I like this. Sounds like you work with a handful of people with managable egos who don't feel threatened by one anothers' skill / competence. I personally would count myself lucky to have this environment as this is the exception to the rule for most workplaces.
No, they're warning us about an AI which could outsmart or outperform us, and lead to our demise as it pursues the goals we've encoded into it without realizing they lead to a result we don't want.
I don't think so. I think a case can be made that he's talking less about SkyNet and more about the risks something like an automated trading algorithm (or planning system, or any case where we put too much trust in a system as infallible) ten years in the future causing major disruption due to too much trust in a fallible system as being infallible.
There's also the possibility that a true AI (not just a complex expert system as above) may be fallible just like a person in not being able to correctly account for the unknown unknowns.
In the end I think it's about the difference between automating positions to make them more efficient (meaning it's still possible to do manually but less efficiently) and relying on things that are essentially impossible to do manually, such as an economic planning AI which may outperform regular economists 95% of the time. The question is what happens in that 5%, and will it catch the problem, and if not, will we keep listening to it as it takes us down a dangerous path.
As a seasoned engineer, I could not agree more with the justifications you provide.
As a business owner who's customers are actively engaged with my staff who need servers and resources to be available during the day when, you know, my CUSTOMERS are awake, your recommendation for outage windows would be completely ignored.
You schedule outages around the people who pay the bills, not the people who don't.
The plan is to never have an outage. Instead be scheduling maintenance that should, at worst, result in some backed up queues or non-functional admin functions.
Building a system for graceful degradation costs time and money.
Just my $0.02, but it seems to me that if the site is akin to a book as you say, wouldn't the behavior you're suggesting doesn't make sense (TOC, chapter, TOC, chapter) work for a technical reference? The successive pages are certainly quite brief but in a way, isn't it a technical reference?
This, exactly. I pretty much treat everything on the internet as technical reference, I never sit and click "Next page" and read through anything but forums. Everything else I like to keep my handle on how I got there, and then successively look at the page that looks most relevant to my current needs. This works pretty well for this too. I never intended to read this from top to bottom.
However, I do 100% agree that "Next" and "Previous" buttons should never be target="_blank". That's a pretty unnatural and terrible experience. Only chapter links and external references should be.
At the end of each individual post, there's a link to see the next one. It's very much the same concept as your next/previous buttons, which you agreed shouldn't be opened in a new window. That's primarily what I take issue with.
Personally I'd also argue that the TOC shouldn't be new windows either, that the user should have to take explicit action to follow a link in a non-standard way. But reasonable people can disagree about the merits of this in certain cases.
Any plans for an Android version? Disappointed that I can't check this app out. (Or at least an Android sign up page so I'm not missed when I forget about it in the next 20 minutes.)
I have a question from the article that I hope someone here can answer... What's the difference between simple encryption and the "strong" encryption Snowden was insisting on? Truecrypt volumes?
