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When I click through I only see a 4MB zip file. Where is the dataset?

It's great to have this kind of data available. So much computer vision research is done with a small number of datasets, e.g. imagenet, and there are lots of gaps to fill in on how sell these techniques apply to industrially relevant data like this.

WSL2 has quirks that make it not the same as running linux natively. For some workflows this may not matter but I have seen it evaluated for some use cases where not everything worked.

Also, windows is, for lack of a better word, obnoxious, in the way it bothers you about updates (and other messages of various kinds), and forces you to restart frequently and kn its terms.

The few times I have used windows recently, I found it the opposite of "just getting out of the way and letting me work", and I fear that even if wsl did work smoothly for what I was doing, just the fact that windows was running in the background would degrade the experience.

I was linux only until last year when someone convinced me to try a Mac. I have been very happy with it: it's way less intrusive than what I had pictured (I think prejudice against commercial OSes from my windows days). Memory and CPU issues that seem to crop up in ubuntu using desktop apps are not present - I had a lot of trouble using e.g. zoom and g-suite on ubuntu without having either lockups or full blast cooling fan. And I still have a unix-like OS that I can do my usual development, ssh-ing, and file manipulation on.

I currently have a Mac for "office productivity" stuff and ubuntu for development, but if I had to only have one computer, it would be a Mac.

There is another comment in the thread where someone suggests that maybe its time we do away with april fools. Personally, I think most of the jokes are dumb (and honestly mostly closer to the kind of inoffensive-to-all anodyne crap that can still be distributed as a "joke"). But I find it horrific that people think doing away with it is the answer (it's also possible that person is trolling I suppose)

Anyway, I've said before, this reminds me of "The name of the rose" where the inquisition era zealot couldn't accept that religious men should laugh, because if they can laugh, they could laugh at God and the whole power of the church would fall apart. There is an echo of this in the current lack of tolerance for any humor that derives from making fun of something, grounded in the misunderstanding that finding humor in something means disrespecting it.

I'd concede that it's not cool, if true, that banks and tech companies have so much power over people that a fake invoice someone knows they aren't responsible for makes them afraid for their survival.

Haha, I guess I'm a minority. Other commenters thought it was "morally reprehensible", "fraud", and are "livid". I'll try to do a better job of seeing how evil those around me really are.

I think most agree it was a bad joke - there is no 'absurdity' to it. Even when you find out it is fake, it's not really funny, it's more like "oh, why did you do that".

That said, I'm amazed how angry commenters here seem to be getting over it. Yeah, they tried to do something funny, it wasn't, it backfired and annoyed people. But at the same time, lighten up. Not everything needs to be a rage-inspiring transgression.

I'm curious about the co-CEO thing. That seems like it is universally something that doesn't work and is just what happens when nobody wants to make a tough decision. Is there any context on why it might be the right move here?

We had an Apple IIe, but our first x86 was a 386 with 2MB ram and a 25MHz processor. I think the HDD was 40 MB.

There is definitely some validity, even if it just boils down to "understand how your ML models make there decisions and make sure you're cool with that". I think the challenge is that a lot of the "ethical ai" agenda seems to be getting set by people that understand neither ML not ethics and end up focusing on superficial issues that are not actually related to ML and are more about "now that you've written your decision criteria down, you may not like what you find". Maybe that's what you're seeing, that what could be more of an objective science gets wrapped in a social movement so it ends up looking a lot less legitimate

This whole thing has transcended any kind of logic, and there does not seem to be a rational way to discuss the tradeoffs with people. I think this is just the first "crisis" - actually the mildest thing that could happen and still be considered a global pandemic - to land in the milieu of social media and polarization that the world had become already, and this is the result. The pandemic is really just a fashion accessory for a lot of people, a way to talk about how they're doing their part, look down on others they perceive to be the cause, and add as a hashtag to their posts.

In an earlier, less connected world, there would be other more sensible jurisdictions to go to, and people to speak out and debate rationally about why the ridiculous overreaction we've seen is in nobody's interest. But these days, I think we're all fucked. I think we lost a war a long time ago without noticing, and this is what we're stuck with.

I can't believe people are accepting it in canada either. I'm hoping that people will start to push back more as restrictions move from temporary to systematic, but so far I see very little evidence of this. Possibly just because the media refuses to cover it.

I think that's part of the point. Initially I couldn't understand why ostensibly right wing premiers in Ontario and Quebec were to pro-lockdown. But when you see how much the interests of bigger businesses are being served, basically removing all their competitions, it makes more sense.

There are fewer lobbying efforts on behalf of smaller business (and none on behalf of people who just want quality of life) to the bigger businesses with a direct line to the government get the covid rules basically written for them.

Is there a direct link to the project?

I often have a shell open on my phone, but far less often than I would if there were good options for typing. I'm very excited by the prospect.

A lot of the "system integration" work that these big consultancies get hired for is more like configuration (of big erp systems like SAP and Oracle or whatever)? There may be some overlap but as I understand it's very different from what many people would think of when they hear software development.

Edit: I think this causes internal confusion as well, like consultancies hear "software project" and assume their team can do it because they have "software" experience, and then you end up with these disasters like you hear about from Accenture and Deloitte where they spend 10's of millions of dollars building a website that doesn't work. The parallel language in a academic, SV type tech, and tech consulting is actually a source of a lot of confusion.

