friends that the computer would be as important an invention as fire. He'd been a hippie 10 years earlier, and thought I was being childish, possibly because fire is so vital, more likely because he had a hippie's distrust of the computer's relationship to authority. In retrospect, he was probably right for either reason, though it took me multiple decades to catch on. This article does a nice job of laying out the case for being cautious.

<comment><USER11> Important, yes. Friendly, maybe no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Back in the early days of BYTE magazine, early microcomputers, etc. I seem to recall that Steve Jobs coined the term "Personal Computer". Apple didn't market it to death. But at that time the way these computers were described was as "micro" or "home" computers. Or even "home brew", because before the "holy trinity" (Apple II, TRS-80 and Commodore PET), no two computers' hardware was the same. A real hinderance to mass software distribution.

IBM named its computer the PC, thus co-opting the term and forever being associated with it. But you have to remember back further.

<comment><USER12> Although the article claims IBM invented the term "Personal Computer" and Steve Jobs also claimed to have invented the personal computer, Alan Kay wrote at Xerox PARC about "A personal computer for children of all ages" in 1972 [1]. Many of his ideas went into the Xerox Alto (1973) personal computer [2]. The Apple I was introduced in 1976 and the IBM PC in 1981.

[1] [http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_pers_comp_for_children.pdf](http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_pers_comp_for_children.pdf) [2] [http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-79-11_Al...](http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-79-11_Alto_A_Personal_Computer.pdf)

<comment><USER13> A pinterest page of interest : [https://www.pinterest.com/pin/239887117628640892](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/239887117628640892)

At once time in the early 70's DEC was calling the PDP-8 a "your own personal computer" stressing that its cost was such that you could dedicate the entire computer to a single individual, so why not buy several. This as opposed to the PDP-11 or VAX which were 'department' and 'organization' level computers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you marketed it as a "server farm in a box", you could probably get people to start buying literal mainframes today.

<comment><USER15> > If you marketed it as a "server farm in a box", you could probably get > people to start buying literal mainframes today.

Probably not. The path of computing has been directed by economics: cost and its counterpart, volume. There's no reason why any greenfield project would choose to host on a mainframe.

The administrators are rare and expensive, the hardware is expensive and single source, and the performance is mediocre.

I can kind of understand why core business processes don't get ported off of mainframes: the business risk is too high. I just don't understand why anyone would choose to start a new project on one.

<comment><USER16> > There's no reason why any greenfield project would choose to host on a > mainframe.

What if it was a lot cheaper and didn't require as many people to manage it? Certainly the markups on EC2 (and related) services are insane.

<comment><USER15> It could be the case that that is true.

If I were a business owner, that is not a bet I'd make.

1\. z-series experts are rare, expensive and typically old. Old does not mean unemployable, but it does mean a limited future career. Who's going to replace the current crop of experts? Internal education is a possibility that could work, but any way you cut the knot, it'll be more difficult than going with x86 and linux.

2\. z-series hardware sucks. They are low volume parts who's main value is their backwards compatibility. If you think the hardware performance is acceptable today, will it be so in 10 years? Computer performance improvements have certainly slowed down, but peripheral vendors like nVidia continue to make solid progress. Even if IBM gets around to supporting them, you'll always be a 2nd class citizen compared to the PC platform: drivers, bus availability, etc. will be half baked or late.

3\. z-series is off the main stream of computing. Huge numbers of talented software developers are building great open source software for linux (and other OS's) on x86. I don't know if administration on z-series can be done better or less expensively than on x86 today. I feel confident in saying that there will be no contest in 10-15 years. The pace of innovation is enormous, and IBM is not a company that can credibly make a commitment to bring that innovation to the mainframe.

4\. Yes, mainframes can run linux and do various sorts of emulation. I don't think that that is a cost effective. I'm not alone in that assessment: if running mainframes was a cost effective way to run linux, I'd expect that to be the way big internet businesses run their internal data centers. They don't.

5\. You'd have to deal with IBM sales. At least with x86, you have multiple sources for parts, and if you're big enough you can do contract manufacturing.

6\. The markups for EC2 (especially the network transit) is really high. There is a continuum from Lambda and App Engine, through, EC2 to dedicated hardware rental like OVH and finally running your own. That is way more options than you have running on a mainframe: certainly way more vendors.

P.S. Huge fan of your writing.

