
Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers - ydereky
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/amazons-own-machine-learning-university-now-available-to-all-developers/
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waynecochran
All that machine learning and they still send me reviews for products I
haven’t received.

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have_faith
All that machine learning and they still think I would like to re-buy every
product I've ever purchased.

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snowwrestler
It's worth pointing out that this recommendation behavior is only
unintelligent if it has a downside, i.e. reduces Amazon's profits. Companies
(and their AIs) only care about your business transactions, not whether you're
annoyed.

I'm sure Amazon engineering is well aware of the jokes about their
recommendation engines. But their recommendation engines are not calibrated to
reduce jokes, they are calibrated to increase sales.

If you only know ONE thing about a person, pinging them about that one thing
might still be better than ignoring them, or offering completely random
recommendations. A memorably annoying ad can work better than a boring and
inoffensive one, sometimes.

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coltonv
That's not true, putting a product I've already ordered on my recommended list
instead of something i actually want to buy is costing them money in lost
sales.

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dkokelley
Amazon also doesn't know if this is a single use or consumable item. Some
things have significant marginal utility beyond 1, and others can be consumed
and need to be reordered. (Charging cables, Amazon echo for multiple rooms,
paper goods, etc.)

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FireBeyond
How often do I buy a HP Color LaserJet printer, versus toner cartridges for
it? Or ink for another printer of which it has no evidence that I own)?

Yet I bought a color laser printer and my first two pages of recommendations
are for other variations on the same ("Hey, you bought the wired MFP! Perhaps
you want the wireless too! And I know it's a HP printer, but maybe I can
suggest some Brother toner for you!").

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dkokelley
You're correct that Amazon should be smarter about some recommendations. I'd
say give them the benefit of the doubt in that they may have found an
algorithm that works most of the time (or at least when it comes to their
bottom line), but edge-cases stand out to us.

Still though, there could be a method to the madness. You bought a printer -
are you setting up a home office? Perhaps you want a second printer for
upstairs?

Also, you just bought an HP brand printer. Were you replacing a printer that
just ran out of ink? Maybe THAT printer was a Brother printer. Perhaps this
Brother ink cartridge can extend the life of the hypothetical printer you may
be replacing...

My point is that I can contrive cases where the recommendations might make
sense - not to you, specifically, but to a large enough cross-section of
consumers.

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SOLAR_FIELDS
I don’t doubt there are entire divisions in Amazon that draw statistical
correlations and do A/B testing to figure out what annoying emails work. Just
like any other marketing agency. So you can be sure that any annoying email
you get is the probably the result of years of metrics.

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DEDLINE
I loved AMZN's cloud certifications. Not a Data Scientist / ML Developer, nor
am I trying to be, but I love sitting for these exams as I believe the amount
of study gives you enough credibility to have thoughtful conversations with
specialists.

Looking forward to reading sentiment to see if the curriculum is industry
relevant and worthwhile!

~~~
autotune
We can agree to disagree on that. The certs are useful if your business
requires them for whatever reason but my standard take is any cert that
doesn’t require hands on learning, such as RHCSA/RHCE/CKA/CCIE, tend to be a
pointless exercise in reading comprehension. I say this as someone with
several AWS certs.

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botanrice
What are some certs that you believe are worth investing in (i.e. ones that do
require hands-on learning)?

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autotune
Mentioned in initial comment (probably could have been more clear that those
are the certs that require hands on learning):

RHCSA/RHCE/CKA/CCIE are the first ones that come to mind.

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botanrice
Thanks for your response.

Do you believe that those certifications are solid investments for any IT
professional (from developer and up) or only for those that are looking to
become a SysAdmin/Network Engineer? (forgive me if my terminology isn't spot-
on)

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ConfusedDog
"The digital courses are now available at no charge at
aws.training/machinelearning and you only pay for the services you use in labs
and exams during your training."

Any one has an idea how much it might cost going through the training?

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mooreds
I bet on the order of tens of dollars. I know that when I do my demo of amazon
machine learning (another ML service they offer) it costs about $0.50/demo,
which processes about 25k records.

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barbecue_sauce
I haven't had a lot of time to look at the offering, but can anybody tell me
if these courses have any theory, or are they just for promoting specific AWS
ML services without going into the underlying complexity?

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ghaff
I haven't looked in detail but the description strongly suggests an applied ML
focus (which would be very typical of IT certifications in general). In AI/ML,
there's some overlap between applied AI and research AI--e.g. you're going to
want to know something about statistics in any case--but I'm not sure the
distinction is always appreciated.

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barbecue_sauce
Is there a cert to go along with the courses?

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ghaff
Some online courses or groups of online courses have certs associated with
them. Some don't. Whether those certs are worth anything from a job hunting
perspective is going to depend on the cert and who is looking at them. Very
situationally dependent.

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barbecue_sauce
I was specifically speaking with regard to this offering. AWS has a pretty
mature certification program (though I think was recently outsourced), so I
figured they would have some sort of certification track to motivate people to
consume their educational resources.

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bombledmonk
Ugh, no choice to speed up the videos to 1.5x.

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simonw
Try this:
[https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1047257214052794368](https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1047257214052794368)

~~~
jholman
Bookmarklet for fixed multiplier:

javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22video%22).playbackRate=1.7}();

Bookmarklet for variable multiplier:

javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22video%22).playbackRate=parseFloat(prompt(%22Set%20the%20playback%20rate%22))}();

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talow49
One of the hardest to use online learning platforms ever. I thought it was
going to be a structured course from beginner to expert.

Of course Amazon doesn't make it that easy.

And the Free Digital Training 'enroll now' button does absolutely nothing.
You'll spend most of your time choosing which of the 90 Machine Learning
courses to do.

~~~
applecrazy
You have to enroll, and then add it to your “transcript” to actually start
using the course materials. A bit confusing.

As for the content, most of it seems to be geared towards IT professionals (ie
focusing towards implementation) instead of underlying theory.

~~~
talow49
Yeah I kinda worked this out eventually. But quite unintuitive. Can hardly
call it a "Machine Learning University" imho.

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muhneesh
I'm excited for this - I have stitched together my own courseplan to study
machine learning, but this will be great to workback from, complement, or
supplant in certain cases.

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omega3
Is this something you could share?

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muhneesh
Hi, sorry I missed this message. You probably won't see this, but my plan is
to do the following (you can Google the course names):

1\. Learn math (I majored in history and sociology)

Classes \------------- Linear Algebra: Foundation to Frontiers (UT Austin)
Linear Algebra, MIT OpenCourseware Single-Variable Calculus, MIT
OpenCourseware Multi-Variable Calculus, MIT OpenCourseware Probability Theory,
Stanford CS109

2\. Learn machine learning Machine Learning, Stanford CS229 (taught by Andrew
Ng) Classes @ deeplearning.ai (also taught by Andrew Ng)

3\. Start my own project

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bikle
I enrolled in the class: "ML Building Blocks". It served me a page with links
to two videos. The page seems broken though. The links are dead.

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Invictus0
What's the cost?

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muhneesh
Free outside of compute resources I think

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johnx123-up
Any YouTube playlist link to share, please?

