Asperger's manifests very differently depending on the individual, and does not necessarily block the ability to connect strongly. On average, it may be more difficult for an individual with Asperger's to connect strongly because they are not in tune with the majority of the population, but that's more a function of having trouble finding like-minded individuals than of not being able to connect.
The idea that Aspie individuals are paragons of logic and reason is misguided. The article even mentions individuals with Asperger's having stronger feelings, and there are theories that Asperger's individuals are actually more sensitive in general to everything, resulting in overstimulation both physically and emotionally very quickly. A world of Asperger's individuals does not mean a world of perfectly rational individuals.
I absolutely agree that Asperger's does not make an individual broken or inherently "worse" that others, and that the idea of "fixing" an Aspie through medical intervention is antiquated and harmful at worst, but I don't believe that an world full of Asperger's individuals would be logical, reasonable, or in any way inherent "better" than our current world. It would make the world different - not worse, not better - the same as how it makes the mind of an affected individual.
Based on my limited interactions with people diagnosed on the spectrum, I agree that any notion that such individuals are inherently "more logical" is incorrect and unrepresentative.
Whether a person is logical or not is orthogonal to their position on the autism spectrum. It is useful to delineate between "logic" and "reason" here: reason is arriving at appropriate conclusions given the state of the world, and logic is the means by which we accomplish this. Using logic relies entirely on the premises chosen and assumptions made, which is where the "human element" comes into play. Many people, regardless of psychiatric diagnosis, are quite adept at cherry-picking premises such that, through careful selective ignorance, they arrive at pre-determined conclusions.
So if I had to make a very politically incorrect and anecdotal hypothetical assertion, I'd say that in my experience people on the autism spectrum indeed are more rigorously "logical" but they can also be correspondingly irrational; where someone not on the spectrum might be fine with a few measures of cognitive dissonance, someone on the spectrum might construct a labyrinthine fortress of logic to prevent any sort of uncomfortable or distasteful conclusions, and to reassure themselves that the world conforms to their notions of justice.
This is neither good nor bad, or any kind of judgment. Just supporting the parent comment with anecdata.
"The idea that Aspie individuals are paragons of logic and reason is misguided."
I certainly agree with this; I was simply offering a positive take on some of the "hyperlogical" behaviors described in the article and elsewhere, e.g. building a snowman inside because it's too cold outside.
The PM role is not at all about finance or marketing. PMs at Microsoft are expected to be technically competent and depending where they're stationed, may regularly contribute code. Julie Larson-Green is noted for her expertise in UI/UX. If anything, this exemplifies a shift to focusing on the end-user.
> "PMs at Microsoft are expected to be technically competent"
That has most certainly not been my experience with Microsoft PMs when I lived in Seattle. There were more than a few who had zero experience writing code in-industry, and many who I wouldn't trust with a product at all.
My experiences with PMs were universally good; these are people who would look at ideas in-the-baking and find ways to improve them, run interference for a number of projects, put together decision-guiding research, and generally somehow manage to bring things together.
There are bad apples in every bunch. The reason MSFT has so many PMs is not that they are under-competent; I suspect it has a lot more to do with the fact that it is a large organization that is often unable to silo teams from each other effectively.
As a former PM, I can confirm that many of them are not technically competent. I would say a good number of my colleagues did not have the engineering rigor to get a good mark in any CS class with a heavy engineering/programming component.
So your experience in OSD translates across a company of 90k+ people? Seems legit. I have met some PMs that probably couldn't write a line of shipping code too, I have also met some highly competent ones. I guess, like all things involving large numbers, there is a distribution, not all fall in the tail.
Hah, as a former OSD PM, I found the opposite true. Everyone's experience at Microsoft can be really different though; the company is huge and each division itself is enormous.
There's technically competent and then there's 'can sustain working as a developer for an indefinite length of time.' Some people are just not a good fit for being a developer. The worst though are people that have given it up but still try to maintain the cred.
