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Deep Learning Is Eating Software (petewarden.com)

Pete Warden, engineer and CTO of Jetpac, shares his view on how deep learning is already starting to change some of the programming is done. From a blog post, shared by a reader last week: The pattern is that there's an existing software project doing data processing using explicit programming logic, and the team charged with maintaining it find they can replace it with a deep-learning-based solution. I can only point to examples within Alphabet that we've made public, like upgrading search ranking, data center energy usage, language translation, and solving Go, but these aren't rare exceptions internally. What I see is that almost any data processing system with non-trivial logic can be improved significantly by applying modern machine learning. This might sound less than dramatic when put in those terms, but it's a radical change in how we build software. Instead of writing and maintaining intricate, layered tangles of logic, the developer has to become a teacher, a curator of training data and an analyst of results. This is very, very different than the programming I was taught in school, but what gets me most excited is that it should be far more accessible than traditional coding, once the tooling catches up. The essence of the process is providing a lot of examples of inputs, and what you expect for the outputs. This doesn't require the same technical skills as traditional programming, but it does need a deep knowledge of the problem domain. That means motivated users of the software will be able to play much more of a direct role in building it than has ever been possible. In essence, the users are writing their own user stories and feeding them into the machinery to build what they want.

147 comments

  1. AC Is Eating First Posts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Nom nom nom

    1. Re:AC Is Eating First Posts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      kudos

    2. Re: AC Is Eating First Posts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      White gold wielded?

  2. Ya, right... the rich and poweful maybe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In essence, the users are writing their own user stories and feeding them into the machinery to build what they want.

    That is, IF you have access to their platform. Nobody is going to be doing this in their garage on their own.

    And we see yet more consolidation at the peak. The rich get richer and the rest of us are left with less.

  3. Accessible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "what gets me most excited is that it should be far more accessible than traditional coding"

    Translation: We can pay people less to do the same work.

    1. Re:Accessible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're right. Pneumatics and hydraulics just put so many hard-working people out of work.

    2. Re:Accessible by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Except for the fact the deep learning systems, may not be efficient enough. There are some tasks which it excels at, however some tasks there just isn't the volume or rewards for outcomes for the system to adapt fast enough to.

      Lets say a flood control dam system. Which is is strictly coded if water goes above this line, open the dam and flood the down, because otherwise the damage is far greater than flooding the town. The reason why this is computer controlled is because it takes the faulty morals out of the picture. You wouldn't want to be the one to press the button and flood the town, even though it is for the greater good. A Deep Learning system, will want to take more variables into account, and will either decide that it is important to press the button before it hits the limit, as it would only create minor flooding problems, or too late figuring that it can wait a little longer creating a catastrophic failure.

      Deep Learning often creates a lot of superstitious like behaviors (As shown in the funny walk of Googles Deep learning to walk video) Where it learned to do the task, but not at optimal way. This may just be a mater of time for the technology to get better, however it isn't a time to panic and toss out your CS Degree and get a job at your local Walmart as a greeter.
       

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    3. Re:Accessible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Vada doosh!

    4. Re:Accessible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your problem is that you envision Deep Learning to replace everything. That's a flawed assumption. It's going to replace parts of systems it can handle well, those that were already messy and difficult to understand.

    5. Re:Accessible by Etcetera · · Score: 1

      Except for the fact the deep learning systems, may not be efficient enough. There are some tasks which it excels at, however some tasks there just isn't the volume or rewards for outcomes for the system to adapt fast enough to.

      That sort of goes out the window once the Singularity hits, though. A sufficiently advanced AI with the ability to goal-seek improvements to itself will wrap its own subsystems in learning simulators. It won't need to train on real-world disasters, it will simply iterate on simulated ones and then iterate on updating the simulation. Meta-learning, if you will.

      The Go AI, which is now approximately 100 times smarter than it was before and is becoming nearly impenetrable for Go experts to understand how/why it's making the decisions it is, is a prime example of this. After a certain point, its own mechanism of adaptation outpaces our own.

    6. Re:Accessible by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

      However it isn't a time to panic and toss out your CS Degree and get a job at your local Walmart as a greeter.

      Wait, you mean Walmart pays those people to do that? I thought they were just deranged people with nothing better to do!

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    7. Re:Accessible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What are you doing? You have outlined a plan for AI to become GOD! We are now all doomed!

  4. Not just software by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    More likely - jobs,

  5. I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me.

    This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Good bye.

  6. Ok, I got this by rsilvergun · · Score: 2

    Deep learning's eating software and software's eating the world. We just need a few waves of Chinese needle snakes to eat Deep learning. Then gorillas to eat the snakes. Finally when wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
    1. Re:Ok, I got this by freeze128 · · Score: 1

      Let me know when it's whacking day.

  7. Ya right... by Matt.Battey · · Score: 2

    Ya, I'm calling BS. Give us some concrete examples of how ML/AI/DL is doing anything other than burning CPU cycles on public clouds that drive up revenue for the cloud vendor.

    1. Re:Ya right... by religionofpeas · · Score: 2
    2. Re:Ya right... by Visarga · · Score: 1

      It's doing a lot of things, but it isn't replacing traditional software, it is going in different directions, mostly image, text and voice processing, driving cars, driving data-center cooling, medical (reading scans, diagnosis), financial, spam, sentiment, content/product recommendation and web search ranking.

    3. Re:Ya right... by David_Hart · · Score: 2

      Google translate: https://www.nature.com/news/de...

