Advertising and media? Robots bid on the ads that billions see every day, and decide what videos billions of people watch.
367 karma · joined April 20, 2017
Another study in Eur J Clin Inv had similar findings comparing countries: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484
COVID went wild basically everywhere. There were a few strong exceptions: China (apparently), Australia, New Zealand and some others. What these had in common was very strict police enforcement, which led to some dramatic scenes like people getting welded into their houses in China, or houses in Australia getting broken into by police on suspicion of too many people gathering.
In my _opinion_, lockdowns didn't work elsewhere because most cases are not from casual public transmission in places like stores, restaurants etc. Rather, events like kickbacks, dinner parties, and practices like in-home workers (nannies, cleaners etc) continued throughout the pandemic, or resumed shortly after the original March 2020 shockwave. While strident police enforcement of physical distancing could eliminate cases, and seemed to in a few places, the half measures used by most of the world did little-to-nothing positive while being an economic and cultural disaster.
Personally, I never caught COVID and rarely socialized during the pandemic. All the cases I heard of stemmed from the kind of thing I mention above: private dinner parties, nannies and so forth, rather than casual public transmission.
You, or any individual may have taken social distancing seriously but it's clear many or most did not, including people on both political "sides", up to and including governors, members of congress etc.
All my offers came from applying direct. Always got the runaround from recruiters.
It's a hard case to make. Sweden for example has had less excess death than harsher lockdown countries like Spain & UK.
Lockdowns have done little if anything in US states. New York and Florida have similar stats (worse in NY if anything).
We could go further and outlaw cars that don't have speed governors. That would save lives. Lower speed limits would save more lives as well. Now we have a balance between freedom and safety.
> Tens of thousands of people are dying a day right now because not everyone is taking the precautions they have been asked to take.
That was true during the flu season of 2018 as well. The excess deaths from COVID are higher, but not orders of magnitude higher (more like 3x) [1]. The response is off the charts, economically and culturally devastating. Not the right balance.
It's on the same order of risk as driving. Many young people die driving every year, yet we still do it plenty, with reasonable precautions. If you take reasonable precautions, are young and healthy, it is a risk worth taking to many.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0/figures/2
Yes, and I also see the push for remote work also affecting the demand side of the software labor market as well as the supply. There will be even more push for good collaboration/communication work process software. It's still a fast growing market.
That is like saying, "one of the downsides of using a cooked noodle as a fork is that it doesn't hold its shape". It's disqualifying until that issue is sorted.
The value of solar right now is that it provides energy at the hottest, most energy use part of the day. But there is a tipping point where marginal solar is not really valuable for a grid anymore. California and Germany are at that point.
Hopefully we get cost-effective day-scale energy storage, it's not going to happen in the next few years unfortunately.
Of course, there is a caveat. The static, crystallized structure is only one aspect of a protein. The dynamic behavior dissolved in H2O, at different pH, different ionic strength, with different ligands/cofactors are all also important, and not (afaik) directly addressed by this research.
I discourage everyone from doing a PhD, but it sounds like you've made your mind up.
Be very careful with your choice of advisor and department, and if it isn't working, be ready to walk away--sounds like you have a career to go back to.
The people running big companies aren't "nice guys" and that's true in all sectors. But the oil and gas cos are just selling people what they want. If they are evil for selling it then so are the customers for buying it.
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/68-americans-wouldnt-pay-10-month-...
This assumes that the source and target listings definitely have accurate keywords.
There would be plenty of value in a model that can use either keywords OR images to effectively make recs.
> Considering the data gathering, it seems easier to do user-product collaborative filtering.
What user data are you talking about here? The customer doesn't necessarily have user data.
I personally think this approach makes a lot of sense. If it works, a one-size-fits all recommender would be really useful and easy to sell.
The search algorithm, as you point out, is pretty much commoditized at this point.
Each individual network call is faster tho, good point.
The tower still has to ping the rest of the network to find the service you were requesting to in the first place.
If total latency ~ 500 ms, phone-to-tower is maybe 50ms of that in 4G. Even if it's down to ~1ms, total latency is only down 10%.
Not a networking expert so maybe I'm missing something here. Perhaps better use of CDNs could make this much faster?
Here is a good discussion of the difficulty: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...
Part of the leverage is going public and saying it's about some principle.
For experimental control, executives tend to think simple is better. The more complex, the more room for fudging.
CEOs finally have leverage against their marketing departments to do black-out testing on social media ad spend. It's difficult to actually measure impact of ad spending, and marketing teams spin results to their advantage.
They will observe what happens and re-introduce spending where it actually works.