I like Windows. But I like unified memory more.

It's super-trite, but true: technology can be used for good or bad.

I love the productivity gains and breadth of instructional knowledge AI has given me.

I hate that when I'm on Facebook I have to spend half my time blocking groups that generate AI summaries of classic TV shows and characters (that I'm otherwise a big fan of and follow).

...assuming the book can still be found in print form

CSS is not Turing complete

I once warned a manager at a smallish company that their fantasy of doing manufacturing would never happen partly because of a lack of QC and the lack of anybody with authority to shut a project down if it was not meeting spec. "We need that guy!" the manager said, and I came back, "If you had that guy you'd fire him the first time he told you something you didn't want to hear." Musk is in a pickle right now and I'm sure he really doesn't want to hear that the tank failed an X-ray inspection and the whole craft needs to be taken apart to make sure it's OK, thereby missing the launch window. And I'm sure the QC guy knows that. So as I warned that guy who once asked for my advice, this is what he got.

cf V'Ger

Of the three "godfathers of AI", Yann LeCun is the only one who is not concerned about the dangers of AI. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65886125

He disagrees with his fellow godfathers that AI is a risk to the human race.

By "prover", I meant that Agentic AI is not a single-shot execution engine, like LLMs of today or theorem provers of yore. By "planner" I meant externalizing the logic/reasoning. Perhaps I was aiming too much for alliteration.

Apple’s new paper on GSM-Symbolic shows that today’s best language models crumble when a gradeschool math word problem is re-phrased -- even if the logic is identical. It echoes 1969, when Minsky&Papert proved that a singlelayer perceptron could never learn XOR.

That blockade vanished in 1986 with backprop and nonlinear hidden layers. My bet: LLMs won’t need two decades to cross the reasoning gap. Why? Agents that call scratchpad Python or GraphRAG pipelines already externalize formal reasoning, turning the model into a planner rather than a prover.

Look, I’m thrilled Vox can read an SEER plot and notice that smoking, screening, and HPV vaccines matter (slow clap). But before we crown Big Tobacco lawsuits and Gardasil as the sole saviors of humankind, can we maybe glance at, oh, the last half-century of environmental regulation?

What about the asbestos bans that cratered mesothelioma in post’70s construction cohorts? 84% risk reduction -- ring a bell? What about Chile and Taiwan slashing arsenic in drinking water and watching bladder and lungcancer mortality do a Wile E.Coyote cliff plunge two decades later? Or the Mercury & AirToxics Standards that took nickel, chromium, and friends down by 80% -- something the EPA’s own Section 812 analysis credits with thousands of avoided cancer deaths?

But sure, let’s keep peddling the tidy narrative that medical tech alone bent the mortality curve. Those radon-mitigation building codes? Irrelevant. Beryllium and benzene exposure limits? Yawn. Apparently if the benefit isn’t measured in ninefigure pharma revenue or a primetime Super Bowl ad, it doesn’t make the Vox word count.

Pro-tip: pathology doesn’t care whether the carcinogen came from Marlboro Country or your municipal tap. Policy matters, and not just the ones that poll well on Twitter.

She hunted and pecked through the beginnings of a reasonably successful career as a magazine copywriter back in the day. I tried to tell her it would be worth her while to spend a few hours with Mavis Beacon, but she insisted she had her way of doing things and that was that. Two index fingers, staring at the keyboard instead of the screen. Meanwhile, I was younger than her but did learn touch typing on a manual in high school. Anyway a year or so after I gave up trying to convince her to spend some time learning to type properly, I walked in on her as she was working and she was holding her hands in the home position, index fingers hovering above F and J, eyes on the screen, and doing a good 80 wpm as she pounded out copy. When I pointed this out she looked at her hands and said, "I don't know about any of that, I just adjusted what I was doing to get a little faster." Well, that's why they teach it that way, but some people gotta ice skate uphill, y'know.

Jobs and Wozniak got rich off Apple, Gates and Balmer off Microsoft. Sinclair was already rich. Tandy, Commodore, Atari, and IBM had hugely popular machines but no "rock stars" single-handedly responsible for their development, and bad business decisions ultimately killed them. Similarly Coleco, which had a great chance to undercut the PC with the Adam and its cheap letter quality printer, but they were too ambitious and by the time they worked out their manufacturing problems the PC had taken root. But the PC killed the rest of the industry by killing itself, making the first clones possible which could run object code generated for other manufacturers' machines, which was Microsoft's second stage to orbit after providing Level II Basic for the TRS-80. It wasn't MIcrosoft's intent, but imagine what today's computer ecosystem would look like if all software was still architecture-specific and there were a dozen or more popular models to choose from.
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Apple and the rest had room to grow because the big names like DEC, Data General, and even IBM were focused on business and saw them as toys. They bought and ate anything that looked like it might compete with them, such as the CP/M office systems which might be a credible threat to minicomputers like the DEC PDP series. That was another gap IBM threaded by being IBM.

Waste Management used to have pretty good customer service, if they missed a pickup you just called, they'd send a truck out. Bin broken, call and they'd come fix it. Easy peasey. Now, all you can get is a call center in India that insists you got service even when you did not. They have missed three pickups in a row now. When my wife finally got a human being after 3+ hours on hold with multiple calls, the rep was completely unsurprised that it ended with a cancellation request and offered no pushback. There are three other companies doing trash pickup in our subdivision, one of them will now get our business, and apparently we're not alone.

Hal's insanity trigger was actually revealed in the book version of 2001 itself.

Builders will have to learn what they can do with it, and what they can get away with, by experience. 3D printing allows walls to flow and make shapes that are all but impossible, or at least very expensive, with conventional techniques. Curves also make them stronger. But it's not clear just how well 3D printed walls will hold up to age and catastrophe. Eventually techniques will evolve to soften the layered look or at least vary it some. There is still no real consensus on what to do about roofs, and end of life demo promises to be a whole new thing. But there's certainly room to explore a technology that just needs to be hosed out after a flood, can't burn, and might be earthquake proof.