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Comment If you're going to criticize... (Score -1, Flamebait) 252

If you're going to criticize someone else's coding style, you should make sure your suggestion actually works first. The function of the program was to print "0123456". His example code (for (int i = 0; i = n; i++) System.out.print(n);) would print out "6666666", which would not solve the problem.

Further, what the code does is immaterial to what the question is attempting to test from the student. What the question is trying to test is that they can trace the code and figure out that because the printing is done after the recursive call, the numbers would be printed in reverse order as the recursion unravels. Which is a perfectly valid thing to test, and a more realistic example might cause the code snippet to be much larger or complex and not focus just on the singular concept the question was attempting to get the student to prove they understand.

Also he used "trace good" instead of "trace well" right in his second paragraph, and I can't stand that grammatical error. Anyone acting as a stickler for syntax should not be making that mistake in a public post that they presumably glanced over more than once.

Comment Re:Sliders (Score 1) 480

Don't get me wrong, I loved the first season of Sliders. But its science was *shit*, and the second season was kind of weak and after that it fell completely off the rails.

Comment Anecdotally... (Score 4, Informative) 218

My "year in review" prominently displayed a picture of the back of my car having been crushed in when I got rear ended by a giant truck. My obvious response was "gee, thanks Facebook." Obviously that doesn't have anything on a picture of someone's deceased daughter, but it shows how poorly conceived the feature is.

Comment Re:What brought this on? (Score 1) 181

The funny thing is that if artificial intelligence does kill us, it won't be because of malevolence or a warped sense of justice like most fiction portrays it, it will be because someone made a programming error and/or didn't include a proper failsafe. It will kill us because we programmed it to kill us. I don't think AI will ever reach the point of doing something I would consider "thinking" or "reasoning." At least not through software and hardware development the way we understand it right now.

Take the case of a sentry gun or unmanned drone programmed to use computer vision to identify and kill human targets. That's totally an AI murdering people, but I would never consider it to be "thinking" or "reasoning." It's not malevolent or spiteful. It doesn't have some sense of justice or revenge. It is literally just doing what it was programmed to do. Now imagine an orbital nuclear launch platform with similarly simplistic AI. That's how we'd kill ourselves with AI. Not The Terminator. Not Dune. More like a microwave.

Comment Re:Dear Intel (Score 1) 724

They don't have contempt for gamers. They have contempt for "gamers," by which they mean the exact same juvenile assholes you get pissed off about having to mute on voice chat when you play online games. If you'd actually read the article, and aren't being purposefully intellectually dishonest, you'd realize this.

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