anonymousguy

HTTPS everywhere is nice... except if your current web host makes free HTTPS hard because they make money from selling certificates.

Small child have to learn language from nothing. They just figure it out through exposure and practice. Even pets learn some language. This is the model to emulate.

Ultimately language use requires a few skills:

* a good parser * motor cognition/coordination * a good memory * semantics/context * vocabulary * situational awareness

The first two in the list are what small children struggle with the most. Fortunately, we can eliminate motor coordination as a need for AI. Although extremely powerful parsers demand a specialized expertise to produce this part of the problem is straight forward. I write open source multi-language/multi-dialect parsers as an open source hobby.

I discount vocabulary and situational awareness, because most children still haven't figure this out until they enter high school long after they have learned the basics of speech. That pattern of human behavior dictates that while it might be hard to teach these skills to a computer you can put this off a long ways down the road until after basic speech is achieved.

If somebody paid me the money to do this research my personal plan of attack would be:

1. Focus on the parser first. Start with a text parser and do audio to text later. Don't worry about defining anything at this stage. When humans first learn to talk and listen they are focusing upon the words and absolutely not what those words mean.

The parser should not be parsing words. Parsing words from text is easy. The parser should be parsing sentences into grammars, which is harder but still generally straight forward with many edge cases.

2. Vocabulary. Attempt to define words comprising the parsed grammar. Keep it simple. Don't worry about precision at first. Humans don't start with precision and humans get speech wrong all the time. This especially true for pronouns. Just provide a definition.

3. Put the vocabulary together with the parsed grammar. It doesn't even have to make sense. It just has to have meaning for words and the words together in a way that informs an opinion or decision to the computer. Consider this sentence as an example: I work for a company high up in the building with a new hire that just got high and gets paid higher than my high school sweetheart.

4. If the sentence is part of a paragraph or a response to a conversation you can now focus on precision. You have additional references from which to draw upon. You are going to redefine some terms, particularly pronouns. Using the added sentences make a decision as to whether new definitions apply more directly than the original definitions. This is how humans do it. These repeated processing steps means wasted CPU cycles and its tiring for humans too.

5. Formulate a response. This could be a resolution to close the conversation, or it could be a question asking for additional information or clarity. Humans do this too.

6. Only based upon the final resolution determine what you have learned. Use this knowledge to make decisions to modify parsing rules and amend vocabulary definitions. The logic involved is called heuristics.

This only way all this works is to start small, like a toddler, and expand it until the responses become more precise, faster, and more fluid. At least.... this is how I would do it.

I think bikeshedding could exist irrespective of processes. Bikeshedding is the behavior of miss-prioritizing trivialities with greater imperative than core concerns because they are easier to think through. The solution for bikeshedding is prioritizing tasks in alignment to a written mission or plan. A documented plan described achievement of the plan where processes are the requirements to attain a certain level of conformance to a sub-goal. In other words the processes, of a well designed system, are the minimal number of barriers to get in the way just enough to prevent mission failure.

The primary problems in that article are nothing to do with technology.

Consider these statements:

* "Tom is a genius", which implies the Tom solution is a trusted asset beyond improvement, doubt, or questioning. It also implies the solutions provided by Tom are golden unimproveable truths.

* The various statements from Scott suggest an indisputable faith in process and convention.

Clearly there are failures at multiple levels here. First of all Tom sounds like a whiny bitch. These personality types are inherently defensive and typically seek to reinforce an individual's position of self triumph in a small pond. Toxic.

Secondly, Scott has a lot of faith in process and conventions. Processes and conventions are the absolute enemy of creativity. I understand processes are necessary to establish a certain level of security, but they more typically exist to satisfy some OCD insanity where there is comfort in doing things in a particular way without consideration for why they are done in that way. Many developers cannot tell the different between security and superficial stupidity. Many technology abstractions enable that stupidity thereby convolute the differences between security and OCD stupid which only enables additional stupidity.

All of the prior mentioned failures are allowed to exist because the management doesn't want to be involved until there is a problem, such as Tom crying. This is called enabling.

Most important of all is that all technology should be questioned, doubted, and challenged. Obviously this sort of continuous improvement is utterly absent, because everybody has a competing agenda.

As a JavaScript developer I feel the same way about Java... Unfortunately JavaScript developers are fully aware they aren't Java developers, but many Java developers don't seem to share this same realization.

> Everyone's on Facebook after all

I know of several people who choose to not waste their time with Facebook. Seriously, why? Any time I need to nudge somebody, that I don't care enough to bother with in the real world, there is Linked In. Everybody else either has my phone number, email address, or they are people I don't know.

The Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson might set a record this year for highest votes attained by a third party candidate.

Perhaps the necessary enough justification could be that an elected president does something that directly and literally violates an article written into the actual constitution and the military seeks to appoint a new leader from the line of succession. That way there is no violation of the principals of Cincinnatus and an elected civilian retains the position opposed to an unelected military figure.

This could always happen in the US. US military officers swear an oath to defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, but they don't swear an oath to other officers or elected officials. That said if an elected president violates the constitution the US military could qualify a military coup to restore law.

Many posters in here indicate oddness that a military force could represent secularism. I am curious why that is. Most uniformed militaries I have observed have always seemed more secular than the people they represent. Let us not forget the Islamic Brotherhood was democratically elected in Egypt, which attempted to instill sharia law. A military coup ended that nonsense. Also, Hitler was democratically elected and was not immediately supported by the military.