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My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

blog.jonasoberg.net

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Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#91

Post by nv-vn »

_rpd wrote: post #67
nv-vn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That bubble's gonna pop eventually, I don't foresee it staying around for 10+ more years.

What do you think will stop artificial intelligence from becoming a closer and closer approximation of human intelligence?

The fact that our current technology (neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc.) is fundamentally different from how the human brain works. It does not have a capacity for abstract thought, emotion, creativity, etc. which are all essential to human intelligence. They can do specialized task, but we are many years away from general intelligence, and that will not come just by investing more in our current technology. If we "invent" general intelligence, it will look very different from what we have now in terms of "AI".

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#92

Post by nv-vn »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #71
_rpd wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think will stop artificial intelligence from becoming a closer and closer approximation of human intelligence?

Your question as asked has lots of reasonable answers, such as the fact humans aren't all that intelligent on average, and certainly not some asymptotic limit we're aiming for. That said, AI is here to stay.

I'm sure that it's here to stay, only that it will become much less valuable in the near future. Just like how the .com bubble popping didn't cause the Internet to disappear, the ML bubble popping will not cause machine learning to go away. Instead, it will make it something ubiquitous that gets used with very little thought, removing most of the specialized job market for it.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#93

Post by monksy »

tmccrmck wrote: post #86
monksy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a concern in forcing kids to learn how to program vs gatekeeping and self-taught developers. With gatekeeping/a tightly knit community: modding, building a PC, and developing a game becomes an achievement that the kids do. It encourages them to succeed to become apart of the community. With having training/classes apart of the curriculum: It removes the reward of solving the problem and removes a sen…

As someone with a background in teaching CS at the high school and university level, I've had this sentiment for the last few years but have never articulated it as well as you've just done. I went back to my old high school a few years ago to see the AP Computer Science class and the difference in the students was marked to say the least.

> I went back to my old high school a few years ago to see the AP Computer Science class and the difference in the students was marked to say the least.

Could you elaborate? I'm not sure by what you mean.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#94

Post by gens »

kibwen wrote: post #90
gens wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust has hype because it is mozilla, servo, and mozilla blog posts about it. But that is not the point i was making. There are a lot of languages that "have safety". Ada is a prime example as it "has" more "safety" and is really old. And yet nobody talked about Ada before rust came with "safety". With static analyzers and valgrind even C has enough of memory "safety". (note that Ada has more "safety" then just memory…

> There are a lot of languages that "have safety". Yes, and in the past twenty-five years these languages have stolen away 90% of developer mindshare from C and C++. The only niches that have held against the onslaught are those that thought that language-enforced memory-safety imposed runtime costs that they couldn't afford, coupled with a complete and total obliviousness to the actual cost of memory-unsafe code-- e…

That's why i said that the hype behind rust is unreasonable. Just look at your post. Is it an objective look at programming ? Or just a lot of words that make rust look like the greatest thing ever ? If you think it is objective, what you wrote that is, then why did you not spend 10min looking at Ada ? Why did you even mention GC, the tired argument as to why "rust is better then Go (note: go has a thing that is more awsome then anything in rust, not that you would care; also go can be used without gc) ? Not that it matters anyway. There is more to programming languages then "features". There is no "perfect" programming language. Rust is most definitely not a replacement for C. And it sucks at "systems programming", whatever that is (for kernel programming, C is definitely a lot better). Just the mere fact that i will not talk about the shortcomings of rust is a clear indication that there is too much hype behind it (you can blame it on the "loud minority", but there is none).

Feel free to write yet another page of text about how rust is the most greatest thing that is great and i am wrong.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#95

Post by gm-conspiracy »

rijoja wrote: post #22
gm-conspiracy wrote: post #6

Meh. Summary - we need open-source licenses for flying cars, so our children can tinker with the kernel code, since the current Liunx kernel is too complex for children starting out. I've always wondered about teaching Linux "history" via hands-on with older hardware and OS (like 2.x kernel building on an older version of Slackware with a 486 or Pentium 90).

