Duplex: Hi, Umm... Can I book 3 seats on Wednesday?

Restaurant: Sure! And what time is it?

Duplex: Yeah, Oh, I'd like it at NullPointer Exception if it's possible.

Restaurant: Invalid parameter "NullPointer Exception" restarting program...

Fucking trueee

Google I/O 2018: Google Duplex AI
Apple WWDC 2018: Dark mode

It's easy to make jokes about this whole Google assistant thing, but can we just take a second to appreciate what they've done here?

Ethics and morals aside, this tech is incredible, we are truly living in the future. Right here, right now.

Google Duplex: "Hi! Uhm.. I'd like to make a dinner reservation for 3."
Restaurant: "Sure! What time would you like?"
Google Duplex: "It's, uhh.. for tomorrow May the 11th at NULL POINTER EXCEPTION."
Restaurant: "Internal Exception: Invalid parameter not satisfying: time"

Btw, hi devRant, this is my first post!!

(Warning: kinda long && somewhat of a political rant)

Every time I tell someone I work with AI, the first thing to come out of their mouth is "oh but AI is going to take over the world!"

No.

It was only somewhat recently that it started being able to recognize what was in a picture from over 3 million images, and that too it's not that great at. Honestly people always say "AI is just if-else" ironically, but it isn't really that far from the truth, we just multiply an input by weights and check the output.

It isn't some magical sauce, it's not being born and then exploring a problem, it's just glorified-probability prediction. Even in "unsupervised" learning, the domain set is provided; in "reinforcement learning" which has gotten super popular lately we just have the computer decide which policy is optimal and apply that to an environment. It's a glorified decision tree (and technically tree models like XGBoost outperform neural networks and deep learning on a large number of problems) and it isn't going to "decide" to take over the planet.

Honestly all of this is just born out of Elon Musk fans who take his word as truth and have been led to believe that AI is going to take over the world. There are a billion reasons why it can't! And to top it off this takes away a lot of public attention from VERY concerning ethical issues with AI.

Am I the only one who saw Google Duplex being unveiled and immediately thought "fraud"? Forget phone scammers, if you trained duplex on the mannerisms of, for example, a famous politician's voice, you could impersonate them in an audio clip (or even video clip with deepfakes). Or for example the widespread use of object detection and facial recognition in surveillance systems deployed by DoD. Or the use of AI combined with location tracking and browsing analytics for targeted marketing.

The list of ethics breaches are endless, and I find it super suspicious that those profiting the most off of unethical AI are all too eager to shift public concern to some science fiction Terminator style takeover that, if ever possible, would be a long way out and is not any sort of a priority issue right now.

Watching the Google I/O 2018 where they are showcasing their AI called Google Duplex, making a call for reservation.
I just realized it has better communication skill than me.

I am pooping for last 20 minutes watching the video.

While Google is developing breakthrough AI systems that might quite possibly pass the Turing tests in the near future, my university suggests I learn JQUERY and calls the course Advanced Web Programming

GF: How was your pitch to investors?
Me: it was great (... went-ahead to talk about the daunting process of the preparation and motivation).
GF: Why do you go through all this process, when you can become a fraudster, you can use voodoo and make it even easier, in less than 3 months you can buy a duplex, nice car and we can go shopping... you don't need to do any human ritual unlike before - I heard you can even meet a chief priest to make it faster for you.
just get the bag abeg (slang for getting rich quick).

Me: Fuck the day I met you, not everyone wants to be a low-life, and fuck out from my life.

Men if you live in a saner society, or you are born to elite/upper-middle-class you don't how lucky you are.
Most times I wonder how I keep my sanity with all these shitty people around. like messed up society where almost everyone is a fucking deep hypocrite
.I know I need to change my circle but how the fuck do I do that when I am surrounded by fuckstards, which are far worst than Gypsies.
lowlifes with low dreams.
I need to get the fuck out of this place!

Got an assignment in school to make an easy project in c for embedded real time processors with a free complexity level (it was really early in the course and many had never been programming before).

Since I've been working a few years in development I decided to create an own transmitter and receiver for an own protocol between processors (we had just spent a week to understand how to use existing protocols, but I made my own).

The protocol used only 1 line to communicate with half-duplex and we're self adjusting the syncing frequency during the transmission. I managed to transmit data up to 1 kbps after tweaking it a bit (the only holdback was the processors clock frequency).

Then I got the feedback from our teacher, which basically said:
"Your protocol looks like any other protocol out there. Have you considered using an UART?"

Like yeah, I see the car you built there looks like any other car out there, have you considered using a Volvo instead?

Dat awkward moment, when you think you’re smart because you made AI that can beat first level of Super Mario Bros, but then you see Google Duplex AI

I've made the json protocol. It's a protocol containing only json. No http or anything.

To parse an json object from a stream, you need a function that returns the length of the first object/array of all your received data. The result of that function is to get the right chunk of the json to deserialize.

For such function, json needs to be parsed, so I wrote that function in C to be used with my C server and Python client. I finally implemented a C function into python function that has a real benefit / use case. Else you had to validate but by bit by the python json parser and that's slow while streaming. Some messages are quite big.

Advantage of this protocol is that it's full duplex.

I'm very happy!

Waiting for the day when amazon Alexa would talk to google duplex and Siri trying to get into the convo. 😋😉😉

OMG I'm such a hero - I can print duplex on a simplex printer!

p r i n t e r s

I was about to print a bigass document. Wanted to save paper, and saw my printer had a two side mode. I try it out. A few pages print, then the driver says PAUSED - RELOAD PAPER. This is normal, as double sided printing is not automatic. Underneath, there is a message:

[Printing - Manual Duplex: Please reinsert pap...]

I try to resize the window to read the message.

THE MOTHERFUCKING WINDOW WAS NOT RESIZEABLE!!!

are these products not fucking tested???

I find a guide saying the paper should be reinserted with no flips, then the "continue" button should be pressed.

The button was not in the driver UI, or on the printer. Further research showed that you are supposed to:

OPEN THE TONER CHANGE DOOR AND CLOSE IT AGAIN TO CONTINUE A PRINT

what fuCKING designer thought this shit through!?#@?#$!

printers
fuckem

Liking the sound of Google's Duplex!

Guys.. what do you think of google Duplex??

I'm making a booklet of some handy notes. So, the old trick is print in pages of 4, to make binding easier. I spool about 60 of those and then it starts printing in my manual duplex until
*a wild blank line has been spotted*
`wat?`
I go back and see that I've not noticed a trail of white blanks that had been slowly creepily increasing in the print space where the text should be. Almost 20 of my pages are wasted. I take out the print cartridge and wipe the drum, run the cleaning sequence on a clean sheet and try to print.

Presto! good as new!

Sippin some coffee, browsing the web.. oh and woah! The blank reappears and it is now bigger. The previous 12 pages are not affected? wth

I do this whole thing again. Wipe and print. It works. And along the lines of 15 or so prints, the blank appears again, bigger and bolder. wth. I really need those prints now.

If it was broken, I'd have fixed it in the afternoon, but it is evening now. No one opens at this hour. Why is y printer fucking with me?