LeetHacks

Yes, the AI was wrong and output was blindly accepted. There's no evidence migration background was a good predictor of fraud. The government was warned multiple times what they were doing was both illigal and ineffective. And even if it was a predictor, 26000 people were wrongly labeled as fraudsters, causing personal bankruptcy (which is very bad in the Netherlands), evictions, divorces, children wrongfully being taken away from the families (1100!) and suicides.

All while systematically denying the issue, government officials that knowingly lied during public hearings and a complete inability to compensate those that were affected.

Don't drag "wokeness" into this discussion, it has nothing to do with it.

No, the law allows for technological innovation if the usb group proposes a new connector, or if the industry wants to move to another connector. It will require some lobbying though, but the big tech companies are well skilled in that.

Plenty cheap boards out there with Cherry MX mechanical switches. A first board doesn't have to cost more than $100, maybe even towards $70 dollar range. Buy secondhand and you can go even lower.

Go for Cherry MX Switches. Want clicky (and loud) take blue. Want tactile go brown. Want no bump at all when typing go red.

I would find a cheap second hand board and see if you can appreciate the experience. It probably will not have lubed switches or may have a scratchy bump or hollow sound or whatever the hobbyist tell themselves to justify a new board. You probably will already be amazed by the quality improvement and won't care.

Because at the end of the day PayPal is better for the average consumer than a solution where somebody needs to handle a private key.

A lot of tech savvy people lost money due to losing their keys. Now imagine the disaster if your mother needs to handle them.

Payment solutions are also heavily regulated, often also in favour of the consumer. If my bank goes bankrupt or gets hacked I have much better garuantees of getting my money back compared to when I lose my private key.

The final reason (in my opinion) that "private key solutions" are not adding much is that to legally use it you need to comply with the regulations for traditional finance. Hosting an exchange without KYC can be considered illigal in many western countries.

Want to advocate for less regulations in finance? Sure, that's a valid political opinion. But you need to go into political solutions for that, not technological ones.

I am very against the idea that somebody with a PhD is the only one that can do a certain kind of work. But I am ofcourse biased given that you call me out.

Creative and critical thinking is not exclusive to people with a PhD. The ability to understand ones strengths and weaknesses is not exclusive to a PhD.

I would never attempt to write or publish a paper without help of somebody with stronger mathematical or statistical knowledge. On the other hand they should not write source code for a paper without consulting somebody with a strong background in sw engineering. You complement each other. Power is in recognizing that.

You would be surprised how many software bugs I have found that invalidated entire (draft) papers. A PhD in ML doesn't save you from that.

It highly depends. I was hired for a small research group that didn't have a product in production. Got hired for programming, was on the table discussing and contributing to research within a couple months without any background in ML.

Maybe have a chat with them and explain how it's affecting you?

If you are not comfortable having a chat like that you need to play it via an intermediate like HR, but remember that HR only acts in the companies interest.

I am not always in favor of the "victims should grow a thicker skin", but sadly that's how many need to survive in the workplace.

Try to judge others behavior like you would judge a rude child. If a child is rude you may think they are tired, stressed or hungry and not take it personally. If a VP is rude he must be a shithead, while stress might explain a lot as well.

Very early on in the pandemic one research group opensourced "COVID-Net", using the described flawed dataset.

Given the fact that at that time there was still quite a lot of "if we all help we can beat the pandemic" positiveness going around. An easily run-able piece of small code that promised "results" was available and the fact that a lot of organizations wanted positive PR, you get these insultingly low quality "research" practices.

I looked at a lot of the initial papers and models and most were forks of COVID-Net or used an already established model like ImageNet and retrained it with the bad dataset. Presto! Paper out PR happy. Very few questioned the dataset or the approach in general. But they loved bragging about it on LinkedIn.

If properly done, that approach would most likely generate a model that works really well and detects COVID for the right reasons. Put it out in the wild and it breaks down again because all radiologist would have to use the exact same method of scanning patients. Practice shows that scan parameters, position, annotations vastly differ across hospital, scanner and radiologist.

A client of mine wanted me to look into this dataset and help creating a model for detecting COVID. One of the doctors they where working with wanted to be able to submit pictures they took (from their point and shoot camera) of the CT scan. Good luck putting that variation in your dataset.

It hurts me that some people seem to consider this a luxury position. I completely wrecks me, to the point where I wished every day that a semi would drive me off the road and end it all. Switching jobs makes these thoughts go away instantly, but the boreout always returns.

Even in times where I have plenty work to do, it's all so meaningless or unchallenging. It's becomes easy faster then I get promoted. Most work is busywork, work on an advice that you know will be ignored in the end. Build a product nobody needs. If it's actually used my input feels minimal. Sure I made it, but 15 people had to review it in an "alignment meeting" at which point I am alienated from it. Imagine building a table and 15 people pointing out small things that could be done better. In the end it might be a better table, but damn would I hate it at that point.

It's heavy, every day feels like a drag. Appearing busy to avoid other bullshit tasks. Hoping IT doesn't look into your browsing behaviour. Rotate the same social media all day. And what maybe stings most, is that your performance reviews are very positive, further strengthening the point that it does not matter how you do it, as long as you are present.