<comment><USER17> Why do we think the markups on EC2 are insane? Aren't they comparable to Azure and Google?

<comment><USER16> If you've ever worked at a firm with serious calculation and data loads (aka data science at scale), they almost always end up with big hardware in a data center. Because markups on EC2 (and google/azure) are insane.

<comment><USER17> If the cost of all cloud services is similar, then maybe that's just what it costs to run a cloud service? That's not high markup, that's just cloud being more expensive than on-prem. Or are you suggesting price collusion to maintain artificially high profits?

<comment><USER16> The latter is obviously the case. Look at their profit margins! You don't get those kind of margins on commodities unless you're price colluding.

Cloud trivially can't be more expensive than on-prem. Cloud is just on-prem at scale where they sell you the leftovers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The wheel of reincarnation is so called because it turns, and it will probably turn again. The new buzzword "edge computing" refers to the use of computers close to the user to do what was once done in "the cloud." Peer to peer is on the rise too, linking "edge" devices directly together. Voila, PC revolution 2.0 but with new terms. Soon we will reinvent the BBS, shareware, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> With edge computing, though, the computing is done under the control of whoever controls the mainframe even though it's physically close to the user, so it's quite different from personal computing.

<comment><USER18> For now, but edge computing diminishes the role of the mainframe. This makes it easier to replace the mainframe. Eventually someone will do that.

Previous PCs came from chips and designs that were originally built to power terminals for mainframes like the Intel 4004/8008, the 6502, and the Z80. Today's handheld dumb terminals for mainframes are built with ARM64 chips that are approaching "desktop" performance levels just like those old dumb term chips started to approach useful performance levels before someone realized you didn't need the mainframe anymore.

... and so the wheel turns.

I think the biggest current barrier to de-cloudification of mobile devices is the heavily and cryptographically locked down OS. That's a software thing, not a hardware thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I get overall sentiment, it is thought provoking. At the same time, one of our clients has on-prem AS/400 with only half of CPUs enabled by IBM. Same client moved payloads between two cloud providers and one on-prem option in last 18 months. Same same, but different.

</comment><comment><USER20> At an architectural level a number of mainframe elements have returned, such as I/O and microcode AKA writable control store.

One of the defining features of the minicomputer, and later microprocessor, was that the CPU did all the I/O. In mainframes of the 60s and beyond, the IO devices had their own small processing units (to be distinguished from the Central Processing Unit) so that if you wanted to write a group of blocks to a tape drive you could set them up and then send the tape drive controller a block of commands to make it happen and DMA the data.

While early machines like, canonically the alto in this case, bit-banged ethernet interfaces directly. The early UARTS were cool in that you could actually get them to do something with the bitstream to/from the terminal (i.e. buffer up to 8 bits at a time: wow!).

half duplex in your terminal came from blocks of terminals attached to a terminal controller (HDX existed in the teletype system before computers, but this channel controller model is why we still have it in our modern terminal drivers).

</comment><comment><USER21> The cynical side of me thinks the worst side of the cloud represents another front in the Civil War over General Purpose Computing.

[https://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html](https://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm wondering whether there is a way to connect to a real mainframe, not through Hercules, just to play with it and maybe do some good programming on it.

<comment><USER22> IBM runs an annual 'Master the Mainframe' competition for schools, but also give away year-long free access via the 'Learning System':

[https://www-01.ibm.com/events/wwe/ast/mtm/audit.nsf/enrollal...](https://www-01.ibm.com/events/wwe/ast/mtm/audit.nsf/enrollall)?

<comment><USER3> Thanks man I'll take a look, sounds very interesting!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nitpick: (2013)

The quote by Solzhenitsyn really cuts deep.

<comment><USER24> I'll add the whole thing here:

 _If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn_

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This user has spammed this same page five times including twice in the last eighteen hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> Who, me? I can assure you that I didn't, but I saw it on Reddit, so others might have submitted it as well.</comment></comment>


SECUREDROP = 0.3 – Possible Backdoor and Privileges Escalation by Unauth User - <AUTHOR> http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2015/Apr/8

<comment><USER2> Relevant portion of the rant:

        File /securedrop/journalist.py, lines 125-128, missing @admin_required
        decorator
        125 @app.route('/admin/add', methods=3D('GET', 'POST'))
        126 def admin_add_user():
        127     # TODO: process form submission
        128     return render_template("admin_add_user.html")

Ouch!</comment>


Ask HN: Whatever happened to "flag" link? And why? - <AUTHOR>

I probably missed the announcement, but I noticed that I'm no longer able to flag submitted stories. Since there's also no way to downvote a submissions, only upvote, I can no longer influence what kind of stories I don't want to see on HN. What is the rationale for "flag" link removal? <comment><USER2> I still see it. Maybe your flagging capability was revoked.

