Not that I'm a futurist, but I predict that 2020 will be the decade where AI becomes unsettling (beyond image recognition, which is already becoming unsettling), and that 2030 will be the decade where AI has serious economic consequences.
Think of DeepDream x 1000. First, start with self-driving cars and semis cutting out taxi and freight services. Then, move on to musicians and composers no longer being hired to do mundane (90%) work, or video game levels being procedurally generated with intelligent design. From there, go on to everything that could be automated today, but requires a little bit of human ingenuity.
Economic transactions will start to look very different than what's normally accepted today.
In pre-Copernican astronomy, where the Earth was considered the center of the cosmos, the erratic orbits of the other planets relative to us were explained away as epicycles within perfect circles. Later, closer examination of the orbits required modeling the orbits as epicycles within epicycles, exactly as depicted in the rotating circles above. In the end, it turned out that there aren't epicycles in the orbits, they were just creating a Fourier transform to explain the orbital paths. We now know that you can create a Fourier transform to generate any arbitrary path.
I sometimes wonder how many of our modern physics models, such as the standard model, differential geometry, and M-theory, are just highly sophisticated versions of the Fourier transform.
Not all code is server-side code that can be addressed by elastic computing. Most C++ programmers work on desktop, mobile, and embedded programs. In such a domain, it is very likely that your code will be running on more than 10,000 cores on launch day (and with little or no intercommunication between the cores).
Security theater. sigh If the government was actually serious about protecting women and children from people with malicious intent, terrorists would be toward the bottom of the list, just above school shooters. Domestic abuse far outstrips any news-worthy outrages, but you don't get many votes talking about that.
Security theater to treat criminal violence theater. It makes a perverse sort of sense.
Terrorism is not really about deaths; there are many greater causes of preventable death, as you note. It's about attacking a nation's perception of safety. You can ignore another random car accident or drug-related murder, but it's much harder to ignore 9/11.
I'd much prefer the vaccine to the "cure": to educate ourselves on this tactic and refuse to play along, treating terrorism the way we would treat a natural disaster. But alas, there's too much money and power to be gained in the security theater racket, and power abhors a vacuum.
I like to code with about a 9 point font, in order to maximize the amount of code per screen without going too far into the illegible. At that size, the proportions of even a single pixel are large enough to make any anti-aliasing annoying. You lose the sharp contrast that every good font needs to have along its edges.
Mine too. Dina is my font of choice for now, also because it does a good job "to maximize the amount of code per screen without going too far into the illegible", among other things. If you code just with ASCII, maybe you'd like to try it if you haven't already.
That isn't what it looks like on my computer. I suspect this image has been resampled because even aggressive hinting wouldn't generate such rough forms at 11 pt.
There's nothing at all opposing about those goals. They're both natural by products of expertise in signals intelligence and cryptanalysis, and skill breaking security helps provide more secure systems by subjecting them to more sophisticated attacks.
Just as a clarification, NSA doesn't set those standards. Agencies like NIST set AES and SHA3 through open worldwide competitions. These standards then become parts of larger compliance guidelines like FIPS (Federal Information Protection Standard I think) that govern how the USG should protect its data.
NIST has like 2 cryptographers, doesn't it? The real guidance at NIST comes from NSA. If you think NSA is backdooring Suite B crypto, you can't trust NIST.
> Why would anyone trust one of them going forward?
The same reason people trust the Dollar as a reserve currency. Yeah, it sucks, but better than any of the alternatives.
Fortunately, there exist open-source/public-domain alternatives for security products. (Doesn't mean that contributors can't be coerced with the equivalent of a Nation Security Letter, though.)
The only reason people trust the dollar is because if you refuse the dollar, the US military shows up and kills you.
How long until we find out that the "humanitarian aide" so heavily pushed WRT Syria, is an IMF debt loan requiring a central bank and fealty to the US dollar is the primary reason for the opportunity war being sought.
