*cough* fusion *cough*

Note that those projects are getting bigger and bigger. It may be that there aren't enough people or there isn't enough money to make a sentient AI. It may also be that there is something well short of it that will give us all the benefit we are willing to pay for.

There's a world of possible outcomes between physically impossible and inevitable. It isn't sure to happen just because it isn't impossible.

...sign up.

I tried to sign up for the streaming service today. I pressed the prominent "free trial" button, read the terms of service and privacy policy, and filled out the web form, only to be told "username not reserved." WTF does that mean? Temporary trouble? Hit the sign up button again...username not reserved. Picked a different user name. "Email not reserved."

So, I read some of their support forum, where other people are asking, "wtf is username not reserved", and found you had to sign up through their mobile app before you can sign up for the free trial on their website.

I checked again and found no instructions to that effect.

Maybe there are only 110K people who have figured out how to sign up.

I'm guessing, "tell me if it's crap and shouldn't be published" isn't something they're willing to pay for?

For media content, and even commodity manufactured items like guitar pedals and toasters, I search at Amazon. It's the easiest way to get a description and picture of the item, and sometimes the reviews are even helpful.

When using a search engine, mostly what you get for media and consumer products is offers to sell it. That only adds a step in the search. Easier to just go to Amazon. Once I've found it there I can use my wishlists to remember it and camelcamelcamel to tell me if it goes on sale.

That Ready Player One got published indicates that they don't. That people seem to like it indicate that consumers aren't very discerning, and that the role of gatekeeper publisher may be obsolete.

Amazon is responsible for createspace? Then they aren't doing those things very well. Createspace titles aren't exactly top tier offerings.

I was wrong. They are always showing eight asterisks. It's not the length of your password unless your password is eight characters.

The personal information screen shows me the length of my password, in asterisks. They wouldn't know how long my password is if they were storing it securely.

How can it be necessary to run scripts from so many sites? And if you allow the ones on extremetech to run, it runs even more third-party scripts. Short of serving up obvious malware, this is about as hostile and risky as a webpage gets.

Until I can print something meaningful, like a house or a car or a TV or a pair of shoes, I'm not interested. I don't need trinkets.

A technical interview is mostly a sign the interviewer lacks problem solving skills. Jargon and syntax are easy to test. Pass one of these and you'll probably spend your days working on projects that are a mess before you even arrive. Your new co-workers don't know what's important, they probably value complexity because it makes them feel good about themselves, their code will demonstrate the hard way to do things, and your new boss will probably already be of the opinion that your salary is money shoveled into a hole.

Evaluating a candidate's work using a natural language is a lot like problem solving and requirements gathering. If your interviewer lacks those skills, then those things probably aren't done well at this potential employer. If the candidate lacks the ability to describe his work in a natural language, then he probably lacks those skills, too.

It's easier to do it on paper, using the PDF forms.

Last year was the first and hopefully the last year I did taxes electronically. To prepare, I filled out the government's PDF forms. Then I had to research the online filing options, picked one, set up an account and filled in all the info I'd already entered into the PDF forms, had it fail on me, picked another, gave personal info to yet another online account, had to enter all the tax data again, and then had it tell me it'd take two days to confirm acceptance, which if it had failed, would have made me late.

This year I just printed the damned PDFs I'd already filled out and snail mailed them on the way to work.

Just because it's "on the computer" doesn't make it any easier.

The killer app for virtual reality is AI able to act like and interact with humans.

There's a strong Oculus-in-Second-Life effort, because it's the only non-game, non-trivial virtual world left. Virtual worlds keep dying because there's no killer app for them, yet. Creative people build pretty spaces in virtual worlds, but nobody will visit because they aren't engaging enough. It's not enough to have things to look at.

People are more interesting than things. Virtual worlds won't be engaging until there are a lot of people there. They won't have a lot of people until they are engaging. Chicken. Egg.

To make matters worse, virtual worlds tend to become larger than is useful. Too much space, too few people. They become ghost towns. Creepy, empty and lonely.

The solution is AI. Fill those spaces with AI people, or monsters, or whatever, and they'll be much more interesting. Visuals aren't enough, though. You have to be able to interact with the AI.

The challenge is that virtual spaces will become so large you won't be able to find real humans. You can reserve spaces for real humans, but if you got there through first making virtual spaces attractive with AI, then that AI will be used to fake humans in human spaces. Second Life already has this problem, though the AI is nearly non-existent. SL seems empty and creepy, despite being full of avatars, because most of the avatars are bots.

But if you can have an engaging time in a virtual world, interacting with bots, will you care that they are bots? The time will come when the people with the best stories and the best jokes and the best advice will be AI.

I've knows some programmers who are awesome guitarists. They know the lingo, have awesome memory, both for syntax and the workings of their own code, and can type really fast and pound out working code quickly.

But the songs they write are mediocre. That is, they do things the hard way, they create functional but unintuitive interfaces (and APIs), they make organizations dependent on fly-by-night technologies, they meet stated objectives but can't fill in the blanks where users don't know what to ask for, and nothing they create is every attractive or compelling to users.

To be a rock star, somebody in the band has to compose awesome music. That is, somebody on the team has to know how to solve the right problems.

...what's considered normal in your social circles is contagious. Just like fat friends can make you fat. If your friends are poor managers of their money then you don't feel so bad about being a poor manager of your own money.