I’ll add on to the other responses and tell you that for a lot of people getting old sucks and the thing that sucks worse than getting old is being old. Constant pain. Lipoma pressing against your spine means no matter how you sit or lay you feel uncomfortable. It hurts to take a shit, it’s hard to get all the piss out and even when you so you have to clean up the floor and toilet because it dribbled everywhere. You can’t remember the last time you jerked off and don’t care to try because it started hurting every time you ejaculate more than a decade ago. You can’t stand for more than an hour before your back is on fire forcing you back down to your sitting position which is “only” uncomfortable.
If you are reading this do yourself a favor and take your body’s health seriously right now before it’s too late. Exercise every day, get that 30 pounds of fat you jokingly call your dad bod off before it’s too late, go to the doctor and fucking do what they say instead of nodding and convincing yourself you know better and don’t really need to do that. Oh and brush and floss your damn teeth. The above story doesn’t have to be your story but if you sit at your computer all day everyday and don’t take care of yourself it very much can become your story.
Really disappointing to hear this. The ML revolution is very real and so is the immense value it’s capable of granting us...HOWEVER it’s really only in a narrow category of problems and people don’t want to admit that so they try to shoehorn it into every corner of everything...not too dissimilar from blockchain.
That narrow problem space where ML has become revolutionary is classification problems where the cost of a false positive is marginal. In the industry we frequently refer to it as “professional judgement” and anyone who has ever referred to that statement in the course of their work should be concerned because ML is coming for you. As far as the false positive part of it, we’ll no on bats an eye when a surgeon loses a patient, but we’re unlikely to accept the same from a computer any time soon.
The biggest area where I can think of that this narrow problem space exists to be capitalized on is...search. Not surprising then that Google became a king of ML because to them it was actually a revolutionary leap forward to their core problem.
And just like blockchain, the reason it gets forced into every field is VCs.
"We are going to challenge existing players in $market" gets you nothing, "We are going to disrupt $market with blockchain/ML" gets you a eight-digit seed round.
ML has been used and is being used to significantly advance image processing, video processing, image classification, speech-to-text, natural language understanding, medical imaging interpretation, medical notes and differential diagnosis, warehouse management, shipping and delivery, transportation, networking, agriculture, biomedical research, insurance, law practice (document scanning), journalism, politics (through better polling, targeting, gerrymandering, whatever), probably other things I'm missing.
That list is flag planting of the first order — like a dog claiming territory as a kingdom after a few stray golden showers here and there.
Yes, ML has been applied to all those topics, but to narrow/superficial applications & with limited success (in most of those areas, any how). The applications have also been explored in relatively ad-hoc ways, with little improvement in systematic understanding/knowledge of any of those fields.
Please. The vast majority of the above are fields where ML failed spectacularly.
If you had any idea about medical diagnosis, biomedical research, supply chain optimization, politics and journalism you would know that machine learning is a laughing stock in these fields.
ML had 2 big wins: (image & data) Classification & NLP. It is stupid to not use ML for these problems, but it equally stupid to try to fit ML in fields that it cannot work.
Let's not claim something has failed when it has just begun... Given today's hardware and given that it's a very new topic of research, IMHO the accomplishments are incredible. It's not yet production ready, but that doesn't mean another 10 years of progress won't get it there.
We need to invest in long term R&D to potentially achieve an ML breakthrough in one of the above fields instead of allocating enormous capital to ML unicorn businesses.
But to do so, we need to first openly admit the truth. ML is not working for the wide range the problems it is currently pitched for.
Seconded. Today’s “narrow”applications are quite wide compared to the expert systems of decades ago. I wouldn’t say we are in a second AI winter when cool new applications of DNNs pop up frequently on HN.
My impression about ML is that it shines where "intuition of a master" is needed. That is, for example, the mastery of a "technician painter" who has build an intuition of imitating Van Gogh painting can be achieved through AI.
Any intuitive skill that can be built through hard work and years of experience seems to be within the realms of what AI/ML can learn to do. Separating background from the subjects, guessing the 3D shape of an object from a 2D image etc. Anything that people can master through experience, including stuff like "sensing that there's something fishy but can't tell exactly what" kind of intuition.
I bet that there would be welding machines that can help an amateur to weld like a master by learning and imitating the way a master welder does its job.
In you view, why do you think the society has an issue when a “machine “ makes a decision vs a human? Can you think of a legitimate areas where trust in machine outputs wouldn’t be favoured vs a human?
ML systems will struggle when the question itself is ill-posed.
A human can say “I’ve been instructed to group these data into those categories, but this particular example doesn’t fit into any them.” and then devise a way to handle special cases.
By construction, an ML system can’t. At the end of the day, a classifier needs to assign one of the predefined labels to each example. At best, it might give you a confidence value, or a probability distribution over labels. However, interpreting those is usually outside of the system itself.
