Yeah, one of those machines (either the Palo or the Alto) was put on display near the entrance of the late Xerox PARC on Coyote hill (near VA). I was playing with the idea to power it but was told that it doesn't work anymore, at least the power supply is dead and allegedly there were also missing components... I suppose SRI will toss it soon if not already...
Never heard of the Xerox Palo computer and I worked at Xerox for much of the 80s. Xerox made a lot of different machines (mostly but not exclusive in the D-Machine family) but if there was a Palo machine I’d be interested in seeing a photo.
I love this mini article, however, I disagree with the main conclusion that collaborative editing is not an algorithmic but a UI/UX problem. I think that collaborative editing is a semantic problem. To the best of my knowledge (I'm writing this comment without much preparation), all SVN/Git algorithms are based on UNIX diff (Hunt–Szymanski algorithm). UNIX diff (and patch) is purely syntax driven.
Actually, I will make a small deviation here: I think it is a big industry/startup/open source project there, in creating a set of semantic diff algorithms/implementations. For example, due to my present job, I am very interested in collaborative editing of electrical circuits, and layouts for PCB and chips. Altium and KiCad are trying, for exmaple, to store everything in XML/text files and put the text files in Git/SVN and I can tell you a botched C++ program is nothing in comparison to a botched and malformed electrical circuit. So we need diff tools that "know" about a text file, vs rich-text with formatting, vs bitmap vs vector image, vs song, vs English text. Anybody want to start an open source project (DM me or put a comment here).
Anyhow, thanks to the authors on the great insights and let's work on the take home!
What an obvious article. But it, because it comes from Apple, everybody pays attention. Proof by pedigree. OK, here is my two cents. Firstly, I did my Ph.D. in AI (algorithm design with application to AI) and I also spent seven years applying some of the ideas at Xerox PARC (yes, the same (in)famous research lab). So, I went to and published at many AI conferences (AAAI, ECAI, etc.). Of course, when I was younger and less cynical, I would enter into lengthy philosophical discussions with dignitaries of AI on what does AI mean and it would be long dinners and drinks, and wheelbarrows of ego. Long story, short, there is no such thing as AI. It is a collection of disciplines: the recently famous Machine Learning (transformers trained on large corpora of text), constraint-based reasoning, Boolean satisfiability, theorem proving, probabilistic reasoning, etc., etc. Of course, LLMs are a great achievement and they have good application to Natural Language Processing (also intermingled discipline and considered constituent of AI).
Look at the algorithmic tools used in ML and automated theorem proving for example: ML uses gradient descent (and related numerical methods) for local optimization, while constraint satisfaction/optimization/Boolean satisfiability, SAT modulo-theories, Quantified Boolean Optimization, etc., rely on combinatorial optimization. Mathematically, combinatorial optimization is far more problematic compared to numerical methods and much more difficult, largely because modern computers and NVidia gaming cards are really fast in crunching floating point numbers and also largely that most problems in combinatorial optimization NP-hard or harder.
Now thing of what LLM and local optimization is doing: it is essentially searching/combining sequences of words from Wikipedia and books. But search is not necessarily a difficult problem, it is actually an O(1) problem. While multiplying numbers is an O(n^2.8 (or whatever constant they came up with)) problem while factorization is (God knows what class of complexity) when you take quantum computing into the game).
Great, these are my 2 cents for the day, good luck to the OpenAI investors (I am also investing there a bit as a Bay Area citizen). You guys will certainly make help desk support cheaper...
I don't think I'm alone in reading "they ** up" as "they fucked up" in my head, without meaning to. So whoever would be offended, is still offended, only now they can't complain about it since the person technically didn't swear.
There's no stakes here (the internet) for it to matter if you swear or not.
Your attitude on the internet won't result in any meaningful feedback, by default.
Someone has to be watching from a more strict environment for it to matter what you say on the internet. It needs to affect your job, or your wife needs to read your posts, or a moderator needs to clamp down on you.
The community accepts swearing by default.
Soo people who are in professional environments are going to bring their communication norms with them when they post online.
An I over
-explaining an answer to a rhetorical 'why?' question. I think I am.
I can never tell online, if people are literally asking a question that requires explaining OR it is simply a rhetorical question.
This is a great diverging discussion about the "censorship" and the commenting style in public forums. Let me add something: when I was writing the original comment that started all this, I wanted it to be funny, catchy, snarky, and karma-point-worthy. So, I decided to put a swear word as a stylistic choice. Then, to add some extra to the short comment, I decided to poke fun at the whole FCC bleeping regulation. Here, I will warmly recommend a book dedicated to bleeping over the seven "unspeakable words": the famous Steven Pinker's famous book "The Stuff of Thought".
Now, about the number of asterisks: I really didn't think that much about this, I kind of think I counted the right number of letters, but then there is no caret overwrite mode in the bleeping browser, which is yet another story...
Well it's pretty clear I injected my own world view onto your comment and enjoyed it.
The FCC bleeping regulation doesn't really interest me, it's mild irritant in media..
It's slowly becoming obvious to me that the English-speaking cultures (UK, US, AUS, CAN, ect) are sculpted to interpret the same content in their own cultural view and it all somehow works even though we're constantly talking past/parrallel to each other.
Watching an American historian's reaction to philomena cunk peice, showed me how much he enjoys the literal-ness of her straight faced jokes, the same jokes I see as boldly satirical comments made for chuckles. And it somehow works for both cultures.
With that in mind, communicating anything worthwhile over internet comments is obviously orders of magnitude harder because of the cultural barriers. And the cracks between worldviews run deep.. and are starting to show.. I don't really know how to comment to other cultures accurately anymore.
Google helping with your security is similar to when those nice mafia guys knock on your door offering protection. Don't forget that Google is apotheosis of evil corporation trying to take over all your data. This is the very company that turned "don't do evil" into "do things".
It's almost like a giant company like Google have ~100,000 employees, with a complex incentive structure at different levels that are encouraged to do different goals. While I have almost completely de-googled my life a few years ago, it is just stupid to attribute malice to anything they touch -- they have plenty of good contributions, certain parts of AOSP being an example.
I would be happy to have that on a GrapheneOS phone for example, if I hadn't went with Apple.
This is not a Googler's 20% project. You can expect any major feature released to have been infected with Google's morality and mentality of being an ad company needing to extract profit out of free products.
You cannot apply Hanlon's Razor to megacorporations.
I think a lot of Android devices have that; you type ##4636## into the dialer, and a menu appears. In that menu, you can select which cellular technologies are used.
I wish there was a way to create or apply a rule that addressed that type of comment. Most, certainly not all, end up not contributing much, just angst.
Yes? The world is nowhere near perfect, but those mafia guys are probably actually going to protect "their" money from other gangs, and Google's obsession with your data means they have even more incentive to protect said data from other actors. In addition, of course, to the more general incentive to build features that can make more people (or in this case, organizations) choose Android.
Credit where credit's due. Google moves against our best interests very often but this is not one of those times. Let's accept this improvement graciously. Other Android-based operating systems like LineageOS and GrapheneOS will also benefit.
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