scottlegrand2

I'm going to disagree here. I have enough understanding of AI to have built a deep learning framework from first principles. That deep learning framework makes a pile of money for Amazon to this day.

That I know how it works because I wrote the thing doesn't take away from the miracle that it makes that kind of money for doing complicated but not all that complicated stuff.

When I look at generative adversarial networks and the recent attention-based language models I am similarly amazed at what they can do.

But I am also 100% aware of their limitations and I think the hype that they are near-term AGI technology is the real magical thinking.

It's mostly magical thinking because it's so very unlikely, but in the odd event of a mass shooter this would come in handy.

Sez you...

https://youtu.be/ZqCOeECBfR8

Apparently Paul Allen's Experience Music Project has been a secret weapon against malevolent AIs all along!

Or if you're no fun, it's an electromagnetic pulse.

I'd be more interested in the immediate application of improving cochlear implant technology with these threads. But then I'm deaf in one ear so I'm biased.

I know too many guys intensely personal about their six-figure jalopies. They don't seem particularly healthy to me but maybe I'm missing something...

I'll just drop this here...

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-think-we-should-star...

I'm not poor and I think crickets are tasty. I've had them fried I've had them as flour and I've had them on pizza. All they really need is their Impossible Burger moment to go viral because it's not the taste it's the idea of eating bugs that's unattractive here.

Seems to me like a perfect opportunity for a simple neural network or machine learning model to predict the next song to play based on the last k songs having been trained on a bunch of existing playlists.

Cavorting in SF, bottling wine, or occasionally taking classic muscle cars out for a spin apparently.

The best way I have seen to handle this was by a former manager who made sure we ate lunch together most days as a team. It wasn't mandatory, but it was informally expected to happen. That team had zero communication problems.

Seems ludicrous to ban vaping without banning smoking. I wouldn't ban either personally, but if you're going to ban one...

In my opinion you can just limit yourself to all the episodes written by Darin Morgan if only because Alex Trebek.

I suspect you and I need to agree to disagree here. You seem to believe the stock market is strongly efficient. Whereas I think it is weakly efficient. We're not going to change each other's minds but I stick to my belief that you could ruin Mark Zuckerberg's day for quite a while selling off the stock. Failing that, donate money to a political candidate like Elizabeth Warren that will ruin his day for you.

If one manages to drop the value of Facebook stock I believe very strongly it will affect him personally until the stock goes back up.

I have yet to meet the CEO of a big tech company who hasn't invested quite a bit of ego in the success of their company. beyond that, the annoying and persistent questions from market analysts and from his own employees will keep him quite busy. To give Mark Zuckerberg a point, I believe he still shows up for that Friday meeting with his employees.

But I will grant that it would be hard to start a sell-off like this for the same reasons that there are a lot of people who love to yell at their TV whilst listening to their favorite political commentator deliver their daily two minute hate yet a lot of them don't bother to vote.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/technology/facebook-mark-...

Great, then clearly your own personal benefit from owning Facebook stock outweighs any of your dignified moral outrage at Zuckerberg's conduct? I suspect that's why big tobacco is still around as well.

I have been at multiple big tech companies when the stock dropped 20% or more. These events trigger a flurry of media coverage by analysts declaring that said big tech company's reign is over and soon everything will turn to crap (which it doesn't).

But this causes immediate concern among the employees because this directly affects their annual RSU compensation and it causes concern in the leadership because it makes them look bad and they tend to be the sorts that need to look good.

IMO don't underestimate what coordinated dumping of Facebook stock could achieve here. It does seem like a bit of a prisoner's dilemma though. After the initial price drop, the stock will recover because Facebook isn't going away anytime soon. So from a pure greed standpoint, don't sell. But that's not what this is about, is it?

It's a lot easier to liquidate one's stock in a company like Facebook than it is to find another position in the valley. And I suspect that a lot of people are leaving Facebook over its conduct and they will continue to do so but some are going to stay. What Facebook is doing isn't any worse than what the tobacco companies did and the tobacco companies are all still here. I don't know anyone who brags about working for them though.

IMO quitting in a huff over issues like this causes damage to one's career that one really ought to avoid. I left my previous gig over cultural issues and I nearly got labeled a job hopper for doing so. I'd suggest taking the long view and let's see what happens with all the tech companies that are now doing morally questionable things.

It feels like there's been a phase transition in mood in the valley in the past 2 years.

So if they dumped all their Facebook stock I wonder how that would affect Zuck? I don't like what Facebook is doing right now either, but I also don't own any Facebook stock. if they choose to continue owning the stock despite his behavior, then aren't they complicit here?

