programmers-from-england

"I’ve always been interested in the nature of the universe, nature of reality, consciousness, the meaning of life, all of these big questions. That’s what I wanted to spend my life working on."

"Organisms will soon be designed and produced with the precision and scale of today’s computer chips."

"I think we’re at a moment with the development of AI where we have ways to provide support, encouragement, affirmation, coaching and advice. We’ve basically taken emotional intelligence and distilled it. And I think that is going to unlock the creativity of millions and millions of people for whom that wasn’t available."

"I think that we are obsessed with whether you’re an optimist or whether you’re a pessimist. This is a completely biased way of looking at things. I don’t want to be either. I want to coldly stare in the face of the benefits and the threats. And from where I stand, we can very clearly see that with every step up in the scale of these large language models, they get more controllable."

"After DeepMind I never had to work again. I certainly didn’t have to write a book or anything like that. Money has never ever been the motivation. It’s always, you know, just been a side effect. For me, the goal has never been anything but how to do good in the world and how to move the world forward in a healthy, satisfying way. Even back in 2009, when I started looking at getting into technology, I could see that AI represented a fair and accurate way to deliver services in the world."

"I think in the long-term — over many decades — we have to think very hard about how we integrate these tools, because left completely to the market and to their own devices, these are fundamentally labor-replacing tools. They will augment us and make us smarter and more productive, for the next couple decades, but in the longer term that's an open question. They allow us to do new things that software has never been able to do before. These tools are creative, they're empathetic, and they actually act much more like humans than a traditional relational database where you only get out what you put in."

"I think this idea that we need to dismantle the state, we need to have maximum freedom – that’s really dangerous. On the other hand, I’m obviously very aware of the danger of centralised authoritarianism and, you know, even in its minuscule forms like nimbyism. That’s why, in the book, we talk about a narrow corridor between the danger of dystopian authoritarianism and this catastrophe caused by openness. That is the big governance challenge of the next century: how to strike that balance."

"What I’ve always tried to do is attach the idea of ethics and safety to AGI. I wrote our business plan in 2010, and the front page had the mission ‘to build artificial general intelligence, safely and ethically for the benefit of everyone’. I think it has really shaped how a lot of the other AI labs formed. OpenAI [the creator of ChatGPT] started as a nonprofit largely because of a reaction to us having set that standard."

"The stories we tell, the things we do, and the memories we have - either in our heads or in our backups - are more important than any physical object."

""Nothing to hide" only works if the folks in power share the values of you and everyone you know entirely, and always will."

"Every bit of freedom that a designer has for creativity and good is also freedom for abuse. That’s true not just on the web, but in every single aspect of the online world."

"Every time we design a system, we have to minimise the potential harm. Look at the code that you write, look at the systems you design, and think: How could this be abused? How could this fall apart? What are the failure states here? If you were a bad actor, if you wanted to use this maliciously, how would you go about it? Think about how you’d attack your own systems, explore those failure states, deliberately screw things up and see how your code copes. Because if you don't, someone else will."

"Anyone who tells you they're certain about how the world works is either a mathematician, or they're selling something."

"Some of [Lovelace's] comments sound remarkably modern. One is very appropriate to a discussion there was in England which arose from a tendency, even in the more responsible press, to use the term “electronic brain” for equipment such as electronic calculating machines, automatic pilots for aircraft, etc. I considered it necessary to protest against this usage (51), as the term would suggest to the layman that equipment of this kind could “think for itself,” whereas this is just what it cannot do; all the thinking has to be done beforehand by the designer and by the operator who provides the operating instructions for the particular problem; all the machine can do is to follow these instructions exactly, and this is true even though they involve the faculty of “judgment.” I found afterwards that over a hundred years ago Lady Lovelace had put the point firmly and concisely (C, p. 44) : “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to oriqinate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform” (her italics)."

"I may remark that the curious transformations many formulae can undergo, the unsuspected and to a beginner apparently impossible identity of forms exceedingly dissimilar at first sight, is I think one of the chief difficulties in the early part of mathematical studies. I am often reminded of certain sprites and fairies one reads of, who are at one's elbows in one shape now, and the next minute in a form most dissimilar."

"[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine. … Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."

"We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves."

"Our family are an alternate stratification of poetry and mathematics."

"Circumstances have been such, that I have lived almost entirely secluded for some time. Those who are much in earnest and with single minds devoted to any great object in life, must find this occasionally inevitable.... You will wonder at having heard nothing from me; but you have experience and candour enough to perceive and know that God has not given to us (in this state of existence) more than very limited powers of expression of one's ideas and feelings... I shall be very desirous of again seeing you. You know what that means from me, and that it is no form, but the simple expression and result of the respect and attraction I feel for a mind that ventures to read direct in God's own book, and not merely thro' man's translation of that same vast and mighty work."

