Ages ago, when secretaries (usually female) were still common in offices, my boss told me "learn the names of all of the secretaries and say hello <name> every time you see them. If they know you and like you, they will probably do you a favor, when you need it. They are the important people running the company."
Apps that create false data to crash advertising algorithms. Random GPS locations, random product interests, random web site visits, random follows and likes. Like how SEO poisons search results.
Apps that respond to video ads by calling/messaging the sponsor CEO and the media company CEO with the audio of the ad.
Triplebyte developed an online assessment technology for programmers. The company was acquired by Karat. Their website has claims of enormous improvements to the hiring process. Previously, you could take their tests and use the score to add to your job application.
https://connect.karat.com/tb-welcome
Advertising cost is added to the product price. In order to generate one trillion dollars in advertising revenue, there would have to be about 20 trillion more in product spend. Civilization does not have another 20 trillion sitting around to spend.
Currently, consumers are totally bombarded with ads, on TV, on streaming, on social media, on websites. There are multiple copies of the same ad during an hour time slot. Consumers go from slight interest, to irritation, to disgust, to
nauseated.
Currently, the algorithms that target ads are complete failure. At least, they could get my gender right.
The next big advance in AI is going to be ad blockers for social media, streaming video, live television. Then the next step will be bots that respond to ads, with total click through rate and messages directly to the CEO of the company. Imagine an App that calls the CEO and replays the audio of their video ad. Or an App that DM's the CEO for every social media ad. The CEO bothered a million people, let the million respond directly to the CEO.
2001: a Space Odyssey. I saw it in the theater in 70mm when it was released in 1968. It totally blew me away. A majestic vision of the future. Thirty three years from now (1968) there was going to be all this marvelous stuff: Pan Am space craft going to a huge rotating space station to a round globe ship to a moon with several lunar bases. And a talking intelligent computer! Cool space suits! Video telephones!
Remember, this was before the first moon landing in 1969. There were Apollo flights happening, like Apollo 8 that orbited the moon in December 1968. There was a strong commitment to advancing space flight.
In 1968, the movie presented things that could actually happen, by the year 2001. Much more like a bunch of product announcements rather than science fiction (long ago in a galaxy far, far away).
Ages ago, the Digital Equipment VAX had a hardware hack where a null pointer (value is 0) would return a 0 when de-referenced. Which is the null character, the end of a string. So most of the time operations moving characters would terminate correctly. Obviously not portable to other computers.
In the IEEE 754 floating point definition, there are specific values for errors: mathematically undefined, division by zero, overflow, underflow, and inexact. These MUST be implemented in hardware to meet the specification.
Ages ago, before even dumb terminals, we were programming on punched cards, batch compiling, and printing on a line printer. For some reason, this printer supported control G (the bell character) with a buzzer. So someone hacked the compiler to include control G in the beginning of the error messages.
So we could sit back and listen to the line printer. If the buzzer sounded, the programmer would say "Oh &#$!@". Just like Pavlov demonstrated.
Google makes tons of money each quarter, but cancels projects / products, and lays off people. That does not improve moral. Why should I work my ass off and then my project is cancelled and I am laid off?
But what language is the program written in? It would have to include all of the possible data types and formats, and include all possible operations with the correct semantics.
Their climate calculations do not include the environmental costs of commuting and return to office mandates. There would be less pollution if no employee commuted and there is no big office building.
The Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks. The examples are old, but the wisdom remains. Particularly the chapter (and CACM article) No Silver Bullet-- Essence and Accident in Software Engineering (1986).
I used Computer Structures:Readings and Examples in an architecture class, and High Tech Ventures in an entrepreneurial class at Stanford.
I feel that Digital Equipment Corp entered a death spiral when he left.
As a volunteer, I was fortunate that I was able to work with him on some projects at the Computer History Museum. I wish that I had taped him discussing many of the artifacts in the exhibit, especially machines he worked on.
I created some training notebooks for CHM docents using chapters from Computer Structures, and the 1982 revised version.
There are a bunch of places in Silicon Valley. For example: https://www.abettersource.com/ Search for used office furniture.
There are also auctions when a company closes down: For example: https://svdisposition.com/auctions These may include furniture, computer equipment, machinery, lab equipment. Bidding may be on single items or many items batched together, like 50 office chairs.
There was a local auction two days ago (May 16, 2024) for the entire contents of a Red Lobster restaurant that suddenly closed, as one bid.
1. Winnie the Pooh to kids on their third or fourth or fifth birthday.
2. The Mythical Man Month to non-tech bosses.
3. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to girlfriends (it's a test).
4. "Get It Together: Organize Your Records So Your Family Won't Have To" to 70+ old friend (single) and 70+ old sister (single).
Years ago, I ran a German article about an ex-vice president turned environmentalist through Google Translate. In the result his name was Aluminum Gore.
Is the generated code correct? Was the training input code correct? Did the AI understand what you were asking? Did you specify the problem correctly, with all of the boundary conditions?
If AI programming is so good, why are there so many zero-day bugs in Windows?
You have to do visible, great work.