Biometric Auth.
My first job out of university in 2003 was with a biometric security company. even back then the technology was shockingly mature. But yet getting deployed was so difficult.
I also remember in 2004 going to my favorite waterslide park and being able to use my fingerprint to get in and out of my locker - rather than an awkward key or combo. But a year later those lockers were replaced by clunky combo ones.
Agree generally.
Except being unimpressed unless performance is achieved on sub Google scale hardware.
Today's Google supermachine is tomorrow's raspberry pie. No need to artificially constrain our bounds. There is, after all, the inevitability of Moores law.
Moore's law has been dead for a while now. Most of the chip in your phone is powered off because otherwise it would burn up. Highly recommend watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9mzmvhwMqw
Really thanks for posting this video. Very cool to see Sophie Wilson talking so elequently and with obvious authority on a subject I and many others deeply care about. Great!
True, but even without Moore's Law, using neuromorphic chips instead of general-purpose CPU/GPUs would likely be much more efficient. In the meantime it makes sense to use large server farms to emulate candidate neuromorphic architectures.
Interesting. I've yet to hear a Moores law is dead argument, so perhaps I should watch the video before commenting further. But the fact that most of the chip is turned off, doesn't falsify the fact that most of it still exists. Cooling it properly is a separate problem independent of computation no?
Good question.
Just one anecdotal data point here ... So take it for what it's worth.
I'm a grad student focusing on reinforcement learning but have a lot of interaction with many deep learning folk. I'd have to say that they seem mostly motivated to learn how to make deep learning even more powerful and how to apply it. Not so much solving what's going on inside the box.
We do understand in general, just not every neuron and input weight in particular, because they are too many for limited human working memory to hold at once.
An automated labyrinth could be solved by hand up to a size, but if it becomes larger, it would become "impossible to understand". We'd need to rely on computers to find the route for us.
It's not computer magic, just an ability to hold more data at once. We're limited to 7-8 things - try to remember a string of more digits and see if you can - it's hard, we just have that kind of limitation. So any computer algorithm that can't be broken down into 7-8 understandable parts is hard to grasp.
Of course we can make ML tools synthesize the preferred input of any neuron. That does help a little.
For many researchers, "understand" relates more to the underlying math. Things like "what kind of convergence properties and guarantees are there" and "formality, what can this model learn and not learn"?
Yes. Furthermore, neural nets are just one small part of the solution to [edit] general intelligence. A truly scalable intelligence that learns on its own, and doesn't rely on "the right answers" through training data by human experts. Without this training data, neural nets can't do much ...
80 years is very conservative. Rich Sutton has a very well articulated argument for achieving human level hardware (using Moores law, and an estimate of the computational power of the brain derived from measurable computations in the eye (retina?).
But as you said, it's the algorithms that are by far the long pole. Current supervised learning is much akin to simple rote learning. This is the promise of reinforcement learning - and the ability to truly learn on your own through experience. That's scalable.
*that said ... I'm biased being one of Rich's students :(
Yes. Be wary. I lived in Vancouver for 3 years, 2012-2015. Those mountains sucked. As did the ocean. And the ability to walk everywhere downtown. Total pain being able to walk to work, shop, dine, etc.
kidding aside ... Yes ... I earned less $ ... But was ok with it.
Entrepreneurship is mastering - if anything - "operating" in extremely uncertain and risky conditions. There's no tangible hard skill you're mastering. It's fulfilling - but personally completely void of the feeling I've had truly "mastering" a sport. (I'll use "mastery" loosely here - I wasn't nearly good enough to play pro. It's a completely different feeling than "mastering" a subject such as physics or calculus (again using "mastery" loosely). Perhaps mastery of soft skills leaves me a bit void and its the hard skills that entrepreneurship lacks.
Fair enough. I missed the part where this is an employees perspective.
WRT being selfish. It's often the last thing a founder wants. Boards, family members, and even sometimes employees - often pressure a founder into an acquisition the founder themselves isn't as keen on.
I've founded a company through an acquisition and led mobile for another. Life was definitely much much better before the acquisitions. But the perception that it's anything but a first world first world problem ... is a bit misleading and entitled.
That's a very dismissive attitude toward real emotional attachments. The loss of something you've poured your life into can genuinely be traumatic, shocking, and dismaying.
I don't like the notion of applying the "first-world problem" dismissal to things that aren't trivialities. It's one thing to laugh about how you have to get up from the couch to get a remote. It's another thing entirely to talk about major changes to one's career, wiping away years of their work, or the loss of something they care deeply about as a "first-world problem".
Sure, getting acquired might be a "good problem to have", but it doesn't make its toll any less real.
I mean nothing ... violent or otherwise unpleasant by this, but it's really important to learn to let go. You pushed the rock up the hill for a while and now maybe it's somebody else's turn.
IMO, it's important to retain the capacity for grace in these things. Not least for your own sake, much less you're career.
I would read the parts of Shelby Foote's "Civil War" surrounding Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. It helped. Whatever else may be said of Lee, he was a master of grace under pressure.
Fair enough. There are real and powerful emotions at play.
But it's a bit of a stretch to suggest an employee at a company founded 5 years ago has "poured their life into."
Personally, I'll reserve evocative language of loss for things beyond a strategic shift at the office - but I shouldn't judge others who view things differently.
Consider, briefly, that the relevant question is what it meant to the OP, and clearly for her it had that impact. Having been through many of the same experiences (I, too, was an early Parse engineer, though I left about a year after the acquisition), I can tell you those feelings are real, and that it's definitely possible to form that kind of attachment to your work in well under 5 years.
There's a major difference between being in leadership and being on the line. You signed up for an acquisition -- the employee worked for you partially because you weren't <insert big company here>.
I guess as a founder you were rewarded when it came to being acquired. I am not sure what position OP had but I think it accurately conveys feelings of any ordinary (but loyal) employee.
We cannot ask for employees that are engaged, purposeful, passionate, and committed without also expecting negative feelings to happen when things don't work out. If you ask people to care about their company and their colleagues, fucking own it when they actually do.
That's my experience at least. Not all acquisitions are rosy experiences for the employees. Sometimes employees get blindsided when they show up to work one day to be told the company has been sold.
This is awesome. Well done.
Wondering if there was any real time speech to text that could be trained. Seems like these commentators all have their canned lines when the team scores. "He scores", "Goal", etc. etc. Seems like you might be able to fairly accurately capture that and add the sentence as an attribute?
Well done. My Oilers need something like this for every time we win the Draft Lottery! McDavid!!!!!!
