svdad

The human-assisted aspect of AI development in general seems to be getting a lot more (well-deserved) attention recently. Google along with everyone else has depended on cheap human labor for data labeling for many years. The fact that Cruise is also relying on human labor to deal with the 2-3% of edge cases the AI can't handle is not surprising. I agree there may be a concern about how it's being represented, and the consequent implications for public perception. It's also true that the cars are operating themselves a significant portion of the time. In my book there is a lot of "self-driving" happening here, just not 100%. But that seems like an unsurprising stage in this process. I have my doubts about whether we will ever get to 100% autonomy, i.e. no human intervention ever, but whether that is a viable goal will be up to the company implementing it to decide... is it more cost-effective to provide their service with mostly-autonomous cars that require occasional human intervention? or is it cheaper just to rely on human drivers in the first place?

Congrats on your launch! Seems like a really slick product.

Have you taken a look at https://cloud.google.com/ml/? I assumed you would have but didn't see anyone mention it in the comments.

Do you see your product as complementary to a service like that? e.g. could you use the Google service as the execution engine for yours? or do you see that as competition?

Not my experience at all. Video quality as far as I can tell is equivalent, and the Skype UX is miles better. Full screen with the little self-view monitoring window at the bottom -- great experience.

My parents-in-law still can't figure out how to get on their G+ account to use Hangouts, but for them Skype is second-nature. Open it, click on the contact, phone rings, presto, we're chatting.

LeapMotion might be the missing piece. Doesn't have haptic feedback, obviously, but it would be better than trying to type.

What are you talking about? I have never been in a car that did have this little arrow. I just thought it was something you had to know.

(Now I'll have to check my car tomorrow morning to be sure I haven't just been ignoring it all this time.)

Great point about not hiring jerks, and those are some excellent ideas about how to avoid it. Having worked with, and currently working with, that kind of jerk I've seen how destructive they can be.

I barely even have time for the 3-6 technical interviews most companies want to do, let alone multiple days/WEEKS of "try out" period.

No, it isn't. Unless you're saying you gained weight again while still eating the same diet, you solved the problem, you just failed at implementing the solution.

Ok, let's read this closely. It doesn't seem to me like Larry and David are really denying much of anything.

"Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers."

Sure, that's fine. But the fact that the initial PPT gives a specific date on which Google cooperation began already suggests that Google may be handing over data, not that the gov't is sucking it all down automatically.

Also, they say "data centers" in particular. Data travels over lots of other pipes.

"We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday."

Not surprising the NSA wouldn't tell them the secret code name of the project in their discussions.

"we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process."

This is an enormous loophole. "in accordance to the law" could mean anything, and with automated review systems the volume of data passing through could be massive.

"Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period."

Not providing "open-ended acces" does not mean not providing any access.

"We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist."

But not surprised to learn that other not-so-broad orders exist. How broad is too broad?

"Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false."

Not "on such a scale", but on a slightly smaller scale, sure.

"there needs to be a more transparent approach"

In other words, we wish we could tell you about everything we're doing with the NSA, but we aren't allowed to.

Really this doesn't read like any sort of denial at all.

All the older people are, in fact, at Google. The average age of software engineers there is much higher than you might think.

Nice pivot. I had the same idea myself about two years ago, and saw swole.me but thought it looked way to focussed on weight training users for a general audience. This looks much more widely useful.

No. This is something you have to stop.

Speaking from experience I know it is hard not to define yourself by the people around you, but it's deadly.

What helped (and continues to help) me is this question: Do you want to be that person?

As in, "do you want to be the person who sits in the office chatting and surfing facebook all day? or do you want to be the person who other people look to to get things done?"

The point is, look at yourself from outside. Decide how you want to act (for me, thinking about how I want to be perceived helps here). Then make it happen. Stop waiting for the people around you to make you into the person you want to be.

Yeah, that's awesome. What's so unusual about it to me is that when he was discouraged she didn't tell him to do something easier that would make him feel more immediately satisfied (by making money, providing for the family, etc.); she told him to keep doing what was making him unhappy in the short term. I think that takes a damn strong relationship.

"See it through to completion" != "iron out bugs"

> Put another way: for self-direction to work, the culture needs to rank improvements as highly as novelty. Possibly higher.

Which it never does. At least, I have yet to experience or hear of a (software) engineering culture in which that's true.

> It's more about using previously tested blocks of language. Here's a good example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalaya_clause

Right; there's some cargo culting in legal writing. Until a particular form of words has been tested in court, no-one really knows whether it will stand up.

If there's an untested standard form, most people won't want to experiment with a variation because if their variation happens to be the one that fails, there's a possibility of a negligence suit for not using the standard form.

If there's a tested standard form, even fewer people will want to experiment, for the same reason.

There's no "right" or "wrong" about NK doing nuclear testing, although for convenience we might phrase it that way. We don't want them to have nuclear weapons because we believe they're a belligerent, unstable regime. Yes, we opened the can of worms, but that doesn't change the power balance.

Absolutely. The alternatives -- OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Docs -- are all broken in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways, especially if you're a long-time Office power user.