      I think that he meant an everyday example like building better accounting software not something that would obviously benefit from deep learning like language tools.

      Language tools are an obvious use for deep learning. Especially when users/contributors can tweak the context of words and idioms that do not directly translate very well into words and may require some cultural knowledge for proper use in sentences.

      Something like accounting software would be hard to visualize using deep learning since the outcome is pure calculation. And argument could be made that deep learning would be suited to tax software for optimizing the reduction of your tax bill, through various what-if scenarios, and perhaps in keeping the rules updated.

    4. Re:Ya right... by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      I think that he meant an everyday example like building better accounting software not something that would obviously benefit from deep learning like language tools.

      That would be silly, because the article only says that problems that benefit from deep learning systems are programmed in a different way, not all programs.

    5. Re:Ya right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I think that he meant

      You're free to think what you wish, but Matt.Battey didn't offer your qualifications. When you find yourself having to invent a bunch of qualifications to support your argument you may have a faulty argument.

      Financial institutions have been using ML to detect fraud for years. Every large credit card transaction you make is scrutinized by AI systems to detect fraud. Insurance claims and tax returns are also being analyzed by ML systems. This is an argument from ignorance.

    6. Re:Ya right... by Matt.Battey · · Score: 1

      OK, so ya, I didn't give many qualifications. But implications that ML is improving coding (or at least "in a different way") needs some qualifications and examples. I'll even except that ML can optimize algorithms and "improve page rankings." BUT, it needs some pretty good examples and boundaries. Warden is trying to push us away from thinking his post is a "deep learning hype" piece, but that's exactly what it is.

      I mean he says "What I’m seeing is that the problem is increasingly solved by replacing the whole stack with a deep learning model!" But where's the evidence, and what is the "whole stack." Your whole stack may not be my whole stack.

    7. Re:Ya right... by Dog-Cow · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Essentially, ML can replace (parts of) systems that rely on heuristics. Anything with fixed rules, no matter how complicated the rule set, will not benefit. Why train a ML system when you can get 100% deterministic answers?

    8. Re:Ya right... by David_Hart · · Score: 1

      I think that he meant

      You're free to think what you wish, but Matt.Battey didn't offer your qualifications. When you find yourself having to invent a bunch of qualifications to support your argument you may have a faulty argument.

      Financial institutions have been using ML to detect fraud for years. Every large credit card transaction you make is scrutinized by AI systems to detect fraud. Insurance claims and tax returns are also being analyzed by ML systems. This is an argument from ignorance.

      Matt Brattely's reply was to the topic and the article. The point of the article was that ML and AI was being used to develop a large amount of software that most people wouldn't recognize as being a use case for ML or AI. It doesn't take a genius to reach a logical conclusion that while he may not have stated this qualification up front, it's implied.

      Yes, banks, etc. are probably using DL to detect fraud (another obvious use case). But that's not what I meant by Financial software. I mean things like Tax Software, Accounts Payable, Receivables, etc. which you totally missed because you were more interested at getting your screed down than actually contributing.

      Besides, whether I am right in my assumptions or not it's still a valid question. What are Google using AI and DL for that are non-obvious use cases?

    9. Re:Ya right... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      It's doing a lot of things, but it isn't replacing traditional software, it is going in different directions, mostly image, text and voice processing, driving cars, driving data-center cooling,

      I find tha tdatacentre cooling one a bit odd. There's traditional CFD software that deals with such things. Maybe I didn't read the right sources, but I never saw a comparison to the engineer+CFD software school of design.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    10. Re:Ya right... by RoccamOccam · · Score: 1

      I've been thinking about this a good bit lately. Just last week, I was playing with a UCI data set for poker hand recognition. I used a neural net for the recognizer and tested it against the training and the test data set -- 99% accuracy!

      Seems pretty impressive, right? But, a simple, rule-based system would be 100% correct, always.

      I have a bad feeling that we're going to start seeing a lot of 99% solutions for 100% problems.

    11. Re: Ya right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because you still have to code your logic up correctly, but with ML you just use standard code plus the training data.

      Also, most deterministic models rely on making assumptions about the data, which may or may not hold well in practice.

    12. Re:Ya right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      B/c it might be cheaper to train some off-the-shelf ML system than writing a spec, doing architecture and design, coding, writing tests, testing, and telling the MBA it'll be done early next week.

      Just don't do a tax system the ML way.

    13. Re: Ya right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Meanwhile, using a small sample size, I solved not just gaming probability but all of mathematics!

      2+2=4
      Based on this, the answer to everything in math and game theory is four!

    14. Re:Ya right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      systems that rely on heuristics. Anything with fixed rules, no matter how complicated the rule set, will not benefit. Why train a ML system when you can get 100% deterministic answers?

      Assuming there are no complexity issues.

    15. Re: Ya right... by datavirtue · · Score: 1

      That would be a great way to choke an AI system...feed it our tax code without letting it know the goal is social engineering.

      --
      I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
    16. Re:Ya right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Financial institutions have been using ML to detect fraud for years. Every large credit card transaction you make is scrutinized by AI systems to detect fraud.

      And I for one am getting sick of my credit cards being randomly declined every time I go on vacation.

  8. Obligatory Tron quote by the_skywise · · Score: 1

    Alan Bradley: Some programs will be thinking soon.
    Dr. Walter Gibbs: Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop.