<comment><AUTHOR> If that's the case I'd like to know why. Maybe there is a limit of available flags? Or maybe because on the release day of new Apple OS I flagged 20 articles on the home page related to that event? I can only guess.

<comment><USER3> Flagging is supposed to be for spam and other submissions that don't belong on HN. It is not supposed to be used for downvoting things you personally are not interested in.

So it sounds like you abused your flag ability and it got revoked. Which I didn't know could happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I still see the flag link as well.</comment>


Help Us Share Gratitude with the World - <AUTHOR> http://sharemygratitude.com/ We are trying to share the things we are grateful for with the world this holiday season. Please join in with our small project and help us collect gratitude from all over the world. In return we'll make you famous with our background quilt in return. http://sharemygratitude.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Forgot to say we are open to any constructive (or destructive) feedback. If you have any feedback please feel free to post it here!</comment>


Tell HN: If you liked the article about prison vs. probation, you'll like Roodman - <AUTHOR> David Roodman's posts for Open Philanthropy on crime: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/impact-incarceration-crime <comment><AUTHOR> Series: [https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/impact- incarceration-c...](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/impact- incarceration-crime)

[https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/9/25/16340782/s...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/9/25/16340782/study-mass-incarceration)

> The final report reaches two major conclusions:

> I estimate, that at typical policy margins in the United States today, > decarceration has zero net impact on crime. That estimate is uncertain, but > at least as much evidence suggests that decarceration reduces crime as > increases it. The crux of the matter is that tougher sentences hardly deter > crime, and that while imprisoning people temporarily stops them from > committing crime outside prison walls, it also tends to increase their > criminality after release. As a result, "tough-on-crime" initiatives can > reduce crime in the short run but cause offsetting harm in the long run.

> Empirical social science research—or at least non-experimental social > science research—should not be taken at face value. Among three dozen > studies I reviewed, I obtained or reconstructed the data and code for eight. > Replication and reanalysis revealed significant methodological concerns in > seven and led to major reinterpretations of four. These studies endured much > tougher scrutiny from me than they did from peer reviewers in order to make > it into academic journals. Yet given the stakes in lives and dollars, the > added scrutiny was worth it. So from the point of view of decision makers > who rely on academic research, today's peer review processes fall well short > of the optimal.</comment>


Ask HN: What is missing from Android? - <AUTHOR>

What is the killer feature that you think is missing from Android? For enterprises? For Consumers?<p>An there are no bad ideas so shoot :-) <comment><USER2> Open device drivers, AOSP builds for a wide range of devices, and the availability of the Play store and all associated apps and services for customer builds of AOSP.</comment>


The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon - <AUTHOR> http://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/

<comment><USER2> This phenomenon shows me that our brains must be wired to ignore quite a bit of clutter until we have a reason to consider it interesting.</comment>


Ask HN: I have some loyal users. How do I get more of them? - <AUTHOR>

I made a site called http://cyrolaughs.com/videos/267601721-1XF7b_MNEIAg the weekend before Thanksgiving. It's like stumbleupon for videos.
I posted it here on Hacker News and got some really good feedback. I've done some very basic moderation and added a few features that users have suggested.
I have a problem that I'd love to get some advice on.
Right now, I have ~30-40 unique visitors/day after my initial HN spike. They're accounting for ~200-700 pageviews/day (yesterday 600 pageviews on average 15 pageviews per visit and are spending on average ~19 minutes on the site). I'm getting some people to stay on the site up to a couple of hours.
It seems like the site is reasonably "sticky" but I don't know how to generate more traffic. I've been posting the "top videos" of the day on my friends' walls  on Facebook and I have been tweeting a video per day, but that will only get me so far.
I'd definitely be curious about ideas on how to move this project forward.
Does anyone know of old threads here on HN about this? Or other blogs that talk about this sort of issue? I really appreciate your advice. <comment><USER2> Are your users referring you to their friends? Are they not? Do you know the answer to that?

