141–150 of 163 posts
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Could someone explain the Ray Kurzweil hate to me? Predicting the future is hard.
For me it's the smug "See, I told you cell phones would be important in the future" gloating over obvious predictions, and the "well I said we would all be using driverless cars but since there is one, that still validates my entire prediction" hedging. Also his whole "I'm going to eat magic vitamins that will keep me alive forever" thing.
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Or as a culture. It seems to me that the gap between what language is acceptable in informal vs formal settings is fairly large in the US, while in other countries, using words like 'bullshit' in more formal settings is less taboo. Wonder if there's any research on this.
I've worked at some VERY major US companies, and there was generally no hesitance to throw around significant profanity in engineering department meetings, that's for sure!
What an interesting reflection on who we are as a species. We build systems to organize who we are (urbandictionary) but hate it when the systems use that information tell us who we are (watson). It feels so much like the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. Perhaps an appropriate response would be for the computer to measure the tension in the human voice response to it's queries and optimize for lower tension. So it…
I have to disagree. I'm not an "angel" by any means, but any time I visit Urban Dictionary, I come away feeling filthy. I typically go there to look up some abbreviation I heard on reddit or IRC or a blog post somewhere and what I look up usually ends up being middling-dirty, but the stuff that I see there "on my way" to the word I'm looking for makes me cringe and gives me a bleak vision of what the next generation…
Yet the younger generations are growing up, getting degrees, decent jobs and generally giving the old guard a run for their money.
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Techie jargon is generally meant to enhance communication, while biz jargon is meant to baffle the listener with bullshit. Huge difference.
Want to come build a distributed social cloud web app with me using node? The real problem is when the meaning of a word or phrase becomes so broad that it conveys no information, or gets swamped by overuse and becomes a buzzword.
> distributed web-app
Yeah that sounds way better than any marketing-speak sentence.
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I have to disagree. I'm not an "angel" by any means, but any time I visit Urban Dictionary, I come away feeling filthy. I typically go there to look up some abbreviation I heard on reddit or IRC or a blog post somewhere and what I look up usually ends up being middling-dirty, but the stuff that I see there "on my way" to the word I'm looking for makes me cringe and gives me a bleak vision of what the next generation…
What are you disagreeing with? It sounds like you're demonstrating the point: You find it distasteful to be told a bunch of stuff that was already true.
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Depends how you define upload. Why couldn't a computer just simulate a persons outputs based on recordings of their life. Does virtualization of life really need to have consistent consciousness? Maybe rip would be a better word than upload.
Continuity of consciousness is a fascinating problem to contemplate. To Be: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc See also the Grandfather's Axe paradox, aka Ship of Theseus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus A longer piece, Mechanisms of Mind Transfer: http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/extraordinary_future/Ph...
Regarding the Ship of Theseus, our identity is most likely tied to an ever evolving process that depends on the architecture of our brains rather than a fixed set of molecular components. Beside the neuronal DNA, most if not all cell components are subject to a turnover.
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Eh. Every field has its jargon. Techies who mock business lingo live in exceedingly fragile glass houses.
Techie jargon is generally meant to enhance communication, while biz jargon is meant to baffle the listener with bullshit. Huge difference.
I've had business types say exactly the same to me about tech jargon.
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Eh. Every field has its jargon. Techies who mock business lingo live in exceedingly fragile glass houses.
Techie jargon is generally meant to enhance communication, while biz jargon is meant to baffle the listener with bullshit. Huge difference.