w_t_payne

Yes, and that's exactly what I do. It's also what the OP is advocating for.

I am hugely excited and energised by discussions of how we can make artificial intelligence safer and more reliable; how we can ground our symbolic requirements both in real-world phenomena and also in the sub-symbolic representations learned by the massively over-parameterised machine learning tools that are currently in vogue; and I am fascinated by how we can use synthetic data and domain randomisation to bridge those divides and achieve that symbol grounding.

Even in technical communities, it's hard to find people who are as engaged, excited and energised by those topics as I am. In 'everyday' life, people either disengage and switch off immediately, or react in a (presumably defensive) mocking and derisive manner.

It's only by spreading our net further, by reaching out to a global community of academics, scientists, engineers and founders that we can build ourselves a more sympathetic and engaged social network, and that we can fully satiate both our social and our intellectual needs.

This is true, but it's also about giving the customer a strong sense that they have made a saving, making it easier to reach a deal.

Shared-nothing dataflow models are an interesting way to engineer (some types of) parallelism.

How much would it cost them to hire a software contractor to reproduce what you've made? Get your boss to ask for fixed-price quotes from three different software contractors. 60-70% of the median value is probably a reasonable ask for you to make, and anything above 50% seems the right ball park for a deal.

Maybe getting contracting gigs might be easier than finding perm roles?

This is pretty typical example of culture change when moving from a small organisation to a large one. The thing that makes this sort of culture change so emotionally challenging is that involves a fairly dramatic change in values. This can lead to a lot of feelings of underappreciation and frustration, which can be overcome only by recognizing that values are not immutable and universal, but are instead highly context dependent.

Massively overgeneralizing of course, we can observe the following tendencies: Small organizations tend to value people who are highly responsive and who can work independently in a fairly unstructured and unconstrained operating environment. They tend to value people who can do "whatever is technically necessary" to rapidly solve problems and move the business forward towards it's goals.

As organizations grow, such forward progress is easily stymied and halted by interruptions and context switches from colleagues, and velocity becomes largely a function of how much such "frictions" can be reduced or eliminated. Behaviours and traits which were highly valued and rewarded in a small-organization context (e.g. highly independent problem solving and proactivity) can, under many circumstances, become liabilities in large organizations if they interfere with the smooth running of established processes, or cause disruption and confusion to large numbers of people. Reliability (and above all predictability) become far more important than responsiveness or (sometimes) raw velocity.

Needless to say, being able to adapt behaviours and attitudes depending on context is an exceedingly useful skill, and just because you were rewarded for acting in a particular way in a small organization does not mean that you will continue to be rewarded for acting in a particular way in a big organization. The two are completely different beasts, and it's the communications structure that drives the shift in values.

And when the cause of that internal crisis is the rise of far-right populism (either actively funded or at least tacitly supported by Putin), then it really doesn't take much effort to put two and two together. There are no mysteries here, only evil working in plain sight.

It's a mistake to conflate Putin's interests with those of Russia. His continued attempts to bolster hostile far-right strawmen into something more substantial puts his actions in direct conflict with those he claims to represent. His divide-and-rule politics puts him into a state of active, ongoing conflict with all of us.

Well, considering that we're at war, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, we will eventually reach a point where none of us has any choice whatsoever.

I don't care who started it. I'm focused on direct threats to myself and my family.

He clearly isn't exclusively responsible, but he is a big part of the problem, and it is part of a hybrid warfare doctrine that's being actively and aggressively pursued.

Similarly, those fascist/neo-nazi elements, whether in Ukraine or beyond, though supposedly anti-Russian, are to all practical purposes serving Putin's domestic political interests.

Clearly pretty vile, indefensible stuff, and yet it's Putin who is waging war against us.

They stop being mere 'domestic voices of dissent' once they start threatening my family.

Putin justifies his clumsy adventurism by attempting to paint his enemies as fascists. The rise of the extreme right in the west provides significant political cover for Putin, and should probably be assumed to be a tool of his hybrid warfare strategy.

Very interesting, and aligns very well with my experience with synthetic data as well. (In that diversity trumps realism by a LARGE margin).

I have found that the vast majority of people are very warm, considerate and forgiving.

As long as you're honest and transparent with everyone around you (including yourself), you don't necessarily need to worry too much about the 'skills' bit of "social skills". Just concentrate on the 'social' bit.

My experience suggests to me that there is a strong perceptual component to depression: It is a sort of blinkering of the internal eye.

The world does not literally become black and white, but nothing in the world is capable of engaging the mind enough to elicit even the briefest saccade and fixation upon it. Attention must be forced upon objects in the world, laboriously and painfully, and the entire perceptual experience is dull and muted, as if the internal emotional pain has become so overwhelming that it has cast a grey fog over the landscape.

The symptoms are profoundly physical; physiological in nature. It is without doubt a disease of the physical body; albeit one which often seems driven by a fractured and injured psyche throwing out discordant, disordered and malign thoughts.

Recovery from depression feels like waking up. The blinkers withdraw, and the world expands, becoming larger, richer and more engaging. The brilliant yellow of a flower is quantitatively still the same, yet draws the eye and becomes an occasion for delight whereas before there would have been nothing.

This experience makes the most sense for me when I consider perception as an active process. Information does not simply fall into the eyes to be passively consumed. Our perceptual experience is a dynamic thing - a continual act of the imagination, only just held in check by our senses. Depression distorts and undermines that part of our imagination which we use to see the world.

Entirely deliberate Bullingdon-style class warfare.

That was a really nice description. I've struggled to get traction with a lot of this stuff for a while (and not really needed to understand it, so my curiosity remained unstated) ... but this has really helped. Thank you!

This is one of those ideas that causes you to kick yourself for not thinking of it earlier. Simple, and with the power to be transformative. Well done and good luck!

True. Both can be true! :-p

Yes, that's certainly true.

Linters are good because they stop people arguing. Some early employee in the team defines some set of rules, and that's just the way things are from then onwards.

Less time bickering means more time spent doing actual productive stuff.

Sadly, behind every person who is prepared to act upon his or her racial animus with acts of physical violence directed against the innocent and helpless, there is an army of equally malevolent supporters and enablers who willingly compound the harm and trauma with gaslighting and similar abusive and manipulative acts.

My children being physically assaulted and called racial slurs.

The COVID lockdown has, if anything, improved matters. With most people staying home, the need to deal with aggression, hostility and abuse on the street is very much reduced.

If it wasn't, then why did the Brexit referendum unleash such a torrent of racist abuse?

Brexit was an absolute tragedy for my family.

Immediately after the referendum was lost, my children and wife started to experience a level of racially motivated abuse that we had not seen before.

This reached a level where my wife felt she could no longer remain in the country and arranged for us to relocate as a family to mainland Europe.

The move was not kind for me, and soon after I arrived I had a breakdown and our marriage fell apart. I'm now back in the UK, but the place seems strangely unfamiliar and hostile to me; and whilst I am still able to work, all the joy, happiness and hope seems to have drained from this land.

There are all sorts of strange and inconsistent rules that we (as a species) make up all the time. The number and arbitrariness of these rules helps keep other people in our society on their toes and uncomfortable, anxious and vulnerable to criticism and as a result, easy to manipulate and control.