I'm curious what the actual stats are with regards to that theory. More than a few historic immigration waves were prompted because things were so bad "back home" - for a variety of reasons including social instability - that the fear of setting out to a new place was far less than the fear of remaining. I'm not sure if that was so much an issue of individual freedom.
Examples off the top of my head would be the rise of the communist party in China and the Irish potato famine.
However, the first wave of Europeans colonists to come the US definitely did value individual freedoms over stability. I don't know how strong their influence is on the population itself, but their views are definitely reflected in the laws and historical document (e.g. The Constitution).
The short answer is that the data doesn't support generalizing the motives of American immigrants over 300 years from very diverse social, political, and economic conditions. There is no suitable generalization. The same goes for attempting to describe America's current cultural values as a single group.
Longer answer requires the gradiated initial cultural values held by every significant immigrant group (puritans, slaves, Irish, Chinese... significant defined by impact, population, whathaveyou), determining how resilient those values were when thrown into America's melting pots (assimilated? insular?), and to what extent they influenced the groups around them over time. That's a career question, though - not a HN comment that I'm underequipped to answer.
Even in the case of migration to avoid a bad situation, it's still a small minority that left whatever the old place was. The vast majority stayed there, so you've still got a tiny self-selecting population of immigrants.
I'm going to diverge a moment here as say that it's incredibly difficult to prevent big budget software from leaking. When you have hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals involved in the process, some of which who inevitably just won't care about the franchise or value "internet" cred more than keeping the game a secret, you're in a hard place. Putting more internal controls in can drastically slow things down and get in people's ways, and it can build ire when people feel like they're being treated like irresponsible children instead of employees. Then once you start gearing up CD production... You've introduced thousands of underpaid laborers who probably don't really care about your franchise.
Back on point, you can absolutely blame people for playing the game and then maliciously attempting to spoil the ending for others. Pirating is not a passive action. Some people believe information wants to be free, but since my pay is dependent on information/software as currency, I'm not about to subscribe to that ideology. Since I like the products that have come about from people willing to pay for information, I'm not going to evade paying the creators.
Opt-in for the user, but not opt-in for the people around them. I don't get to choose to not be recorded. Compounded with modern law stating if you're in public, you can be legally recorded, and that it's already difficult enough as is to explain to people you'd rather they not tag you as being at a location or to take photos and instantly upload them... It's really worrisome. The only reason it isn't is because it's not popular.
If you "have nothing to hide", it's not a big deal. If you're fighting for custody of your child, transgender, gay, a targeted minority, visit a psychologist regularly, or even just happen to do a few things one day that could be misconstrued, all of a sudden, the potential of it taking off becomes a very big deal - sometimes much more so than current privacy issues.
In that respect it's no different from the hundreds of security cameras most of us pass by each day. If you're doing something in the presence of someone else's view, and you know they're pointing a camera of any type at you, it's hard to argue you have an expectation of privacy.
It's really hard to point at Glass and say it's materially different from the broad array of recording devices already out there. If you're someone trying to avoid being recorded, those are a much bigger problem - they're pervasive, generally have better viewpoints (can see more total area) and often have built-in illumination as well.
I'm suspicious of the game being UT2k4. It's a fast game with a steep learning curve that's long past its glory days - meaning a small player base. To someone unfamiliar with the game, even the AI that came in the box could be mistaken as human. To an experienced player, it'll be easy to identify newbie-ish patterns and see where the bots are straying from typical new-player psychology once they start toying with them. If the bot is acting experienced... Even the movement during combat in the game is complex, and there are a ton of areas an AI could trip up in.
If the judges were at a competitive level, colour me impressed - but if it was their first time, or even their first week, I'm a little more skeptical. I don't think a novice player would understand the game well enough to judge well. It would be like attempting a traditional Turing test with humans who can't speak English fluently and were raised in a non-English culture: impressive, but no indicator of bots reaching human-like levels.