There really is nothing comparable to the Office suite when it comes to features and interoperability. Yes, it has its quirks, but you just can't make the other products do what the Office products can do.

> Do any of you have any experience with this?

Um, YEAH. And just started seeing a counsellor about it. I don't think there's anything wrong with me (or you) but I want someone to talk to about it.

I disagree with "Efforts taken at this point to turn things around would be futile." I'm living proof. I bounced from job to job for 10 years, then lost a job in finance in 2007 at 33, went back to school, got out in 2010 at 35 and now have a job as a software engineer. Yeah, I'm competing with young turks 10-15 years younger than me. Yeah, sometimes they're better... but a lot of the time they aren't. It turns out I actually did learn a few things bouncing from one job to another, and people do see that.

Is it the best job I could have at this point in my life, am I as rich as I could be, as if I had done everything "right"? NO. I threw away a bunch of fucking brilliant opportunities earlier in my career. But is it a good job that will give me a platform to build a satisfying career in the next 20 years? Absolutely.

The really hard thing for me at this point is figuring out where I really do want to go. In my case, a lot of the bad decisions were to do with "grass is greener" feelings -- I'd see one job that looked cooler than my current job, go out and get it, then decide it wasn't that cool and bounce to another one. So now that I've finally recognized that, where the fuck DO I want to go now, and how do I figure that out?

I think that's really important. Calling it "finding your passion" is bullshit, though, because it's not really about passion -- it's about making a sensible decision, taking everything into account including financial situation, family responsibilities, and the realities of various careers, as well as, yes, what you like to do. I'd love to be an astronaut, always wanted to, but -- life sucks -- it ain't gonna happen now. Not that it is 100% impossible, but I'm not willing to make the sacrifices it would entail. But there are great, exciting, satisfying things I can still do.

Another thing that's hard is making sense of the past while still keeping my focus on looking ahead to the future. That's what I'm trying to do now. I don't want to keep repeating broken patterns, so I feel like I need to think about what I've done in the past and understand it, to some extent, so I can see what I did wrong and how I can make sure not to do the same thing again. I think I've identified some of those things, but that's the main reason I'm seeing the counsellor -- I want to talk out my analyses of my past decisions and try to understand them and use my "lessons learned" for the future. I don't think completely ignoring everything that has gone before is right -- I did that for a long time and ended up making just the same mistakes 10 years later. But obsessing about the past is (obviously) not helpful either. It's a hard balance to strike.

So, you aren't alone. Very much not alone, I think. Hope you're able to make some sense of things. You can ALWAYS turn things around.

And showing data for the week ending Jan 11 2014. CDC staying one step (year) ahead of Google.

I hope his analysts are better than he is. This is shockingly insubstantial analysis coming from the CEO of Stratfor.

I have to say, I think asking someone as deeply depressed as the OP to find the perspective to hear the stories of struggle amid the trumpeting of success is asking an awful lot. That's tough for anyone to do, never mind someone who is struggling from a severe lack of perspective in the first place.

I thought it was just me. Really bugs my wife when she's trying to read something over my shoulder.

Seconded. 20% time is still real, if you ask/push for it. If your idea fits somewhere under the broad umbrella of your group's mandate, so much the better.

I have to disagree a little with one of the earlier points, though. Through start-up acquisitions, Google is getting a lot more groups with the developer/hacker mindset. Those groups tend to keep to themselves and rail against Google's slow pace, and often eventually quit. Google could learn from that mentality, but equally those developers could learn from Google's methodical approach. In my (limited) experience Google could do much better at integrating newly acquired start-up teams into the overall corporate culture and development philosophy.

I think we'd all be better off if energy, rather than space or water, were the limiting factor.

The feeling of seeing a sequence of random, unfamiliar locations, followed all of a sudden by a familiar street is really amazing. Especially if you type in the address of a street you haven't lived on for a long time.

I must disagree -- in my experience, the jet/mud/arm analogy translates precisely into real life results.

Also, should you find an additional paper pass to be necessary, you'll find it complicated by the fact that the area to be wiped is now wet. Toilet paper notoriously doesn't hold up well when soaking wet.

> The pragmatic reason for having compulsory voting is to provide a better sample of what the population wants. In effect, to dilute the crazies.

Yes. It forces the expression of weak preferences which otherwise wouldn't be expressed.

Whether the race was close has nothing to do with how likely one side was to win. If there are 100 voters and I know with absolute certainty that 51 of them are die-hard republicans and 49 of them are die-hard democrats, I'm probably justified in saying that the republican candidate has some large probability of winning, 90% or something depending on actuarial probability that some of the republicans die etc. But that's a 90% probability of winning by a 51/49 margin. Alternately if there are 10 republicans, 10 democrats, and 80 independents I may have no idea how the independents will vote so AFAIK it's equally likely that either candidate wins. The margin of victory has nothing to do with the probability of the outcome.

I think you're confusing probability of winning with winning margin. His 79.4% number is his estimate of the probability that Obama would win Virginia by any margin. I don't think it's correct to say he's "a little bit right" -- either his prediction is correct, or it isn't. The only way I know to gauge the accuracy of his actual probabilities would be to run the election multiple times -- but there might be a more statistically advanced technique I'm not aware of.