That's about it. Horrible user experience - oh you're about to pay us, just click a few sidewalks first - and condescension of asking people to do a menial task that improves their ML models. But forcing you to use one of their sanctioned browsers and let the record what they want to is where the real hostility comes in. Its exercising monopoly power to squeeze more out of people and repress competition, I'd call that hostile.

Gambling, e.g. casino or sports betting is different because for some it's a fun pastime and participants are (more or less) aware of what it's about.

"Crypto" - not the underlying tech which is potentially interesting and may have merit in some incarnation - but buying or trading "assets" grounded in the tech, is essentially a quasi-legal pump and dump scheme right now. There is a rich history of securities law that is designed to thwart predatory investment schemes, and all of that has been circumvented by allowing people to trade in these assets.

I generally agree that adults should be able to do what they want, but I don't think we have found a way to balance that with what right now is effectively one big fraud.

The site has a big re-captcha banner on it - one of Google's most consumer hostile products. They should consider switching to something else if they want to "take on google".

Related, in English, words of latin origin are often perceived as more pretentious sounding than their Germanic equivalents. It's not true for all cases but there are lots of obvious examples in this list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinat...

That promition is ridiculous, or at least superbly ironic.

I think though it's an example of how actual health (or quality of life which is a much more robust measure) outcomes are virtually irrelevant to policymakers.

We a just lucky when quality of life happens to coincide with large business interests (all gatherings are banned unless they're in a walmart), bureaucratic ass-covering, or vote buying. In normal times it balances out decently but the equilibrium has been thrown far off here.

Just my opinion, there's a lot of extremism around handling covid, basically a religious reverence where no measure is too severe to prevent even one death.

But it would be a mistake to apply this thinking in reverse as well. Rare reactions to a vaccine, even if tragic, should not be cause for general alarm or be a reason to stop using it.

Agreed that just quoting the delayed value does not tell the whole story.

But it could be a pretty good proxy: to some approximation, everything in the supply chain would be set up to work with the 9.6 Bn daily flow of value - everybody's financing payments, payroll, working capital, etc. The time is gone. Just like if you had to take two weeks off (unpaid) because you were sick, you could work more later to get that money back, and recover some of it if you work overtime, but you still missed that window to make money.

But will taking away abstractions address what the paper is talking about?

If we can abstract away the models and training, I see an opportunity to focus more of the dataset. If you look at something like Pytorch Lightning (and I think fast.ai but am not familiar) you can deploy very powerful, and proven, models without having to get into the details. What might still be missing are more tools to work with the dataset - easily varying size, composition, using active learning, etc. But it's all supported by more abstraction.

(I'm a huge believer in the importance of understanding things from first principles, so I agree with making sure students develop their skills that way. But when it comes to practical work with datasets, abstraction is very important)

Wow, I just want to say that this was good. You have managed to very accurately and eloquently describe the CBC. And you're right, you have missed nothing since you tuned out.

Yeah, I came here basically to say the same thing. Don't want to get political, but CBC is so far from objective both in the spin they put on stories, but mostly in what they select to "report" on that I give no weight whatsoever to what they report. Canada badly needs objective, good journalism (CBC may still be at the top of the comical lineup of special interests we call news outlets). However, I think a big problem we have is that many people still do trust the CBC, I see it all the time in discussions where the nonsense they report on is accepted as gospel.

I find this is common in python: there are nice shorthand things you can do that are definitely powerful, but they are not easy to understand nor to remember. Particularly with conditions applied to arrays / series this is a problem. "Truth of a series is ambiguous" is one of my most frequent errors.

That said, the overall ecosystem still makes python the most practical general data science language in my view.

> Without a motivating example, it's hard to imagine that people will want to pickup a Go-like (but not exactly Go) language for data science

Exactly. I use almost exclusively python (including for data science- or ML really). I've been wanting an excuse to learn Go by doing a project with it. But learning some third Go-like language would be a tougher sell for me, unless there is really something it does better than python, because it still doesnt give me the benefit of learning Go.

But like someone else said, "because you can" is usually a good enough reason to build or learn a new language, so I'm sure it's still worth it for many.

When it was short term, I can see the argument both for decency and for a smoother return of keeping people on. I was surprised that my employer pretty much instantly dumped all the facilities related staff when we went to wfh. But now that it has become structural, it's hard to fault places for adapting. I read comments about people continuing to pay their barbers or cleaners. Are they just going to keep doing that? At some point, and where I am it was probably once we realized we'd still be wfh at the end of last summer, I think it's perfectly reasonable to restructure the business to reflect reality. People doing jobs that aren't needed will realistically need to adapt. When things change back, companies and the labor market can adapt back.

I only have limited perspective, but the people I know who are really interested in free software (including most notably my girlfriend) are really not interested in the other aspects or RMS or anyone else's politics, in relation to FOSS. There is this perception that people are sitting around saying "oh, well I like free software, but thay movement is dominated my mysoginists or whatever, there's no place for me". I don't buy that. Positive contributors are drawn to FSF over free software advocacy. Other personal/ personality issues only matter to most people when they are made so distracting they can't be ignored, and that just breeds apathy.

So tldr, I agree with you, this may be appeasing people who have just taken an interest to make trouble, and sponsors that dont want to get involved, but it is completely alienating people actually interested in free software.