Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The surprising cleverness of modern compilers
I wanted to know how a modern C compiler like clang would process the following C code: #include <stdint.h> int count(uint64_t x) { int v = 0; while(x != 0) { x...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
We are passing the Turing test right on schedule
In 1950, the brilliant computing pioneer Alan Turing made the following prediction in his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence: I believe that in about fifty...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Professors intentionally slow down science to make themselves look better
Recently, the president of the United States announced a big anti-cancer initiative, to be headed by his vice-president Joe Biden. Will it be fruitful? Maybe. But...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Email: how to be polite and efficient
Email is an old platform, but it still represents the cornerstone of most of our work online. Surprisingly, many people seem to be using email poorly. Here areContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is software a neutral agent?
We face an embarrassing amount of information but when we feel overwhelmed, as Clay Shirky said, “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.” Unavoidably...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
We know a lot less than we think, especially about the future.
The inventors of the airplane, the Wright brothers, had little formal education (3 and 4 years of high school respectively). They were not engineers. They wereContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How will you die? Cancer, Alzheimer’s, Stroke?
Before the 1950s, many of us suffered from poliomyelitis and too many ended up crippled. Then we developed a vaccine and eradicated the disease. Before the second...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The powerful hacker culture
In my post the hacker culture is winning, I observed that the subculture developed in the software industry is infecting the wider world. One such visible culture...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
No more leaks with sanitize flags in gcc and clang
If you are programming in C and C++, you are probably wasting at least some of your time hunting down memory problems. Maybe you allocated memory and forgot toContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How close are AI systems to human-level intelligence? The Allen AI challenge.
With respect to artificial intelligence, some people are squarely in the “optimist” camp, believing that we are “nearly there” as far as producing human-level intelligence...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Narrative illusions
Our brain contains lots of neurons and can do great things. I can read, write and speak fluently in two languages made of tens of thousands of words. Millions of...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Being shallow is rational
Pundits often lament who people have become shallow. They no longer sit down to read books cover from cover. Instead of writing thoughtful 2-page emails, they write...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Could virtual-reality make us smarter?
When the web initially took off, there were major concerns that it was “dumbing us down”. There are similar concerns with e-books making us dumber. I am quite sure...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Setting up a “robust” Minecraft server on a Raspberry Pi
My kids are gamers, and they love Minecraft. Minecraft sells its client software, but the server software is freely available. Since it is written in Java, it can...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What thirty years of technology looks like: the early high-school years
Thirty years ago, I was attending a high school. My oldest son is preparing to attend a similar high school. There was a meeting at my son’s future school, andContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Declarative programming is a dead-end for the lowly programmer
Most programmers focus on software execution. We want to understand what the computer is actually doing. Java, C, JavaScript, PHP, Python… all these languages make...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What the heck is interesting research?
I have long advocated that the world would be better off if more people did research. But what the heck is research? In simple terms, I know of two types of interesting...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Ranged random-number generation is slow in Python…
A colleague has been running simulations using a library written in Python. She has having serious performance problems… Her application is parallelizable, butContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Biology and computing are more alike than you think…
Biological systems are seemingly of infinite complexity. We still don’t know what a heart attack is, not really. Despite billions spent, we still don’t know what...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog