As I mentioned above: outlaw the practice of preventing people from shopping if they haven't opted into your dystopian facial recognition software.
It will essentially kill it immediately but still allow research.
538 karma · joined December 8, 2021
I built it originally for my son... It uses sports psychology and research-backed cognitive science to completely transform off-ice stickhandling practice. It brings elite cognitive load training, usually reserved for expensive sports science labs, right to your home. My son loves it. His coach constantly talks about his stickhandling and it's clear that he's benefitted from it. Anyway, if you want a shot, let me know as right now it's in testing and you can have a really long free trial :)
hello@hockeytastic.com
It will essentially kill it immediately but still allow research.
It's easily countered by creating a law that prevents discriminating on the basis of opting into tracking, AI and whatnot.
Problem solved.
It prevents privacy issues and doesn't stop research.
Exceptions could be made in gov buildings perhaps due to national security but the idea of unlimited private companies taking my photo, or using video for gait analysis, facial analysis etc is abhorrent.
I'm not against tech and love what AI can do but private companies using my images for facial recognition is a step too far.
I lost my job at the start of the COVID stuff (Feb 2020?) and couldn't find another. No one would take my calls and I found out from some recruiters that eventually spoke to me that they were getting thousands of applications per job: one got over 5000 for a £300 a day contract!
I got to the point I'd ran out of money, gov wouldn't help, was getting money from my parents to survive so I decided to lie on my resume.
Now, don't get me wrong: I'd been programming since the 90s. I knew SQL server like the back of my hand and could programme .NET with the best of them but I'd never done it as a primary job (partly fear - didn't think I was good enough but turns out I was pretty fucking awesome at it :D) so I changed my resume to make it look like I had been doing it for years in various roles and got a job in 2 weeks!
I'm now an architect and couldn't be happier... the money definitely helps.
I'm looking to do my own thing though as I'm done with the corporate life.
However, I can't knock it too badly: In 4 years I've gone from being in serious financial shit to paying off my mortgage a month ago :)
When I'm explaining AI stuff to family, the example I use is classification and I specifically use cats and dogs. I use the analogy of how you teach a toddler that this is a cat and that is a dog. Essentially repetition. And at first they get them mixed up and the parent will say "no, that's a dog" when they think it's a cat and so on.
But essentially, for a child learning the difference between a cat and a dog you only need to show them a handful of each and they'll generally get it from that point on.
That being said, why does it take ML millions (or billions) of images to be able to say "that's a cat" when a human does it on a handful (might be up to, say 100 but my point stands). Why can ML not do that yet?
I'm a dev for many years but not in AI, hence my ELI5 question :)
Edit: If the answer is massively long and complicated, perhaps if you could point me to some text (book, paper etc.) and I can read at my leisure.
Edit2: I just thought of something. Is it related to whether the child sees a still image or a live cat? So, for example, a still image is a single example of a cat standing in a particular position etc, whereas a moving, live cat, would be interpreted by the brain as many many still images, all processed individually? The end result being that, in fact the child, when seeing a live cat, actually sees thousands or millions of still images of the cat? It just popped into my head there :D
In an ideal world, companies with a massive safety-related function should have Warhammer 40k gun servitors hovering over the execs in the event they cut corners on safety with orders to empty the clip!
Boeing are really a gov extension these days from what I can see.
I'm not mega pro-government intervention but there are times I'd like to think my gov has my back... this is one of them!
It's not like they're making lollipops ffs... they're transporting millions of people per day in things that cannot afford to have issues... ever!
Sure, I understand that the media has them under a spotlight right now but even so!
On another note this quote got me laughing: "Stocker said the company would “celebrate” the employee who spoke up."
"Yeah, Mike, just step out the back while Tony and Big Joe celebrate you in the alleyway here"! :)
Imagine you could stick 2 x 64GB DDR5 DIMMS on the GPU in sockets, would that not be faster to access than the motherboard DIMMS? It won't be as fast as on-die memory of course but could it not act like a sort of halfway house?
I'm a grey-haired .NET dev (pushing 50 now!) and for me that comment means there is no desire for new devs to learn beyond what they need for the day-job!
As an example: I learned programming in the 90s at a time when computer resources had to be managed - You couldn't just throw more servers at it since they cost so much money and you had to host them on-prem at the time.
So I learned the OS inside out. I knew how Windows worked to quite a low-level - Not Mark Russinovich levels but way, way more than colleagues did and all my code, even today, has an eye on performance all the time!
Back then, when I learned SQL, I spent lots of time tweaking SQL to get it to run faster - I mean the tables, indexes and such, as well as the SQL queries that I had to fix (I wasn't coding then but I had to fix much of the $hit that third parties produced).