Can you think of a way to encourage your users to send your site links to their friends? I see the share buttons over on the left, but I think the button owners' networks benefit more than you do.

I watched a few videos and clicked the three buttons at the bottom. At this point I haven't signed up, and it looks like I can do everything possible without signing up, which is really cool but why should I sign up?

Now I've signed up ... and I don't see anything different. In fact, my video history that you were keeping track of before I signed up (via a cookie I assume) did not carry over into my account, and everything is set to zero. A minor complaint, but a nice touch if you pull it off.

In your orange "+" chiclet you list a lot of ways to share. Not everyone has a facebook or gmail account, but everyone has email, so maybe a mailto: link should be at the top of that popup?

I see that email is buried down in the list of share methods, arranged alphabetically. Maybe bring that link up to the top of the initial popup, or even out into your list of four main chiclets. Or do some AB testing on that and similar design choices.

I tested you reset password link, and got the reset email quickly, so points for that IMO.

But, the fundamental question is why should I use your site? It's an attractive, minimal site, but I don't see anything that it does (and it only does one thing) that isn't done at least as good by more well known sites like reddit, stumbleupon or even youtube itself. I really don't mean to be mean here, but I doubt if I'll come back after this. Have you thought of what you can do to make your site unique enough that people will come to your video sharing site instead of someone else's?

Maybe you can let people share a public list of select videos, so their friends can follow them. Let people write reviews and comments. Let people _engage_ in some way.

Categories or tags on videos, and a way to search those, I really don't want to sit there and click skip skip skip until i see a video I like. Maybe I missed that?

EDIT: I forgot to add, I don't know how to pronounce Cyro. I don't think it's a common English word or name. Speaking for myself, I don't like to say words to my friends if I don't know how to pronounce them, fearing embarrassment. If this is true for other people, you might want to say how to pronounce Cyro, maybe on your About page. Try to reduce every bit of friction in front of your users sharing your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the helpful feedback. I really appreciate it.

I think you're right that I need to think about things that you would be able to do uniquely on this site that you can't do other places. This was originally a side project so that I could have something fun to do with family after Thanksgiving dinner. It's already done way more than I expected.

I agree with you that I need to come up with something to make it different, if I'm going to keep working on this. The frustrations that I've had with reddit/stumbleupon/youtube is that there are a lot of distractions. So I just tried to make things as minimalist as possible. Stumbling for videos on StumbleUpon hasn't always worked well for me either - I often get thrown back into a "normal" website after more than a few stumbles and the ratio of videos that I actually like is kinda low. I like your idea of sharing lists of videos. I'm all ears to other ideas.

I understand the rationale for why you wouldn't come back. Honestly, I was kinda surprised to see so many people return. I'd say 20 unique people (those 20 people are different each day) are coming back to the site on any given day. I've emailed them to ask what they like and what'd they'd like to see me make. The main critique I got was the one about carrying over the session data after you create an account. I'll work on doing that. I've just been storing that in the session, which gets reset after you sign up. Good advice.

I like your idea about adding reviews/comments. It also gives people a reason to sign up.

I'll be sure to add a pronunciation guide in the about page.

These are all great suggestions about how to keep people on my site. I'm also curious about how to get more people to visit in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's your current viral coefficient?

[http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/lessons-learnt-viral- marketi...](http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/lessons-learnt-viral-marketing/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hard to say. I've only really sent out 14 invites on their facebook walls to close friends and posted it here on Hacker News and posted a couple of videos on Reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Try $100 of reddit ads.

<comment><USER5> Have you actually had any luck with that? I did $100 of reddit ads a few times with a super high CPC and a very, very low click through rate.</comment></comment>


PJDL – Multi master, software emulated one wire data link in 171 lines of code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gioblu/PJON/blob/9.0/strategies/SoftwareBitBang/SoftwareBitBang.h <comment><AUTHOR> PJDL v2.0 requires 1 or optionally 2 wires and no additional hardware to handle one or many to many communication on a single channel or bus. It can be run on low performance microcontrollers sharing a common direct pin-to-pin connection. It is a valid alternative to 1-Wire because of its flexibility and reliability. Bus maximum length is mostly limited by resistance of the common conductive element used. It has been tested with up to 50m long insulated wires, results demonstrate the same high performance achieved with shorter lengths.</comment>