Congrats Niniane! I didn't realize you were here on FF. We've launched a room with National Geographic, and love the simple, easy to use interface. - tagami
There's a lot of misinformation about what "singulatarians" actually believe. Not everyone agrees with Ray Kurzweil's notions that he'll live long enough to upload his consciousness. The best resource I've found is Michael Annissmov's Accelerating Future blog: http://www.acceleratingfuture.... - Dan Kaplan
I'm all for it, only I say let Kurzweil go first when comes to the first downloading of brain contents. That way if something is missing, we'll know pretty quick ;-) - Dean Terry
Interesting, we were just talking about this last night: http://friendfeed.com/e/b3ce29... Doing a quick search, looks like singularity is on the brain of Friendfeed lately. Ooooooeeeeeoooo. - Mark Trapp
As long as more and more people spend all their time on FriendFeed, there won't be too much AI technology being developed. :) - Chris White
i think its at least a few years off, so you can relax, plenty of time for you to get used to it before it happens :P - bob
It's just amazing that I haven't seen any of the movies where this happens (Terminator, iRobot, etc.). What else are people working on from within the FriendFeed headquarters that can kill me? :) - Ana
I'm not convinced. still disconcerting as hell though. - Marco
ana, i think someone is working on doomsday devices over in the furniture graveyard :P - bob
I took Computer Ethics at SDSU (where Vinge taught) and one of our assignments was to compare Vinge's singularity essay to Ted Kaczynski's "Unabomber Manifesto." The similarities are rather striking. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it is extremely fascinating the differing approach people take to similar topics. - Brooks Bishop
to counterbalance computers that are super smart, we need humans who are freakishly strong. - eviltom
I always thought the first sign of the singularity was twitter. sigh - Elad
Thanks for posting that link to Vinge's essay, Michael. You're right - a mind-boggling read on a fascinating subject that hadn't really crossed my radar until reading this terrific thread. Makes me appreciate FF all the more for putting it in front of me. Could its increasing popularity be another of the early signs indicating the onset of the Singularity? I think we should be told. - Bob Kingsley
movies are pretty bad at showing the future; they tend to show things that *look* cool - Amit Patel
@nick: Thanks for that wired link. Thanks to all for discussing this topic - very interesting. - nadim
Since there seems to be interest, most of the best reading on this is SciFi. Vinge's "Rainbow End" and Stross's "Accelerando" are probably the best "What happens when (if) the Singularity happens" books. (Interesting to note that Vinge is an ex CompSci professor and Stross is an ex-perl hacker). If you want to get scared by the singularity read "A Fire Upon the Deep", though. - Nick Lothian
@Nick: thanks for the link to the Bill Joy essay. Another fascinating, absorbing read. - Bob Kingsley
Ana, you should keep your eyes out for human sized bugs, among other things. - Clare Dibble
I'm a singularity skeptic - increasing compute power doesn't solve basic problems like global warming. - Piaw Na
Directuer, this is part of urban warfare and survival tactics training. Maybe this kid got his hands /idea from the some army guy or he just did it for kicks :)- - Peter Dawson
Somehow, I'm reminded of this joke: What does a redneck say before he dies? "Hey y'all watch this!" - Hutch Carpenter
this is fantastic - long live This Guy so my pyro bend can continue vicariously through his efforts (realizing, of course, that he may already be dead) - Nate
In Chinese table manners, chewing mouth open is acceptable. I've even tried it, though i need keep reminding myself or else revert to Western custom. Air and/or oxygen does change the flavor and also cools hot (caliente) food. Japanese custom requires sucking bland noodles up quickly to draw up flavorful soup. I also prefer others slurp hot soup rather than having them blow it. - John Lam
"1. WALL-E records audio from his favorite movie, XXXXXXXXXXX, putting in onto his own digital recorder (bypassing the macrovision DRM on the tape). A COPYRIGHT CRIME UNDER C-61
2. WALL-E archives the audio, he doesn’t merely time-shift it. He listens repeatedly! A COPYRIGHT CRIME UNDER C-61
3. WALL-E shares his DRM-broken music with his friend, another robot named XXXXX. A COPYRIGHT CRIME UNDER C-61" - Benjamin Golub via Bookmarklet
I knew there was a reason I liked that little guy! - Nathan Henderson
actually, since it's hundreds of years later all of that stuff would be in the public domain :-) - mathew ingram
If history is any guide, Disney's copyrights will never expire. - Kevin Fox
+1 for Kevin. They don't call it the Mickey Mouse Protection Act for nothing. - Cyndy
Since Disney owns Wall•E and Wall•E is violating Disney's copyrights (which never expire as Kevin points out), I'm hoping Disney would end up in some sort of lawsuit infinite loop and implode, leaving Pixar to make good movies. - Scott Johnston
