Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Submission + - We're Building Neal Stephenson's Primer. We need your help. (github.com)

hherb writes: https://github.com/hherb/prime...

In Neal Stephenson's 1995 novel The Diamond Age, a device called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer changes the life of a street kid named Nell. It doesn't teach her by lecturing. It teaches her by telling stories that respond to her life, asking questions that force her to think, and never once dumbing things down. It meets her where she is and walks beside her as she figures things out.

Thirty years later, we have the technology to build it. So we are.

The Primer is an open-source Socratic AI learning companion for children aged 5 to 14. It runs today as a desktop application and text REPL in Rust, holds real conversations with children, and is designed from the ground up to eventually run on a battery-powered handheld device with no internet required.

It's AGPL-3.0 licensed. Every line of code is public. And we need contributors: especially for languages beyond English and German. There is a fabulous manual for developers wanting to jump in: https://github.com/hherb/prime...

Comment Re: Cue up (Score 1) 348

At least this time you presented something more nuanced than "people can't afford housing because they spend too much on other things". You could have led with that.

Also, I live about as far from California as is geographically possible within the lower 48, so I'm not assuming any blame for what happens there.

Comment It's this or GBTW (Score 1) 43

This looks like the latest escalation in the tug-o-war between employers and remote workers. The relatively few people going to extraordinary efforts just to avoid doing the job they're being paid to do is going to ruin it for everyone else. Do you want to make return-to-office mandatory? Because creating AI fakes to pretend to be on work meetings sounds like a good way to make that happen.

Comment Pay up or wallow in the dump (Score 2) 75

Bots and other bad actors thrive in free (as in beer) environments, for reasons that should be obvious. If we want to do anything meaningful about them, sites will need a nominal but real fee to use.

It's not what anyone wanted, but "free" was always inevitably going to lead to the Internet becoming a dump. The free ride is over.

Comment Look up "human shields" (Score 1) 255

And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

Comment Comparing your accent to claimed residence history (Score 1) 255

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

Comment Need state approved toilet paper to wipe your own (Score 1) 123

California's version "adds a certification bureaucracy on top: state-approved algorithms, state-approved software control processes, state-approved printer models, quarterly list updates

This is the most California thing I've ever read. Unconstitutional, unenforceable, and a massive increase in costs and bureaucracy; they hit the trifecta! I wonder if printer manufacturers that bake their own bread will be exempt once their checks to the governor's presidential campaign clear.

Incidentally, this is the kind of stupid shit that helps Trump and people like him get elected over and over.

Slashdot Top Deals

A failure will not appear until a unit has passed final inspection.

Working...