Fast forward to now and you are lucky if 20% of our devs at my company understand SQL properly. They can write basic SQL statements but that's it! They all learned to program using ORMs and can't troubleshoot slow queries. I'm not joking! I had to fix a system that used EF and one of the queries that EF generated caused the DB to try to sort through 14B rows of data when we don't even have that much data in the DB! Our largest database had almost no indexes on it and they kept adding more CPU's to get it to run faster... it didn't! I've subsequently fixed it and we've dropped the CPU count quite a bit too.
I think Scott Hanselmann talked about it a few years ago. The analogy he used was to do with the kitchen taps in his house: they broke, and his wife's understanding of how the plumbing worked stopped at the point where the pipe went into the wall, so she had no idea what could be wrong! His argument (if I remember correctly) was that if you just try to understand what happens when the pipe goes into the wall then you'll open up a whole new world of understanding.
So I agree with the sentiment: we live in a world of abstraction and new devs are coming onboard without that desire to know what happens under the covers and it'll bite us in the ass when guys like me retire.
So I've changed all that and tried a few things. I've settled on golf (used to play as a child - I'm 49 now) and playing piano (played that as a child too).
Anyway... I'm happy af now (only way to put it).
Not to sidetrack this but I reckon unfinished stuff is a definite cause of mid-life crisis: I realised that I start many things but don't finish them and often use the excuse, "meh, it wasn't for me!" to justify it and funnily enough, from the middle of last year to this year I was decidedly unhappy but couldn't put my finger on it. Since I picked up the piano and golf again (both things I quit at before), I've never been happier.
Anyway, golf and piano :-D
So when I start in the morning, or especially after the weekend, I hit F5 and it shows me the exact line where it broke... and that's where I start from.
It's mega simple but it works for me as I do my utmost to forget about work when I'm not there.
I've explained the purpose of ads and how nefarious they can be and they now hate seeing ads. At all.
When they play a game on their phones, when an ad appears, they put the phone down and look away or do something else.
Stop looking to the government to solve this problem. There are many many thousands of sources online that one can easily use to get nutrition information.
If you want an example of how NOT to do it, just look at the US Gov food pyramid! Most of that diet is made of carbs.
Edit: I did a search and the first article, albeit from Huff Post, shows the food pyramid - https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/usda-dietary-guidelin...
It was more about getting him to think deeper than surface level: if I open a file, that means it locks so I need to then think about what happens when someone else tries to open the file etc.
It was a contrived example tbh.
If I'm looking at a dev in a corporate environment, the meme-related toy projects are a good start (everything else being equal) but I'd rather compare apples to apples.
If I was interviewing you, here are a few points that I'd likely bring up if you showed me your code (again, this is just my opinion and I'm going to assume you're looking at junior dev roles here):
1. Show me how you handle malicious input (assuming forms on your site)
2. Show me how you ensure you don't add errors to previously working code (here, I'd be looking for an example of tests - they don't have to be comprehensive, or even all that good, just that you are thinking about it)
3. Do you have a datastore of some sort? Show me how you read/write to it (again, doesn't have to be a clustered Postgres infrastructure, it can be a text file but I want to see how you handle the thought process of reading/writing to a data store. So if it was a text file, you'd likely have some sort of lock when writing so do you handle errors when another user wants to access it, for example).
These are just things spewing out my head as I write this but I'd be looking for someone who is thinking correctly and perhaps has an idea of the kind of things that would be required in a corp env, not necessarily how to do them. So if your single unit test is a bit shite, but you actually have a unit test, I'd call that a big win (I'm sure I'm not the only one that's inherited multi-thousand-line codebases with no unit tests!!!). Likewise, you'd wrap certain code blocks in try-except blocks and so on.
Oh, I may ask you to code something simple, fizzbuzz for example too and, in all honesty, if you can do that, you'd be an ideal candidate!
Any/all of these things would put you high up on any candidate list I reckon.
Anyway, just my $0.02
I am a contractor and for the most part it's still, thankfully, a meritocracy. So experience is, in my opinion, the biggest factor.
I have no doubt that sometimes, perhaps for the entry-level roles, they will discriminate against age but for senior roles, due to the cost of the candidate and the potential damage they can do, a younger candidate without the experience, could affect them badly.
They usually send you a confirmation email to say that you're their bitch now but I reply to the confirmation email saying that if I hear nothing for 7 days, then I can go with another recruitment firm.
I've learned not to trust agents. At all.
If I get a call I assume that I'll be ghosted or that they're lying about the role.
If I manage to get an interview, I usually get the role (I'd say about 70%+) but getting to the interview stage is always a pain with the agencies.