  9. Nice Advertisement by prefec2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Most software today and in the coming decades is designed and developed to support business processes or data flow and execution in scientific processes. These systems need a deterministic and foreseeable behavior. Yes, you may use "learning" classification mechanisms such as neural networks to support some tasks, but this is not changing how we develop software. Especially, developing software is usual a technical and social process, as you have to understand the demands and needs of users, which require interviews and discussions with users. You also need to communicate with UI designers to develop together with users and UI designers useful and easily to understand interfaces. And yes, you have to map all this onto technology.

    1. Re:Nice Advertisement by cellocgw · · Score: 2

      Not to mention the spate of articles showing how to destroy deep learning results by changing a few well-chosen pixels in images. You gotta have a heavily rule-based system in many cases, or in pretty much any case where "five 9s" reliability is involved.

      --
      https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
    2. Re:Nice Advertisement by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

      The article isn't saying that traditional software development is changing. What is happening is that some problems are suitable for a solution based on deep learning, and for those problems, the traditional programmer is replaced by someone specializing in configuring the neural net and training it. Pretty obvious, of course.

    3. Re:Nice Advertisement by edittard · · Score: 2

      Of course if it looks like it'll save money then it'll get applied to problems which aren't suitable. There will be tears; whether they're of sadness or laughter, we know not yet.

      --
      At the bottom of the /. main page it says 'Yesterday's News'. Well they got that right.
    4. Re:Nice Advertisement by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 5, Funny

      I think it's a reflection that people always relate to what they know.

      For people who work in deep learning software, almost everything is just petabytes of data to be analyzed and classified.

      For people who work with microcontrollers, almost all of today's software is pure bloat that wastes CPU cycles and RAM.

      For people who work in security, almost all programmers are idiots.

      For people who work in design, almost everything is ugly.

      For everything else, there's MasterCard.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    5. Re:Nice Advertisement by prefec2 · · Score: 1

      That sums it up quite nicely.

    6. Re:Nice Advertisement by prefec2 · · Score: 1

      The aim of the article is "Deep Learning Is Eating Software" meaning it changes everything. Beside the rather aggressive term "is eating" (meaning it eradicates other approaches), this statement suggests a disruptive process which takes place. In the article itself they downplay it to data processing software there is a change away from specific logic to deep learning. While that is true in some sense, it does not have anything to do with their aim displayed in the title. In addition, they claim that deep learning is becoming more widely used. Well that depends, most of these techniques are decades old, but old work well with enough input data. And it is rather unclear to which techniques they refer. There are tons of them. And there are even more statistical models with and without a learning component to them.

      In essence they say it is hip and cool and they have speculated about its potential applications. And that is just advertising themselves and Google for that matter.

    7. Re:Nice Advertisement by prefec2 · · Score: 1

      Absolutely. If you read their article, they downplay their claim "is eating software" to hey it has applications in data processing. Yes! What else is new? Most of these things which sail under "deep learning" now, have been available for decades and they have been used for decades for all sorts of things. All the deep learning stuff is there to classify data transforming it into information. And they still have the same issues than before, but with some more software and more processing power, we can handle this better now than then. You still need rule-based systems to check if the classification results make any sense in your model.

    8. Re:Nice Advertisement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Almost all programmers are idiots.

      Fixed that for you.

    9. Re:Nice Advertisement by HuguesT · · Score: 1

      This is one of the most insightful comment on Slashdot ever.

    10. Re: Nice Advertisement by datavirtue · · Score: 1

      you have to understand the demands and needs of users....

      Who don't understand or care to quantify their own demands and needs.

      --
      I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
    11. Re:Nice Advertisement by nickol · · Score: 1

      If you ever worked with marketing specialists, you know that there is nothing like "deterministic and foreseeable behavior" in marketing. In fact there are few deterministic and predictable processes in business, and most likely traditional software will remain there. However, let's take a look at a typical chain of business processes of an internet store:

      advertising - far from predictable
      SEO - not deterministic
      affecting buying habits - unpredictable and informal
      placing order - yes
      processing order - yes
      shipping - well... maybe
      actual delivery - unpredictable, especially in big towns\
      user reviews, post buying behaviour - unpredictable

      So...

  10. Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    "how deep learning is already starting to change some of the programming is done."

    Perhaps how some of the English is done too?

    1. Re:Huh? by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      Perhaps the AI optimised the sentence by removing the repeated "how"
      Maybe it's learnt that subtly changing the sentence in the summary leads to more clicks, as readers who notice it click on the link to see if the error is just in the summary, or the article as well.

      Or it was just written by someone with English as a second language
      Or someone who isn't very bright.
      Or it was a simple mistake.

    2. Re:Huh? by Archtech · · Score: 0

      One can speculate endlessly, but I notice more and more "English" on the Web that wouldn't be accepted in a primary school. Some comes from people whose first language is other than English; but many of those speak extremely correct English. A lot comes from people who were brought up and educated in Britain, the USA or other English-speaking countries.

      If I had to account for it, I could only wonder if it has been hurriedly transcribed by someone whose English is quite poor, from a sound recording of variable quality. That might help to explain such repeated patterns as the substitution of "is" for "has", if not the equally grating misuse of "substitute with" where "replace by" would be correct. Or "for we the people", or "write correctly, such that you will be understood". And so on and so on.

      --
      I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
    3. Re:Huh? by slickwillie · · Score: 1

      I think the AI ate your dingo.

