I'm really fascinated by the resurgence of some of these old languages. I vaguely understand that the paradigm behind Prolog is quite different compared to oops or functional languages. Can anyone please help me understand where is this really useful? As everything is data oriented these days, is Prolog a good language for doing statistics or ML or scientific computing?
Ohh this is so good to hear. The Macbook pro (Intel) that I've got from my Company is on its last legs. I'm eagerly waiting for an M1 replacement. I'm not too concerned about the libraries but it'd be really nice to have R and Python locally with data related libraries. I do most of my work on AWS instances though.
There is no point defending Apple or Google. Both of them probably collect data. Personally I'd be more comfortable with Apple collecting my data as they don't have an Advertisement based model. They've less incentives to use our data, whereas Google's business is based around that very idea! Apple advocates privacy and has made many features available as part of the IOS to enable very granular level control.
Hahaha.. Thank you. James May is a legend. Even though he is friends with two petrol heads, he owns a Tesla and a Toyota Mirai. He has an open mind towards futuristic technologies. I like watching anything by James May. Seems like a good bloke. For some reason he doesn't like the French! :D
James May must be really happy now. This means the "rozzers" have solved all the existing crimes and are now focusing on petty things like this. James must have gotten his telly back too!
To be honest I have read it online as well. I don't know if it's true. I reckon if the battery is designed to take fast charging all the time, it should be okay. Another thing that affects batteries is weather. In colder climates like Europe you're probably okay. We have had reports of batteries losing half their capacity due to heat in Australia. Those were all Nissan Leafs, which didn't have any active cooling in place. We don't have an extensive supercharger network either. You'll probably be okay in East coast region. Forget about charging your car, in some remote areas you're probably not gonna get petrol either. You can only get diesel. Seems like EU is far ahead in EV adoption than AU.
I don't mind if you downvote my comment. That's perfectly acceptable if you don't like my opinion. I respect that. No harm done there. :) It's true that everything I know about EVs are from personal experience of people I know. Believe it or not I'm happy that coal is on its way out. I wish it happened sooner.
My sister owned a Tesla model 3 in California for 3 years. She had a lot of fun in it and used it as a daily commute. You're right that in most cases a regular person won't have any problems. They had problems with long waiting times at superchargers at charging stations during long weekends and public holidays. Once they literally had to wait for hours just to get a chance to charge it. She did lose some battery capacity and sold it.
Hydrogen takes 4 to 5 minutes to fill up as opposed to 30 to 40 minutes for EV with supercharging. There is no comparison there. Also using a fast charger all the times can damage batteries. I'm not saying Hydrogen cars are practical now. They could be in future. I hope it is.
I can understand why I got downvoted. I might have come across as an EV hater. I'm not one. I do appreciate the technology and acknowledge that it's the future. I was pointing out some of the flaws. I don't argue against the torque figures and everyone knows that EVs have more torque. Even the base model Teslas are faster off the line compared to some of the ICE super cars. I'm hopeful that we generate electricity from more renewable sources than burning coal or gas, which defeats the whole purpose. Long charging times, range anxiety and battery longevity are real issues for customers. I don't know if durability of electric motors for these sort of applications haven been proven yet. Hydrogen based EVs can fix most of these problem. But only if we can create Hydrogen more efficiently.
Most farmers depend on their tractors for their livelihood. I reckon it'll be difficult to convince them to shift to electric ones that costs more and haven't got any long term reliability or efficiency reports. If anything, battery powered cars lose a lot of value as their battery capacities tend to decline over time. Also, unless their farm has heavily invested in solar power, they'd still have to use electricity from the grid. In a country like Australia most electricity is generated from coal. So that's not really helping the environment. The EV industry will only last as long as we don't figure out efficient production and transportation of Hydrogen. This is impressive use of ML though.
Good effort by the author. I was expecting to see a bit more elaborate benchmarks, to be honest. I had a look at M1 Macbook Air yesterday at the local store. Everything felt snappy and the display is brilliant. I'd go for at least 16 gigs of RAM. I'd probably wait for the 2nd iteration as well.
My initial reaction to this was to support the underdog and vilify the big corporation. But then I read her responses online and found it to be extremely unprofessional. And also read her interactions with "Yann Lecun", someone who I respect a lot. The way she attacked Yann, even after his apologies is unacceptable. It's fine to be an SJW but it's not okay to bully others for your beliefs.
