Bluntly put, you are not allowed to be even a little smart and not all "aww shucks" about it. It has to be in service of something else like medicine or being a CPA. (Fun fact I found in a statistics course: the average CPA has about five points of IQ on the average doctor.) And it is almost justified, because you are in constant peril of falling down into your own butt until you disappear, but at the same time it keeps a lot of people under the thumb (or heel, pick your oppressive body part) of dumbass managers and idiots who blithely plow forward without a trace of doubt.

I usually skip this portion of the cocktail unless things are particularly bad. The disorder is progressive, so when it comes for my brain, well, that's when things are over. I do not have much going on for me in terms of personal value except for, well, solving problems.

A very close friend of mine has had two hospitalizations for gangrene, and the second one absolutely devastated his cognitive abilities. He has leveled off at about eighty-five percent of where he was before. If he is tired or feeling unwell, verbal perseveration begins.

My mother is fairly well-on in her years. She used to have a tremendous vocabulary, despite her very limited education. Now, she has begun to lose words and I end up "translating" for her because I know what she is getting at. She could do crosswords but refuses to, even the Monday selections, which are typically the easiest. Very recently, she has begun misplacing things. I had my suspicions, and during a routine head, neck, and brain imaging for something else, I checked out the results and, sure enough, some loss of volume in the right hippocampus.

I pointed out her history (or hystery, heh) and the kinda obvious gluey, webby bits in the pictures (they're quite visible once you look at enough of them).

Then I grilled him on which of the then-three brands were on the market and which were had on hand. Dude acted like he was just yanking a bad video card on a Friday afternoon, which I found less than optimal.

I was not surprised when, post-surgery, the rest of the staff attempted to hustle us out the door. I had abort their well-rehearsed ejection procedure to get aftercare instructions ... and to make sure the scripts had already been called in ... and then to get the follow-up appointment cemented and the "oh shit something has gone wrong" post-surgical emergency contact information. I suppose in the future they will have a kind of water slide from the recovery room into the parking lot, and they just will aim for the open passenger-side door.

Exact Audio Copy, the author seems to have moved on to other interests, which is a shame because I was looking for something compatible with an autoloader. And it looks like dbpoweramp is the only one left in that arena.

I am allllll about the metadata. Also, a thumbnail, synced lyrics if they could be found, custom metadata for hyperlinks back to entries on Discogs and MusicBrainz, perhaps some ReplayGain values in fields on the FLAC, depending on my MP3 processing case ... but I have so many unanswered questions.

Sometimes, the local addressing authority was wrong, and I would have to prove it to them. "But it was checked!" It was checked wrong. Street numbers would be off by thousands. It would take some pointing out of obvious problems in the progression of numbers, plus a plat, plus an email from the building manager to prove to them that I knew what I was talking about.

I was contacted by a woman who kept having drivers for all kinds of services attempt to use her driveway as a street, even if she had a sign up, which she did. Her local municipality was no help. Nobody was. She was irked and frantic, as these trucks would destroy her driveway, lawn, even garden.

Much digging ensued. It turned out that the proximal source of the error was a statewide system, one of many which Google simply hoovers up and digests like a baleen whale siphoning up plankton, then digests and tries to "make work." I got the proximal source to make a correction, which they might publish in another three months. The original source of the error was a long-missing minor street from many decades ago, which I had to find in caches of searches and the like.

It was idle curiosity, but it took me about twenty hours of digging on evenings and weekends.

Address points are easy. Parcels, aka the polygons upon which zero to many address points might rest, are harder. Road networks are terrifically hard. I managed to catalog ten different cases of road discontinuity in the process of trying to find such things in an automatic fashion. And I might not be bright enough to have enumerated them all!

And then we have cases of people who deliberately insist that their address number is "00." As in the first two-thirds of a certain not-so-secret agent's code number. Or imagine the fools who decide to put up a sign at the end of their long driveway and simply declare that it was a road.

Each county has its own addressing standards, and included in each are addresses from the Olden Days, real wild west stuff, which the authorities are just itching to scrape out of their systems once and for all.

