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In regards to GDPR, I agree it's the right thing for consumers, but it puts compliance pressure on startups. So from the perspective of a startup, I could see its removal being a positive.

(Note that is just from the perspective of a startup)

I moved to London to do a startup in December 2019. All I can say is do not do this. The government during covid has been horribly inefficient, I just received my NHS ID in the last month (taking upwards of a year to process, during which time they denied me covid testing after I had the necessary symptoms) and I received my NINO 6 months after moving here, however now with covid they aren't even processing these anymore.

In terms of brexit, any sort of gains for a startup will be possible only if the British government allows them to be (for example with deregulation or the removal of GDPR or the reduction/easing of bureaucratic proceses). In my experience betting on the British government to do the right thing is a bad bet. They have the digital London effort but it seems more like a PR stunt than a good-willed effort to attract startups.

You will also encounter strange socio-economic effects that you would not see in other places, for example being an engineer and starting a startup here is viewed as a negative while being a business major is a positive. There is a big divide between capital and labour that perpetuates itself through these stereotypes that are not present in places like America.

I find the term "ethics" has had its meaning warped lately, ironically for the purposes of "ethics-washing" which is what this article is claiming is happening when big corporations engage in AI ethics. When I worked at a FAANG company in the machine learning field, there was a group of people interested in ethics, but they never seemed to discuss different views on ethics. They often seemed to use the word as a tool to hide behind their collective action to force the company to change course.

For example this article says the following: "Members of Google’s Ethical AI team sent additional demands to Pichai, calling for policy changes, among other things.". If you look at these demands it includes the following:

* The dismissal of the company vice president.

* The reinstatement of Gebru at a higher level than she previously had.

The question as to whether these demands are ethical is not clear at all to me.

Another case in point, anecdotally I saw this a lot at the place I used to work, was the call for regulation to control AI research, and indeed this article talks about this in the section: "Scrap self-regulation". Taken from a different political perspective, someone might argue that giving more control to the state for the purpose of pursuing legitimised violence against AI researchers is unethical (note this is not my view it is an example). I saw people air views like this in the ethics discussions and given very unfavourable treatment, bordering on unethical.

It would be great if AI ethics was a field that produced solutions to problems such as verified datasets, best codes of practice and testing tools. Instead it just seems to be a way to highlight issues and advocate for political positions, which isn't in itself worthless but it feels like the first step in what should be a journey. Unfortunately highlighting problems is really easy, fixing them is the challenging part.

I often got the feeling that the people interested in this just cared about directing the labour of other people for their own interests, e.g. leading from behind rather than leading from the front. All seemed rather unethical to me.

Is this not legal? I would have thought this would be illegal if they republished their content, but if they use it to train an ML system is this not transformative? Google Books vs the Authors Guild seems to suggest so [1].

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-co...

So I don't know if he is saying that lockdowns will "generally" continue on a global stage remain until 2022, or if he saying that there will be lockdowns "somewhere" in the world into 2022. Initially I take this to mean the former because of this statement in the article: "BILL Gates predicts global Covid-19 restrictions could last until 2022".

If this is the case could someone explain the reasoning here? The UK is expected to complete its vaccination program by April 2021 [1]. I can't imagine other Western countries will be very far behind them. I imagine the isolated nations such as AUS and NZ will allow travel with the necessary vaccination certificates [2].

I feel like I'm missing the link as to why lockdowns dragging on to 2022 is likely?

1: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-vaccin...

2: https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/qantas-coronavirus-va...

Is there any data that shows the number of people believing in conspiracy theories is actually greater than it was, and that that gap was due to social media?

20 years ago I remember TV shows talking about the moon landing being a hoax, and a decent number of people I talked to at the time believing it. This is just an anecdote, but I've noticed that people make the claim that conspiracy theories are on the rise and I've yet to see hard evidence to support that claim.

I find it weird that science can't conclusively answer the question "is wearing a face mask going to significantly reduce the spread of covid". It's been nearly a year since this was a known disease, and beyond that masks have been around for a long time and they are used by the medical community to some degree. How can we not know based on the shear mechanics of these two entities whether this is effective?

