Lol, no. We discourage her from using the computer because she's been scammed* so many times. Generally speaking AI is not uniformly perceived as this awe inspiring boon to those of her generation. Often it invokes fear - fear of instability, fear of discrimination, a simple fear of the unknown. These people lived through a lot of scary technological advancements in their day. The last thing they want is another thing they can't understand.
People who don't get this display a lot of ageism.
*- "Microsoft" telling her her computer's been infected and she needs to call this number asap! Luckily a bank teller stopped her before she completed the transaction.
Ex-googler here as well. I'm not sure the distortion was worse outside of the core business. In the peripheral businesses (if one can call them businesses), I think you had more of an opportunity to ponder the larger implications of your actions. As an early Nester I argued vociferously for designs that would specifically dis-empower Google as a central service, in deference to the end user and as barrier to future misuse. Of course many of these ideas were not accepted. But my sense was, had I been part of the core Ad business, many of these ideas would have been third-rail topics, subject to immediate shutdown. Whereas within the Nest org I was able to foster discussions on the topics at multiple levels.
Indeed, my impression was that people within the core Ad business were more adept at maintaining an air of integrity while doing substantively the opposite for the goal of optimizing revenue. I suspect that the closer you got to Google's "center of gravity" the more distorted your reality and motivations became.
> No other data structure works like this. You can't mess this up in an array, because no function that manipulates arrays is just going to keep going until there is a null.
This is patently false. Sentinel markers are used widely in array types. Consider GNU's getopt_long() function, a mainstay in GNU tools:
The argument longopts must be an array of [struct option] structures, one for each long option. Terminate the array with an element containing all zeros.
> You can spread propaganda and poorly sourced zeitgeist and be among friends but if you try to have a genuine conversation about programming languages you are made to be unwelcome immediately.
Indeed. And the ignorance of computing history in this discussion is particularly disturbing.
The context of this particular thread is "zero terminated string is ... computing's biggest mistake". This completely ignores the situation on the ground when C was developed. At the time, people were striving for a system programming language that sat above the level of assembly but was compact enough to run within the limited resources of the then emerging mini-computer systems. The PDP-11 on which C was developed was certainly not the first mini-computer, but it was among the earliest to have a regular enough instruction set and addressing model to make a general purpose, high-level system's language possible. These systems were extremely limited in memory; the PDP-11's instruction set is limited to directly addressing at most 64KiB (code and data) and many systems of the era were hardware limited to less than that. (Indeed, I regularly run an early version of Unix, including an early C compiler, on my PDP-11/05 which is maxed out at 56KiB [of actual core]). There was no way that even a brilliant engineer like Dennis Richie was going to be able to shoe-horn in "optional" types, or the mechanics of length-value strings into a compiler that has to run in such limited space, and produce code (e.g. the Unix kernel) that has to run in even less. The fact that strings and arrays are thin abstractions on top of pointers is both a brilliant compromise in design as well as a nod to then-prevalent assembly practice. It was the exactly kind of pragmatic decision that was needed to move computing along at the time. Of course the designs from this era are antiquated now. But they were not mistakes.
IP licensing and certification are entirely separate from access to standards documentation. Of course certifying conformance to a standard is going to have a cost. But publishing documentation that has already been written is effectively free.
> ... not intended to mislead users, for example, generating an image of a living room to showcase a sofa,
So it would be okay for AI to rescale a sofa to appear proportionate to other furniture in a typical room, even if the actual sofa is much larger, or (more likely) much smaller than depicted?
> AI just makes it easier to get the information people were already consuming.
This is clearly false. By now it's evident that AIs can hallucinate in ways that contradict their training data. That means that, beyond any errors or misinformation present in their input, AIs also naturally introduce their own level of error on top.
Beyond this, of course, AIs are much easier to manipulate during training, much more so than the Internet at large. So they represent yet another source of intentional deception aimed at the user.
Oh ffs. How does one draw a line from Dennis Richie, Ken Thompson, Steve Wozniak, Bill Joy, even Linus Torvalds to 'terrifying overlord'? The fact is that those people who were closet 'terrifying overlords' weren't actually nerds to begin with, because they lacked the essential quality of humility.
There's no "supposed to" here. Humans, (including governments) are inclined to do bad things; both law and technology are necessary to restrain those tendencies.
Absolutely. The real moral liability here rests with any organization still using SSNs as a form of secret or authenticating credential. Spend the legal fees to go after these people and the problem will be truly solved.
People who don't get this display a lot of ageism.
*- "Microsoft" telling her her computer's been infected and she needs to call this number asap! Luckily a bank teller stopped her before she completed the transaction.