🔗 Quick links thread
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It had been modified with a weaken 1st rule.
Second half of the first law, actually: "...or, through inaction, allow a human to be harmed." Accidental misapplication of the second law caused the robot to want to hide (it had been yelled at and insulted rather definitively, and then told to get lost, so it did so to the best of its ability. Unless that's still yet another story, lol.)
But that was a different story than the bit you quoted, which definitely revolved around the robots unable to make the calculation for wormhole travel or something.
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Alternatively: a delicate surgery is being preformed on the train
Another ridiculous premise.
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Asimov surely thought about things like this, because many of his stories involved situations that required his laws to be modified or else abused in some way, like the one that had half the second law disabled.
(Acknowledgement to @loose - different presentation, not duplication.)
That story is Little Lost Robot. It was half the First Law, the portion about saving a human from harm, which was deleted. Susan Calvin, a principle designer character in the story, described the folly of that: A robot with the modified Law could drop an anvil that by its falling would crush a human, if it knew it would be able to stop the anvil after releasing it. But since there was no longer a rule about saving a human from harm, after releasing the anvil, the robot could just decide not to save the human. Crunch! Robot murder.
Fortunately the rouge Nestor apparently didn't think of that -- she would have been dead before her idiot bosses got around to destroying the thing. (There's a corporate-style dilemma for you: "Save the human or destroy an expensive robot? Hmmmm...money, human, money, human...")
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Escape is the story I was thinking of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape!
Looks like Discurse is hosing the link: the exclamation point is part of it, but I'm on mobile and don't know how to make it work right.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape!
Have to escape the exclamation mark as %21, apparently.
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@cartman82 said:
Computer programmers
Maybe they're thinking of the old definition of the people who moved tubes on giant panels.
These days, I think the word "programmer" is used more often for SQL-only programmers or some such.
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ONT:
http://reverent.org/an_artist_or_an_ape.htmlAn artist or an ape?
by Mikhail Simkin
Some of the images displayed below are masterpieces of abstract art, created by great artists. The rest were painted by an ape. Can you tell which is which?This was also a recurring bit on David Letterman. But it was always an ape. I think it was for legal reasons. Apes were less likely to sue for being compared to an artist than artists were to be compared to an ape.
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That's a trick question, isn't it, given that humans are apes.
Umm, I'm not sure that they are. I believe that they're considered to have a common ancestor.
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http://www.pressherald.com/2015/06/08/san-andreas-style-earthquake-not-possible-in-maine/
Because the state has no active faults like California's, 'the big one' can't happen here, Maine's state geologist explains.
What a shocker!
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##How to receive a million packets per second
Researchers try to hack linux network stack to handle a million UDP packets per second. No practical application, but very informative of all the little chinks and switches that could influence the speed of real programs.
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##Following a Select Statement Through Postgres Internals
Third in a series of articles following what happens with a simple data query, starting from a very high level in Rails Active Record, all the way down to deep PostgreSQL internals. I don't care about the active record stuff, but this PostgreSQL breakdown I found fascinating. A must read if you work with databases.
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Robot testing.
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Robot testing.
It must've happened either on the ship from Galaxy Quest, the Aperture Science lab, or the lab where @nullptr works, or something along those lines.
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@blakeyrat said:
Robot testing.
It must've happened either on the ship from Galaxy Quest, the Aperture Science lab, or the lab where @nullptr works, or something along those lines.
Nah, if it was where I worked, the 20 year old repurposed code that ran the lever, which was originally designed to simulate a train throttle, would throw an exception in such a way that a bunch of puppies would explode.
Oh, and the anvil wouldn't be redirected.
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@FrostCat said:
suffered brain damage and became stupid or insane, went semi-catatonic, something like that; I haven't read teh story in decades
It had been modified with a weaken 1st rule. Because the humans were exposed to gamma rays.
No, that's actually a different story.The warp-drive one wasn't a robot as such, just a computer (IIRC "brain" was the term). They got around it by saying "we're not going to put people on this, we just want to know" and it managed to get through the logic bomb and design a solution, but the experience left it a little cracked. It built them a ship which had no viewports, came complete with spooky voices pretending to be from the afterlife, and had only canned beans (or some such) for rations.
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@Jarry said:
i'd say it's a question
HumansApesdon't have tails.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--szrOHtR6U
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Humans Apesdon't have tails.
Not sure when "tails" snaked their way into the thread (CAB to back track the replies to the replies). But we primates do have tails. The relevant vertebrae have atrophied into a ridged structure called a coccyx, which has tucked itself up under your fundament and is the cause of the excruciating pain you experience when you land on it. Or otherwise receive a blow / kick to it.
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Opps, sorry I caused a SEGMENT_FAULT
loose:
a semi-ridged structure called a coccyxThere FTFY
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Damn autocorrect!
