Visual Studio is becoming a strangler app. By collecting data from all the developers and developing the technology to perform more and more of the developers role, Microsoft hopes to eventually make the leap and supplant the developer altogether. But in the meantime, we will all benefit from greater productivity. And perhaps the symbiants that we are to become will learn to truly master this thing called software. Or the software will master us. Please excuse me now. I just got a comment on my Facebook post that requires my urgent attention!

"We need laws to stop this data being collected in the first place"

- R. Stallman

Any form of communication can be used to "facilitate prostitution". This is clearly a massive breach of our first amendment freedom of speech. If FOSTA is left to stand then what we'll have is:

            The Internet
                  R.I.P.
            1983-2018

You can bet he would never let garbage like this see the light of day.

That's what's been missing in the plan for global domination!

Don't you worry your pretty little heads about it. Daddy will take care of all those nasty gasses. And here I thought diesel fumes were bad!

Sounds kind of like the Spruce Goose. What shall we call it? The Steel Steed?

taxpayer dollars.

If we tax mechanical robots that displace human workers, then shouldn't we also tax software in the same vein? We need a lot fewer accountants than would otherwise be the case without TurboTax.

Being Newt Gingrich should be a felony

If only Tove had found this out sooner.

For those who actually looked at the patent, it does not use a separate sensor. It looks for the IR signal in the image to being photographed. So go ahead and put black tape over the camera lens. The system still works! Unless you're into photographing the backside of black tape. Very clever, Apple. Hopefully other phone and camera manufacturers won't bother to license it.

The issue isn't whether the rest of the world would use it. The question is how long until the backdoor is hacked. Knowing its there will make it a prime target. Is the US government willing to back up its confidence with a guarantee to reimbursed all losses for everyone using this technology? Only then could the claim that it wouldn't "cause any commercial problems" be at all plausible.

A couple of points:
          1. There is no way to disprove the claim because it's based on a hypothetical metaverse that is presumed to follow Moore's law, like our own.
          2. There are many possible implementations ranging from simulating the perception of a single person (me, of course) to simulating the entire universe in total. The first is far easier (to which my friends could attest), and thus far more likely. This makes it likely that I'm very special. Certainly good news for me!
          3. If one accepts the assertion the simulation is wide-scale, and that the metaverse hosting our simulation obeys Moore's law, and further posit that Elon is right, then it follows that:
                                  a. There is a one in 1 in (10E9 - 1) chance that that metaverse is also a simulation inside a yet higher level metaverse with the chance of 1 in (10E9 - 2), etc.
                                  b. So then we would almost certainly in a long, long chain of simulations,
                                  c. The chance of any one of those losing energy, funding, or interest is certainly much, much greater than the chance of it being a simulation. This is especially true given the inefficiencies of running a virtual machine (which would mean that optimistically we are running at 10E-81 of real time).
                                  d. So the fact that we still exist means almost certainly that it's either a) not a simulation, or b) one with a simulated history that's about to end soon, so it doesn't matter. Unless, of course, it's just me being simulated.

I was hesitant to post for a few seconds until I realized that none of you are at all likely to exist anyway (least of all Elon), so I have nothing to lose :)

   

Teaching everyone to program would be like training everyone in the 1950's to be machinists. Coming out of WWII, machines were an elite bunch, not unlike the programmers of today. They were indispensable for churning out the copious war machines of that war. But then CNC lathes and milling machine were invented, and highly-paid machinists have become a rarity (compared to highly-paid programmers at least).

The AI renaissance will similarly obviate the need for all but the most elite programmers. Imagine a decendent of Siri/Cortana/Now/Edge that can answer any question and perform virtually any concrete task. And not just information-based tasks, thanks to the burgeoning fields of robotics and the IoT. Advanced, PhD-level AI/ML will "soon" be the only employable computer science skill set. And basic programming is so far removed from machine learning as to be nearly useless for understanding and/or controlling AIs.

Education on programming, like any topic, will be ubiquitously available (the AIs will be teaching us), and kids will be free to pursue any topic that interests them.