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Maybe "A journey to protect the Great Barrier Reef using ML"? The video is five minutes long, is basically a nature advert complete with stirring music, has a

Maybe "A journey to protect the Great Barrier Reef using ML"? The video is five minutes long, is basically a nature advert complete with stirring music, has a bizarre cartoon in the middle of it and is all about an attempt to control the reef's population of starfish. We're told that the starfish are doing great thanks to there being fewer predators and more nutrients in the water, but that this is bad because "it's quite a nasty animal" and it eats coral. The goal is to find starfish "outbreaks" using ML and enable teams of divers to kill the starfish as quickly as possible. They appear to think this is a stirring example of protecting nature. There's even a diver at the end who breaks down in tears at the way the reef has degraded over his lifespan. Fortunately since the video was made it was discovered that the reefs are now at record-breaking coverage levels despite the starfish, so apparently they didn't need AI driven death-from-above. Also it's not really clear why Google wants to help implement mass animal culls in a place where people don't even go. Why are corals better than starfish? This seems like a very arbitrary judgement. Corals and crown-of-thorns starfish have been co-existing in nature for far longer than people have. So: 1. Not for developers. They use batching and quantization, that's as deep as it goes technically. 2. Essentially a long ad for their cloud ML services. 3. Consists mostly of people talking about how meaningful, awesome and filled with hope they feel.

lordswork 3y ago
Agreed. That seems like the short high-level feel-good talk aimed at corporate folks, whereas the remaining 17 talks are technical and aimed at actual developers.
- revelio 3y ago
  Guess it depends what you mean by technical. I randomly picked another, "Product fairness testing for developers". It seems to consist of two Googlers reading a codelab out loud. And I mean that literally: https://youtu.be/RcgBNkX0RjE?t=904 https://youtu.be/RcgBNkX0RjE?t=904 She literally reads out the title, pauses, reads out the subtitle, pauses again, reads out the rest of the document word for word. WTF? Is this person a text-to-speech AI? Why did Google make a video that consists of Googlers doing a TTS-quality video of their own documentation website? I'm a developer, watched many dev oriented tech talks and I've never seen that before. The bulk of the talk is about how important it is to be ethical and stuff. First time we see code that isn't just a snippet in some docs is at the 22 minute mark in a 34 minute talk. It appears to be little more than running some regexs over some rather incoherent LLM output. The code isn't even explained anywhere, just what it's doing. No dev is going to learn anything from this even if they're at bootcamp level. The video has got only around 4000 views, which seems about right. I can't imagine anyone watching this and thinking, yes, awesome, let's share it around. BTW the bootcamp level of the code might be because neither of the speakers are developers. One is a product manager, the other is an analyst. Really don't think this is targeted at developers dude despite the title. It definitely wasn't written by one. So that's twice now.
derefr 3y ago
> Why are corals better than starfish? Corals as a habitat host a lot of species, creating biodiversity. People don't really seem to care about corals by themselves; rather, they care about a few hundred species of pretty-looking tropical fish that exist nowhere other than within coral reefs. Anything that kills enough of the coral, is likely to make all of those very pretty fish go extinct. (I've never heard about starfish as a threat to corals; the wellbeing of coral reefs is usually brought up mostly in relation to the impacts of ocean acidification and seafloor trawling.)
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  > I've never heard about starfish as a threat to corals; it's a well-known thing. 2023: https://www.scubadivermag.com/9-8-million-program-to-protect-corals-from-starfish/ https://www.scubadivermag.com/9-8-million-program-to-protect... 2020: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2258714-coral-eating-starfish-threaten-great-barrier-reef/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2258714-coral-eating-st... 2018: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/world/australia/starfish-coral-great-barrier-reef.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/world/australia/starfish-...

lordswork 3y ago

Agreed. That seems like the short high-level feel-good talk aimed at corporate folks, whereas the remaining 17 talks are technical and aimed at actual developers.

revelio 3y ago
Guess it depends what you mean by technical. I randomly picked another, "Product fairness testing for developers". It seems to consist of two Googlers reading a codelab out loud. And I mean that literally: https://youtu.be/RcgBNkX0RjE?t=904 https://youtu.be/RcgBNkX0RjE?t=904 She literally reads out the title, pauses, reads out the subtitle, pauses again, reads out the rest of the document word for word. WTF? Is this person a text-to-speech AI? Why did Google make a video that consists of Googlers doing a TTS-quality video of their own documentation website? I'm a developer, watched many dev oriented tech talks and I've never seen that before. The bulk of the talk is about how important it is to be ethical and stuff. First time we see code that isn't just a snippet in some docs is at the 22 minute mark in a 34 minute talk. It appears to be little more than running some regexs over some rather incoherent LLM output. The code isn't even explained anywhere, just what it's doing. No dev is going to learn anything from this even if they're at bootcamp level. The video has got only around 4000 views, which seems about right. I can't imagine anyone watching this and thinking, yes, awesome, let's share it around. BTW the bootcamp level of the code might be because neither of the speakers are developers. One is a product manager, the other is an analyst. Really don't think this is targeted at developers dude despite the title. It definitely wasn't written by one. So that's twice now.

derefr 3y ago

> Why are corals better than starfish? Corals as a habitat host a lot of species, creating biodiversity. People don't really seem to care about corals by themselves; rather, they care about a few hundred species of pretty-looking tropical fish that exist nowhere other than within coral reefs. Anything that kills enough of the coral, is likely to make all of those very pretty fish go extinct. (I've never heard about starfish as a threat to corals; the wellbeing of coral reefs is usually brought up mostly in relation to the impacts of ocean acidification and seafloor trawling.)

SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
> I've never heard about starfish as a threat to corals; it's a well-known thing. 2023: https://www.scubadivermag.com/9-8-million-program-to-protect-corals-from-starfish/ https://www.scubadivermag.com/9-8-million-program-to-protect... 2020: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2258714-coral-eating-starfish-threaten-great-barrier-reef/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2258714-coral-eating-st... 2018: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/world/australia/starfish-coral-great-barrier-reef.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/world/australia/starfish-...