The personal contact is a personal thing. The fact that some people don't know their neighbors, I don't think that technology is at fault. You don't lose anything with technology. You gain other avenues of understanding.

I also administer the Internet Assigned Names Authority, which is the central coordinator for the Internet address space, domain names and Internet protocol conventions essential to the use and operation of the Internet.

A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. Our decision-making is better when we draw on the collective knowledge and unvarnished opinions of the group.

The paradigm for intelligence was logical reasoning, and the idea of what an internal representation would look like was it would be some kind of symbolic structure. That has completely changed with these big neural nets.

What I try to do is factor in how people use computers, what people's problems are, and how these technologies can get applied to those problems. Then I try to direct the various product groups to act on this information.

Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning, and remains so as the system grows and evolves. Today dozens of Google engineers use Python, and we're looking for more people with skills in this language.

Chess programs don't play chess the way humans play chess. We don't really know how humans play chess, but one of the things we do is spot some opportunity on the chess board toward a move to capture the opponent's queen.

When I first got to Apple, which was in '84, the Mac was already out, and 'Newsweek' contacted me and asked me what I thought of the Mac. I said, 'Well, the Mac is the first personal computer good enough to be criticized.'

The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.

I think, in general, it's clear that most bad things come from misunderstanding, and communication is generally the way to resolve misunderstandings - and the Web's a form of communications - so it generally should be good.

The result is - document destruction - we're really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.

I think it killed the performance on a lot of the systems in the Labs for years because everyone had their own copy of it, but it wasn't being shared, and so they wasted huge amounts of memory back when memory was expensive.

Understanding- -like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors--is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling. This great road has no final destination. The journey itself is the reward.

We were developing an innovative Personal Information Manager called Chandler but a couple years ago I took off from that to do a project writing down my memoirs essentially, reminiscing about the development of the Macintosh.

You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.

That was clearly surprising, interesting - a very interesting milestone was when you can pick up a magazine and read an article about some sort of computer related thing and they mention the word internet without explaining it.

Basically, we convert the entire Web into a big equation, with several hundred million variables, which are the page ranks of all the Web pages, and billions of terms, which are the links. And we're able to solve that equation.

Most of the AI goes into figuring which are the important pages you want. And to some extent what your query means, and what you're likely to be after based on your previous behavior and other information it collects about you.

I've been a Fellow in a number of companies: Xerox, Apple, Disney, HP. There are certain similarities because all the Fellows programs were derived from IBM's, which itself was derived from the MIT 'Institute Professor' program.

My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation.

It was immediately clear to me that security was a cross-cutting issue, so rather than dividing the space up in parallel with each of the other areas, I wanted security cut across the areas in addition to having its own content.

If it is to be effective as a tool of thought, a notation must allow convenient expression not only of notions arising directly from a problem, but also of those arising in subsequent analysis, generalization, and specialization.

People don't like what I represent, and they think I'm trying to represent the whole gay community just because I'm a gay person and I make music. By default I'm supposed to represent a whole community? I think that's ridiculous.

Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from Larry Wall, who is my hero actually. I want to make Ruby users free. I want to give them the freedom to choose.

In passing I draw attention to another English expression which often occurs in Dutch texts: "the real world". In Dutch - and I am afraid not in Dutch alone - its usage is almost always a symptom of a violent anti-intellectualism.

The properties of executability and universality associated with programming languages can be combined, in a single language, with the well-known properties of mathematical notation which make it such an effective tool of thought.

There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.

When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.

I've surprised myself and made another career change. I had a great time at Google, met lots of interesting people, but I met some folks outside doing something completely outrageous, and after much anguish decided to leave Google.

Years ago when you?d go to a working group most of the people in the working group would be from universities. Now most of the people are from companies who are building internet products and care what the standards turn out to be.

Years ago when you'd go to a working group most of the people in the working group would be from universities. Now most of the people are from companies who are building internet products and care what the standards turn out to be.

I see a sea of networkers all doing and saying the same things. They look alike, act alike and sound alike when speaking to prospects. If you want to rise above the average, mediocre networker... then you have to think differently.

An unmarried adult who cannot navigate the welfare system has no choice but to work, but a married working parent is constantly evaluating the relative merits of staying home with the kids versus bringing home that second paycheck.

I think people need to understand that deep learning is making a lot of things, behind-the-scenes, much better. Deep learning is already working in Google search, and in image search; it allows you to image search a term like "hug."

If 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself: 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well that would be enough immortality for me.

My own personal preference is that the consumer, the individual person should be protected because individual people and the difference between individual people and the diversity we have between people on the planet is so important.

The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics.

The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built.

I was interested in data mining, which means analyzing large amounts of data, discovering patterns and trends. At the same time, Larry started downloading the Web, which turns out to be the most interesting data you can possibly mine.

Although humankind inherently "desires to know", if open access to, and unlimited development of, knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then common sense demands that we re-examine our reverence for knowledge.

Our examination of computer viruses leads us to the conclusion that they are very close to what we might define as "artificial life." Rather than representing a scientific achievement, this probably represents a flaw in our definition.

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

I had half my family that were farmers, and I was really pretty good at repairing farm equipment. There was certainly a period of time where I would have been happy to do that, just to be a farm equipment repairman in Dalemead, Alberta.

AI's ability to recognize visual categories and images is now pretty close to what human beings can manage, and probably better than a lot of people's, actually. AI can have more knowledge of detailed categories, like animals and so on.

If you don't understand viruses, phishing, and similar threats, you become more susceptible to them. If you don't know how social networks leak information that you thought was private, you're likely to reveal much more than you realize.

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

I think of the company advertising "Thought Processors" or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.

We start from the presumption that our people are talented and want to contribute. We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in myriad unseen ways. Finally, we try to identify those impediments and fix them.

If one ox could not do the job they did not try to grow a bigger ox, but used two oxen. When we need greater computer power, the answer is not to get a bigger computer, but . . .to build systems of computers and operate them in parallel.

TCP works very hard to get the data delivered in order without errors and does retransmissions and recoveries and all that kind of stuff which is exactly what you want in a file transfer because so you don't want any errors in your file.

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