I use to play UT/CS competitively and worked for a startup that licensed our technology to id Software and Riot Games / League of Legends a long time ago.
UT2k4 was an amazing FPS game with a really steep learning curve. It's one of the only FPS games that I refer to as the "basketball" of online gaming. The diversity of movement, weapon tactics, and map control meant a seasoned gamer could really define their own style. But it also meant few people ever transitioned from public servers into competitive play because 1 pro could easily go Godlike and demolish an entire server, making it extremely frustrating and unexciting for casual gamers.
That being said, watching the videos included in this article signaled that these judges had no experience with UT2k4.
In a match with professional gamers, it wouldn't surprise me if those judges thought WE were the bots. 50%+ accuracy was not uncommon with prim shock or lightening gun.
Can't agree more with you. Just watched the video - definitely first-timers. Combine accuracy with (typical competitive) prediction of spawns and enemy movement - especially of novices - it would definitely appear to the uninitiated that there was a bot using autoaim and possibly hacks instead of a person - that is if they even survived long enough to see their opponent.
> If the judges were at a competitive level, colour me impressed - but if it was their first time, or even their first week, I'm a little more skeptical.
There's a pretty broad area between those two extremes - I'm nowhere near competitive level, but I played (very casually, mainly with friends rather than online) a few hours a week for years, and I definitely understand the game well and can identify good and bad plays, and humans and bots.
I do thoroughly agree, though, that this is nowhere near the level of a true Turing test - but I thought it was still quite interesting!
--
Aside: I think these days with the rise of game spectating and commentary and analysis of matches, more and more non-competitive players are gaining deeper understanding of games they like even if they couldn't necessarily pull it all off themselves.
For a more modern game like Starcraft II for example I think you could find a very large number of non-competitive players that could reliably identify bots from humans.
Actually, it's even worse than that - the judges weren't spectators, they were players, so they'd probably be too busy dodging to look closely at what the bots were doing.
I'm a former and returning Microsoft intern, who interviewed in her freshman year. I strongly suspect I got the interview as a result of being female and facing discrimination early on (but not because I was female and they wanted to hire someone of my gender).
Long story short, I'm used to being dismissed or looked over by my male peers - often in CS, but also in the hobbies I've taken up over the years. I found the only way to be listened to or respected was that I had to prove myself very quickly to anyone I had to work with. I got my interview after talking to a Microsoft dev doing recruitment for 10 minutes about a project I worked on after identifying he had a personal interest in that field. He didn't even look at my resume, but I saw him star it when I gave it at the end of our chat.
I would never have been able to do that if I wasn't used to being over-looked. I can signal that I'm competent and easily discuss projects or tech interests within a couple minutes of meeting someone because in the past few years, I've learned that when I neglect to do that, I'm going to get ignored. Because of that, I have an incredibly advantage in that many of my male peers CAN'T do that, simply because they've never had to until it came time to search for a job.
FWIW, one of the biggest reasons I'm returning to Microsoft is that it's one of the few places I've ever felt like I was respected off the bat regardless of age or gender. I couldn't imagine working with most of my peers back in school because of the lack of respect. There are bad apples everywhere, and certain teams are definitely geared towards older folk - but there are highschool kids doing internships there, in some very coveted areas. The guy was out of line, but he's definitely the exception and not the norm.
My family uses Facebook heavily to stay in contact since we tend to be in different countries, along with Skype and email. They moved to this long after the initial craze because Facebook offered some really compelling advantages.
For my tech-savvy parents and non-tech-savvy grandparents, it provides an easy way to share/view photos. Using email/IM means having to come up with some sort of filing system for photos, whereas Facebook just provides it, along with captions which can be useful for travel albums.
It's a broadcast system with less urgency than email. If there's some photos or a story from daily life you want to share, emails like that will get lost in an overload of tasks and requests. IMs are easy to ignore and hard to dig up. Facebook provides a way to find out that hey, something interesting happened, and when I get around to it I can browse what's up with people I care about.
