And my first philosophy class at Berkeley in 1982 I predicted the singularity would happen in 2025. I just applied more slaw a threshold of million 1982 dollars for a grad student to be able to use a college bot machine to code intelligence. I also predicted that instead of writing code the way we do today there would be a new profession where we guide the machines telling it more about what we wanted than how to build it.

And my first philosophy class at Berkeley in 1982 I predicted the singularity would happen in 2025. I just applied more slaw a threshold of million 1982 dollars for a grad student to be able to use a college bot machine to code intelligence. I also predicted that instead of writing code the way we do today there would be a new profession where we guide the machines telling it more about what we wanted than how to build it.

Humidity can take this in two ways. We can harse the awesome potential to produce more with less work making everyone much better off. Or we can follow history and it will be a s*** show for everyone.

So, I work for Google. I am on the only team that defends your data from all of Google. It is a weird threat model: The CEO shows up at your desk with security guards and demands that you hand over a particular user's data by the end of the day or you and your whole team are fired. If you succeed in providing the data, you've failed. To be more specific, we ensure that Google can't see your Android backup/restore data, unless you can prove you know your Android screen unlock secret. If you do, then secure hardware I helped deploy to data centers will let you recover your backup data to a new Android device. If you fail 10 times, your data is lost forever, because the secure hardware only allows 10 guesses. This is all in our white paper.

I am of two minds about this sort of press. First, I'm proud to work for the only company I have ever known to spend a crap-ton (an official unit of measure) to hide user data from itself. On the other hand, Google's management needs reminders that users actually give a shit about privacy.

I'm an Air Force brat. In 1969.I watched with my family as Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon. That was an OMG moment, which set unfulfilled expectations for years to come. Instead of OMG moments, we've had a steady advance in tech, better every year, but never with an OMG moment like that.

So, I'm disappointed that I cannot vacation on Mars. At the same time, the steady tech revolution has changed the world far more than most of us would have thought possible.

In 1982, I took a philosophy class at UC Berkeley. For my final project, I predicted when the AI singularity would occur. My hypothesis was that we sim[y lacked the compute power, and when we had enough such that for $1M in 1982 dollars, any mainstream university could afford a neural network with the same capacity as a human brain, then some a-hole would come along and program it to actually be intelligent.

I predicted, based on Moore's Law, 2025....

Because the only way to defend a network is to think like an attacker, and far better, be an attacker. Every time we PWN an adversary, someone will ask, "Would that have worked against us?" And the answer will be, "Yeah, they've PWNed us for years with that."

Clearly the world just needs to get off its butt and adopt real privacy and security.

There are also security and privacy issue here. Exactly how long would you like your personal data to be remembered after you lose your device? Remember, that data can be handed to police if they have a valid warrant, and don't forget about China's attack on Google. Do you really want Google to remember your data forever?

There needs to be some threshold for data retention. The government would like that to be 10 years. What's your vote?

Imagine a trial over this dude's firing... Is the Judge a woman? Are there women in the jury? How many of the lawyers are women? Have you read the "manifesto"? Would you expect any rational woman to be empathetic to this dork?

+1
That "manifesto" was the most offensive document I've seen come out of Google. That dude is seriously deranged, and I'm glad he was fired. Frankly, I'd be afraid of working with someone that unstable. He actually argues for less empathy, as if we could apply the Golden Rule without it. If he had empathy at all, he would realize how much he hurt people. My definition for an ass-hole: someone who hurts others and does not care. What an ass-hole.

Well, maybe firing that a-hole made the legal team happy, but in this case, it was a good example of not being evil.

The way Tata uses H1-B is a negative, depressing wages, and exploiting workers, IMO. However, H1-Bs when used properly (as has been the case in most places I've worked) is beneficial to everyone. When we get the best/brightest talent from abroad, the results include:

- Making the US more competitive, while hampering our competition
- More job creation: the highly talented H1-B users I've worked with have started many companies, creating more jobs than they take.
- Increasing wages: by increasing the demand for coders and engineers, they've helped fuel a pretty nice wage increase curve in Silicon Valley

There's tons of evidence that the H1-B program has created lots of jobs around here. Immigrants who started on H1-Bs are over-represented as company founders, including many of the ones fueling the tech recovery. Of course, when abused, H1-Bs do exactly what you said. I'm all for ending the abuse, while protecting the program overall. It would be a mistake to reduce the number of top-talent H1-Bs issued at this point in our economy. When the economy goes south, that's a different story.

Agreed, and note that in general, I am an H1-B fan. We benefit a great deal in the US from this program. However, no one in the US should be asked to train a replacement with an H1-B. This is not the situation describe in this article: they were training remote replacements without H1-Bs. Frankly, that is at least as bad, even if it does not involve visas of any kind. Also, it rarely works: companies off-shoring their design staff typically are on the financial rocks soon after. This is typically an act of either desparation (the company is already on the rocks) or stupidity (unfortunately, most big companies).

+1. When was the last time you hired a programmer in their 60's? The "safe" route is to go into management, but some of us just love programming, and will do so as long as we are able.

There are cultural issues, not just overt age bias. As a total noob in Java working among 20 and 30 year olds right now, I wish I were 22. Then, my co-oworkers, who are awesome in general, would offer to mentor me, teach me, etc. Instead, I have been mostly on my own for two years, and have been given every task that came along that involved C or C++, meaning I couldn't work with my teammates. In my workplace, that means editing code that other teams "own", which is a special kind of purgatory.

Full disclosure: I work for Google. Regardless, Google Fi is a no-brainer, IMO. My wife and daughter do not agree, and have iPhones with Verison. We pay about $160/mo combined for their plans, while my son and I get by with typically $40/mo combined. My son and I have at least as good service as Verizon, because of the switching between Sprint and T-Mobile.

My daughter had to have an iPhone, and not an Android device, because her friends hang out on iMessage. Her Android messages were shown in the wrong color on iMessage, which offended some teens to the point of excluding her from conversations. So... I pay a $60/month premium so she can be the right color. Evil!