I think it's telling that someone who "only" orchestrated one of the most used pre-training and benchmark datasets in computer vision is seen as less accomplished than those who developed algorithms that require those datasets to work.
Yes, dataset creation and curation is less glamorous, but it's important work. I've worked with a few modelers who could stand to learn that first hand.
Can you explain how the actual taste component is indeed virtual?
The article mentions the hydrogels already contain the tastants, even those beyond the 5 fundamental ones, which means a rich taste+smell combo already present in physical form in the gels.
>There were nine taste-generating channels filled with flavored hydrogels. The gels were made out of agarose mixed with a bit of mineral water and specific flavor essences: sugar, salt, citric acid, cherry, milk, green tea, passion fruit, durian, and grapefruit.
Don't get me wrong, the miniturization and delivery is cool, but nothing virtual here.
I mean.. what did you expect? Did you think that they wired electrodes into someone's brain and simulated taste? We're you expecting claims of telepathically communicating taste channels to virtual reality users? Or maybe they managed to upload someone's consciousness into vr, through which delivered virtual taste.
As far as hacker news pedantry goes, this is award winning.
Something like electrodes stimulating the tongue to create the sensation of flavour. I wouldn't call this "virtual taste" for the same reason I wouldn't describe Glade as "virtual scent".
First, consider that the culture of the city you're in can play a role https://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html
But more than that, the neighborhood or whatever natural social circle you've found yourself in is that way, but it need not be that way with some extra digging into other subgroups of people around you.
Second, consider your own behavior and whether it's not tech itself but another aspect that you're confusing with being in tech, simply because people are (annoyingly) too polite to tell you.
In "tech" I find almost as much diversity of personalities and quirks than in the general population. I haven't personally experience what you're talking about, but that doesn't mean you're wrong. Perhaps the nearest neighbors that are lowest friction to socialize with aren't the best choice?
Every city has a culture and NYC especially does. That said, I find this disdain for tech workers to be universal in every city. Even in SFBA, it exists largely and tech workers themselves are self-loathing. I was always around people who were so critical of tech even in SFBA and thought I'd never meet people who hated tech and tech workers more... then I moved and realized most of society would prefer us to be dead than living.
I didn't think people in tech were any weirder than the general population. Then I kept meeting infra engineers from big tech and I understood where the stigma came from. These folks make up the majority of engineers in big cities. You don't need thousands of engineers to work on the Instagram/FB app itself. You need thousands of engineers to make it scale to billions of users. There's always less openings for product engineers than there is for infra.
My behaviors are pretty normal. When I avoid the conversation, I get a lot more good feedback and people at least in NYC assume I'm in finance or something. It's when they find out that I'm in tech that they really start to distance themselves. I've learned to avoid the conversation due to this.
In my experience, the thing that makes people wary isn't that they think you might be some sort of strange geek. It's that there's fairly widespread anger and fear over the effects that the tech industry has on society.
Honestly, that's not the main feedback I get. They just don't like the low status associated with tech workers. They assume everyone in tech is a dweeb and everyone is very concerned with being around people they think are cool and importantly that others think are cool.
I don't think the anger/fear thing is really much of an issue. If that was the case, all these finance bros would be getting hanged.
Do you have to hang around those people...? As far as I can tell, none of my friends or even acquaintances have ever judged me for "status", low or high. Or maybe they have without me knowing, but then they self-select out of my friend group anyway so it works out...?
There are certainly people, orgs, social circles, etc. who don't care about your social status, income level, or any of that nonsense. They can be interest-based (some activity), values-based, cultural/subcultural, whatever.
> everyone is very concerned with being around people they think are cool and importantly that others think are cool.
Among adults, this really shouldn't be a thing after high school...
Nobody is "cool" to everyone. People gather with people they like, doing things they enjoy together. It's not about trying to be cool and impressing the people who look down on you. Fuck them. Just find your own people around whom you can be yourself, they can be themselves, and everyone laughs and has a good time together. Then all the class differences and such melt away and you just learn to treasure each other as people, not as spreadsheet rows. Maybe finance bros just aren't your crowd. Who cares? Don't mingle with them and find people less judgmental and more interested in the same things you are.
Ahh, then we're talking about different things entirely. I've never encountered an issue about social status, personally, so have no useful comments on that aspect, aside from guessing this is a problem with certain regional cultures or subcultures.
This is all well and good, but unfortunately depends on the people pushing for the metric/system to give a shit about what the metric is supposed to improve. There are still far too many that prefer to slap 1 or 2 careless metrics on an entire team, optimize until they're promoted, then leave the company worse off.
Sounds like bad management at the top, too. If leaders can't determine if middle management is showing them success in a metric that doesn't actually help the business, they're doing the same thing (paycheck till the parachute arrives).
> The best way to do that, I think, is to do away entirely with the symbolic and mathematical foundations, and to derive what Gaussians are, and all their fundamental properties from purely geometric and visual principles. That’s what we’ll do in this article.
Perhaps I have a different understanding of "symbolic". The article proceeds to use various symbolic expressions and equations. Why say this above if you're not going to follow through? Visuals are there but peppered in.
Agree. This text relies heavily on traditional mathematics to define and work through things. It's quite good at that! But it does become weird when it starts out by declaring that it won't do what it then does.
Yes and no. An alternate perspective is that the output of each neuron in an artificial neural net is analogous to an F-I curve in a real neuron (spike frequency-input DC current curve). In this way, different neurons have different slopes and intercepts in their FI curves, just as a network of ANN neurons effectively have their activation functions tweaked after applying weights.
I usually only say this to other neuroscientists who have a background in electrophysiology. The analogy isn't perfect, and is unnecessary to understand what ANNs are doing, but the analogy still stands.
I have the exact opposite experience — VS Code notebooks are much snappier and are possibly the best Jupyter implementations I’ve ever used (better and more responsive than vanilla Jupyter or Jupyter labs).
VS code notebooks also support LSPs with refactoring, typing etc. Black is supported. Step by step debugging is supported. Venv is built in.
There are so many conveniennces in VS Code that whenever I have to use Jupyter Lab I feel a lot of stuff is missing.
I agree with you that the VSCode experience feels superior. It integrates a lot of the other various IDE widgets into the notebook experience. Code formatting, variable definitions, spell checker, non-garbage tier code hints, etc. The little timer noting the time it takes to run a cell alone is a huge boon.
My only complaint is how white space heavy the VSCode layout is by default. Probably can be customized, but I have never dug into it.
Hitting Escape in normal mode takes you out of editing the cell and into "notebook manipulation mode" instead. This is so counter to the way Vim normally works - Esc should leave you in normal mode no matter where you started - that I found it almost unusable until I realised I could just remap that binding. I made it Shift-Esc and am very happy with it now.
Yes, dataset creation and curation is less glamorous, but it's important work. I've worked with a few modelers who could stand to learn that first hand.