got2surf

>The old adage goes: when you wrestle with a pig, you get muddy.

Not only do you both get muddy, but the pig wins with the benefit of experience

Thank you! For making the image, and sharing story behind it

Because it's a university senior design project - they often pair students with related majors together to work on a project over the course of a semester or two. It's about the interesting engineering of the entire project. They never claimed any one part of it was "novel" but the project as a whole clearly is.

The evidence is literally in the original article: "Darker-skinned women were the most misclassified group, with error rates of up to 34.7%. By contrast, the maximum error rate for lighter-skinned males was less than 1%"

Regardless of whether the higher error rate is a combination of race, gender, or both, it's still a huge issue. Granted, that study was from a year ago, and other companies have since improved their facial recognition systems. But an overall precision/accuracy/f1 score doesn't mean much when accuracy varies that much by group. Sure, you can market it as "accurate on white males", but you can't market it as "accurate"

NYC comes to mind, probably others as well.

Incredible - got goosebumps reading that

That's a great point. One of my favorite parts of college was small research-based classes with 10-15 undergrads/grad students. The level of personal interaction and feedback from professors was the most valuable part.

That being said, I was fortunate enough to have similar experiences re: research at the state school as well (a professor who went out of his way to mentor me, leading to a few publications). It was definitely harder to find (because of how many other students professors at big state schools have to deal with), but it was more a function of professors' time than their willingness.

I had a unique opportunity of taking a year of classes at a good state school (in the top 100 for most STEM fields), and then went to an "elite" school for undergrad (taking a mix of CS/non-CS courses at each).

You can absolutely find motivated peers and professors at state schools, particularly if you look at places like the honors college. If you want to land a good job, go to a good grad school, etc (which is the goal for most people), all of that is 100% possible from a state school.

However, if you want to do something non-traditional (startups, research abroad, "choose your own adventure" style careers), I found that the "elite" school offered a lot more opportunity. Part of that is due to funding/size, where top schools have more money to allocate to students who ask for it. Students at elite schools have more support on average (from family as well as the school itself), so they tend to have more opportunities open, earlier.

It's like the difference between a big city and a small town. Plenty of people are successful without living in a huge city, so it's definitely possible. You could argue that the average drive of folks in a big city is higher, but a lot of that has to do with resources and opportunities as well.

The top students at a good state school would absolutely fit in at an elite school. The only difference I saw was in the support/resources they had before coming to college.

Even worn paths through the grass at university/corporate campuses can show better ideas for sidewalk layout.

Thanks for taking the time to reply - this story is a good reminder to treat employees/all people as well as you can, not conditionally.

Do you think there's anything the CEO could have said/done today that would make you reconsider Instacart? I do like the retroactive payments he mentioned, but wonder if the there's anything more they could do to regain a customer like you.

Just curious, did you use Instacart or any of their competitors before this?

Cool, thanks! That's a good enough value prop for me to register :)

Great read. Points #5 (on being able to use a longer time horizon when investing in ideas to let them grow) and #6 (on the growing importance of consumers) stood out to me as well.