    4. Re:Huh? by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      Honestly, I'm just satisfied that we can call these types of algorithms something reasonable (deep learning) instead of the incredibly misleading and far-too-broad term "AI".

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    5. Re:Huh? by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      That's an Australian reference.
      A New Zealand reference would involve sheep or Kiwi's

  11. CREIMER ADVOCATES 3rd WORLD EXPLOITATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sadly it will be a long time coming before replacing human slaves with AI becomes cost effective.

    Remember when you said that buying an underage Mexican bride was "getting the most for your retirement dollar"? I remember that.

    I remember you specifically said underage, and then when people were all ??? you autastically added that the Philippines was also a good place for retiring with an underage wife. Still doesn't make a bit of sense but it's the sort of stuff that makes people think you may be literally retarded.

    1. Re:CREIMER ADVOCATES 3rd WORLD EXPLOITATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ACs discussed child brides in 50+ comments last week. What a bunch of perverts!

    2. Re:CREIMER ADVOCATES 3rd WORLD EXPLOITATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You hope that the ACs who bring up your past posts will see this and say:
      "Oh no! If people read what creimer wrote they could think bad things about me"

      But it doesn't work like that, people will read what you said and stop wondering if you are bullied unfairly, we won't have the one or two people popping in to say that your trolls are more annoying than you. It shuts down the creimer debate. If you're not constantly trolled and downmodded you will create almost as much spam as your trolls do, except it won't be contained to one or two threads and it won't be at 0 and -1. Nobody should feel sorry for you either because regardless if you were being bullied or not, you'd still be an asshole and would in fact be a worse asshole. I can show people a choice selection of creimer content back when you thought you had accrued a decade of positive karma and could act as you please consequence free. You were a smug, cocky prick, you're much nicer now.

    3. Re:CREIMER ADVOCATES 3rd WORLD EXPLOITATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As has been repeatedly demonstrated over the last two months, the trolls are far more annoying than creimer. Pushing the child bride narrative says more about you than it does about creimer. Trivializing a serious issue to have "fun" at someone else's expense is childish. Grow up and move on.

    4. Re:CREIMER ADVOCATES 3rd WORLD EXPLOITATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You were a smug, cocky prick, you're much nicer now.

      Creimer is still fucking around with this trolls. All he has to do is post one or two comments per day and his trolls go ape shit. Nice to see him mix up his styles. The autistic routine was getting stale.

    5. Re:CREIMER ADVOCATES 3rd WORLD EXPLOITATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      " All he has to do is post one or two comments per day"

      No, Chris, that's all you CAN do with your karma.

      "Nice to see him mix up his styles"

      Uh huh. You're an obese loser who farts on the bus. How is that a "style"?

      ". The autistic routine was getting stale.'

      Your new psychotic routine is barely more entertaining.

    6. Re:CREIMER ADVOCATES 3rd WORLD EXPLOITATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You sound bitter, sweet tits.

    7. Re:CREIMER ADVOCATES 3rd WORLD EXPLOITATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Shame is the only thing that stops guys like creimer.

      You're not shaming him. You're giving him another blog post idea.

    8. Re:CREIMER ADVOCATES 3rd WORLD EXPLOITATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    9. Re:CREIMER ADVOCATES 3rd WORLD EXPLOITATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For creimer to experience shame, he'd need a conscience. Here's a guy who boasted that he wastes 7 hours a day at work shitposting, and one hour of "work".

    10. Re:CREIMER ADVOCATES 3rd WORLD EXPLOITATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A few days ago, Creimer was called a creep so he accused the AC of molesting his own children. This is the person you are defending?

      Creimer should be dragged into the street and shot like a dog.

    11. Re:CREIMER ADVOCATES 3rd WORLD EXPLOITATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You know in the whole backlog of creimer shitpost anecdotes I've read I can't recall him ever commenting on other people's feelings in a sympathetic manner.

    12. Re:CREIMER ADVOCATES 3rd WORLD EXPLOITATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bingo. And this is why he is disliked everywhere he goes.

  12. BitCoin/Deap Learning -- Climate Change by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    People always talk about these things but wouldn't the carbon footprint be higher for these compute intensive tasks vs a well thought out solution?
    Keeping all this data requires power and manufacturing of large amount of storage isn't carbon free.

  13. Re:Deep learning is hungry... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Wo-hoa Ceeee Dreimer
    I believe you can get me through the night
    Oh Ceeee Dreimer
    I believe we can reach the morning light

  14. Re:Deep learning is hungry... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Since creimer is promoting his YouTube playlists based on books that he read, here are the direct links.

    "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" by Antonio Garcia Martinez
      https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtlmIXFOGwagl54esP6cNv8d20cUF6D4m

    "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59" by Douglas Edwards
      https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtlmIXFOGwaiH17BCelXHYMxj4SwSuK3Q

    "Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal" by Nick Bilton
      https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtlmIXFOGwaiD8eDgxcYXZ842MP0Lr3Ui

  15. Blogspam by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 1

    This is marketing dribble from some guy at some company, neither of which are relevant. This is the kind of blogspamvertisement I'd expect in my inbox after a sales/marketing-oriented PM got a bug up their ass to research something outside their realm of expertise, not on /.

  16. Getting the most bang for your retirement dollars! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sadly it will be a long time before AI can replace human slaves.

    Remember when you said moving to Mexico to marry an underage girl is "getting the most bang for your retirement dollars" I remember that.

