I was expecting SETI to find intelligence on Earth before space. They've been looking at the entropy of bee hives and other disembodied signal-passing collectives for a while now.
Security company SpiderOak (not affiliated) seems to be working on a "zero knowledge" end-to-end encrypted hosted Slack competitor. I'm no security expert and I don't know whether these claims actually hold up. You can read more here:
Being complicit in state-ordered censorship is different than removing someone's embarrassing video when they ask nicely.
And the fact that it was an informal request, not legal arm-twisting, and that they complied anyway just makes it more evident that there was some form of tit-for-tat expected.
I wonder if anyone at Google would resign over something like this, or if everyone has already rationalized it away and now just keep their head down for the next paycheck.
Some people definitely do go in with very strong principles, but those seem to dilute quickly.
The killer feature in the Thinkpad line for me is the military-grade sturdiness. Does Dell have the same kind of resistance to spills, drops, heat, etc.?
Programmer in Campinas, Brazil, on a work pause recovering from RSI-related problems.
As personal research I'm slowly working on a 8-thimble predictive wireless keyboard and coming up with plans for a solar-peltier atmospheric water generator.
I think a concatenative language with an immutable append-only log (instead of a stack, like Forth) as its implicit data structure would be the best fit for this sort of keyboard.
You don't need to type commands and then run them if the commands themselves are the keys.
The advantage over concatenative languages like Forth is that if you assume a graphical virtual keyboard from the start, you can also use a GUI to give you instant feedback on the state of the log instead of guessing by keeping the stack in your head.
All in all, this is circling back to keyboard terminals and session logs like we do in our shells today.
The difference is that, instead of looking at graphics and thinking of a table with papers shuffling around (thank you so much for that, Xerox PARC </s>), you set yourself free from ASCII paint on the keyboard and ASCII paint on the screen, keep the 1D terminal metaphor, and help users figure out what's possible through predictive typing (of which bash completion is an ugly toothless old cousin) instead of statically patronizing them with a limited set of options on a window.
The web has been moving in that direction. Twitter/FB news feeds are a command prompt with a log where you see yours and other people's commands (only "echo", unfortunately). WeChat, FB Messenger and Slack are all in on the "chat everywhere" UI concept.
What screwed with the CLI was not the metaphor. We've been chatting with our computers on the command line and it's great. The limitations were 1) in command & syntax discoverability and 2) in the richness of content that could be represented.
We fixed the latter with rich text popping up in our logs (Twitter was text-only before it started embedding stuff), now we need to fix the former with virtual predictive keyboards.
It's about time we let go of the symbols hardcoded onto our keyboards and start finding better abstractions for our thoughts.
Touch devices have already started the move to a virtualized keyboard, but so far they only parrot the static layout of a QWERTY keyboard and add a few tabs for emojis.
Predictive typing adds a few higher-level, dynamic keys to your virtual keyboard as a top row.
But if you make every key dynamic and predictive, you have a self-programming macro generator guessing your next keystroke and combining frequent sequences into a new single function.
And if you have that, why do you need a 2D keyboard with the confusing N-to-1 mapping of functions to fingers?
The keyboard has to rest on a surface, you need to make non-discrete movement in space to find what you want, and the whole thing leads to enormous bodily stress.
It is time to wash the printed letters off our keyboards, tear out anything that is not the homerow, glue those buttons to our 8 homerow fingers, and live a full, untethered, virtual, predictive typing life =)
I want to tap on my thighs while zooming through predictive VR code interfaces, not go back to ASCII.
I'm a big fan of Moxie's work, but would you mind elaborating on for which work he'd receive a Turing award? I'm not familiar with their eligibility standards. Thanks!
Thank you for this video. I'm just starting to get interested in the subject, and I think I was approaching it more in the "Meditation Seals" mentality. Glad I saw this video before going in.
I bet there are tons of hospital staff who use WhatsApp in Brazil every day to coordinate mission-critical stuff, in which case this absurd move is putting people's lives at risk.