As long as Pixar continues to produce hits, Disney will leave Pixar alone. Even better, Pixar's influence will be felt stronger in Burbank and animation will improve there too. BOLT! this fall is the first to have Pixar's Story Method imposed upon it. Look for much better results than recent Disney animation. - John Frost
Someone censor that movie before it becomes a threat to the MPAA et al!!!! - Roberto Bonini
Wouldn't some sort of reverse Statute of Limitations apply since he doesn't do any of this until the year 2815? - Ken Sheppardson
The best known perpetrator of this is Comcast, a major US ISP. Comcast forges packets to stop computers communicating when their networks are overloaded. They selectively do this to certain programs and it's very hard to detect. - Jon McAlister via Bookmarklet
It makes Firefox honor the color profile in images instead of just assuming the color profile is the same as your displays profile. This will make images look the way the author intended them to. Not a big deal on Windows but very helpful on a Mac - Benjamin Golub
AH, I see. I wasn't exactly seeing a "world of difference" - probably because I'm a dirty Windows user! ;) - Nathaniel Payne
Nathaniel, make sure that you're using the best possible color profile for your Windows installation. I had to adjust it on all of my Vista machines and now Firefox's colors are incredibly vibrant. Also, it corrected a red-shift that happened which made blue links, for example, appear kind of purplish. - Akiva Moskovitz
I'm not really amused, but I am impressed that the writer was able to put nearly 1,500 words against this subject. - AJ Kohn
"As with many dubious fashion choices (see: leggings as pants), much of the blame can be placed on American Apparel." True. - Erica Baker
"At Urban Outfitters, there are eight different options for guys, including the "Super V," which boasts a 27-inch neckline from shoulder to hem. A 27-inch neckline." - David Vasileff
I want a "Like" button for all these hilarious comments : ) - Jess Lee
that story is classic - I must admit I find the shirts repulsive and strangely hard not to look at the same time.. are you gay? - ben rogers via twhirl
Ugh, I physically shuddered the first time I saw one of those American Apparel ads. Was hoping that this trend was going to stay firmly ensconced in the fern bars of Three's Company on TVLand reruns. Some trends should *never* be resurrected. And to the men reading this: ixnay on any thought of the gold medallions. - Casey
Slow news day, although I agree "Women demand men look a certain way". Or else we cannot enter the fern bars of our choice. - Russellreno
"It's, like, another three inches and that's a vest, motherfucker." LOL - Jeanette Martinez
An "owl" is someone who wakes up at 8 or 9am? I guess Paul is a bat :). - Sanjeev Singh
I'm just trying to convert myself being a morning person. I really don't get it. After being in bed (sleeping!) from 9PM, at 7AM I STILL won't wake up... - Claudio Cicali
At 3:30pm every day, I'm a sleepy monkey - Ginger Makela
I have tried to take naps in the past and have always ended up feeling awful for the rest of the day. I've tried both short naps (~20 minutes) and longer naps but either way I end up suffering from "sleep inertia" for hours (ie: until I get a night's sleep). - Laurence Gonsalves
I often have the craziest dreams when I nap. Awsome. - Marianne Lenox
"Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age." - grant via Bookmarklet
It's going to be all about data mining everything all the time, with ever stronger algorithms -- and the rapid evolution of this supercomputing grid into a global superintelligence. Who gets to control this thing, and access what parts of it, is going to dominate politics. - Sean McBride
And will that sorting and sifting make us any happier, I wonder? - Brent Newhall
All that sorting and sifting will probably make some people wealthier and more powerful. - Sean McBride
we are BORC...resistance is futile. yeah and i like it. individualism is overrated...and a waste of resources.:) - krz9000
Humans anthropomorphize and tend to recognize intelligence similar to their own. They might not recognize intelligence distributed among members of collective (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...), in the same way neurons in a brain cannot recognize inputs from their neighbors as intelligence and in the same way humans cannot recognize the distributed intelligence of humanity and higher forms of order without social tools such as journalism to reveal the new patterns. In this case, cockroaches form egalitarian conclaves unlike hierarchies of bees and ants. Swarming appears adapted to let them survive by clustering into survivable swarms. Think about it. Roaches eaten or otherwise killed no longer attract other members. Surviving roaches attract others, and the swarm evolves and perhaps breeds. - John Lam