I've also floated the notion that if one started putting Zuckerberg deepfake videos on Facebook, I think the thin-skinned tyrant (I mean this is the guy who supposedly threatened employees with a samurai sword in the early days) would suddenly do an about-face about promoting such content.

This seems unnecessarily pessimistic. I mean they're still funding amazingly dumb ideas like pogo sticks as a service right now. One day, a startup will resist getting acqui-hired just like Google resisted getting acqui-hired by Yahoo and it will disrupt its incumbent. But I'm guessing it won't be a company focused on pogo sticks as a service. As for the harder and more beneficial challenges out there, the Silicon Valley MVP model never worked for them in the first place because they are hard and they take time. I'm not seeing the vision to go after those problems emerging in any serious way yet.

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/05/31/swedish-startup...

And yet no efforts at fecal recognition...

I prefer what you may have written up before you got yourself a lawyer. and especially the comments from fellow cyclists on your behavior that day...

https://sfist.com/2012/04/05/cyclist_who_struck_pedestrian_a...

You're right it shouldn't be a death sentence but neither should pointing a gun at your head with only one bullet in it and pulling the trigger. They're both different versions of the same game to me. I think people who run these traffic signals do not realize how much danger they are in and I don't think such people would particularly choose to play Russian roulette. And yet there they are running red lights and stop signs.

In the split second that my car is in an intersection and and such a person comes barreling through, the best I can do is slam on my brakes and hope for the best. I'm not even going to try to get out of the way because that could only make things worse by hitting another car or pedestrians who had nothing to do with the situation. If I had infinite time to respond I might be able to think this through, but we are talking less than a second of reaction time here. Really? This is worth it to you?

As much as I am in favor of cyclists and I am in favor of bike paths and every other variant thereof I do not get the incentive to save 30 to 60 seconds dodging a traffic signal versus the cost of what happens if it all goes wrong and I don't think I ever will.

Downvote this at will. This thread had me on the verge of deleting my Hacker News account but then I found out you can't do that. So I am posting this final response to say that this is what I think and if someone won't hire me because I think this way I probably don't want to work for them.

As for that paramedic, he didn't start that way. There used to be this particularly obnoxious cyclist in his town that made a habit of flying through intersections and taking his hands off the handlebars and giving the fingers to all the cars he cut in front of. One day he got hit and broke his leg cursing the driver that hit him the whole time. Said paramedic was the one who took him to the hospital knowing exactly who he was and what he had been up to. I still think the guy was a Darwin award in the making and he probably died later on in life if he continued doing crap like this. If that makes me a despicable human being then I am a despicable human being.

It's not the cyclist's fault when he/she runs a stop sign or a traffic light? Explain? It would certainly be my fault if I did that in the car.

I think you ought to compare a driver running a red light vs a cyclist running a red light to make this point. I might even agree with you, but speeding is conceivably even safer than going the speed limit if everyone else around you is doing the same thing no matter what the law says.

Running traffic signals on the other hand is just plain stupid and self-centered no matter what you're piloting at the time.

Or SF...

https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Bicyclist-sentenced-for...

I find watching all of the machine learning courses that are posted to YouTube to be a good way to keep up and to get insight into the thinking of the authors of recent papers. It has more or less become my morning ritual to watch one lecture a day.

That said, the past few weeks have been an absolute tsunami of potentially groundbreaking papers. And it is hard to keep up with The cutting edge.

What happens to this rift if it's operating on an equation with a derivative such as the gradient of a neural network?

I'm a huge fan of deterministic computation, but we seem to be doing okay without it in deep learning with respect to floating point round off error. Or despite the fact that the computation could be deterministic, the algorithms are written in a way that they are not due to asynchronous accumulation and computation.

Would we just get a different minimum each time we run or would something more pernicious occur?

You are preaching to the choir here. I loved when Micah Posner, one of the chief NIMBYs of Santa Cruz, turned out to be an illegal ADU slumlord. That in my opinion explains a lot about how Santa Cruz really works. Or as I refer to it to outsiders: Mayberry politics by the sea.

Yeah they're already doing that in Santa Cruz and it sucks across the board.

Evidence: I live there and I like to go to open houses just to gloat at how badly people have f*ed up otherwise perfectly workable floor plans to make a little extra cash.

OTOH reducing the cost of in-law unit permits to zero across the board would work wonders.

Then you should have sublet the space to someone who needed it, no?