    I remember you specifically said underage and then when people were like ??? You autasically added that the Philippines were also great for marrying underage girls.

    Then you tripled down that we were all overreacting and incorrectly stated that the age of consent was below 18 years old many places in the USA.

    Then later on you said marrying underage girls was as american as apple pie.

    Well hopefully we can replace child brides for autistic middle age men with AIs or something, one day.

  17. oh for fucks sake!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I just got done learning reactjs and rust...what the the hell!!!

    1. Re:oh for fucks sake!! by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

      The lesson here is that you should have learned the languages of the future: Turbo-Pascal and Fortran.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
  18. While this is mostly marketing bullshit by tietokone-olmi · · Score: 1

    I'd be willing to speculate that the underlying sad story is one where magical black boxes, in all their imperfection, can still do better than e.g. run of the mill application software written by the majority of programmers who got their degrees in the last decade or so. Not in things like bookkeeping of course, what with tax codes and all, couldn't learn that by example if one tried -- but for genuinely nebulous things like individual preferences in conference room scheduling, or other frankly shithead jobs.

    However, if this were to happen, we'd run out of juniors; or everyone entering the line of work would have to do said low-status jobs into a shoebox just to get to the level that black boxes can't reach.

  19. If so, for a tiny fraction of the market by Junta · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ML is generally enabling scenarios that were just too tedious to actually do by developer hands. Sure there are specific scenarios where developers had done the best they can (and generally failed) with hopelessly unstructured data, but for the most part those problems were just left untouched as infeasible to do manually.

    For the vast majority of software development, ML doesn't add anything. If you have no unstructured data or a way to impose structure, ML doesn't do anything over boring old programming. Even when you find yourself in one of the very chaotic, large, and diverse data sets where ML can in theory help you sort through, you have to first chew through enough data in training to get decent confidence. So you not only need a large data set, you also need to have a continued need after human assisted training has already done the work on a big chunk of that data. Even then you may be grasping for some intelligent way to apply ML techniques, because the kicker is you have to have some sort of real idea of what to do, even if you have a 'how to do it'.

    Big Data has done this same song and dance. ML is now the purported answer to 'once collected and have tools to analyze, most orgs have no idea what to do with the data'. I suggest that the orgs will still have no idea what to do with the data, and ML won't move the needle much in the wider market because the root cause is just a general lack of thoughts on what to do with the data. This is the curse of hyped adoption, the vast majority of adopters will be disappointed because it doesn't magically solve.

    --
    XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    1. Re: If so, for a tiny fraction of the market by Ken_g6 · · Score: 2

      Don't say ML for machine learning, when talking programming. There's already an unusual language called ML, so it's confusing.

      --
      (T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
    2. Re: If so, for a tiny fraction of the market by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't say ML for machine learning, when talking programming. There's already an unusual language called ML, so it's confusing.

      No it's not, because nobody save for a very few people that even know about the language called ML would also make the mistake of missing the "machine learning" context you are being talking about, or not know what "machine learning" is well enough to make the correct assumption.

    3. Re: If so, for a tiny fraction of the market by datavirtue · · Score: 1

      Intellisense already tells me how to program. You don't say clippy? I will do that but first let me Google that so I know what the fuck I'm doiing.

      --
      I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
  20. Only for general programming by spaceman375 · · Score: 1

    These systems will not gain the insight and expertise needed for many areas that require real-time responses. They may produce wonderful results in predicting stock market prices from historical data, but they will take far too long to be useful for the microsecond resolution trading that is done today. That takes teams of people designing new hardware and programming it, plus real-world factors such as proximity to the stock market's computers. As tech advances, the already trained, overly complex systems will need to be updated and re-trained. There are many reasons why the real-world usefulness of these programs will be limited, despite the starry eyed predictions of their heralds.

    --
    On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
    1. Re:Only for general programming by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

      but they will take far too long to be useful for the microsecond resolution trading that is done today

      A guy like Warren Buffett may think a year before doing a trade, and he's been pretty good at it. Not everything has to be done at microsecond level.

  21. linear regression by dmitrygr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    And by "deep learning" in most cases they mean "linear regression on cleaned-up data"

    --
    -------
    1. Enjoy your job
    2. Make lots of money
    3. Work within the law

    Choose any two.
    1. Re:linear regression by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      Except that the heart of deep learning is nonlinear operations. If they were linear, you wouldn't have to make them deep.

    2. Re:linear regression by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Even if they're not linear, you still don't need to make them deep, in the sense that 1 hidden layer has been shown to be a universal approximator. We just have no idea how to algorithmically train a NN with 1 hidden layer that can compete with a deep network on non-linear problems.

    3. Re:linear regression by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Interesting

      No, not really, and I wouldn't call this insightful.

      Deep learning is not especially well defined, but it's not linear regression. I've seen several competing/complementary definitions.

      1. A neural net (much) greater than 3 layers deep. A sufficiently wide 3 layer net has enough capacity to run any function, so a lot of ANN learning focussed on these in the past. Turns out having lots more layers makes training much more tractable (particularly with stochastic gradient descent an batchnorm).

      2. Convolutional nets (where you're basically learning convolutional kernels, which saves a huge number of parameters compared to a normal net especially if you have many layers) with many layers.

      3. Something which learns the low-level features in the same optimization as everything else. Traditional ML algorithms were often structured as a feature extraction stage which takes the data and extracts some features in a human designed manner. Then applies ML, but if the ML can't optimize the right loss, you go for the closest loss you can, then get the thing you want with post-processing.

