orange_tee

Being required to write a paper in LaTeX, is the least elitist requirement of any profession that I can think of.

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?

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.

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.

It's all about putting the price in context.

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.

Since when do you first get people to buy and use your device and only later tell them how the device could become useful in some form or another?

It's a joke that they are trying to push this for self serving reasons, but cannot even come up with one good reason for people to wear them.

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.

> 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.

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.

I want to know what logic he is using to determine how wealthy countries should be, relative to others.

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.

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.

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.