Writers can't be held responsible for the lack of reading comprehension exhibited by audience members.

Assumes facts not in evidence. That could easily be a firmware (on-gate) vs. software (DHD) argument.

Carter said it is "impossible" due to physics

Potentially unreliable narrator.

also established that with enough raw power (e.g. blackhole, ancient device, etc) it could be kept open longer

Yup, cited above.

built their own DHD which presumably would have different computer limitations

firmware vs. software

when all DHDs in the universe died except theirs due to the malware

you're not doing devops unless you have one button that can destroy your entire infrastructure

But, more likely, it's just a play on a reason a Stargate (when unaided by some hostile energy source or time dilation field) just shuts off after 38 minutes with no explanation.

Or, you know, just use lists as parameters. That's the standard Erlang pattern for unknown parameters lengths (e.g. io:format("debug ~s because ~p~n", [SomeString, SomeType]))

So many programmers don't even consider "overhead" of data when writing things. But, most of the time it doesn't matter. Do you need a list of ten things? Great. Do whatever. Do you need a list of a billion things? Then you need to rethink everything from the bottom up.

when all you need is just a pointer to realloc

Wrong! https://github.com/Tarsnap/libcperciva/commit/cabe5fca76f6c3...

My grandfather was very racist and never changed as long as he lived. I'm glad most people aren't immortal. There's no guarantee a full AI wouldn't be tempted by evil and just become republican (or worse, a VC).

It can also recursively improve itself.

So can people (the more you know, the more you can learn), but most don't. It's important to remember "intelligence" isn't an abstract concept—intelligence is also embodied in personality—and personalities have wishes and goals and desires and loves and hates and that one song they can't get out of their head. A true "strong AI" will be fully conscious, not just algorithmic function bating.

Good luck telling a mildly strong godform to stop tripping on youtube videos and instead solve the global economic stability equation over lunch.

This advantage will lower the bar for strong AI even more.

That's kinda foofy conjecture. Being good at rectangular grid outcomes isn't necessarily a step in any direction towards a hands-off tax evaluating robot.

It feels really really good to talk about how AI will be a hundred billion trillion times smarter than the combined brainpower of all humans that have ever lived, but it feels good in the same way thinking dead people live again after they die feels good—it triggers that warm wishful thinking parietal lobe that removes a bit of reason for the sake of an overarching calmness.

Enthusiasm is great, but tempering with real expectations and less technopriesthood is better.

Whenever you see "open core," you should read it as "VCs said we need to do this to keep them happy."

VCs love the idea of how you can give part of something away for free then lock people in to auto-renewing subscription contracts for the whole banana (with fees increasing 7% to 17% every year for ongoing "maintenance"). Many VCs still actively recoil at the thought of giving away everything for free then just hoping the best will happen.

Nginx is a weird example because I'm not sure how well they are doing or who would buy "nginx pro" instead of haproxy+nginx or haproxy+varnish+nginx some other combination of already existing stuff.

MongoDB is an interesting example because they went with the "provide open software, but with really serious, game-stopping flaws, then force people to pay for support because nothing works" route. That's almost literally bait-and-switch (bait-and-support?). But, that hasn't ended up so well for them. From a recent WSJ article: Fidelity has cut its valuation of MongoDB in eight of the nine quarters since Fidelity made its investment in December 2013, valuing the shares 58% below what it paid.

I think pg originated his "sufficiently smart compiler" startup idea in his pycon talk. You can find it online somewhere. The other take away from his talk was: just lie to customers about it being automated, manually farm out the parallelize-all-the-code tasks to works/interns/turks while saying it's "automatic," then eventually figure out how to automate it yourself later so you don't need pesky humans in the loop.

Living in a place shouldn't grant you the right to obstruct progress forever just because you got there first. In the same vein, just because you got somewhere first also shouldn't mean you get unlimited profit potential just because... you got there first.

land value tax comes from the idea nobody should be able to "own" land, you should rent land. When there's a more profitable use for your land than you are current exploiting, you must give the land up. The UK enjoys things like 99 year leases on land instead of in the US where you "buy" land and own it until the heat death of the universe.

negative wage taxes is like basic income if you make the "negative wage limit" really high. The government pays you because you don't make enough (maybe for reasons outside your control, like all jobs you are qualified for are now done by robots).

Singapore has free computerized centralized healthcare that doesn't cost a million dollars a person-year like in the US.

Estonia lets you get something resembling a "mini passport" with no international recognition (perhaps some cross-EU identity recognition, but no residency benefits), but with legal ties to an Estonian "e-residency" so you can verify your identity online electronically (chipped smart cards verified by government records, etc).

That's like saying they aren't telling us how to make time travel because the grandfather paradox hasn't been solved.

They aren't withholding some unique secrets of the universe because we have unsolved problems... they are just slightly crazy people who can turn a phrase and pivoted that ability into an endless series of "grants" as to avoid needing to get real jobs contributing to GDP.

The output of their work is amusing, but just because someone runs around with veracity of purpose doesn't mean what they say is part of a ground truth reality.

Read it for enjoyment, but don't read it for belief.

We need something like Certificate Transparency to log ACL hits for all these "connected, but proprietary" things in our lives.

Do we have any guarantees a rogue tesla employee can't just tell your car to drive off a bridge while you're inside it?

But probably perfectly characteristic of the design firm he hired to do it for him.

I posted this yesterday if it helps: https://matt.sh/heroin

Absolutely yes in the right circumstances (have you seen how this website works?).

Not every service needs to be written as "scale out to a billion nodes" architecture with eight layers of checks and balances between idea to production.

We can't globally say "everybody must use a 16 step verifiable app development pipeline" when some people run 3 servers and others run 3 million.

(Plus, not all services are stateless! Redeploying stateful servers is painful—you'll be killing user experience. Updating code live on a running server while maintaining internal continuity of state can maintain sessions/caches/game-state without annoying users by kicking out of their current flows.)

That's founder code for "we actually failed, but we know rich people, so our failure is really our success—suck it, everybody else who fails without millionaire friend safety nets."

VCs love love love the joke of "We're supposed to be all about new unproven dynamic ventures and insight into the future, but we're so risk averse! lol!!!!"

It's relatively easy to get the "hey look over there!" viral bump, but beyond that it turns into a game of retention with ugly words like "drip campaign."

People are always interested in "new," but they need a reason to keep returning. That's what makes a business run.

(kinda like how, for movies, the opening weekend gets all the news, but not so much the 22nd weekend.)