Road addressing is Fractally Bad.

When I code, I try to make everything I write not clever. I am not saving a byte here and there because I am not typing in a program from a magazine in the 1980s (I was there, I am not going back). No code golf. I did my time on the Timex-Sinclair with its miserable two kilobytes of memory and reserved keywords as special-function strokes at a character each.

Each line should do one thing, in general, and it ought to be obvious. Cleverness is held in reserve for when it is truly needed, namely data structures and algorithms.

One of my accomplishments which seems to have mattered only to me is when my apartment-finding/renting system, written entirely in Perl, was transferred into the hands of students, new programming students. Perl is famously "write-once, read-never" and seems to have a culture favoring code golf and executable line noise. Still, the students got back to me and told me how easily-ported everything was, because I had done just one thing per line, avoided $_ and other such shortcuts, and other practices. They were very happy to take it over because I had avoided being cryptic and terse.

If you do not consider these things, you get Monster Hotels and general ridiculousness. If it falls too close to reality, it is boring. At the same time, things can be Too Much. So, for my philosophy, you want the mountains to be taller and the valleys to be deeper ... but only sometimes. Spaces to breathe for the beleagured traveler, but then drips and splashes and slashes of Tolkien, The Black Company, and even a little whimsy to break it up.

Even in physics itself, the word "mass" has multiple contexts (inertial, gravitational, and conversion to energy) in which it is used. Einstein made quite a lot of hay out of relating the three. "Entropy," too, has multiple contexts.

The second thing possibly tripping you up is the tendency for scientific terms to be poorly appropriated into a new context, like "theory." You can fight this but it is a losing battle, so I typically just try to set it aside.

I was not able to figure this out from the docs thus far.

And, yeah, so much ... cruft now, and I rarely hear reasons for the tradeoff, other than "should" and "It will be great."

And if it is so great, why did it go away?

My personal "take," which is worth nothing, is that something like Cyc is necessary but not sufficient for a serious AGI. Many other components will probably be required.

Yes, we are gonna need natural language parsing, and a good one, unless we can make the whole world speak in lojban. It would certainly speed up the collection of assertions.

I suspect embodiment is also a requisite, wherein one can acquire experiences and test premises. The ability to explore your surroundings, to move, to investigate. To jam your sensory cluster where it does not belong. To drop a block and see it fall. To drop a balloon and see it rise -- surely that must suggest an avenue of investigation.

I would be surprised if neural networks will not make a showing. Recognition through the fuzziness and quirks of reality is needed before you can sufficiently abstract into various rules. That isn't a new species of animal, it's a cat without fur and with an unusual number of limbs (Sphynx with a missing leg). Recognize, then expand the knowledge: cats usually have fur, but some breeds do not. Cats usually have four limbs, but they can be lost. But before you can say that, you still have to recognize the catness of the beast before you.

Another probable component: emotion. e-motion. Motion. Drive. In a way, hunger is an emotion, as is a full bladder. These are prompts to do something that one might return to equilibrium and focus on the higher level problems. Buildup of carbon dioxide, that one surely prompts you. These are currently tied to our embodiment, but parallels can be worked out, such as Opportunity's last ... words ... "My battery is low and it's getting dark." Right now, our attempts at intelligences are still reactive. Waiting for a prompt, waiting for a problem to be put before them. I suspect a strange loop (or really a series of interconnected ones) might be one of the final components, with the emotions serving as a way to keep it from lapsing into catatonia. Boredom would be one. Most of our human emotions would be counter-productive, but probably not all, and there may be analogues.

As a subcomponent of that, I believe in laughter. Babies laugh a lot. We laugh at jokes. No, we laugh at new jokes; old jokes grow progressively less and less funny. Laughter seems to be often prompted by a new connection, and it is both a reward and a communication.

I have covered both textual ingestion and experiential evidence, but let's throw in another one: I expect that the ability to examine an expert system and replicate it, to incorporate it into its mind, is one of them. Think about those old flowcharts in hardware books which enable you to diagnose a computer with boot issues. We can do it and I expect an AGI ought to be able to examine other rulesets for ingestion as well.