"Perhaps you have felt already, from the tone of my letter, that I am more than ever now the bride of science. Religion to me is science, and science is religion. In that deeply-felt truth lies the secret of my intense devotion to the reading of God's natural works. It is reading Him. His will — His intelligence; and this again is learning to obey and to follow (to the best of our power) that will! For he who reads, who interprets the Divinity with a true and simple heart, then obeys and submits in acts and feelings as by an impupulse and instinct. He can't help doing so. At least, it appears so to me."

"When I behold the scientific and so-called philosophers full of selfish feelings, and of a tenency to war against circumstances and Providence, I say to myself: They are not true priests, they are but half prophets — if not absolutely false ones. They have read the great page simply with the physical eye, and with none of the spirit within. The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole... That God is one, and that all the works and the feelings He has called into existence are ONE; this is a truth (a biblical and scriptural truth too) not in my opinion developed to the apprehension of most people in its really deep and unfanthomable meaning. There is too much tendency to making separate and independent bundles of both the physical and the moral facts of the universe. Whereas, all and everything is naturally related and interconnected. A volume could I write you on this subject."

"With all my wiry power and strength, I am prone at times to bodily sufferings, connected chiefly with the digestive organs, of no common degree or king. I do not regret the sufferings and peculiaties of my physical constitution. They have taught me, and continue to teach me, that which I think nothing else could have developed. It is a force and control put upon me by Providence which I must obey. And the effects of this continual disciple of facts are mighty. They tame the in the best sense of that word, and they fan into existence a pure, bright, holy, unselfish flame within that sheds cheerfulness and light on many. — Ever yours truly. "A. A. Lovelace.""

"[...] engine is the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity."

"All but one of the programs cited in her notes had been prepared by Babbage from three to seven years earlier. The exception was prepared by Babbage for her, although she did detect a 'bug' in it. Not only is there no evidence that Ada ever prepared a program for the Analytical Engine, but her correspondence with Babbage shows that she did not have the knowledge to do so."

"A large, coarse-skinned young woman but with something of my friend's features, particularly the mouth."

"The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with. This it is calculated to effect primarily and chiefly of course, through its executive faculties; but it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself in another manner. For, in so distributing and combining the truths and the formulæ of analysis, that they may become most easily and rapidly amenable to the mechanical combinations of the engine, the relations and the nature of many subjects in that science are necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated."

"(6) Lady Lovelace's ObjectionOur most detailed information of Babbage's Analytical Engine comes from a memoir by Lady Lovelace. In it she states, “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform” (her italics). This statement is quoted by Hartree (p. 70)... The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false."

"I have a strongly held opinion about Transgaming and WineX. I feel that Transgaming is a company made up of good people with good intentions, but I believe that they are wrong. I feel that emulation will do far more harm than good in the long term for Linux. In the short-term it is a win; in the long term, I believe emulation is sacrificing the future for the present. Linux can stand on its own two feet. It is solid and strong, and does not need to cling to the leftovers of Windows."

"I wasn't a fan of the gameplay in Postal 2, I loved the message that the company was trying to put out. Because you can play Postal 2 in the most violent and graphic way, but you can also play it without hurting a single person. I don't know anyone who's played it like that, but I like that the people who made Postal are saying you can get through this game without any violence."

"If they come to us, we do all of the work and take all of the risk. They have no financial exposure. Making the client themselves is always risky. However you cannot look at it in terms of money only. When a game is ported to a second platform, it almost always exposes bugs and problems that would otherwise have been missed, as the developers have to re-work portions of the game. This will mean that creating a Linux version will increase the stability of the Windows version, and increase the quality of their core product, a fact that in itself may justify the cost of a Linux port."

"The biggest challenges, technically, are 3D graphics and Networking. Network interoperability between Linux and Windows will rarely happen, because companies often use the proprietary Directplay library which cannot be ported over to Linux. We have created a multiplatform alternative, called Grapple, and we hope that over time, some Windows developers may pick this up to use in their titles, allowing cross platform multiplayer."

"Things like a spreadsheet and graphics package mean that people can use their computer for working. Games mean that people can ENJOY their computer. If all you have is productivity apps, then Linux will be a fine OS for work, but who is going to really want it around in the home if all they can do on it is work."

"Most games that we are approached with are too close to existing open source games for us to publish... we have no real desire to compete with open source products."

"The most popular games for Linux are evenly split. First person shooters such as Quake 3 and UT2K3 sell more copies to start with, but they trail off when the next graphics leap happens. Strategy games like Alpha Centauri still sell well for Linux, they dont sell as fast, but they last a whole lot longer. Kind of like the hare and the tortoise"

"I personally believe open source is most important is in the operating system and in file formats. As long as those two things remain open source you can never have a monopoly. No company can dominate by any means except a superior product, and that puts the choice back into the hands of the public."

"Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works."

"A computer is a state machine. Threads are for people who can't program state machines."

"Stealing is OK as long as it's done well."

"Twenty-eight years ago, I created my first game on an Apple II in my bedroom closet at a time when the interactive entertainment industry was taking its first baby steps. Today the games business has grown to a multi-billion dollar industry and we are just at the tip of the iceberg. I'm thrilled to have been a part of this successful journey and I'm extremely honored by the Academy's Hall of Fame induction."