Singularity

Black Hole of Doom

There's an idea kicking around somewhere out there in the lun-i-sphere that somehow all the computers connected to the internet are going to join together to become self aware, i.e. intelligent, and they're calling this idea 'singularity'.

Remember a week or two ago when there was a big fuss about the 'Russians' supposedly hacking into ten of the biggest banks in the USA and how it was an act of war or state sponsored terrorism?

Last night we tried to watch Blue Ruin and Netflix failed to deliver. This was our second attempt. We tried last weekend and the same thing happened. We get about five or ten minutes into the show and a Loading... message comes on the screen and never goes away. Okay, 'never' might be putting it a little strong. No amount of button pushing would convince it to proceed.

Today I tried to contact Netflix on the web to inform (bitch) about this problem and I'm getting mysterious web errors. So I call (using a telephone) and in short order I'm connected to a real person (by 'short order' I mean less than two minutes). The nice lady I am talking to is having trouble with her computer system. It's being very slow and I can hear her muttering under her breath. I enjoyed it, made her seem more like a real person, not some soulless corporate drone. (As always, your mileage may vary, but in this case, if it does, you are wrong.)

While I am typing this message Blogger keeps flashing little pink warning messages at the top of the screen telling me it's having problems.

Thor VS Giants

Last week Coding Game* suffered a server crash and they lost some user files. Now these are some pretty savvy computer dudes and they suffered a server crash? How embarrassing. They seem to have recovered. Matter of fact, if they hadn't told me about it I would not have even noticed.

Just now Blogger put this message up.

We won't even talk about all the pictures of mine that Blogger has lost. Several posts to the help forum have elicited only idiotic responses. I think it happened because I signed up for Google Plus once upon a time, didn't like what it did to Picasa, so I reverted to ordinary Google, and all this plussing and minusing confused Blogger. That's what I get for not following the herd. Buck the powers that be and they will squash you flat and not even notice.

So the Singularity might be coming, it just won't be the one the lunatic fringe is praying for. It will be more like a physic's singularity where everything just stops because all the electrons have gotten sucked into a virtual black hole.

Update: Remember Moore's law? About how computers will double in processing power every two years? How about the corollary? Ever heard this one,  also from Gordon Moore:

"It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens"

P.S. I forgot to mention that HBOGO quit working on my ROKU box a couple of weeks ago. In order to get it going we had to find our logon ID and password for Frontier.com, which was kind of difficult because apparently we had never set up an on-line account, or more likely Frontier had lost it, which isn't too surprising since they seem to think that there is a phone number connected to my account, which there isn't. What's more all of the phone numbers they think are mine are wrong, except the one they used to call, which they don't seem to be able to find anymore. Color me severely impressed that their service works at all.

*Re: Coding Game - I've worked my way through all of the Easy puzzles and most of the Medium ones. Recently I've started working on some of the Hard ones and this week I ran into one (Thor Versus the Giants) that has me stumped. This is not an unusual pattern. All of these programming puzzles start off very easy, then gradually get harder, and then at the end add an element completely invalidates the approach you've been taking so far and requires a major rework of your code. But always before I knew how to deal with it. This time it's really like shooting in the dark. I have an idea on how it might be attacked, but it requires more fussing (more code and more execution time, and worst of all, more hand tuning) than I am comfortable with. It all comes down to what one sentence in the description of the problem means. Maybe that's why it is classified as Hard. Bah and humbug. That means I will have to work to solve it.