The way it was published does not lead me to believe that story. The link to the document riffed on documents whose authors want all Googlers to read them and fix their broken ways.
According to the interview with the author linked in comments above, he published it internally a month ago. The fact that it only got linked and went viral weeks later would indicate it was originally limited.
I`m sure The first driverless cars for the public will start being available for rides in Silicon Valley or AZ and just on the regular roads they know very very well. I've still never seen one on the highway.
If anything, it seems like they would make sharing the road more common, because a reasonably reliable self-driving car would be safer around impromptu crosswalks and the like than many human drivers.
Are you sure they want robotics rather than pure software? For the longest time I was really put off of programming because of all the libraries and magic going on and people trying to show me the "cool stuff." It was cool stuff but I could never really get into it because I never felt I had a good feel of what was going on and there were so many components involved. I think if I was introduced to competitive programming earlier I would have loved it. Nothing messy to think about but the problems themselves and some kids might be motivated by the competition or puzzleness of it.
I live in the south and even here a ton of the churches are ok with LGBTQ and don't harp on guilt or how we all need to be saved. Unitarians, Episcopalean, Presbyterian (USA), Quakers, etc. It's still hard to sit through a service where you don't believe anything.
I'm honestly not searching, though, so even the Unitarians feel awkward. At least as I understand it, Unitarianism is still at least deistic. The most I could offer would be moral introspection and some meditation work, none of it in real connection to the supernatural. I'm not opposed to religion on principle, but I'm certainly not trying to find something to place my faith in.
If anything, the best I can see aiming for is some equivalent to cultural Judaism, where even non-believing Jews are invited to attend major ceremonies.
Same boat here. I've repeatedly thought about going to UU events, but they're still too New Age for me. I've long been somewhat envious of my Jewish friends for the strong community aspect of the culture, which requires too much religion in other, well, religions. Nothing else seems to really drive as much community though, as far as I've seen at least.
I feel like this is a surprisingly common response (especially since so many people in the tech world meet a lot of practicing-but-nonreligious Jews). I have a lot of respect for UU organizations, but I just don't feel like I fit in with it, and I haven't found a good substitute. Solstice parties and their ilk are A) too rare for community-building and B) sort of a pallid imitation of real organizations.
Hobby groups and community organizations offer a bit of this, but it seems like there's a fairly specific identity/culture gap that's not easily filled with anything else for non-Jewish atheists/agnostics.
Of course there is work to be done. It's just work that a smaller and smaller percentage of the most competent people + technology can be useful in. This isn't just an issue of providing more training resources, technology allows people more access to the work of the most competent so there is less and less work for people who are not the best at things or capable of learning really quickly to fill the new wide open niches that are popping up before technology narrows them too.
No economic use is not oblivion. Being useless needs to somehow be destigmatized while not being encouraged. It's not the end of the world, there are happy monks who live in seclusion off the generosity of others, there are some happy people with special needs who we don't try to make work and retired people who still enjoy life. There's no reason we can't have people being happy doing hobbies some day if we can get past training ourselves to feel like shit when we're not doing useless but socially necessary work (which is what most jobs are rapidly turning into). Some country is going to implement basic income and force us to talk about these ideas that successful people feel we can keep pushing away because it doesn't affect us yet.
> there are happy monks who live in seclusion off the generosity of others
Monks choose to live that way. Most people need more than money to survive. They need challenge and creativity, too.
> Some country is going to implement basic income and force us to talk about these ideas that successful people feel we can keep pushing away because it doesn't affect us yet.
Scandinavian countries have had better social programs for years. It's why the wealthy in the US fear discussion of things like basic income. They don't want to pay the tax rates of those countries.
There are countless ways to find challenge and creativity that don't involve working for money. In fact, most paying jobs are pretty bad at satisfying that need.
I totally agree with you. I should have been more clear.
In my opinion, some people want to work. They want to contribute to society and receive validation in the form of a variable salary that can go up or down according to their contribution. Others don't. Both are fine.
Calling people "useless" is not a great selling point for basic income. It strikes a nerve with some people [1], and while I think the post I just cited went over the top, I see what they're getting at.
Useless is subjective. I wouldn't call monks or anyone else useless. Yet, this is one of Altman's reasons for supporting basic income [2]. I don't think he intended his statement to be interpreted that way. It is what it is.
What abstraction? Comparisons are ubiquitous, easy to read, and a one-liner as well. If the range were to change it could affect performance. I've never seen anything written like the original loop, it's not like it's a Python idiom or anything. I'd say it's the wrong way to do things.
The abstraction is in removing the cognitive overhead needed to understand this. The original programmer can now allocate the time saved to higher level concerns. That is what C did for assembly and what Python is doing for C. Is that not the theme of abstraction?
In this case I actually think the cognitive overhead is larger for the in range(5) call. You have to know how that will behave, is it 1 <= x < 5 or 1 <= x <= 5? The comparisons are more explicit and they are quite easy to read in this case.