+1 for observation
-1 for pedantry
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Details of what's going on in the picture at the link.
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maybe it's a little old, but...
Lego Universe to close because people kept building dicks
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##4 Reasons Not To Use MySQL For Analysis
Sounds click-bait-y, but it's pretty interesting nonetheless. The gist: MySQL may be fast and reliable, but its query capabilities are way behind PostgreSQL and others.
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Can't figure out if a coincidence or a clever visual pun. The photo is so grainy it could be either.
RHS actually wears a halo sometimes.
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##Bill Gates was a ruthless, cutthroat businessman...
A nice reminder of what bastards MS used to be at the height of their power.
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Just remember everything is relative. The most cutthroat businessman of the 1980s and 1990s pales in comparison to the most cutthroat businessmen of the 1910s and 1920s who literally halved the population of the Congo.
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Just remember everything is relative. The most cutthroat businessman of the 1980s and 1990s pales in comparison to the most cutthroat businessmen of the 1910s and 1920s who literally halved the population of the Congo.
Yeah, that's the impression I get about Gates. He's "cuttthroat" against people who can take it.
He doesn't care if some rich American corporation is put out of business. It's not like anyone who lost their job because of him starved or was even significantly inconvenienced. He puts it on a scale, where slightly crappier IT market is on one end and African children starving to death is on the other. And he always picks the children. He'll squeeze everything he can out of Microsoft because, in his mind, his other activities are much more important in the big picture.
Now I disagree with his priorities, but I sort of understand them.
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I think he was just raised in a super-competitive environment and took a long time to mature and get over it. Guy was badly in need of slack. Now he's just as slack as the average Seattleite, so kudos to him.
Me, I was raised with far too much slack and so I can never be successful at anything. There's a careful balance needed.
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Record terminal session, automatically upload to their site when done. Could be useful.
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Oh no. God no! DELETE THAT POST BEFORE HE SEES IT!
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Oh no. God no! DELETE THAT POST BEFORE HE SEES IT!
Too late, he already got the notification.
No!...Wait!.... This is Discourse! The notification can still be intercepted before it gets into the queue to be sent
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How the hell did I get a notification for "@■■■■■■■■■"?
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ninja edit?
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@accalia, You seem malnourished. Are you suffering from internal parasites?
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rude
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@accalia, You seem malnourished. Are you suffering from internal parasites?
Are you coming on to my partner‽ I challenge you to Claw-Plach!
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Medical marijuana has not been proven to work for many illnesses that state laws have approved it for, according to the first comprehensive analysis of research on its potential benefits.
Does it really matter? Like most medical marijuana was really for medical purposes.
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Not only does it not matter, but it's going to be obsolete in a few years when all you lame slow States follow Washington's lead and legalize the shit.
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Also the "proven to work" is problematic as it is hard to get approval to test it for things (due to being classified as schedule 1, which it would loose if it had an approved use).
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9lx3fb-JC4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmLP3nYp9j8
Pretty cool debugging library for VS. Boy, do I miss C# dev tools in node.js programming!
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Coding confession with the worst condemn vs absolve ratio I've seen:
The new guy specializes in web design but is already somehow much quicker with the nitty gritty of javascript than I am. It's scary. He's only used notepad++ before, so I turned off all the validators in the eclipse configuration I gave him. I'm hoping it slows him down.
And deservedly so! What an asshole!
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http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/06/23/someone-got-android-1-6-running-on-a-texas-instruments-graphing-calculator-oneplus-one-owners-feel-strangely-jealous/
Android on a calculator 😂
(yes yes 1.6 but still)
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##The Role of a Senior Developer
Interesting. I see myself as intermediate going towards senior, according to his classification.
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That doesn't surprise me about country music listeners .
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Sort of related to the previous link, a guy gains the "senior mindset"?
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Related (a ways down on the page):
>A small publisher, And Other Stories releases 10 to 12 new titles a year. “We’ve realised for a while that we’ve published more men than women,” said Tobler. “This year we’ve done seven books by men and four by women ... We have a wide range of people helping us with our choices, and our editors are women ... and yet somehow we still publish more books by men than women.”
I can't stop laughing. This is an admission that women, or at least women in the publishing industry, desperately need to be saved from themselves. So rather than honestly ask themselves the obvious question 'why do we women prefer male authors?' they instead, being good progressives, immediately blame something else, someone else, anybody but them. And then they follow it up with an completely stupid and pointless gesture that solves nothing, and may even hurt them (lost profits).
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http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3bar2z/what_is_the_best_the_bad_guy_won_ending/csklk4u
A guy on reddit analyzes the movie vs comic ending of the Watchmen. His conclusion: movie ending makes more sense logically, but fails to deliver the message the comic did. Very interesting.