Very true indeed. That's why I stopped bothering with Linux. I love Linux and I've used it on many laptops. But not a single one offered me trouble free computing. I can't blame Linux for that. It's amazing what the open source community has achieved. I hate Windows and I can't be productive on it. People who have used Apple's ecosystem know what the phrase "it just works" means. I probably wouldn't spend $899 (Australian dollars) on those headphones. But my wife recently bought a pair of Airpod pros and I've never had an experience like that with any other earphones! They just work. It feels like Apple just knows what we want! I still use a three year old iPhone 8 and it just works with latest OS updates. It hasn't slowed down a bit. Why do I need to buy a POS Android phone with 12 gb of ram when I'm happy. Apple's products actually have that zen feeling. It's hard to describe. And the longevity of their products make them really good value for money.
Thanks for the replies. I did a course on Data Analysis from MIT and used R a bit there. I liked GGplot and RStudio. I don't think Python has anything close to those two. R was a bit harder to learn and I've already forgotten most of it, since I don't use it. I understand that it's based on Scheme and has roots in functional programming. I'm curious about Julia as it's being promoted as one of the fastest languages. I don't see a lot of value in that as I do most of my data intensive (in terabytes) work on pySpark on AWS clusters before I touch Pandas or any other BI tool. I couldn't use Julia on my laptop to do that! I guess sticking to R has more short term benefit as most courses on Statistics are heavily dependent on R. Julia will probably catch up soon.
Is it worth learning Octave/Matlab for ML or Data analysis work? Does anyone use it outside the engineering/scientific research community? Since Andrew Ng teaches his ML course in it, I'm curious. However, I'm wondering if learning Julia or R will be better for my career. I mostly use Python/SQL at work as a data analyst.
If Apple wants or cares about the scientific computing community, they can do a great job. If they can achieve this using an ARM SoC that evolved from a mobile platform, they could very well make a beefier version of it dedicated to ML or graphics intensive workloads. They could easily make enterprise versions of these to power Cloud GPUs that'll easily outperform AWS offerings.
I wonder how they compare the machine learning performance of the integrated GPU. Does anyone know if any of the ML libraries support the new architecture? AFAIK most libraries don't support anything other than nVidia. Any tests on training models? Or is it mostly inference?
I reckon they'd finally have to get R working natively on the new chip. I don't foresee Apple offering the fat binary support in the long term. It's probably only an intermediate solution for the transitional period. Also, does it mean the native version of R will finally work on the iPad? I know Apple doesn't allow compilers but there are a few examples like Pythonista and Apple's own Swift playground. It'd be cool to get R Studio on the iPad.
This is one thing that I hate the most about IOS. I like the polished look and the usability. To be completely honest, I don't need to have a shell running on my phone. I'm not going to write a shell script to automate anything on the tiny screen of my iPhone 8. iSh is an emulator anyway! But, like many other curious users, I don't want to lose the ability to do it. Especially when the hardware is a lot more capable that what the OS supports. I understand that Apple does it for "security" purposes!! They should at least enable this on iPad OS. May be warn the users about the "perils" of "foreign code'! I've been using iSH since the TestFlight days. I played around and downloaded packages. Even downloaded Perl! Now that's gone. I can sideload it using Xcode, but not everyone has a Mac to do it.
That's a really small sample size. Are they allowed to publish a study like this for such a small sample? Does anyone know if there is a minimum threshold size?
I've a rant unrelated to the story! Amazon is different in that way. I'm already paying for the subscription and some movies are available only to rent or purchase. Very different from Netflix. The user interface is pathetic. It pissed me off the most when I get advertisement even after paying for their subscription.
I'd no knowledge of SML until I came across the Programming Languages course by Washington Uni on Coursera. I tried learning Scala first but then never got anywhere. This course was amazing. Unfortunately, didn't have enough time to dedicate to it. Thanks to this post, I'm excited to try again. :)
Nice one. I'm one of those non-CS background person in IT. Although, I'm not a dev, I do write a lot of code in SQL and Python for data analysis. People like me can benefit a lot from understanding algorithms. Especially because we often deal with huge amounts of data. Cheers.
I agree with some of the comments about composabilty of SQL. I've been doing SQL since more than 14 years. Most of it was spent working on ETL projects for Finance and Utilities industries. Even today 80% of the code I write in pySpark is just plain SQL. It's been my bread and butter. However, I spend a lot of time trying to think about a solution in SQL. It's not an easy language to use when it comes to implementing complex transformations. I could write the same logic in Python in a lot less time. I use SQL mostly because it's easily portable across systems and most analysts and to some extent tech managers understand it. I work primarily on proof of concept data products and it does the job for that. Then a real developer takes over and implements it in .Net.