The simplest way to describe the attitude of software engineers and companies to linguistic interfacing with their customers would be to say that they do not give a monkey's fart about such matters. Not only do they never have a linguist check the use of language in the programs they expect us to use (that'll be the day), they don't have anybody at all checking it.

If they program interfaces this carelessly, just how likely is it that robots are going to respect the Three Laws of Robotics?

Not just software engineers.

This is just so astonishingly cool and Jetson-like.

Sunk costs rears its ugly head again:

Little Boy cost, well, a bomb. It seemed a shame after all that effort not to drop on somebody.

Can't say I am too surprised. But I wish I were.

Effectively, Google’s autocomplete function is working as my “desktop dashboard,” a flow of messages from the deep space of the Google data sphere.

Just by accident found this piece on transcribing podcasts with IBM's Watson. I wonder how it compares with SwiftScribe? Need to give it a try, because as I attempt more complex stories it certainly helps to have a bit of text in addition to notes and markers on the audio.

Interesting piece on, among other things, Jacob Rees-Mogg

 [H]e’s authentic all right, but that will never make him a populist hero — because he’s not faking it.

I suppose things really have come to this.

[T]he sort of dining rooms that tend to do better on the World’s Top 50 Restaurants list than they do in the Michelin guide; the kitchens where the artistic imperatives of the chef tend to outweigh any questions of what a customer might want to eat; the meals after which a cynical diner, confronted with 20-plus courses of kelp, hemp and tree shoots, makes jokes about stopping for tacos on the way home.

Yeah. No.