I agree. I have full confidence that I, a literal nobody in academia, could theoretically write a mathematical paper, submit it to an appropriate journal, and have it accepted if it were correct and good enough. I don't know for sure, but I suspect there are disciplines in which this would not be the case, and that most papers in those disciplines are probably written in Word.
Maybe the disconnect here is that they are talking about "innovation" but not necessarily profitable innovation.
There's also something to be said about the kind of innovation that disrupts a whole market, and the kind of innovation that incrementally improves on some process or tool. Maybe another question would be, is there enough of the latter kind of innovation to make up (economically) for the lack of unicorns?
Unicorns are a net negative to the world. Uber isn’t even a business for example. It is using invested money to make taxis cheaper. That’s not innovative or even a business.
The idea that casual sex serves as some sort of formative process sounds ridiculous. In my mind, sex serves an important role in pair bonding, and casual sex would then inhibit the ability of people to pair bond.
Leading how to do them well means having relationships.
Casual sex for a limited time window is good for learning more about sex, but if you don’t shift to investing in relationship building, you may not learn those skills before it is too late.
It's probably psychology.
For example, myself quite frugal, I would probably not pay explicitly to remove ads.
But if you raised my internet subscription by $1.50/month, with the same intent, I wouldn't bat an eyelid.
I also just don't want the mental overhead of deciding which of my 20 subscriptions I'm getting value from. Yes, I used to have that to some degree with magazine subscriptions. But most Internet subscriptions actually tend to be pricier for less content--probably in part because so few people pay you need to charge those who will a fair bit to make it work.
I also observe that I do get some free newsletters and my usual pattern is I read them regularly for a bit and then they go into being read less and less frequently. (Which was admittedly often my pattern with magazines as well.)
Yeah well, deep learning is still very far from general artificial intelligence. It just gives you that impression because it's essentially a very advanced parroting system.
The challenge with automating seemingly monotonous human tasks is that often when the human is doing the task, they may be doing it without thinking 99% of the time, but if they have to, they can resort to their human intellect. No deep learning model is going to be able to do that because it does not have any higher intellect to resort to. And more importantly it cannot even know when it is failing.
> In explaining possible use cases of facial recognition, Bosworth said that Facebook’s smart glasses may help someone recognize someone at a dinner party
What a fucking joke. There is clearly no practical upside to this for the wearer, or the rest of society.
> What a fucking joke. There is clearly no practical upside to this for the wearer, or the rest of society.
Yea, not for the average person. The most creative thing I could come up with was to play a game with your eyes closed and then let your glasses tell you who's who. So, not really worthwhile.
But then I thought, what if you're an old person that has issues with recognizing people. I think some of them could benefit from it. It points to a theme which is: AI could help certain senior citizens to augment their cognition, and recognizing someone via glasses is a small example of that.
Obviously they want to make everyone wear their monitoring cameras though.
They could have created and marketed a device only for people who need it, and nobody would have complained if they had done that.
The author used GDP per capita as noted in the comments on the page. Why not use a less clickbait title like "why is UK's GDP per capita lower than US?", his piece would have sounded less intellectually dishonest.
I do not think that solves the question. What is the reasoning behind the assumption that GDP/capita in the UK should be equal to that of the US?
And why should it not be equal to say, that of Italy instead?
The author is assuming a certain "natural order of things" and placing the UK a few ranks higher than it actually stands.
Well as somebody who has written research software, I don't agree that research software is a "tangled mess". A couple of points,
1. often when I read read software written by profession programmers I find it very hard to read because it is too abstract, almost every time I try to figure out how something works, it turns out I need to learn a new framework and api, by contrast research code tends to be very self contained
2. when I first wrote research software I applied all the programming best practices and was told these weren't any good; turns out using lots of abstraction to increase modularity makes the code much slower, this is language dependent of course
3. you will find it much harder to read research code if you don't understand the math+science behind it
> many of those writing software know very little about how to do it
This is just not true. I found in my experience that people writing research software have a very specific skillset that very very few industry programmers are likely to have. They know how to write good numerics code, and they know how to write fast code for super computers. Not to mention, interpreting the numerics theory correctly in the first place is not a trivial matter either.
Quite a few professional programmers evaluate the quality of code by "look": presence of tests, variable length, function length etc. However, what makes great code is really the code structure and logical flows behind. In my experience, good industrial programmers are as rare as good academic programmers. Many industrial programmers make a fuss about coding styles but are not really good at organizing structured code for a medium sized project.
As someone who's worked for a large part of my career as a sort of bridge between academia and industry (working with researchers to implement algorithms in production), both you and the original author are right to an extent.
On one hand, academics I've worked with absolutely undervalue good software engineering practices and the value of experience. They tend to come at professional code from the perspective of "I'm smart, and this abstraction confuses me, so the abstraction must be bad", when really there's good reason to it. Meanwhile they look at their thousands of lines of unstructured code, and the individual bits make sense so it seems good, but it's completely untestable and unmaintainable.
