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  .e 8:56 pm on February 9, 2010 Permalink
  Tags: college, computers, dijkstra, thinking   

  defending the unthinkable 

  i went to college with the intent to major in computer science and design a computer that thinks. pretty ambitious, but computer power was and is flying up and after all, kurzweil says it’ll happen in 2030 or whatever is his hypothesis now, so it would be in my lifetime. as perfect time as there could be for it.

  along the ways i ran into a single quote from the 70s that completely stopped me.

  “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim” – Edsger Dijkstra

  in one sentence it summarized for me that “thinking computer” is a just a language illusion. it’s not real and it will never be real.

  a computer will never think in the same way a submarine will never swim. swimming is what living things do, a submarine instead ‘propels itself through water’. a computer will never ‘think’, it will ‘perform computations in order to arrive at conclusions’. which, guess what, they already do and have been for ages.

  for people to agree that a machine is a “thinking computer” would be one that can feature a display of a pleasant cartoonish face that, when computing, would furrow it’s brow and make “hmm” noises. while an interesting task and a cognitive/behavioral challenge, it’s not a computer science problem.

  the better goal i learned in compilers: we should be working to precisely define problem spaces where computers can help with decision making, and then writing better and more robust expert systems (by whatever buzzword they’re going by nowadays) that can read data about the situation, and suggest or perform actions in response. not as glamorous as ‘thinking’, but infinitely more useful.

   
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  .e 5:42 am on February 9, 2010 Permalink
  Tags: computers, mac mini, reboot   

  and you thought your rebooting was a pain 

  this is process for rebooting the mac mini at my apt:

  1. power on
  2. enter username and password
  3. you will get between 0 and 4 warnings about hard drives being corrupt (long story), just hit ‘Ignore’ for now.
  4. your screen will suddenly switch from normal to all messed up. to fix it back, click offscreen to the right and up and find the pull down menu option to switch to 1244×768 resolution. long story.
  5. next, networking. the built in wireless doesn’t work (long story) so it uses a usb wireless. the one that this mac has is not mac compatible (long story) so it uses spoofed windows drivers. run USBWirelessUtility to connect. in case it ate it’s configuration, you might need to re-enter WPA2 key.
  6. networking part 2: since the computer shares network to the xbox you will need to put in custom command line routing rules (long story). first do “killall nadt” and wait about a minute (long story). after “ps -au | grep nadt” shows it died, run “./nads”.
  7. next, storage. there are four usb drives which all have full disk encryption. start Disk Utility and count the devices. they sometimes don’t come up correctly (long story) so if one doesn’t show up, figure out which one it is by disk size and power cycle it until it shows up.
  8. now open TrueCrypt and arrange the drives in correct order by size (‘Restore Favorites’ won’t work, long story) and mount them one by one using each of their unique passwords (all 30ish characters) which when entered together in the right order make a verse from a polish song from the 90s.

  and you’re done. if you’re feeling proactive you can reestablish smb connections to other machines, verify dropbox and simplifymedia are running correctly, and check for patches. if there are patches, cross your fingers that they won’t require a reboot.

  .e, and Super Jamie are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Super Jamie 4:51 am on February 13, 2010 Permalink

    Lies. It just works. Steve and his team of turtlenecked lawyers will be sending you a C&D soon in regards to this post.

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    .e 4:59 am on February 13, 2010 Permalink

    in fairness, the only one that isn’t my doing is the screen one, that should just work.

    the wireless i broke (literally, i physically snapped the antenna in the computer, pretty awesome), the drives are full encrypted so are discovered correctly as unformatted garbage, and the custom networking is to avoid having to pay $60 for an xbox wireless adapter: i’m spoofing xbox live using the mac mini, then channeling it out to actual xbox live