4 ms·
It isn't a hoax, but the OP is exactly right: if it were more usable, people would see it for what it is, and not for what the silly media narrative makes it so
by timr 6y ago
It isn't a hoax, but the OP is exactly right: if it were more usable, people would see it for what it is, and not for what the silly media narrative makes it sounds like.
As long as your technology is only usable by a high priesthood, you can make it look like magic.
- nerdponx 6y agoWhy do people feel entitled to "usable" ML at all? In the last 5 years, we have made incomprehensibly huge improvements in power and usability. It's an active field, and improvements are still coming at a steady pace. We have already revolutionized search, natural language processing & machine translation, image/audio/video processing, robotics, game AI, and advertising (for better or worse). And on top of all this, we have significantly reduced the "time to first useful model", and we have significantly lowered the math and programming requirements for building and implementing models. And now we have transfer learning, which lets any old Joe Schmo benefit from massive computing power and datasets to build small on-device models that blow away SOTA accuracy from even a few years ago. Oh, and the ML tooling ecosystem has become a substantial source of innovation in programming language design, "developer UX", and "data ops". What the fuck more do you want? The people who seem the most upset that ML isn't magic seem to be the most confused about what ML even is and does.
- timr 6y ago> Why do people feel entitled to "usable" ML at all? Yeah, people are annoying, with their demands to use software themselves. It would be much easier for everyone if computers were controlled by an elite group of engineers who could hide the complexity from the rest of us. Perhaps they could wear labcoats. > What the fuck more do you want? If I knew the answer to that, life would be a lot simpler.
- dang 6y ago> Yeah, people are annoying, with their demands to use software themselves. It would be much easier for everyone if computers were controlled by an elite group of engineers who could hide the complexity from the rest of us. Perhaps they could wear labcoats. That's clearly not what nerdponx meant. Can you please stick to the site guidelines? "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > If I knew the answer to that, life would be a lot simpler. That was a nice de-escalation.
- timr 6y ago> That's clearly not what nerdponx meant. I disagree. I made a straightforward interpretation of what was written. Given what came after the part I quoted, you really have to stretch to interpret it differently. The OP underscored the same point using profanity. I made a response that was clearly sardonic, attempting to be funny.
- nerdponx 6y agoYeah, people are annoying, with their demands to use software themselves. It would be much easier for everyone if computers were controlled by an elite group of engineers who could hide the complexity from the rest of us. Perhaps they could wear labcoats. What are you even talking about? It sounds like you're upset that cutting-edge technology still requires training & expertise to use and deploy effectively in industry.
- dang 6y agoHey, can you please not take HN threads further into flamewar? We're trying to avoid that sort of thing here. If a comment contains a swipe, please don't escalate. Also, it's good to check if there's something in your earlier comment that might have been provocative in its own right (which there was: "What the fuck more do you want?" is a hop flameward). https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nerdponx 6y agoThank you for keeping an eye on things.
- oivey 6y agoYou can say, with your voice, “who won the Super Bowl last year?” to a device that fits in your pocket and it responds with its own voice with the correct answer. That’s pretty accessible.
- benrbray 6y agoMost of these systems are so far behind any real understanding of your words, though. They behave like Text-to-Speech followed by a Google Search, whether that's how they're implemented or not.
- hoseja 6y agoAnd Google Search is, of course, merely a natural phenomenon that is mined somewhere in Siberia and exploited without anybody truly knowing what's going on.
- benrbray 6y agoSure, Google search is technological progress, but to the best of my knowledge they aren't doing any fancy natural language understanding every time you enter a search. It's a big, supersized information retrieval system that hashes all your n-grams with a few hundred thousand special cases tacked on.