Driving Blind: CIA Conspiracies and Robot Laborers

Ethan Gach

I write about comics, video games and American politics. I fear death above all things. Just below that is waking up in the morning to go to work. You can follow me on Twitter at @ethangach or at my blog, gamingvulture.tumblr.com. And though my opinions aren’t for hire, my virtue is.

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5 Responses

  1. Mad Rocket Scientist says:

    I like the bit on PCs. I already have a LEAP Motion controller on order, and I’m a bit giddy with excitement over what I’ll be able to do with it.Report

    • Morat20 in reply to Mad Rocket Scientist says:

      He’s totally wrong on speech. Speech is slow. Moreover, speech is loud.

      Can you imagine the freakin’ noise of an office full of cubicle workers trying to dictate? Not to mention — why? Reading is faster than listening. Which means you’re going to use a slow method of input (speech) to dictate something that will be read, which means you have to hope your software scrubs out the vocal errors, which means you have to proof-read it ANYWAYS.

      I don’t even buy the “people talk faster than they type” argument anyways. Especially once all the effort required for the end-product is summed up.

      (Not to mention: I can’t dictate MY job — I’m a software engineer. What am I gonna say? “Compiler: widget array element x equals widget array element y? No wait, I wanted that in a while loop. Crap”)

      But noise would be the biggest problem. I’ve worked in a room with 150 people talking all at once. What you got was a LOT of requests from management to use the voice loops (headsets and mics) and to keep your voices down and let the loops amplify them. Otherwise nobody could hear anything, even with the volume up.

      Not that speech recognition won’t be a big thing. Just not as desktop input.Report

      • Mad Rocket Scientist in reply to Morat20 says:

        In the home, noise is less of an issue. In public/at the office, sub-vocalized commands could clear the noise issue (if you had on a throat mic).

        Assigning keywords to command macros can make speech the faster input, if you have a large set of common commands that could be macro’d (e.g. you get into the office & while getting situated for the day, you say “Computer: Login Morat20. Computer: Launch IDE, Firefox, Outlook”. Still, speech recognition will be much more useful for dictation than interfacing.

        However, I think stuff like Leap will be a bigger interface boost, especially for modelers of any stripe.Report

  2. Chris says:

    I’m looking forward to the Calvino letters, as he’s one of my favorite authors.

    Do you know how much I polished it, word by word, to get that unsophisticated, rough and ready style?

    This, strangely enough, reminds me of when Dolly Parton used to say, “Do you know how much it costs to look this cheap?”Report

  3. J@m3z Aitch says:

    Re: Tesla. Insert bog-standard libertarian rant here. 😉Report