naturalgradient

Thank you for the response - I appreciate the complexity, I had just been wondering if there was actually a full time team on it.

From my limited insight (we collaborate with Google Brain), it was my impression that the core problem around such questions is that most research engineers with the expertise to do this are (and I understand this very well as a researcher) more interested in doing research than do full time language porting, and I would expect that to be the case for almost anyone with the expertise.

One thing I keep wondering as a daily TensorFlow user: If Google is staking its future on TensorFlow, why is there such slow development on the Java/C++ version, which would be relevant to lots of enterprise users?

Namely, full support of symbolic differentiation and all operations and optimisers ported. Having to define everything in python and then load the graph definition into a poorly supported C++/Java wrapper is incredibly tedious.

Surely, hiring 5 engineers per language team and having them port and maintain versions would not be a big stretch to the budget.

Or is this an intentional strategy where the lack of language support forces users to deploy their models on Google cloud workflows in lieu of being able to easily integrate them into their big data pipelines (mostly JVM based)?

I have always thought there is an optimistic version and a pessimistic version of this.

The optimistic version is that technology creates enough wealth to provide a basic income for everyone when the value of most human labour is diminished. The interesting part here is who 'everyone' is, because in our imagination it rarely includes impoverished countries.

The pessimistic version is that technology could already create enough value for everyone, but what it really does is it increases inequality.

The value of automation might be captured by few large companies and a technological elite in a few countries, which have no incentive to support the rest of humanity other than to avoid a bloodbath. Combine this with vastly increasing populations in developing countries and resource scarcity + climate change in various regions causing mass migration movements, I just do not see how this can really workout peacefully.

If people have seen the movie Elysium, I always feel that this is already happening, just that Europe and the US are Elysium, and it is only about to get worse.

No, this is not what this is about at all.

We have reached a point where reviewers of reputable conferences will ask why a paper is not referencing unreviewed work that has been uploaded on arxiv a day before the conference deadline.

This is not hyperbole, as anyone who is submitting to ICLR or NIPS can confirm. Work of certain labs is taken as established authority as soon as it hits arxiv.

Curious question: Why does it say CC Christopher Poole at the bottom of the letter? As in, the founder of 4chan?

It seems hard to accept but at this level there are actually only few people even being considered by virtue of

a) name recognition in the industry

b) past experience managing large companies

Whether they failed or not is almost irrelevant.

Boards would vote for an arguable incapable Marissa Mayer over some super successful but unknown higher middle manager from Google because she is perceived as less of a risk.

Not to be flippant, but ever since LinkedIn has become unbearably slow and buggy to use (since the UI update), any pressure to improve is welcome.

There is this interesting phenomenon that in some regions, Twitter activity is not particularly high (e.g. Germany), so according to an analysis I read a while ago, a few hundred tweets within a few hours are enough to get a topic trending in the region.

So there is this effect where a small group of activists (20-30) can easily coordinate to launch a 100 tweets. They then reach out to online media outlets, which in turn report that a topic is trending, so it is officially 'news', and thus the cycle begins.

In particular, journalists are disproportionally over-represented on twitter and thus seem to (somewhat self-importantly) overvalue it as a discussion medium. At least where I am from, it is almost exclusively activists, journalists and politicians in their own Twitter bubble talking to each other and reporting about what they say about each other.

So as they believe in its importance, it becomes important, and thus opens avenues to manipulation by pr agencies or state actors or political splintergroups.

What I am really looking forward to is to hear how Marissa Mayer will frame her time at Yahoo in hindsight.

Will she show humility for failing at turning the company around? Will she claim success for a coincidental share price increase she had nothing to do with? Will she claim nobody could have done better? This will allow for a better judgment of character.

I have noticed that with any type of money processing service (stock broker, bank, ..), whenever any irregularity happens, I end up losing money no matter whether I was at fault.

The asymmetry between me as a customer and a large organisation with a faceless customer service is just so big that complaints take too much effort to reach someone that could do something about it (if they were willing to own up to problems, which they usually are not).

Having the legal right to get any fee refunded and getting it are just so far removed that I would wager all money handling services make non-trivial amounts of profits from unjust fees because they can exploit this asymmetry.

Sadly, for me as an individual the right decision is almost always to let it go because my time is more expensive.

Regardless of what specific reasons he has or hasn't for accepting this move, this is fascinating from an organisational perspective.

With a significant part of senior leadership replaced, what will happen to Uber's work place culture? As in, can culture in such a large organisation be changed top down? Are there any examples where an organisation has changed on a short time scale?

I am thinking of the Ballmer/Nadella transition but in my (outsider) perception it took years for Microsoft to be viewed differently as a company. There is also an aspect of bringing in an outsider versus letting an insider take over.

Would be interesting to see a breakdown of your spending vs the 30k household here.

After all, if you always adjust your spending to your income, you will never be rich in any 'cannot be ruined' sense. Consequently, it would be unfair to compare situations to the 30k family and conclude you are in the same boat.

Reasons are given in the recode post linked within:

Michael, as Recode also reported, was also involved in an incident where an Uber executive he managed directly named Eric Alexander obtained the medical records of a rape victim in India. He also came under the spotlight when he suggested digging up dirt on journalists to a BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith in 2014.

Leading somewhat off-topic, but this has also sparked a rather frank debate on r/machinelearning about some of the things discussed in the review, in particular arxiv flag painting:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/6gke6a/d_r...