I feel like every other day there is a new study or report that refutes the study or the report I just saw from another respected institution. I'm not surprised people are frustrated at this problem. As an example, look at this study that was posted just 13 days ago on HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25159583

Through my career I've traveled to new countries and cities for work, each time the office helped me connect with people and make new friends, some of my best friends in fact. What does the future hold for me in this respect? It seems like a lonely place.

As someone who tried to use git to do this for large sets of data, I'm very glad this exists. Will be trying this out in the future.

I've noticed when your organisation gets to a certain size, it is inevitable that you will end up working with someone who believes in an "everything is X" fervently enough to do damage. The most common one I've seen is backend developers trying to force frontend to adopt backend paradigms (such as everything is a service, even libraries, and must be communicated to over RPC calls).

They tend not to care about the collateral damage or nuances, they want to order the software according to their beliefs. Once you recognise this you can see the same pattern repeating in a lot of other non-software disciplines. I guess it's just a personality type.

Anecdotally when I talk to Uber drivers about how they feel about laws like this, they are staunchly against it, in fact I haven't found one that is for it (sample size of maybe 20 or so). Does anyone have any data on whether these drivers actually want AB5 in effect? All I see from the pro side are cherry-picked examples.

I got fed up with the state of news, see more here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/meantime-browser-plugin

With all this remote work going on, does anyone know whether this will affect whether companies are willing to relocate people to the USA? Would be a real shame if that was to go.

I've begun using Swift for Linux to build sites on Publish (https://github.com/JohnSundell/Publish) on my CI.

I wonder if this is why my issue is with the terminology, what you have described in 1 to me is a microservice architecture. I currently have a monorepo deploying microservices in order to get the benefits of developing in a monolith but with the isolation of microservices, but I do consider it a microservice architecture on the whole.

I wonder if there is a difference in terminology between the way I use microservices and the industry? I have worked on a number of systems, both monoliths and microservices, and when a service gets big enough (think Spotify or Uber) monoliths simply don't scale. I will agree that doing microservices before you have to is unnecessary complexity and what I would consider overengineering, however if the consensus is they provide no technical advantage I have to disagree, here are some that come to mind:

1) A monolith will have to consume a large amount of resources per request due to having all the models available at runtime. Lets say I have a system that handles 100 RPS but only 1 RPS uses that model, and that model is GB's of RAM and requires GPU, that means I will have to have this memory and GPU allocated for every request, making scaling much more costly. (Note: your mileage will vary depending on your complexity)

2) A monolith is a central point of failure, if I make a mistake in that service it can affect all of my requests, rather than just the request that calls out to that microservice, this is a difference between my entire service going down and just a feature.

These are just 2 I thought of off the top of my head, but I wonder why I seem to be out of step with HN consensus here.

The article points out that Brussels are alright making regulations around artificial intelligence etc:

"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in Brussels lobbying the European Union’s regulators as they form new laws to govern artificial intelligence, content moderation and more"

Does anyone know what they are thinking of doing in this regard? And what problems they are attempting to solve?

Does anyone else consider these type of articles the clickbait of the programming world? They tend to all follow the formula of

1. Make over the top statement in title.

2. Vaguely address the over the top statement in content.

For example the author hasn't shown us why "All" programming languages are "wrong". They haven't shown how they would fix them to make them "right". Their premises (e.g. "computation is almost always free") are flawed.

I wonder, if the title was called "A rant about some popular programming language paradigms" would it be as popular?

I've struggled to put my thumb on why I've found London uncomfortable as a technical founder but you have hit the nail on the head.

You could do that, but then I wonder if that isn't going down the road of microservices? The ANN services for example would need to interface to the database if you want some kind of real time ANN service.

Perhaps there is a problem where people are splitting a perfectly good monolith into microservices, but I do wonder how do you deal with large scale machine learning without microservices? I am a rather small operation and I still have models taking several gigabytes worth of memory and ANN indexes of about the same size, which clearly couldn't operate in a monolith unless it was a massive machine, and even if it could not every request would necessitate such power. How does a dogmatic monolith approach solve these problems?

Is it possible to do business from a corporation registered in the USA when I am living in another country (in my case the UK)?