That being said, the market is most definitely different at the moment: I'd hate to be applying for entry-level (or even mid-level) roles at the moment!
I have a friend who is looking and he's struggling to get anywhere at the moment and he has more experience than me (I'm more senior than him but his CV has extensive experience on it).
I'm in the UK and the traditional dev/tech job route was via something like JobServe, Indeed etc., where you see a role advertised via an employment agency and you send your CV hoping for a callback.
I'm in a stable contract so I'm not looking but two weeks ago, I was contacted by two agents, one day apart, both unrelated to one another, completely out of the blue.
The first agent was more like a headhunter-type in that he arranged to "interview" me the following day via Teams to drill into my background and skillset. It lasted about 40 mins. Now, I can say, hand on heart, that in all my 20+ years of work that has never happened. Ever. He didn't have a role in mind, just that he wanted a few good candidates to pimp around to his contacts (CTO's and such).
My experience in the UK has been that you apply for a role you find on JobServe, you phone and chase the agent, and you hope to get through the cattle market, not this US-style agent-works-for-me stuff.
The other agent had a role in mind but he also grilled me extensively. Again, never happened before... they usually ask you about the keywords they're looking for and that's it: call done in 2 mins. This call took over 30 mins.
I asked the first guy what was going on as his style was more like the US system where a recruitment agent will work for YOU, and try to get you a role somewhere, whereas the UK model (unless headhunted!) was very much that the agents worked for the companies in question and acted like a CV-buffer to filter out the crap.
One of the agents hinted that there are a lot of average candidates out there at the moment looking for a smaller number of roles so they are aggressively filtering them before handing over to the clients.
I suspect that there have been a bunch of rejected CV's sent to the clients and they're now wanting better candidates... either that or agencies are indeed swamped in average candidates (not pissing on them, but if you have avg candidates and good candidates, the avg ones will lose out).
Anyway, things are a bit weird in the UK at the moment so I thought I'd chime in.
Don't AMD deliberately gimp their consumer cards to prevent cannibalising the pro cards? I vaguely recall reading about that a while back.
That being the case, they have already done the R&D but they chose to use the tech on the higher-margin kit, thus preventing hobbyists from buying AMD.
I've only just started using it for Llama running locally on my computer at home and I have to say... colour me impressed.
It generates the output slightly faster than reading speed so for me it works perfectly well.
The 24GB of VRAM should keep it relevant for a bit too and I can always buy another and NVLink them should the need arise.
Not sure if some are removed also but it definitely changes.
I had one years ago and it was built like a tank. Also, the screen (2560x1440) is possibly the best I've had on a laptop and the keyboard has particularly deep and solid travel making it the best typing experience I've had on a laptop too.
So, best laptop I've had tbh.
It's only an i7 6600U so not mega powerful but I don't write 2M LOC apps anyway so it's fine.
Just waiting on 32GB RAM arriving (official support is 16GB but the chipset supports 32).
I agree 100%... business-class laptops (and printers for that matter) all the way.
Twitter is a subscription-based system (by this, I mean that I have to subscribe to someone's content) so if I subscribe to someone and don't like what they say then buh-bye!
Let me right click on a comment/tweet (I don't use social media so not sure of the exact terminology the kids use these days) with the options of:
- Hide this comment
- Hide all comments in this thread from <name>
- Block all comments in future from <name> (you can undo this in settings).
That would work for me.
However, they currently don't do that - Everything gets put anywhere there is space.
There are some areas where stuff is put all together, like for example, there may be a shelf space full of a particular brand of superglue. If more comes in, even from a different vendor, as long as it is given the same ASIN (I think that's how it works - the ASIN is Amazon's internal ID system, sort of) then you can put that superglue with the other superglue in the same shelf space. That means you don't know who's superglue came from what vendor!
So if you received fake superglue and it came out of that shelf with superglue from 10 different vendors, which one sold you the fake?
It's a brilliant system all round: storage is cheap so the vendor doesn't pay high costs, Amazon keeps their costs low as their storage space is fully utilized.
The downside is that counterfeit orgs know this and it's easy to game!
Amazon can legitimately say that they don't know which vendor is the guilty party and no one can prove that vendor X sent in dodgy goods. Not sure if that's a legal defense or not but they have lots of money and you don't!
In fact, I remember someone a few years back on HN mentioned they were kicked off Amazon due to selling counterfeit DVD's (maybe CD's!) even though they were co-mingled so there was no way to tell.
It's entirely feasible that all incoming requests will hit a single node and stay there.
Still, hitting multiple microservices in a single request will have an overhead when marshalling all the http requests and whatnot.