Retiring the dashed command line option

It is time to retire the dash in command line options.

The clear trend is towards --long-option=value, which is simply a less efficient method of providing key=value pairs.

Apple's Siri is revolutionary

Harvard Business Review: Apple's Siri Is as Revolutionary as the Mac

"Being able to talk to a phone like it's a personal assistant is something that people are going to get very used to, very quickly. It's a much more natural approach than using a mouse on a desktop. And I highly doubt the impact is going to stop at phones. Of course, the computer is going to benefit, but the potential hardly stops there. Take television. Why bother with remotes and complicated TV guides covering hundreds of channels?"

This is one of my Big Life Projects that I have always wanted to do: marry speech recognition with "narrow AI" You don't need HAL-9000-level AI in order to tell your [virtual] personal assistant to add milk to the grocery list, or ask about the weather. Just narrow, scripted AI familiar with your own personal lingo.

So I agree with the author that Apple has something revolutionary, here.

Siri may not achieve that level of usability, but I'm confident technology will get to that point rapidly. Voice recognition is deployed in almost every new mobile phone, and many autos. Google Voice transcribes thousands of voicemails every day. That much field testing and engineering will produce the desired results eventually.

Amateur hour at GOP debate

IMO: Amateur hour at the GOP debate, on both the candidate and moderator side.

Didn't watch the debate, but skimmed the transcripts. Surely someone presidential is able to focus the debate on Big Problems rather than trivialities. Investors and others now hold the opinion that the American president + Congress is simply unable to meaningfully govern or solve real problems, at a time when there really are rather large structural problems.

I saw scant recognition of any of this.

S&P downgrades America's credit rating

Regarding the S&P downgrade of America's credit rating...

Understandable: blame the politicians
Predictable: blame the republicans
Adolescent: blame the messanger (S&P)
Ultimately: blame ourselves

Are we looking at the failure of democracy, where we vote ourselves unsustainable largesse until the system crashes?

Quoting FT Alphaville...

Indeed, the Federal Reserve announced late on Friday that risk weightings would not be affected. Not much surprise there.

It’s all about the collateral, and the deposit crisis, remember.

The US is still, of course, rated AAA by Fitch and Moody’s — the good and the bad to S&P’s ugly. A split rating should mean fewer knock-on impacts. And as Martin Wolf always tells us — and anyone within earshot — credit rating agencies provide absolutely zero new information about US treasuries. It’s the linkages and the contagion (the horror! the horror!) that matter.

Therefore, we guarantee some European-style political bloviation, especially given the palaver over the maths, but the tangible impact remains unclear.

Still, feels like a big deal, no?

Link: Drones, and the future of war

Link: The DIY Terminator: Private Robot Armies And The Algorithm-Run Future Of War

[...] as the tech becomes more democratized and more deadly, what happens when anyone can assemble an army of killing machines?

Text, in an emergency

Headline: Durham 911 now accepting text messages

That's great news. I've long thought that emergency officials, Red Cross and other disaster responders should educate people to text rather than voice call, in emergencies. Whenever an emergency strikes, the first thing everybody does is overload the phone lines and cel towers with traffic; a disaster in NYC means the entire world places a call to NYC at the same time.

Make reliable short messaging a priority, when voice traffic far exceeds capacity, and far more people will be able to contact emergency services or loved ones, during a crisis.

Norway killer is not a Christian

(reposted from G+ comment)
The "fundamentalist Christian" claim is just simply not supported by Anders Breivik's own writings. "As a non-religious person, but still one that acknowledges and respects the impact of Judeo-Christian thinking on Western culture, [...]"

Breivik actively indicates he does not practice religion, and writes essays complaining about "evangelist, fundamentalist churches"

The first ~600 pages is devoted to alternately describing how Muslims are awful because of the nasty things they did to medieval Christians, and lauding medieval Christians for anti-Muslim violence, and Crusading against Muslims.

What Breivik does not do is claim any sort of Biblical or holy justification, or indicate that some higher power is guiding his hand or thinking. He never feels nor says he is acting as a Christian -- just the opposite, in fact.

It seems like standard "race war" agitprop, that attempts to draw from history examples of glory for, and crimes against, white people. Historically speaking that means Christians and Jews (which he does mention).

Yuck. I just feel nasty, having waded through that white supremacist crap.