Not really... Even if the code is difficult to patch, speech/audio recognition doesn't advance much when an attacker figures out how to remove the (non-random) noise added by a machine over the sound file. Actual speech recognition relies on the ability to filter out background noise - which is a lot more complex/random - added by surroundings, not a machine.
It's very difficult to generate some sort of noise via algorithm that a) humans can filter out and b) can't be removed by some algorithm. As a result, audio captchas are a huge vulnerability and the weakest link in almost any captcha system, although you can't get rid of them by law.
Hypotheticals aside, the code was easy to patch - note the footnote:
> In the hours before our presentation/release, Google pushed a new version of reCAPTCHA which fully nerfs our attack.
Could one take real recorded noise and add that rather than noise generated via algorithm? Wouldn't that force attackers to solve a real problem (removing background noise from an speech sample)?
It's not really solving the "real" problem... If I'm just mashing two audio files together, that's going to be different than someone talking in the middle of a train platform and there will likely be algorithmicly-determinable difference from the artificially generated words and the naturally generated noise.
All of this aside, removing background noise is not a huge issue anymore. We have pretty decent noise-cancellation technology. Speech recognition - the other big component - has advanced a lot in recent times and is actually pretty good, although not for every company/product.
Even if it would be helpful, you'd have to record an incredible amount of noise in the first place, seeing as you're getting millions of hits a day and if you have a small sample set, the attackers will just figure out the solutions to that sample set and be done.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I am saying it's probably not worth it at this point. Captchas (in their traditional forms) don't make sense as a long-term strategy anyways.
If the attacker manages to obtain all the random noise, they could index every window in the noise in a k-d-tree and perform an efficient nearest neighbour search for the exact background from the CAPTCHA audio, and then simply subtract the background, giving perfect segmentation in O(log(N)) asymptotic average time complexity for N windows (at 64kHz and 2000 hours of audio, N=460800000, log N = 19.95).
If you look at the latest Windows Phones (seriously, Apple and Android have virtually identical interfaces - the odd one out is Microsoft) and Windows 8 (yeah, it isn't on the market yet, but they released the beta), that's clearly not true. There was the Ribbon too in Office, which was radical enough a lot of users complained during release. They released the Surface and Surface 2.0 as well, though I don't know how strong their market is. Bing has done some interesting things, particularly with video search and maps. I've just gone through 5/6 divisions, 5/7 if you include Skype.
All of this aside, Microsoft hasn't needed to innovate to the degree of the other big players for a while. Apple needed to innovate in order to secure some set of markets in order to survive. Google wants to innovate since it needs to gather more data to boost its ad business. Amazon wants to be the retailer for everything, and anyone selling anything else (e-books, music, movies - notably) cuts into their profits, so naturally they want to cut into those markets first. Microsoft... had Windows and Office, no real issues there until Apple started to edge in on the consumer market alongside non-PC devices. Even prior to that, Vista was an attempt at innovation that resulted in major screw-up for a ton of reasons, Windows 7 was the fix. Is it really any surprise we're only seeing real innovation (in Windows) now?
The idea that Aspie individuals are paragons of logic and reason is misguided. The article even mentions individuals with Asperger's having stronger feelings, and there are theories that Asperger's individuals are actually more sensitive in general to everything, resulting in overstimulation both physically and emotionally very quickly. A world of Asperger's individuals does not mean a world of perfectly rational individuals.
I absolutely agree that Asperger's does not make an individual broken or inherently "worse" that others, and that the idea of "fixing" an Aspie through medical intervention is antiquated and harmful at worst, but I don't believe that an world full of Asperger's individuals would be logical, reasonable, or in any way inherent "better" than our current world. It would make the world different - not worse, not better - the same as how it makes the mind of an affected individual.