Go Gmail! "The cost savings are substantial. The Outlook/Exchange platform involved a AU$33 million contract and took four years to go live, although it’s unclear why it took so long. The Gmail/Google Apps rollout, which is being completed by subcontractors, will cost just $9.5 million and should be live by the end of 2008. User storage will increase from 35 MB to 1 GB." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
This is small compared to the rest of Gmail, so scaling isn't an issue. - Paul Buchheit
Has anyone ever played Warcraft and clicked on a sheep until it exploded? That's what I want to do with the "like" button on this link. - J. Phil
My guess is that the Exchange contract involved having many local servers and administrators (managed by Unisys), while the Gmail contract involves just letting Google do all the work in the US with SMS only doing the local integration. This is all fine and dandy until some ship cuts the submarine cable to your continent and your email doesn't work for a week. - Gabe Schaffer
I work tangentially to this stuff.. the next step has to be a Apps rollout (or at least replacing Office with OpenOffice) - Nick Lothian
Of course, if the submarine cable gets cut, email won't work anyways. - Jim Norris
Presumably they're spending millions of AU$ so the students can email teachers and other students. One would hope the Exchange-based system wouldn't require transoceanic cables for teachers to email their students. With Gmail you can't even edit a draft without a decent Internet connection to some Gmail datacenter. - Gabe Schaffer
There may be datacenters in Australia by now. - Paul Buchheit
Australia has something like a dozen undersea cables connecting it to a variety of destinations in Asia and the Americas. Events that would disconnect Australia from the world, or shut down Google's data centers, are so much more rare than Exchange downtime that it's not even worth talking about. There are plenty of valid reasons to prefer locally served email over a hosted solution, but undersea cable cuts aren't one of them. - ⓞnor
Gmail is a great choice, but the funny thing is that Exchange seems like a really awful choice for this situation. To give email to a million students, it seems like some big-ass conventional IMAP servers would be a lot cheaper and easier to manage. Maybe they were sold a bill of goods about how Exchange/Outlook would integrate with educational courseware? - ⓞnor
The problem really comes down to local vs. hosted services. The article techcrunch incorrectly quoted said the email would be hosted by Google overseas, meaning there are dozens more points of failure (a submarine cable being merely one). My guess is that it was Unisys (the low bidder in 2003) that chose Exchange as the platform, and that SMS (the low bidder this year) chose Gmail. I would also guess that there is no SLA in the contract. - Gabe Schaffer
gmail is so much more reliable then anything microsoft could ever manage in underfunded corporate IT environments - why even try and compare - ben rogers via twhirl
What does a GMail/Google Apps "rollout" involve? I'm assuming it must be some sort of customisation/integration? - Mike Gardiner
Gmail may be 100% reliable, but that doesn't matter because the Internet isn't even close to reliable. All it takes is one kid running BitTorrent to make every student in the school (or district) unable to access email. - Gabe Schaffer
Does it frequently happen that you can't get to Google because some kid is running BitTorrent? - ⓞnor
Kids these days are spoiled. I remember using 'ed' and 'mail'. We used to have to get up at 5am and lick the street clean wi't toungue but we were 'appy. - Andy C
Of course, if the University was really clever, they could have secured 1.5 million free Gmail invites and saved a further $9.5 million. - Andy C
@ⓞnor - bittorrent isn't too much of a concern AFAIK in most schools. What is the big concern is the cost of bandwidth. Telstra (the incumbent duopolist) signed a lot of schools up to very expensive contracts with capped bandwidth (esp in remote areas). It's expensive enough that at some schools they disconnect the internet once the cap is reached (although this isn't in NSW AFAIK) - Nick Lothian
@Andy C: Google Apps has features that not possible with unaffiliated accounts: integration with organizaton's user directory, single sign on and more. - Gary Burd
@Gary: I know. It was a weak attempt at humour. Next time I will append a smiley. - Andy C
It doesn't matter whether it's a broken cable, BitTorrent, a misbehaving router, or any of the dozens of other causes that could make the Internet unreliable; the point is that the Internet is inherently unreliable. Anything that relies on the Internet will eventually fail, and at some point it will fail the day before the big project is due or the final exam, and there won't be anything the school will be able to do about it. - Gabe Schaffer