Well sure but nowadays you can do that with virtual boxes and whatnot. Much more convenient. Remember that build your own linux post from not to long ago? Following those instructions I not only built linux from scratch with custom compiled libc and busybox. Sure I did that when I was 16 or 17, but in those days the same work would have taken me days not hours. And if you want to teach people, you can easily record w…

What I am trying to get at, your days spent learning what took you hours today, would not have been possible without the foundation you created during those several days as a teenager.

I would get nowhere near the experience (and appreciation) of watching you do this on Youtube, compared to the several days experience on real "vintage" hardware.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#96

Post by kibwen »

gens wrote: post #94
kibwen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are a lot of languages that "have safety". Yes, and in the past twenty-five years these languages have stolen away 90% of developer mindshare from C and C++. The only niches that have held against the onslaught are those that thought that language-enforced memory-safety imposed runtime costs that they couldn't afford, coupled with a complete and total obliviousness to the actual cost of memory-unsafe code-- e…

That's why i said that the hype behind rust is unreasonable. Just look at your post. Is it an objective look at programming ? Or just a lot of words that make rust look like the greatest thing ever ? If you think it is objective, what you wrote that is, then why did you not spend 10min looking at Ada ? Why did you even mention GC, the tired argument as to why "rust is better then Go (note: go has a thing that is more…

By all means, please continue to ramble incoherently (who said anything about Go??) while arguing from emotion and failing to refute any of my points. :)

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#97

Post by tonyarkles »

blowski wrote: post #50
tonyarkles wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great, if they can solve the problem! My experience, as a kid who self-taught C after feeling that QBasic was too limiting, is that to debug problems, you often need to go a level or two deeper than the code you're working on. As an example, I've encountered bugs with Python libraries that I had to debug using GDB. If I wasn't comfortable with C, my only option would have been to throw my hands up in the air and…

That's actually the perfect way to be. A startup hiring someone of your level to build an MVP is probably wasting a lot of cash. Most startups will never grow big enough to worry about performance. And if they do, they can afford to pay you to come and in fix their code. That sounds like a balanced ecosystem to me.

Totally! And that's what some of my gigs have been. "We've got a product, we've found a market, and we need to fix some things about the product that we don't have in-house talent to do"

On the MVP front, I somewhat agree with you. It all depends on what the product is. I've worked on tech spikes that have involved hardware prototyping, signal processing (both embedded and desktop/mobile), image processing, RF, etc. Those are the types of things where you often can't really "hack it together".

I've also worked on simple, e.g., React Native MVPs. The only advantage I might have over a less skilled developer is that I can generally bang those things out quite quickly; in many cases, faster than the business part is ready for (which is likely just wasteful).

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#98

Post by _rpd »

nv-vn wrote: post #91
_rpd wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think will stop artificial intelligence from becoming a closer and closer approximation of human intelligence?

The fact that our current technology (neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc.) is fundamentally different from how the human brain works. It does not have a capacity for abstract thought, emotion, creativity, etc. which are all essential to human intelligence. They can do specialized task, but we are many years away from general intelligence, and that will not come just by investing more in our current technology.…

> our current technology (neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc.) is fundamentally different from how the human brain works.

I don't see that. Software neural networks explicitly mimic the neural networks of the human brain. Not saying there aren't functional differences, but the basic structure is there.

> It does not have a capacity for abstract thought

But 'it' does have capacity for unsupervised cluster recognition, and can use the identified clusters to influence processing results. More is likely required, but this seems to be the basic mechanism required for "abstraction."

> that will not come just by investing more in our current technology

I think you are saying that some fundamentals are still missing. I don't disagree, but we seem to have some important building blocks in hand. However, it may be the case that all the fundamentals are now in hand, and it is exactly a process of evolutionary change to yield true AI.

> general intelligence, it will look very different from what we have now

I think this is just the traditional dismissal of "whatever has actually been achieved, that is not AI." At some point this becomes an "AI of the gaps" argument, where the gaps are ever shrinking.

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