Speak, Memory: For many users, interacting with the bot had a therapeutic effect. The tone of their chats is often confessional; one user messaged the bot repeatedly about a difficult time he was having at work. He sent it lengthy messages describing his problems and how they had affected him emotionally. “I wish you were here,” he said. It seemed to Kuyda that people were more honest when conversing with the dead. She had been shaken by some of the criticism that the Roman bot had received. But hundreds of people tried it at least once, and reading the logs made her feel better.
It turned out that the primary purpose of the bot had not been to talk but to listen.
Dennis Ritchie, Father of C and Co-Developer of Unix, DiesBy creating C, Ritchie gave birth to the concept of open systems. C was developed so they could port Unix to any computer, and so that programs written on one platform (and the skills used to develop them) could be easily transferred to another.
In that way, Ritchie has shaped our world in much more fundamental ways than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates have. What sets him apart from them is that he did it all not in a quest for wealth or fame, but just out of intellectual curiosity.
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