New AI breakthrough: One of the hardest jobs for AI has been natural language parsing. There are many examples of ambiguity that would stump most human recipients - and yet are perfectly valid, grammatically correct, etc. We humans resolve these situations by putting them in a context and/or by seeking further clarification. This task - translating a stream of symbols such as words into a meaningful mental object in our consciousness - has been partially solved to date ...
10/09/16 More of the same. Tedious correction of product data with endless errors. Still no manual for the CMS stuff. I know how to do three or four basic operations - and my instructor on those operations got a good deal wrong. As I expected, the old website disappeared and/or was blocked from my access. This directly contradicted my own instructions as well as the job requirements, so I was finally given a new address to access what amounts to the verified so...
Remember "Firefly." That should be in the back of every programmer's personal perspective, like "Remember the Alamo," "Never again!," or the "Fermi Paradox," cosmic tweets conveying the essence of a haunting question or a meta-wrong still not set right, or, ... if you will, a battle cry! Look up "Firefly." Here's a reasonable source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(website) No doubt the reader has run into the Firefly algorithm on Amazon and elsewher...
OK, think back to 1991 or perhaps '92. The web hadn't been invented yet - or implemented anyway. Ted Nelson's Xanadu was known throughout the digerati, and no doubt countless other thinkers had come up with their own mental or prototypical WWW, yours truly included, circu 1979 or so. I even spent most of a year writing a version of Prolog to run on a C64 as the foundation OS for a universal information network that I called the "Personal Knowledge Index" o...
My yahoo.com account has crashed. I can no longer access it and all mail sent to it bounces with a fatal and permanent error message. The last time this happened was years ago when I posted some material here and elsewhere about a Congressman's checkered past. Then I lost access to my blogs as well as yahoo.com mail for about a week. Of course, coincidence is not causality... Altho it did happen twice in the same year. I have not a clue as to why this time. ...
When I post, I usually am writing from memory. Occasionally I get details wrong, and am happy (if chagrinned) to be corrected. When I have the time, I try to include as many references and links as possible to assist the reader in checking my story. Then there are the people who simply don't want certain things said, certain subjects examined, or who are simply trolls, such as the Mensa weenies who quibble over the slightest detain, triumphant in their debate forum ability to bring any d...
Oh joy, yahoo access is back at the libraries! And we only lost a couple of weeks... Does this worry anyone except me? Of late, if anyone has tried to contact me at my Yahoo address, you may be wondering why I'm not answering - at least immediately. The answer is simple: Yahoo is blocking my email. Yahoo is blocking a lot of other people's email, as well - namely library users who log on to public library terminals, at least those at the main public library system of the OC. It seems ...