
Marc
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Commented on Make Up a Guy
It's largely a myth. Yes, many terminals were programmable, but most used non-character keys to initiate the sequence, and most of those that didn't responded to the keystrokes not displayed text. Also most mailers suppressed junk characters - Email was...

Comment Threads
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Greg Tingey commented on
Make Up a Guy
SFR Not "Zum wechseln (in)" then? It was the psychological difference that I noticed first. Or maybe, simply using plain "werden" was easier?...
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Robert Prior commented on
Make Up a Guy
I was thinking about things like: what happens when the important decisions affecting many, many people's lives are made by an inflexible, broken algorithm? Getting back to the original blog post, this isn't science fiction but reality. Leaving aside the negative effects of algorithm-driven social media, things like the availability of credit, sentencing of criminals, hiring for jobs, and more are all driven by algorithms now. Even if a human is in the loop, the safe choice is always to go with what the algorithm recommends — because if they don't, they can be blamed for any negative outcomes (even...
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David L commented on
Make Up a Guy
Leaving aside the negative effects of algorithm-driven social media, things like the availability of credit, sentencing of criminals, hiring for jobs, and more are all driven by algorithms now. Even if a human is in the loop, the safe choice is always to go with what the algorithm recommends As someone who plays the credit card points / rewards game, algorithms are big in getting and keeping cards. I can apply for credit via a major bank web site at 2am and get approved or denied within 90 seconds. Less than 30 seconds most of the time. For a credit...
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David L commented on
Make Up a Guy
algorithm I think I tripped the SPAM filters with my last comment. It was about algorithms and how the CC industry works....
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RM commented on
Make Up a Guy
Chilling comment tossed off in this article John Carmack Interview in the context of this thread. "But if I just look at it and say, if 10 years from now, we have ‘universal remote employees’ that are artificial general intelligences, run on clouds, and people can just dial up and say, ‘I want five Franks today and 10 Amys, and we’re going to deploy them on these jobs,’ and you could just spin up like you can cloud-access computing resources, if you could cloud-access essentially artificial human resources for things like that—that’s the most prosaic, mundane, most banal use of...

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- Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
- How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
- Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
- Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
- Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
- Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
- The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
- “Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
- Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)
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