Five More Lessons about Documentation: A follow-up to Mark Birch’s “Developer Documentation”

Last week’s DevBizOps blog entry (“Developer Documentation: Developers don’t like writing docs, what’s the alternative?“) asked: How programmers can get their answers from documentation, and are there alternatives? As ever Mark’s post advises on questions every developer has to ask in understanding software. Open source or proprietary, documentation is necessary either for using, extending, or changing software. The costs of searching for answers are known to developers and project managers. Empirical literature and decades of research in software comprehension and reverse engineering show that the costs of understanding software are significant. What, then, can be done? We offer five more lessons in addition to Mark’s post, presented as “formulas”:

The Singularity Controversy, Part I

Sapience Technical Report STR 2016-1 Author: Amnon H. Eden ‘The Singularity Controversy, Part I: Lessons Learned and Open Questions: Conclusions from the Battle on the Legitimacy of the Debate‘ informs policy makers on the nature and the merit of the arguments for and against the concerns associated with a potential technological singularity. Part I describes the lessons learned from our investigation of the subject, separating the arguments of merit from the fallacies and misconceptions that confuse the debate and undermine its rational resolution.

Energetics of the Brain and AI

Sapience Technical Report STR 2016-02 Author: Anders Sandberg Does the energy requirements for the human brain give energy constraints that give reason to doubt the feasibility of artificial intelligence? In Energetics of the Brain & AI I review some relevant estimates of brain bioenergetics and analyze some of the methods of estimating brain emulation energy requirements.