realtalk_sp

Would you mind posting the outcome of this? A person I love dearly is struggling with Long Covid/CFS. I’ve been doing something similar to what you describe, but I’m always looking for more angles that could help.

I explicitly caveated my statement with "Using a PhD as a gateway into applied ML" for a reason. The vast majority of people going into applied ML are not pioneering new methods. They're using ML as a tool to support business objectives. This is the group I'm talking about.

The phrase "bent of mind" roughly implies "the way someone thinks". Its usage is declining I suppose but there's nothing connotatively nefarious there.

Using a PhD as a gateway into applied ML is so horrifically misguided I hardly know where to even begin debunking it.

PhDs are one especially crappy way to prove you have the intellectual chops to engage with ML. There are far more direct, practical, and expedient alternative paths to get there.

Importantly, the number of people who were perfectly capable of doing a PhD but chose not to (because, frankly, it's a very bad deal) vastly dwarfs the number of people who stuck around in academia and obtained one. Additionally, my observation at several major tech companies is that PhDs have a bent of mind that is roughly orthogonal to the pursuit of real business value.

Accessibility is the sort of thing that has to be regulated into existence because the economic cost-benefit often cannot be justified. Similar to handicap parking, ramps, etc.

Really tiring of this clickbaity nonsense infecting science and math. This analogy is so tenuous you could snap it with a feather.

Hmm I think I wasn't clear enough with "Stoicism and tangential philosophies". I didn't mean to imply any one philosophy is necessarily a definitive prescription. Rather, they include various good ideas that should be borrowed and amalgamated into a composite that best fits the individual.

To be clear, the "efficiency with which a resource is used" in this case can be represented roughly by dollar per unit compute. As that value goes down, you would expect software "waste" to go up. That's how the Jevons Paradox applies here.

Do you worry that you're taking money at a valuation that's predicated on artificially and transiently elevated demand? It doesn't sound like you have a business compatible with the VC hyper-growth model, outside of the present extraordinary circumstances.

It also feels intuitively like many person counting use cases are satisfactorily addressed by far simpler and lower cost heuristics such as, for example, Google lining up device 'throughput' with lat/long and business records. In fact, I just used their estimate to time my visit to the DMV and it worked perfectly.

Admittedly, it may just be that I'm not creative enough to envision sustainable, valuable use cases for this. But if you've been around 6 (?) years and just took $51M in Series C without being significantly diluted, KP is presumably assigning you at least a $250M valuation and possibly a lot higher. After accounting for terms like e.g. liquidation preference, the economic picture of Density could easily be a house of cards.

I suspect many developers would find software a lot less appealing if it were closer to a traditional engineering discipline (slow, unforgiving, dramatically reduced expressive power and creative potential, etc).

I'm somewhat ADD and get bored easily, so not only do I need to do something more like software but I also have to stay as broad and high-level as possible within the discipline, to stave off ennui. NOTE: very much not arguing this is a good way to go through life.

What's considered aesthetically pleasing continually evolves over time. There are underlying trends in physical beauty that resemble what we see in fashion, art, music, etc. Humans also have a quite a lot of control over much of their appearance with hair styling, makeup, and (increasingly) cosmetic surgery. This, combined with the ageism inherent to modeling, adds up to fairly sustained demand.

This really goes a long way towards explaining the current state of macOS.