693 karma · joined November 25, 2007
He's a skilled techie with a developed bullshit radar. That already puts him above an average layperson.
Over the last 20 years, there's been untold amount of hype from different sources, each wave of which wanted the public to believe that this time it's different.
I'm laser-focused on the developing markets (although China is already past that stage). Moreover, I hold investments in mutual funds for emerging markets, including those with stock in Tencent (for instance).
But I can't name anything in China except:
* bigger supercomputers
* bigger bitcoin mining facilities
* clone cryptocurrencies
* bigger number of patents filed by Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu
* hiring of Andrew Ng and then him quitting Baidu
* proliferation of cashless payments
* excellent team work of techies and business people resulting in WeChat, which would not have succeeded elsewhere
* I no longer buy the claims of ML applications (speech recognition, face recognition) surpassing human accuracy - I've been hearing these for years and then reading refutations, but yes, sure, let's assume a few algorithms were tweaked successfully
Does it all work, yes. It's far beyond the China where I was doing business a decade ago wondering whether the developers I was in contact with have a functioning brain. But is it "more advanced than Silicon Valley" - nowhere close to it, it's well-managed cookie-cutter tech. If anything, the credit goes to the Chinese tech-savvy business people not prone to the American corporate waste syndrome and forced to dive deeper into the tech.
Can you name 3 (three) projects where the tech was not licensed or borrowed elsewhere and is indeed so advanced it did not surface elsewhere? I'd be sincerely interested to learn of such.
And they have (drum roll) an equivalent of the FICO score! It uses "advanced machine learning algorithms"!
There's really nothing related to privacy or societal implications, it's an advertorial. I don't understand why it went past the radar of MIT Technology Review.
A bigger question from me, is China really that advanced? I hold a neutral position on this, but am now seeing a consistent pattern of articles hyping Chinese cookie-cutter tech (or stuff which is bigger) sounding like Cold War era Soviet propaganda. If they really had some kind of grandiose tech achievements, why bother with this?
The general format is about picking a subject (person, brand, company, political party, country) that they are ideologically hostile to, and then picking bits and pieces from the Internet that show that it is baaaaaad. Not that it has a particular downside, but it's baaaad because maybe A, looks like B, I think C, and I heard that D. In this particular piece: the base is not a mushroom (who cares?), Quorn is successful (get'em!!!), I don't like how it tastes (good for you?), and it's owned by a big corporation (see, told you they're evil!). Also, other companies selling fake meat use very complex recipes (you don't say...).
None of that involves actually talking to people or scouting publicly unavailable documents, which is what I perceive as journalism. And they have the guts to claim that "The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce."
I am specifically curious about the kinds to allow for seeing exoplanets by blocking the light of their star.
I wonder whether a startup out there has plans for a timesharing space telescope. Maybe with adaptive optics.
It's not only Facebook, BTW. Whenever you provide those "additional details" to "secure" your account, be sure there's a high probability they will be used elsewhere.
In my case, I provided a personal email address to Azure as an alternative email. That email address had an Azure account associated with it. Microsoft merged the two accounts without me asking for it and (not very surprising) it caused some issues displaying the subscriptions properly to the point that their support asked me to create an empty subscription with a brand new email address.
Sell personal details like credit card numbers or the SSN to a criminal syndicate.
No one said they would spy to steal state secrets.
Another possibility is identity theft. Read about the scandal involving Australian passports used by Israeli secret services in 2010: http://www.smh.com.au/national/mossad-hit-snares-australians....
Seriously, who builds these American trains? And when were they built?
You'd be surprised how many "artisan", "organic", and "fair-trade" brands they own, too.
The full list of their brands did not fit in the main Wikipedia article, so they had to create a separate one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unilever_brands.
"Hip" stuff, B2C, is an area where the younger folks may fare better because they know the segment of the market which is willing to spend more (namely, other younger folks).
On the other hand, B2B requires an extensive network of connections, knowing the corporate bureaucracy, and a lot of patience. It's very unlikely under-30s will have advantage here.
All in all, us old farts are less likely to play by the VCs' destructive narrative of "all or nothing" and aim at the more realistic "much or something". Seriously aiming to be a Facebook or a Google is like including a lottery win in your budget.
And, of course, bullshit radars honed by experience never get obsolete.
With a solid decision making tool, movie execs could finally have a financial reason to accept original scripts that are not yet another sequel and reboot.
In the poster boy of overpopulation, Bangladesh, the fertility rate dropped from 6.2 children to 2.1 children per mother (https://www.ft.com/content/f60e2ddc-0bbc-11e1-9861-00144feab...). No Asian country today has fertility rate above 2.5 AFAIK (except maybe the Philippines).
So it's not generic then.
The police can access files online anyway, it's just a matter of convenience. Most likely, the online databases are now accessible on mobiles.
I saw Facebook misidentifying siblings of different gender with a year difference in age. The bone structure of their faces is similar, all the rest is different.
Yes, in many cases the uses of tech in China are disturbing (like the supposedly planned social credit system).
But this case? It's the job of the police to find people. Facial recognition helps it (although, I suspect, it won't be as flawless as advertised). How is it functionally different from the recognition tech in airports? Because the cops look scarier?
Windows user here. Honest curiosity: does anyone know why the minimize / maximize works on the Mac the way it does? I mean, what's the rationale to design it like this?
Today, it's also prone to sudden random fluctuations because an algo-trading software Bayes classifier decided to sell based on historical data it pulled out of its shiny metal ass.
That's not what the TechCrunch article actually says.
The article says that the big mergers and acquisitions are down. But the big M&A are the economic equivalent of luxury real estate deals. Do you really care that a Hollywood celebrity can't sell his or her mansion at a nice price?
Most people are interested in their segment. In fact, smaller M&A deals are on the rise: http://www.successfulacquisitions.net/ma-today-smaller-deals..., and the chances are, your startup, if it does not go belly up, will end up in this category.
Huge M&A are difficult to pull properly. The fact that there are fewer is a good thing. It will also make the evaluations more reality-based and not based on "but mommy, I wanna be a unicorn too".
Battery life, normal temperature, reliability vs a gimmick that 1 out of a 1,000 users will want.
Depends on the language pair. Depends on the human translator. I met translators who wouldn't compete against 1990s Babelfish / SYSTRAN well. They still had some business.
Amazon employs over half a million people (https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-...). I doubt engineers make more than 5-10%, someone has to mind the fulfillment centres, and the fully automatic robotic future is yet to arrive (https://qz.com/1039169/amazon-is-looking-to-hire-50000-peopl...).
The blue collars make up the bulk, and while the accounts of white-collar sweatshop conditions are argued about, nobody ever contradicted the accounts of blue-collar workers, and numerous complaints have been filed: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-settlement-could-pave-wa....
Indeed, Amazon is probably the best and the worst about the modern tech: an ambitious leader, who manages to create paradigm shifts in areas where he is not a subject matter expert; and a sweatshop-like environment where the low ranking employees are treated like oompah loompahs.