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Comment by pmezard | Hacker News Reader

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pmezard·

> To be perfectly honest, it surprises me the extent to which ML naysaying seems to be popular on HN.

Maybe because there is a larger fraction of people who know or see how the sausages are made.

There are cool things, but is not magical nor transformative. At least not yet.

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I work in “making the sausage” - deep learning techniques have already completely transformed my field and are transforming many others. Most of the people I see naysaying don’t appear to causally work in the field, because their critiques are not the same as the ones people in the field are using.

Can you give a concrete example of deep-learning techniques which have transformed a field? Something not theoretical or confined in a lab? Something which may have changed my life?

Not OP but I can speak with a small example from my previous field - coral reef ecology. It used to be standard to collect video footage and hand annotate small portions of the footage to draw up some statistics about the reef progression. Today we can collect the footage and let ml annotate the entirety of it to get much more accurate and precise statistics about the progression/recession. Not only that but we can do that on an organism basis and also see do highly local analyses. This wasn’t possible 10 years ago. I think the applications for ML outside of consumer tech are far larger than within but everyone here seems focused on that for some reason.

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