      A nice example would be the Viola-Jones face detector. The features are a bunch of zero mean box filter combinations applied to an image, combined with a threshold, each one giving a different binarisation of the image. Those were hand designed. a modified Adaboost[*] is then learned to to get a good selection and weighting of the features to give a pixelwise classification of the image. You want a bounding box, so the final stage is to extract a bounding box from the binarization.

      The "problems" with that are that there's nothing to say those features are optimal, and the pixelwise loss is the wrong thing to optimize. A deep system takes pixels in and spits out a bounding box (or several). The point is you can compute derivatives with respect to all the stages so you optimize everything agains the loss you're actually interested in.

      [*] They actually use a cacade (degenerate decision tree) with a biased adaboost classifier at each node. Either way it's an ML algorithm with largely the same properties.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
  22. Rust was just eating programming by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We were just being told that Rust was eating the programming world, and that all of our C, C++, Java, JavaScript, etc etc etc code would soon be obsolete! So does this new AI development mean that Rust itself is already obsolete, despite being so new?

    1. Re:Rust was just eating programming by hraponssi · · Score: 1

      You must be mistaken here, I think it was the rustmonster eating it all up. Only the blessed +2 rustproof vorpal blade can help you now, you lowly programmer. Tensorflow has now ascended.

  23. Pickaxe Sellers: Gold Mining Is Hot Hot Hot! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Pickaxe Sellers: Gold Mining Is Hot Hot Hot!

    1. Re:Pickaxe Sellers: Gold Mining Is Hot Hot Hot! by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

      No it's not, the value of BTG is crashing.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
  24. Re:Getting the most bang for your retirement dolla by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ACs discussed child brides in 50+ comments last week. Still a bunch of perverts!

  25. Neural networks are fragile by bradley13 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Once upon a time, I did my doctorate in machine learning. The machines were less powerful, but the algorithms? Basically the same as they are today. Sorry, the stuff most widely in use is still the same back-propagating neural networks. The machines are just faster, so the networks can be bigger. That's it.

    Neural networks can work really well on specific problem domains. The problem is: You have no idea what they are actually learning. The features that a network identifies within its layers are not really accessible to us. The problem lies, imho, in the total lack of domain knowledge. Since the network doesn't understand what the objects in those pictures are, they are doing a purely mechanical analysis of some (and who knows which) aspects of the pictures. They can learn some really weird things.

    In a well-trained network, the results mostly coincide with our expectations. In a completely isolated domain, like chess or go, a network can be trained sufficiently to perform quite well. However, in open domains, they are fragile: we have no idea when they will break. Look at the video of the turtle being identified as a rifle (in the link above). Why does the identification jump seemingly at random? When will a cat will suddenly be guacamole? When will a pedestrian crossing the road will suddenly be just a pile of leaves? We have no idea, none.

    It is certainly true that selecting and managing training data is a very different task from classic programming. However, it doesn't really take much domain knowledge. In most domains, gathering training data is tedious, not difficult. The hard part comes in figuring out how to make the best use of that data to train and test a network - and that requires a deep understanding of how the neural networks work (and how they don't work). Plus, frankly, a huge pile of trial and error, because there aren't many rules on how to best structure a net for any particular task.

    --
    Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
    1. Re:Neural networks are fragile by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There was a question I had asked awhile back that covered similar ground: is it that the algorithms have changed/improved so much or are we still basically using Norvig but on better/bigger hardware? The answer given to me was the latter.

    2. Re:Neural networks are fragile by swb · · Score: 2

      I think some of these mistakes are really kind of interesting in an epistemological way. They remind me of a child making what are apparently nonsense associations between things that turn out to be weirdly insightful. Adults don't make the same comparisons mostly because they've been taught they're wrong, not because they actually are.

    3. Re:Neural networks are fragile by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Deep Learning is a distinct evolution of back propagation. This is not your father's gradient descent... Deep learning does all sorts of stuff backprop could not do, even with serious hardware. I know, I used to implement back prop on a mini-supercomputer.

    4. Re:Neural networks are fragile by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When will a cat will suddenly be guacamole?

      When smashed by a barrel of avocados obviously.

    5. Re:Neural networks are fragile by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

      The machines are just faster, so the networks can be bigger. That's it.

      Not just. People have come up with better ways of training networks too which allows bigger networks to be trained in reasonable time without appaling overfitting.

      People are also coming up wiht inventive loss functions and figuring out differentiable approximations of things we want to optimize, which allows the networks now to be applied to a wider range of problems.

      Look up Generative Adversarial Networks for some rather fun stuff (pix2pix has a very fun demo online, anc cyclegan has some pretty cool videos).

      The rest I do agree with.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    6. Re:Neural networks are fragile by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Spot on. 20 years ago I received a PhD for using genetic algorithms to select descriptors for a neural network. I built the 20 node cluster and wrote all the software. It was pretty cool.

      When I look at the field today I see much larger training sets and massive amounts of computation resources. But the technology is basically the same. Very little novel progress has been made in this area IMO.

      I definitely do not believe this will be software 2.0... if I did I suppose I would have kept building these systems. BTW They are amazing at the domains they are good at. But they are not a one size fits all for sure.

      Meanwhile I have some code to write because our data analytics team hasn't managed to build a deep learning network that can do my job yet...