Yeah, but it's all about failure rates. Everything fails sometimes, including Exchange servers. Microsoft themselves, for example, have suffered *weeks* long company wide email outages while they struggle to repair broken Exchange installations. If I cared about reliable access to my mail, I know which one I would pick. And there's no secret mystery failure here: you can just ask people "is it OK if your email is approximately as available as Google?". They know how available that is to them. - ⓞnor
I don't know about you, Onor, but I check Gmail dozens of times each day; I use the rest of Google perhaps 3 times a day. The reason I still use Outlook (instead of forwarding that email to Gmail) is that some mail I need access to even when there's no Internet. - Gabe Schaffer
@gabe: imap with gmail. you can get a local snapshot if you want without the hassle of having to manage an email system. - Ashwin Bharambe
I wonder what order markov chain this is........prob just first order but some of the phrases actually make sense :) - goutham
With a limited corpus, you'll end up regurtitating a lot of the original phrases even if you have a low-order model, because certain words only occur in a limited number of contexts. - ⓞnor
@nor is that a reference to the text generated by computer, or a swipe at Jim Davis? ;-) - Karim
Rachel and I are going there for our Honeymoon!!! Staying for a few days before taking a cruise along the coast up to Venice. These photos are amazing. - Kevin Fox
Thanks :) The city is so picturesque that there is a photo to be taken regardless of where a camera is pointed! Kevin, you'll have a fantastic time. It's a great that you are going to stay for a few days since you can then visit the old town at times other than the afternoon and avoid the crowds from the cruise ships. - Simon
Damn these are awesome. My favorite is the harbor. Serious kudos. - Jim Stanger
Very special, out of the ordinary photos -- love the blue tints. I want to visit this place. - Sean McBride
Hi Simon, I'd be interested in a comment on your selection of Smugmug over Flickr. - Stuart Forsyth
Stuart, I just prefer SmugMug because of the UI from the visitor point of view. I think it makes browsing a little simpler and more intuitive for the occasional visitor, and I think it looks a bit more elegant than the Flickr interface. I have thought about moving over to Flickr though. - Simon
wow please let me know if you do so i can see your uploads more regularly. - Mrsth
Simon, Stuart: I agree, Smugmug is far easier for the casual user. Flickr is a community site through and through. Would be cool if they incroporated some gallery features. But then, one could of course develop something like a Smugmug interface for Flickr with the API and maybe have the best of both worlds. Do you get a lot of views/interaction from the Smugmug community or do you use is mostly as a gallery site for "external" visitors, Simon? - Ole Begemann
Simon, you need not dedicate yourself to one online gallery. They're not mutually exclusive. Why not use them for different purposes? Also, see http://tabblo.com and http://zooomr.com. - John Lam
Simon, did you set your camera to Greenwich Mean Time? All photos seem 2 hours later than as reported. - John Lam
John, I used to have accounts at multiple providers but converged to one out of laziness and convenience. All the times are GMT. Local time was GMT+2. I find it easier to sync with my GPS tracklog when everything is GMT, particularly when I happen to be travelling to multiple countries and timezones (although this vacation was just to Croatia). Ole, about 98% of the visits to my SmugMug site are from non-SmugMug referrers. - Simon
Looooong, but great read. I often felt at Google, on the sales side of things, we were so smart that we were stupid. I can't tell you how many meetings I sat through where simple solutions (and, probably, the right solutions!) were ignored because they sounded too simple. And we'd spend a full hour coming up with complicated, convoluted, confusing solutions because that's what smart people do, right? Come up with arcane stuff? Agh. It was all gas. Not throwing anyone under the bus -- I was as guilty as anyone else. - Ginger Makela
100-word version: "You're not as smart as you think you are. You need to find people way smarter and more effective than you. You can't find them with normal interviews. A six-month trial period might work, but what super smart person will stand for that? Your only real hope is that you've bumped into them some time in the past, or maybe you can find them by asking around. Good luck, and also I made up this weird phrase which doesn't help." - ⓞnor
Ginger, thanks for sharing your experience at Google. - Mike Reynolds
First page down, giving a Like for that. Continuing to read... - Hutch Carpenter
Really great read, and a true take on the types of "smart" out there. Also, I liked this little add-on Steve had in the comments section: "The Dunning-Kruger Effect has a fourth principle that I didn't mention, which is that as your competence increases, your self-evaluation diminishes. The most competent people apparently tend to rate themselves below their skill level.