In short, I am suggesting that our first AGI may require all of the things a human does to be intelligent. We may find that we can do without one or two components. While I most certainly do not want a Human in a Box to be the end product, for a number of reasons, it does seem reasonable to me that we ought to incorporate the different things we already know about the human mind into something we are hoping to be an equivalent.

However, I strongly suspect that giving it full access to something like Cyc would beat just chucking encyclopedias at it and telling it to read.

I do not care for a single facet of it. Not the planning, or the reservations, of the attaining of paperwork. Packing or parking. Checking maps to see where my terminal might be. Pre-flight fondling by total strangers. Getting on a plane. Being on a plane. Getting off of a plane. Trying to find my way to wherever it is I am supposed to go, which I know in theory but must now execute. I also have a mild handicap which can make navigating some situations more difficult than it would otherwise be for someone normal. Seeing just kind of torture the word "breakfast" has undergone to appear in the hotel at morning.

Then there is the thing itself, whatever it is you are supposed to be seeing. Chances are, you won't even be able to get close to it. Apparently, you get to look at the Mona Lisa from something of a distance, and now less than a minute. Oooh. Then you should get a laminated card that says "Some photons bounced off of the Mona Lisa and were absorbed by my retina" so you can tell everyone.

And you're trapped wherever it is until your ticket home is valid.

Even if someone else is paying for it, I just have zero interest. Unfortunately, some friends have gotten into cruises and traveling, which leads to frequent exhortation that I, too, should travel, no matter how much I demur. Being pushed for travel was also an irritant at a previous job.

They say, "Well, think of all of the strange foods and new restaurants!" I spend more time at the international markets than most and, honestly, this city has plenty of restaurants I have yet to try, so if that were a motivating factor, I hardly need a plane ticket and itinerary to partake.

The furthest I have gone is about three hundred miles to take a close friend (he had a very terrible year of one disaster after another occur to him) to a concert to cheer him up.

Civil asset forfeiture started expanding in the 1970s and in the next decade, we got Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Gitmo? 2002. Room 641A is the next year. Black ops sites, aka "we can torture you as long as we're not in the United States" is somewhere around there. Extrajudicial killings, I read 2,400 in just Pakistan, that's Obama-era, right? Stingrays, about 2007 or so. Qualified immunity out the yin-yang; hell, you can just shoot up someone's house for nearly a day trying to capture a shoplifter and the courts will shrug. That's 2015. Even the ACLU has become notably more partisan.

Decades ago, back when I thought people were capable of learning from anything other than a hot stovetop, I used to say that we ought to be careful when making manacles to restrict various liberties and cautious when providing more tools for law enforcement, because you just do not know for a certainty that the manacles you made will not be around your own wrists and that the latest tools of the law will not be aimed at you. "Pretend you will eventually be on the losing side," I said.

We've been going along with this business because it was convenient to believe that these little inches taken will not add up to miles. This will only be used on drug peddlers, pedophiles, terrorists, and money launderers, WINK WINK. We have been building this machine for a long time, and we've been smug as a bug on a landline with a FISA rubberstamp warrant.

Why this headline, now? And also, why this headline, now? Now and this because the people who were very comfortable are finally cottoning on to the fact that the various abilities tacked on to the Executive Branch over the decades might actually be used against them (us? ME? but I am one of the good guys, I only helped construct the machine!) and, while fearful, are still unwilling to engage with their own multi-decade culpability, so they must focus on the latest outrage and nothing before it. To do otherwise would suggest that they have some kind of involvement in this particular outcome and just making noises like "Trump," "Musk," and "fascism" keeps their metaphorical hands clean.

At this point, when I mention this kind of thing online, it's less from a desire to sway opinion (almost no chance of that occurring) and more of an opportunity for me, years down the line, to point and say, "Yup. Called it."

As a side note, while I have seen many UI elements over the decades, I cannot help but think that the wizard (or whatever you would like to call it) has somehow escaped being listed as a standard UI element. Perhaps it is too large to count for many.