ensan

If you’re just an end user and a non-engineer, how can you (1) universally judge the level of programming of data scientists to be (2) mediocre?

"There is huge genetic IQ gaps, lol. Some cats are so smart they blow your mind, others are mouth breathers. The normal distribution is real."

I'm very curious about how well someone with a "lot of experience in digital advertising" is positioned to define "genetic IQ gaps", "smart", etc. as it applies to cats & others. Perhaps instead of throwing these terms around like they're candy, you should submit your findings to an scientific journal (and get rejected :) ).

Intelligence is not well-defined even for humans, and we have little understanding of what goes on in an animal's "mind", yet people like you use terms like IQ for cats like they're established facts. For all we know, it could be that some animals/cats just don't "care" as much about interacting with humans. Just like some humans do.

I don't know your situation but I while there are certainly ultra-competitive CS programs (e.g., Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, CMU), there are many research-focused universities in the US (R1) that are totally good-enough for doing research and getting a recognized degree. In a lot of less competitive universities, there is no admission committee per se; you just email the faculty you're interested in and if he wants to recruit you, then it's basically done.

There are good research universities in the R2 list as well (RIT, IIT, etc.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_...

Is it just me, or are the salaries much lower in UK than in US? Why?

Why not apply to PhD/MSc programs in the US?

The PhD stipend is well above starvation levels and you can go to internships during summer to earn more money and accumulate experience. I have seen many, many people in FAANG with PhDs in SDE/DS roles and they can relatively quickly reach senior levels as well.

There is currently a hiring freeze at Meta for most positions but this rescinding case was mostly caused by visa lottery problems it seems like.

No.

Especially in biosciences. But it’s probably the case that the hardware that Apple produces don’t use fancier methods such as DL/RL that much and depend on more traditional methods. You need capable GPUs for the state of the art stuff (e.g. DLSS by Nvidia).

No, especially in fields that have as much citations and papers on average as ML/DL/RL.

If a paper in any other field was cited 44k in ~8 years, it must have made life-changing discoveries. Maybe some of the early papers on COVID-19 will reach that number.

"ML is starting to fizzle out as a “savior” of the industry after lofty promises were never fulfilled."

What? Siri, text completion, all the health- and activity-tracking features of Apple Watch, computational photography, Photos app, Face ID, and many, many more depend on machine learning. And let's not forget the Neural Engine in M1.

Wow, reading a few pages of mostly spiteful & angry (at Mr. Goodfellow) replies on macrumors.com was really eye-opening. Ordinary people seem to have no idea at all how much in-demand someone at the level of Ian Goodfellow is.

"The paper mentions 35 (!) manual restarts to train OPT-175B due to hardware failure (and 70+ automatic restarts)."

https://twitter.com/awnihannun/status/1521572873449533440

Isn't there a tax deduction aspect to a lot of these donations?

Anyways, 100 more Nature-level articles about climate change is not going to change the situation if there is no political will (or if it seesaws every 4-8 years at best).

Ironically, I suspect a lot of them might end up in fossil fuel companies and do greenwashing R&D.

"If it's from Stanford, pretty much whatever you want."

That not true at all. The name of the university can only get you so far. For example, if you have a climate-related degree, can you really compete with Stanford CS majors for a SDE job? Or with ME majors for a product design position?

IMO if you get into Stanford and can pay for the degree, it would be a waste to spend it in a major like that unless you're really passionate and have very specific goals.

"So, basically, investment banking or data science"

Well, those are definitely not "whatever you want".

I have not had the time to read the paper and see how the authors address this, but the biggest flaw of this study is relying on subjective reports by the owners. Almost all dog owners I know are used to playing down the severity of their dog's aggressiveness.

"peer-reviewed long term study"

This is not a silver bullet, even for recently published Nature/Science papers. You need to convince 3-4 people to get your paper published in the end. For many controversial papers, there is a lot of back and forth about the validity of the results (e.g., "Matters Arising" in Nature).

The biggest flaw of this study is relying on subjective reports by the owners. Almost all dog owners I know are used to playing down the severity of their dog's aggressiveness.

"There could be plenty of reasons why pitbulls feature highly in the dog attack stats (severity making attacks more noteworthy, type of owner increasing likelihood"

Well, the severity of their attacks is essentially a results of their genetics. As for the type of owner, it the same logic used against gun control, saying that they pose no danger if the owner is responsible.

Whatever the combination of factors, the end result on a large scale point to pitbulls as the most dangerous breed of dog to humans and banning them should be a no-brainer.

But is writing a (somewhat pathetic) open letter really trying? Perhaps organizing a strike would convey more meaning, although I don't see that happening at all.

"The S&P 500 had record profitability during this completely unplanned WFH experience."

Correlation != Causation

"They pay well because demand for engineers is high"

Do they pay their teams in Canada, India, China, etc. as much as SV? No.

The method proposed in their Nature method may be very impactful, but the paper itself is nowhere near as rigorous as the other Nature papers I've read; it is written more like a white paper and I believe if this paper was submitted by a university research group (even in its final form as we're seeing right now), it would have been rejected. So I do sympathize with the person raising concerns about it.

“I also can't help but not overlook that he's an UFO nut.”

Well, that’s your personal opinion but I’m not sure how his thoughts on UFOs discredits his view of the work culture at Valve. One can have metaphysical and spiritual beliefs and be an extraordinary scientist as well for example.

Many have left Valve but usually people in the relatively constrained game dev industry tend to be conservative in voicing their opinions if only for their future careers prospects.

Calm down, no one claimed to speak for you.

I come from a country where 6 ft.+ is considered pretty tall so I totally believe that this type of metric is not universal. In fact, there is no real analogue there and I have never heard of a female mentioning a specific height as a preference.

It was a total culture shock to me how big of a deal your height as a number is in parts of the US culture which frankly I find vacuous and sickening.

I mainly blame this on the toxic culture on the "dating" apps. (Also perhaps the imperial measurement system? lol). I guess those who knowingly participate in it have accepted the terms of use.

"Basically this means that in modern dating, if you are short, you are very likely to die alone and this trend will only get worse in the future."

You're being overly dramatic and don't have any to support your claim. It is not really necessary to date dozens of women before getting married.

Dating many women in the first place is only the norm in a few western countries.

Also, I believe the dating apps are mostly used for casual sex, so the statistics there are not really relevant in the end.

So what? If you look at the average speed of a racing car shortly before it crashes, it will be very high.

Look at the luxury stores being regularly robbed in cities like LA. Not exactly “civil”, but it’s an inevitable consequence of inequality: rich people can’t easily enjoy their nice things.

“Once you hit a critical mass of these people, it completely sours the culture and it becomes an irreversible black hole.”

By all accounts, it already has.

This unusually rosy anecdote (claiming to work 2 hours per week???) is from an anonymous account created a few hours ago just to comment on this story.

Let’s not take it more seriously than we have to.