
Russia’s Creepy, Innovative Internet [video] - bilifuduo
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-hello-world-russia/
======
stephengillie
> _But the most stunning—and creepiest—software developed in Russia is
> something called FindFace. It’s an app that lets you take a picture of a
> stranger and then almost instantly, using a facial-recognition algorithm,
> find the person on a social network. If you’re hoping the software doesn’t
> work that well, you’ll be disappointed: When I tested the app, it found the
> right faces all the freaking time. Privacy is so 2015._

Still waiting for social networks to search for you on other social networks,
to verify your identify.

 _We 're sorry, this photo doesn't match your face in photos on other social
media, so we can't add it to your profile._

~~~
slv77
Any idea how these applications are built and trained?

My assumptions are that the process is scraping social networks for tagged
pictures; identifying and standardizing faces and then training a CNN network
to identify individuals.

The trouble is wrapping my head around how to do that at the scale needed to
uniquely identify 20M+ individuals. Do they train the CNNs in smaller batches
and run the models in parallel? How do they normalize the results? How do the
add incremental data?

~~~
bjano
They are using openface:
[https://cmusatyalab.github.io/openface/#openface](https://cmusatyalab.github.io/openface/#openface)

The library gets the picture as input and spits out a 128-element vector. The
more similar the vectors are for two pictures the more likely they are of the
same person.

You don't need to train it, there is a pretrained version available.

~~~
rzzzt
This reminded me of a news article I read about "eigenfaces" as a facial
recognition method way back; here's its corresponding Wikipedia page:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface)

~~~
Senji
Really, there would be "eigenshapes" for any arbitrary configuration of 3D
space. That we can smoothly transition from one face to the next in a higher
dimensional matrix is no surprise.

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dkarapetyan
Many of the really good software engineers I know are Russian. As in they grew
up and were educated in Russia but they all end up working for U.S. companies.
Russia is missing out on a lot of talent right in their back yard. If the
government was a little more forward thinking and didn't try to stifle and
control things so much who knows where they would be right now.

~~~
kushti
Many programmers still here, and talented people also arriving from other
countries (mostly ex-USSR and Eastern Europe, but not only).

~~~
Grue3
Just because we're stuck here doesn't mean we like it.

~~~
kushti
Who we? Me and my circle like the living here.

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nx11x
Articles and the comments they spawn are a bit weird, honestly. Let's talk
about face recognition tech in Russia, and how creepy it makes them.

Meanwhile it's not creepy at all that "Half of American Adults Are in Police
Facial-Recognition Databases":

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/half-o...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/half-
of-american-adults-are-in-police-facial-recognition-databases/504560/)

~~~
drzaiusapelord
There's an obvious difference between law enforcement having these powers (and
we can assume Russian law enforcement does too) and Joe Schmoe having these
powers. As Russians have already said in this thread, the main use of this is
blackmail and cyberbullying. It certainly is an abused feature. I think the
typical "whataboutism" here is distracting from the main issue.

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lambdadmitry
Disclaimer: didn't watch the video, read the text.

At least in the text the author seemingly misses an important theme: there is
a rising gloom in the Russian techscene lately. Talented programmers are
mostly open-minded and keen to the western perspective, so the recent (~2012)
turn in Russian politics was (and is) morally hard for a lot of them. All
hopes for modernization, "westernization", and brighter future in the next
decade were shattered, most startups now look for either government or
government-associated funding. Like, the only way the founders of that creepy
FindFace startup were going to monetize is to sell it to _siloviks_. The
economic downturn also plays its role.

The future isn't bright around here.

~~~
xnull2guest
It's funny when Western social media synonymizes "modernization",
"westernization" and "brighter future".

Especially since it was very recently that huge structural transformations in
Russia (Gorby's shock therapy) brought "westernization", "modernization" and a
"brighter future" to Russia - in at least all of the US reporting. The shock
therapy brought democracy (yes Russians vote) and economic liberalization (yes
Russia is Capitalist society). It also broke what had been of an existing
soviet union (another thing for the US to cheer about).

This constantly unobtainable quality that the US really would like Russia to
achieve is submission to decision making for the world centered in Washington,
and until that is achieved according to "western" (sic) reports, Russia will
not have modernized, and will not have a brighter future. This kind of
exceptionlist rhetoric holds ubiquity over much conversation in the American
bubble, but it's pretty embarrassing when you see that it has no clothes.

Russia sees itself as uniquely important to world leadership. So does the
United States. Neither is about ready to submit to the other's leadership in
world affairs. Prospects for both Americans and Russians in the future are
down, and citizens in both countries are being motivated against one another
in jingoistic fashion to promote a national sense of unity and legitimacy.

The Chinese, meanwhile, are doing quite well. If they can hurdle some
(admittedly big) challenges, they will challenge both Russian and US
leadership in the world in a very serious way.

This is a unique and important time in history, in which the three major
centers of world power may readjust in their orientation toward one another,
and the balance of power may shift in ways hopefully not so techtonic there is
another war between major powers (as it would be truly horrific).