" Interesting thought. - Hutch Carpenter
The core of any good engineering culture is deeply allergic to unnecessary complexity. "Fancy" is a bad word; "complicated" is a really, really bad word. Design doc templates have a section asking you to explain why a simpler solution would work. Half my interviewers (having convinced themselves that I could code) were making sure that I wasn't the type to build giant rickety abominations. But a company like Google is too big for any single generalization to apply. - ⓞnor
ⓞnor: "and also I made up this weird phrase which doesn't help" Ha! :) - Bret Taylor
@nor if you do that for every Steve Yegge post you might have a high-traffic blog on your hands - Jeremy Raines
@Ginger: I see that everywhere, not only in Sales… :( - Amit Patel
very cool...that is probably why friendfeed is ramping so smoothly and getting intelligent new features vs. another nameless service that is having severe growing pains. - Pokai
That's excellent hiring criteria -- would you hire them for your start-up. I know from experience that you can't really understand how important it is to work with A-players until you work at a company with mainly B-players. - Todd Nemet
I really prefer to work with @-players and ideally ?-players - ⓞnor
cos-players tend to be irrational unless you get exactly the right angle. - ⓞnor
Question: Why would one of these super-heroic programmers want to work for you rather than launching their own thing? - Adewale Oshineye
Dan should publish a blog with 100-word versions of all of Stevey's posts. I don't have the patience for the long versions. - Jeremy Hylton
I want high quality generic collaborative summarization in general. Not sure how it would work, it's really easy to warp and distort things when boiling them down, and way too easy to take cheap shots at the author (as I did above). - ⓞnor
Congrats, real good choice that I am sure you will enjoy - Fred Grott
@Louis yeah, I was tempted to mess with people and post pics of myself at FriendFeed and various other places, but decided to come clean. [Note: I still think FriendFeed would be an awesome gig too...] - Jeremy Zawodny
Weird, doesn't seem to work in Fluid. Clicking the link quickly shows the loading circle on the right, then does nothing. Works fine in Safari 3.1, though. - Mark Trapp
Liked just so people see my name when they test it out. - DeWitt Clinton
I notice another change. "You" is the first name listed for all the things I've liked in the past. Even those where I haven't clicked on the expand Likes link. This wasn't previously the case. A bit of work on the Likes sort methodology? - Hutch Carpenter
Noticed that too, Hutch: do you think it's sorting based on order of likes now? Obviously, with "You" always being first and outside the order. - Mark Trapp
Mark - definitely putting "you" out front is a change. I still don't know the basis for ranking the other Likes. Maybe the guys will comment here. Or blog it. - Hutch Carpenter
I like this addition. Clean, intuitive, simple, perfect. - Tsega D
a long list of names isn't too useful; why dont you bold the ones that are my friends? - peter
peter: all your friends are listed first. - Bret Taylor
More recent likes come first, so as new friends "Like" things, you see them. - Bret Taylor
Peter, bolding is a great idea, not just here, but in general. It would be an easy way to find friends that you have not yet subscribed to. - Scott Beale
+1 for bolding names that I'm already subscribed to. - Mike Doeff
I tweaked the sort order to put "you" first, but apparently I forgot to tell Bret. - Jim Norris