    7. Re:Neural networks are fragile by HuguesT · · Score: 2

      Yes NN are the same basic architecture, but it's like saying we are still programming in C, so nothing has changed since the early days of Unix except computers are faster. You'd be right in a way but not quite.

      In ML we have discovered the importance of sparse representations and regularisation (from wavelets and optimisation) leading to better, more efficient learning methods; better gradient descent methods, and more importantly innovative architectures. The keywords of today are not backpropagation but dropout, adversarial network, generative networks, reinforcement learning, transfer learning, recurrent networks, long short-term memory, and many more.

      Will NN especially deep ones solve AI ? Probably not yet, but there has been some significant progress. As more people understand what has truly been done, what its limitations are, the hype will die down a little. Until the next step.

    8. Re:Neural networks are fragile by r0kk3rz · · Score: 1

      Neural networks can work really well on specific problem domains. The problem is: You have no idea what they are actually learning. The features that a network identifies within its layers are not really accessible to us. The problem lies, imho, in the total lack of domain knowledge. Since the network doesn't understand what the objects in those pictures are, they are doing a purely mechanical analysis of some (and who knows which) aspects of the pictures. They can learn some really weird things.

      I think its premature to be calling these things 'Artificial Intelligence', because as you say there doesn't really seem to be a whole lot of intelligence in these systems at all. The way I explain it is by calling them 'Artificial Instinct' machines instead, because that's closer to how these things actually function. The networks build up a set of kneejerk reactions to stimuli which is why they seem to work well for things that humans can do without really thinking about it, like driving cars.

    9. Re:Neural networks are fragile by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Sorry, the stuff most widely in use is still the same back-propagating neural networks. The machines are just faster, so the networks can be bigger. That's it.

      Like you, I did research in neural nets many years ago. Well 25 years ago actually. For my Masters. But tell you what. I am amazed by how much the field has advanced since then and made neural nets a commercially viable success.
      I think the biggest breakthrough has been the discovery that RELU functions enable deep learning to take place. Also more fundamentally the discovery was that for problems like vision and speech, numerous layers of neurons are needed for an efficient solution. Not just the three layers that were mathematically proven as the minimum needed to approximate any real valued function.

      To me these two discoveries are the biggest breakthroughs for mankind.

      Also the design of power efficient hardware for neural net implementation is the other huge breakthrough.

  26. Fuzzy logic producing fuzzy results? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The scary part is the decline of Logic in programming. Systems that kinda work ok most of the time? And when they do not, there will be simply another example added to the training set? Except for the system has already "launched the missiles"?

    1. Re:Fuzzy logic producing fuzzy results? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fuzzy logic is just infinite valued logic. It's just fine to use in control systems. /nickpick A counter example for using logic in the "launch the missiles" scenario is the way world was saved from the nuclear holocaust by human fear, uncertainty and doubt during the cold war. Building logically complete and sound systems works best in the fields that can be fully specified using first-order logic.

  27. Does entropy increase in a vacuum? by gardas · · Score: 1

    If so, at least the article's jumble of catchphrases still moved the universe forward. Yay.

  28. Call me... by sh00z · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...when you can input a photograph of an airplane and the Navier-Stokes equation, and get a flight simulator as output.

    1. Re:Call me... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      i think you'd have to teach it to program first? maybe i should ask an adult to derive an equation and if they can't on the spot; i hope you realise your folly

    2. Re:Call me... by nameer · · Score: 1

      Not really the same, and barely ML, but you reminded me of the work that Steve Brunton is doing. Pretty sweet ideas in physical law discovery for complex systems.
      http://faculty.washington.edu/...

      --
      "Uh... yeah, Brain, but where are we going to find rubber pants our size?" --Pinky
  29. This article says pretty much nothing by CustomSolvers2 · · Score: 1

    existing software project doing data processing using explicit programming logic, and the team charged with maintaining it find they can replace it with a deep-learning-based solution

    So, that team relied on a pre-made code to deal with a specific part of the implementation! Why is this news? Although I personally prefer to develop most of the (data-management) algorithms myself, relying on third-party dependencies is a quite common and acceptable proceeding in software development.

    --
    Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
  30. Most programming is glue by GuB-42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Most programming jobs involve connecting stuff together. Converting a database format to another, design a GUI around it, add the entry points to turn it into some kind of module, extract or integrate features, etc... Even machine learning typically involves gathering a bunch of data turn it into a form that's acceptable for the learning module and feeding the results to some other component.
    I don't know how machine learning will help with all that stuff. An AI won't write a video game, it can help making mobs smarter, generating convincing maps or optimizing revenue. But in the end that's just a module connected to other modules, and programmers will be needed to put the round peg into the square hole.
    It will make things a bit more high level, as always. But except for a bunch of PhDs, I don't expect major changes in the way people program.

    1. Re:Most programming is glue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Only if you're a trainee or intern level programmer. Outside of shitty click games and mobile front-ends for applications, the world is run by business rules dictated by moving legislation laws. No UI or data migration makes real world data keep out western world of finances together. Don't confuse trivial pointless crap hoping for a payday with legitimate systems businesses could not live without.

    2. Re:Most programming is glue by hraponssi · · Score: 1

      I am rubber, you are glue.

    3. Re:Most programming is glue by Windrip · · Score: 1

      Agreed. The insight is that the glue's changing nature.
      For example:
      First there was MRP
      Then MRP II
      ML will yield MRP III
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  31. Re:Getting the most bang for your retirement dolla by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Have you stopped raping your 12 roommates yet?