~~~
woodandsteel
So what you are saying is it is good Russia is corrupt, dysfunctional and
authoritarian because it helps Putin in his drive to gain superpower status
for his country.

~~~
xnull2guest
No you completely missed the point, which is that the US has and does
overthrow democracies for National Security and global power ambitions.
Authoritarianism is an excuse for US activity and reforms in Russia that would
make it more efficient but as strong willed and committed to global leadership
would pose a greater - not lesser - challenge to American interests. The same
analysis, of course, applies in the other direction.

Repeating propaganda about some eccentricities in the style of governance or
opinions about fairness/happiness, be it old Cold War rhetoric or new 21st
Century Great Game rhetoric, misses the crucial axis on which state
competition functions and inevitably renders resulting commentary/analysis
petty and wanting.

There's plenty to read in America about the creepy and corrupt Russians and
plenty to read in Russia about the creepy and corrupt Americans.

But if you're wanting to follow the present like someone in the future is
going to read a history book, the fairy tail elements, "good and evil", finger
and blame pointing, and apologism have to go in favor of a sober realpolitik.

------
dragonbonheur
On Youtube - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tICL-
lwI7KM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tICL-lwI7KM)

------
fsiefken
Does anyone know the name of the Russian choir song at minute 16 of the
documentary? I want to use it for the background song when individual factions
reach the Factory in Scythe (parallel universe board game).
[https://youtu.be/tICL-lwI7KM?t=930](https://youtu.be/tICL-lwI7KM?t=930)

One piece of software I am very impressed by is Dmitry Shkarin's Durilca, a
very fast and efficient file compressor, topping the benchmark charts. I
wonder what he's doing now. And if I'm not mistaken Eltech's Exagear (close to
native i386 binary emulation on Arm) was made by Russian programmers too.

~~~
eternalban
> background song when individual factions reach the Factory ...

I'm sure you'll find something here: [http://sovmusic.ru](http://sovmusic.ru)

[p.s. english:
[http://www.sovmusic.ru/english/index.php](http://www.sovmusic.ru/english/index.php)]

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shade23
Can we have the original article titles (or non-click-bait derivatives) for
HN. This one is not entirely disconnected.But just for Informational sanity.

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icpmacdo
There seems to be so much vaporware around AI currently. It seems like theres
a fair bit of it in this episode. Apart from that I thought it was a great
doc.

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diego_moita
I did see some very solid engineering there. But I didn't see any meaningful
product or business model innovation. As the documentary shows, most companies
there are either replicating western business models, or doing what the
government orders or allows them to do. Russian engineers are phenomenal but
their entrepreneurs don't see either creative of free to create.

Compare them to Chinese entrepreneurs. In China they don't restrict themselves
to copy western businesses. They adapt to very Chinese cultural habits like
having chat engines on online shopping such that you can interact with sellers
or even haggle and bargain when shopping. It's what Jack Ma called being "the
crocodile in the Yang-Tse": being specific to a culture, understand your
customers instead of standardizing them.

Do Russians do the same? The video didn't show that. What it showed is how
much Russian capitalism is a pet of the Kremlin.

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dschuetz
It seems like Russia's tech is having innovation spikes here and there, but it
just seems so. I haven't seen any original ideas in that documentary.
Everything is a copycat of some idea someone else had in Europe or in the
Americas. They took it and made it far better, but for a very limited market.
They exercise the same principles Steven Jobs had used for his designs: find
cheap shit (or get paid by the gov), make it golden, sell it. That's also why
the Russian nuclear institute looked like a trash dump in the video. You can't
sell nuclear science to people. Not with a logo on it, you can't. But, who
knows. Never underestimate the idle mind of a Russian. It's dangerous.

~~~
diego_moita
I felt the same: lots of very good engineering but not a lot of open,
competitive, creative and free capitalism. Even China does a lot better than
just copycat.

However, it seems that most people reading this thread are from the Родина
(rodina: motherland) and get offended by objective criticism about Russia.

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supergreg
Is it supposed to be a video? Because I'm not seeing it. Is it behind a
paywall?

~~~
maxvu
Yeah, the masthead is a video 43m long.

