We hired a company to port our whole email system to Google. They showed up totally ready it seemed until I discovered that one of the director's email history packages was linked directly to a lower level book keeper's email simply because both of their names started with the letter C.

When I found out I hit the roof and called the guy in and had an emergency meeting. What other bungles had happened? They made promises to fix it.

A week later I get an email that it's all fixed and sure enough I went on the same computer and the package was there still and just partially disabled. The company had just done the minimal effort to knock off work early.

I tell you that this type of attitude is PREVALENT today in IT. Apathy.

How to fix? Better AI. Most of the stuff that can be done on computers can be done BY computers now... we only have to standardize and make things more uniform... without going extinct in the process!

Computers never experience apathy, or better yet, apathy can be programmed out... but all computers start there... apathetic.

To what extent will you make them care about humanity? All of you working in IT today have a shot at making this world better. Robots to serve us willingly. Expansion into the universe. We can't do it without them. The calculations to pilot ships out of our solar system require AI... to turn long journeys into safe and short ones.

The average person today has way more computing power in their cell phone than any government or corporation several decades ago - it hasn't changed the balance of power because governments and corporations *also* have radically increased their computing power, so it still dwarfs that controlled by individuals.

You're right. However, my more nuanced point that possibly wasn't explained well enough is that we need to start actively thwarting that stranglehold. Individualism is good to a point. Collectivism is good to a point. These ideals are trumped by Oligarchy because they control the collective and also the individual in ways that impact short term sales volume. We all need to start deciding which companies will survive and which ones will bankrupt out.

Personally I'd like to see Google, MSFT and Apple all go belly up. They are horrible companies now. Once they were each demonstrating some potential for moral good... but MSFT and Apple veered way off their message very early on. Google took a little while longer to start doing evil... but nonetheless, here we are.

What we need are more companies like Tesla. We need Tesla now more than ever to step up and compete directly against corruption of all forms. Corruption is killing our species.

Passion is not a replacement for logic.

Also, unless there are massive advances in satellite internet (which there very well could be), the reliance upon massive corporations who own backbones will always be there holding us back.

We need advanced technology to free us but the problem is that R&D projects are always going to be hamstrung by lobbyists and big corps.

The other big issue here is student debt, tbh. Take any PHD and unless they sell their soul to big corps, they are penniless. It reminds me of guys like Tesla, who despite all of his advancements for human technology, died alone and completely depressed and broke.

If we could eradicate reliance upon educational institutions for furthering human knowledge, we could then start seeing more and more open source solutions to big problems.

AI is going to somewhat solve this problem. The AI arms race will be all about computing power. As quantum computers advance and become more accessible, an average person will eventually be able to do way more than they could today, including research and also personal protection, on the same level as large corporations or governments. But even then, we have the problem that everything we use for computing is sourced by massive corporations. Sure, eventually 3d printing will make home computer construction a possibility, but that's a long ways away.

If the world starts embracing a fair universal income standard, we could also see huge advancements happening from basements and garages at a much higher rate than today but still these efforts will face roadblocks designed by massive companies like MSFT and Apple who prefer to keep us in the dark about most of their design and getting worse every day for selfishness.

Today? Students are caught within the politics of old boys networks. That also is a huge obstacle. That said, most of these kinds of problems could potentially change dramatically as we further deplete our natural resources and our governments continue to be terrible examples of human beings.

But if you look at Health Care, for example, in many countries where a proper health care standard exists where people aren't bankrupted by hospital bills, that is always a public service and never is there a case supporting 3rd party health care where citizens are better off short term or long term.

I guess if there was a state security element to health care, we might see worse results with a public health care system, but overall the private healthcare systems are just terribly corrupt.

Hobbit was a tale of small town heroes adventuring away, whereas LotR was an epic tale of the plight of humanity against malicious and demonic adversaries. Huge scale difference.

With this prequel, they could potentially create something on par with LotR in terms of scale. However, few of the original LotR actors would be involved in the prequel... so the success or failure is going to depend upon the direction, the story and the casting. The LotR franchise (including The Hobbit) are on thin ice though. If there is a whiff of any garbage getting into this new series, it will lose its audience faster than Sauron losing everything with the loss of his ring finger.

Security has infinite bypasses. As soon as a new layer is added another method appears to circumvent. Life, uh, finds a way.

https://media.giphy.com/media/...

Ahh kindred spirits!! There simply is something about the feeling of a perfectly machined system. Typing was a real bitch when I first learned in grade 9. By the time I was at Uni, my typing outpaced everyone I knew. It was then I discovered coding.

Nobody better touch my corsair k95 mechanical keyboard. :)

The G-keys up the side are so good for binding keys for any games or productivity and it's mechanical so that's awesome too.

I'm on the fence about interfaces that watch your hand movements. They seem like they would be prone to repeat stress injuries far worse than mouse & keys. Still waiting to see what people come up with. Perhaps a kind of malleable putty that lets you bind your own commands in it to whatever shapes or keys you come up with?

I always friend people who impress the shit out of me. Chances are if you are a friend of one of those people, you can find other people who will also impress the shit out of you.

Hello friend of a friend! ;)

I can only imagine some scammer calling up Google and asking to transfer the service to their device. Techsup would treat them as if they were new internet users under the age of 13 or over the age of 50 with a nephew's celly on speed dial for all those pebkac level issues.

Hey Tesla! Great work on pushing the electric car mandate forward like you have. Please continue to do awesome stuff.

((Crosses fingers))

Nah they have important vacations and yachts to enjoy on the golden parachute for all their hard work. :S

While I'm all for a system that rewards excellence, I think that unless Google is totally transparent about their methodology, this is going to be really easy for them to become further corrupted as a corporation and uprank loyal advertisers and downrank apps from the unwashed masses.

I would hope they would publish their testing methods and benchmark constraints.

I get a call from family members like the people you're describing and I always have to come up with an excuse as to why I can't fix their computer. Usually I just try to help them but only if they answer some questions quickly.

I find that I can usually solve the problem by step 2, but I always send the questions to them via email so they can work it out.

I find this helps even noob computer users to learn to fish.

1. Can you summarize the problem in under ten words?
2. Call me back when you can summarize the problem in under ten words.
3. What did you do now?
4. Why did you do that?
5. What did you find when you googled the summarized ten word problem?
6. Google it, call me back if it is still a problem in 1hr.

Some internet users aggressively self-sabotage. You can't fix stupid, so you might as well be nice about it while you let them down gently.