On the other side, a lot of the smartest software engineers I've known have a terrible tendency to over-engineer things. Coming up with clever designs is a fun engineering problem, but then you end up with a system that's too difficult to debug when something goes wrong, and that abstracts the wrong things when the requirements slightly change. And when it comes to scientific software, they want to abstract away mathematical details that don't come as easily to them, but then find that they can't rely on their abstractions in practice because the implementation is buried under so many levels of abstraction that they can't streamline the algorithm implementation to an acceptable performance standard.
If you really want to learn about how to properly marry good software engineering practice with performant numerical routines, I've found the 3D gaming industry to be the most inspirational, though I'd never want to work in it myself. They do some really incredible stuff with millions of lines of code, but I can imagine a lot of my former academia colleagues scoffing at the idea that a bunch of gaming nerds could do something better than they can.
> a lot of the smartest software engineers I've known have a terrible tendency to over-engineer things.
Your definition of "smartest software engineers" is the opposite of mine. In my view, over-engineering is the symptom of dumb programmers. The best programmers simplify complex problems; they don't complicate simple problems.
I don't know that our definitions are that different. Most of the over-engineering I've seen in practice was done in the name of simplifying a complex problem, but resulted in a system that was too rigid to adapt. Our definition of "over-engineered" might be different, though.
I work on mathematical modeling, dealing with human physiology. Likewise, the software packages used can be esoteric, and the structure of your "code" can be very different looking, to say the least.
This is certainly a lot of work, and this takes a lot of practice to perform efficiently: But no matter what, I comment every single line of code, no matter how mundane it is. I also cite my sources in the commenting itself, and I also have a bibliography at the bottom of my code.
I organize my code in general with sections and chapters, like a book. I always give an overview for each section and chapter. I make sure that my commenting makes sense for a novice reading them, from line-to-line.
I do not know why I do this. I guess it makes me feel like my code is more meaningful. Of course it makes it easier to come back to things and to reuse old code. I also want people to follow my thought process. But, ultimately, I guess I want people to learn how to do what I have done.
"Esoteric software used for mathematical models of physiology" brought back a strong memory of the xpp software we had to use as undergrads. Apparently it was the best tool available for graphing bifurcations in nonlinear systems... but damn that was some old software.
Writing long descriptions in comments works if you're the only one editing the code, or you supervise all contributions... in a fast-changing industrial codebase, those things go out of date very quickly, so comments are used more sparsely. I document the usage of any classes or functions that my package exports, and I'll write little inline comments explaining lines of code whose purpose or effect is not obvious. Mostly I just try to organize things sensibly and choose descriptive names for variables and functions.
Your points apply to industry, too. I heretically push flatter code all the time. I'm not against abstraction, but it is easy to fall into the trap of building a solution machine, but missing the solution you need.
But why are people so concerned about this whole currency depreciation thing?
Only idiots keep their money under the mattress.
Anyone with sense has their money invested in assets.
I honestly don't get the big deal.
If you want to invest your money in assets, you should be able to do that.
If you want to hold on to your money for whatever reason, you should be able to do that too, right? Many people in the world don't have access to banking services, let alone investment services. In many cases, people with smaller net worths don't necessarily know or understand how these assets work and are easily taken advantage of by "investment advisors".
If you're in a first world country making a good amount of income and have access to financial markets easily, you might not necessarily see the use case as clearly.
But the people shouting about the FED debasing their currency are not poor unbanked people in 3rd world countries so I don't see how your comment is relevant.
I mean, the FED is debasing the currency, that's just a fact, it doesn't matter who is shouting about it, you don't need to be poor in 3rd world country.
I guess it comes down to: if you understand the markets well and can invest in them to generate a good return, more power to you. That's not the case for everyone, so if you want to hold on to your money for whatever reason, you should be able to protect yourself against endless money printing.
How much were you being paid 15-20 years ago and what could that buy you? It’s not just the third world that suffer from currency debasement, it’s all of us.
There would be an economy where only investments that return better than Bitcoin would make sense, for example: you wouldn't have the Vancouver vacant property problem, that money would go to Bitcoin instead and leave the home for someone who has an actual use for it. People also wouldn't be hoarding gold, it's value would go down and you can use it more easily in electronics.
Gold is physical, has no place as a store of value in a digital world in my opinion. You can't transfer it as easily, securing it requires people and storage, you can't divide into very small parts to trade with, etc.
Indeed, depreciation (inflation) and (hopefully) being able to control it is an important feature of fiat money: this is what motivates people to invest it as opposed to just keep it under the mattress, i.e. out of the system.
Economists may be wrong, of course (a lot of times it seems that their math models are pretty crude), but no theory seems to support that keeping your wealth locked away is good for the society. (I deliberately didn't say economy, because optimizing for economic growth alone can indeed hurt the society if we don't channel all the important aspects in somehow. Think global warming.)