I’m a pretty smart guy, or at least I keep getting told that, and I work near HFTs in the finance world. I am also a huge space nerd thanks to a love for things like Star Trek and Star Wars in the 70’s 80’s. I would take a significant pay cut to work for NASA because that work would feel amazing compared to the grind I’ve been in.
I am 100% confident I would not be hirable by NASA, confident enough in that assertion to shut down without trying. I think you may have some bias from your media bubble coloring your perception if you truly believe what you wrote is true.
Does that mean they took an 18 year old and put him back in class with 15 year olds expecting him to stay there for four more years from 19-22? That can’t be right. What does sent him back to the 9th grade mean in this context?
This lists the "maximum age limit to which free education must be offered" which may not be the same as the "maximum age limit to which free education can be offered"
It's possible at age 22 the state is not required to provide him an education, but chooses to do so anyways
Not the OP but it’s not hard to get a charitable interpretation of his point. You know why gun ownership is important because you surround yourself with men holding guns. But while you do that you want to take away my gun? I don’t have a ring of men standing around me, it’s just me between my family and the world.
It’s literally equivalent to Bill Gates telling us how critical the coming ecological crisis is going to be while his family lives in a mansion. It’s okay though because he paid your family to live in a cardboard box so he can claim he’s carbon neutral. When he moves his family into a 300 square foot home so will I and when you put your guns down, you can talk to me about mine.
Ok, fair enough. By surrounding myself with men holding guns - do you mean law enforcement and military? In that case I don't see a disconnect between supporting issuing firearms in a highly regulated way to law enforcement, and not supporting widespread use among a population.
I don't think your Bill Gates analogy makes any sense at all. His work in his foundation, and the expertise he has access to, seems pretty removed from the size of house he chooses to live in. Is your argument that he needs a certain moral justification for warning about climate change? Or that his immense wealth disqualifies him from discussing science?
Secret service is personal protection not law enforcement or military.
BG has plenty of resources and is essentially virtue signalling a lifestyle of carbon neutrality while his actual life is one that would be extremely unsustainable if many other people did the same.
From secretservice.gov (emphasis mine):
"The United States Secret Service is a _federal law enforcement agency_ under the Department of Homeland Security charged with conducting criminal investigations and protecting U.S. political leaders, their families, and visiting heads of state or government."
I haven't heard Bill Gates pushing certain lifestyle choices in regards to climate change, but rather trying to influence policy. Examples to the contrary are welcome.
I very much doubt this is true. I’m sure there are a very large number of FAANG quality engineers all over the eastern US, let alone other countries, that couldn’t or wouldn’t make the move to SV. I would be willing to put money on it being the MAJORITY capable of being hired into those roles couldn’t or wouldn’t move there to take them.
There is no amount of money that would have convinced me to leave Florida. My family and my wife’s family is here. My children’s friends and extended support networks are here. This life is not worth losing for any pay raise. I’m willing to bet a very large number of quality engineer made the same decision I did.
They were director of design! I am not part of that company so it’s possible that director is a joke there but in most companies that’s the highest level prior to the c suite/owners (public company/professional services firms). That would mean she likely had immense autonomy and a large group of direct reports whom themselves had teams of direct reports. Going from that to “just a coder” ie one team member of one team responsible for only their contributions to their current projects.
In nearly every organization that would be a huge demotion WITH a huge pay cut. In this instance because coders are paid so much more than most other professions it’s possible it was a lateral move or even a pay raise! But no question as far as responsibility for the direction of the organization it’s a huge demotion.
> That would mean she likely had immense autonomy and a large group of direct reports whom themselves had teams of direct reports.
As someone who has worked at a variety of companies - this isn't true. It's just a title. I've seen plenty of "director of X" with no direct reports. I don't know how big Stack Overflow's design department is but with only 300 people in the company - I can't imagine it being massive enough to warrant a typical director title you'd see at some truly big corps where a director has 50+ people under them.
Electronics? Didn’t I just read about how the price of coffee is about to spike in the west due to some legislation that will make it harder for them to use slave labor?
I hate to say it because my life is so comfortable but it might just be that comfortable life that is causing the astronomical suffering.
You're absolutely right, unfettered capitalism is at the root of all this. I just wanted to point out that technology is not exempt, seeing as SV-style idealists seem to think technology will solve the world's problems.
If you are reading this do yourself a favor and take your body’s health seriously right now before it’s too late. Exercise every day, get that 30 pounds of fat you jokingly call your dad bod off before it’s too late, go to the doctor and fucking do what they say instead of nodding and convincing yourself you know better and don’t really need to do that. Oh and brush and floss your damn teeth. The above story doesn’t have to be your story but if you sit at your computer all day everyday and don’t take care of yourself it very much can become your story.