  32. I think this is a loss, not a gain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I have tried to get my head deep into the quality of the candidation for results. It is weak tea.
    It might eat human-enumerated methods, but it still has a long way between functional and exceptional.

    EngrStudent

  33. Re:Getting the most bang for your retirement dolla by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Chris' case is getting worse, he spends all day replying to himself as AC on /.

    The tests we ran on Chris have shown that Chris has the intelligence of an ameba:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    So, technically, he is able to conceive some kind of agenda but it will be silly or impossible to follow on a human scale.

    For example, Chris had an agenda to post anything he felt like on Slashdot which did not work well because it was based on his false beliefs that he had an infinite number of karma points as he wrote here several times.

    Several people here explained to Chris that karma maxed out at some level like 50 or so but Chris kept on insisting that his python script had confirmed that he had millions of karma points!

    Oh well, as I wrote before: "It isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody."

    For the valuable /. users that might already have read the following, please note that there is an important update.

    IMPORTANT UPDATE:
    Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education has invested money to buy Chris a new chair:
    http://www.keynamics.com/image...

    Information about Christopher Dale Reimer and autistic people:

    Autistic people have obsessions about things normal people don't care. For example, one of our autistic patient went haywire when he realized that there was a penny missing in his pocket change.

    To calm him down, one of our educator pretended to have found it on the floor and gave a penny to him.

    The autistic patient condition went even worse because he realized it wasn't the same penny!

    Chris has an obsession with budgeting every penny. He doesn't understand that most people do not budget to the penny and have a flexible amount they allow for miscellaneous items.

    I am Nancy Guerrero and I am Director of Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education. We use Chris' (a.k.a. creimer,cdreimer) picture in our document because he is the hardest case we have ever had to handle:
    http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...

    Our artists were inspired by the low carb diet that Christopher follows scrupulously for the small lunch box and by the picture linked below for the rest. I am sure that you will notice the similarities such as the bump on the side of his chest and more:
    https://ibb.co/gVad65

    Please be easy on Christopher although, I am aware that some of our staff handling Chris post joke comments here and obvoiusly, the Santa Clara County Office of Education disapprove that behavior vehemently:
    https://school.discoveryeducat...

    But it isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody.

    Thank You dear users,
    ---
    Nancy Guerrero
    Director
    Special Education
    Santa Clara County Office of Education

  34. Organic vs. Planned by Tablizer · · Score: 2

    I work on mostly CRUD and e-reporting applications. Generally an org wants these kinds of apps to be predictable and reliable, not "organic" (trial and error). I don't see organic learning as a viable way to program such in the future.

    However, I can see AI being used to test the apps and find potential bugs in the source code, being that "suspicious pattern detection" is something it can do relatively well. It may also suggest code, schema, and UI refactorings. But such AI would be an adviser to programmers, not behind the wheel itself.

    Clippy impression: "It looks like you have a lot of code pattern duplication between modules 7, 22, 43, and 51. Would you like help refactoring?"

  35. CREIMER ADVOCATES 3rd WORLD EXPLOITATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Even though it's fun to troll creimer, this isn't simply fun at his expense.
    1) Creimer would make about 5000 posts a year, for the purposes of karma whoring and advertising barely-related products on amazon. He proudly admits to making $600 dollars doing this.

    2) Creimer did often talk about 3rd world child brides with apparent enthusiasm and with very little prompting. I'm sorry if you feel that using this to shame him into silence cheapens someone else's suffering but it doesn't negate what I'm saying or make creimer un-say that going to mexico to marry underage girls is "getting the most for your retirement buck" he said it. Shame is the only thing that stops guys like creimer. Last time I checked he still felt like it would be ok to marry a 14 year old if the age of consent technically permitted it. I hope he moves next door to you one day.

    3) Given that he would eventually generate a ton of positive-rated spam distributed across all boards it's safe to say that we're not more annoying than what creimer would be doing if he wasn't contained. You're simply not seeing what the place would look like if he was left unchecked. He hates knowing that every single post he makes will be instantly linked to something creepy or dickish he's said in the past. It will eventually make him decide to find a new hobby.

  36. I'm skeptical. by wcrowe · · Score: 1

    This sounds suspiciously like a lot of 4GL promises that were made in the 80s and 90s. They also sound like the kinds of promises made by Microsoft promoting their distributed data model based on Office. Many times I've seen users get in over their heads with systems that start out easy, but get complicated quickly. Worse, sometimes they ended up with processes that produced erroneous data. Ultimately, they resort to piling the whole smoldering hot mess onto the programmers, who have to "make it work" somehow.

    --
    Proverbs 21:19
  37. Re:Deep learning is hungry... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There you are spamming amazon affiliate links through your blog with yet another fake account, you revenue stream hogging disgusting fat sexist tube of lard, Christopher Dale Reimer!

    You can be sure I will be watching this fake account too. I know this is you because you told me you were working on your freepass 11 file server and you are so dumb that you can't even masquerade yourself properly.

    Now, I told you I was out of meds last week and you didn't even care to contact me you lazy fucker.

    How many times do I have to express the emergency of the situation??????

    The python click script you wrote for my pheromone revenue stream web site suddenly stopped to work!!!!!!

    You fucking incompetent python script writer!!!

    When it works, I get 4000+ clicks a day on my pheromone revenue stream web site but only 5 or 6 without it!!!!

    Now, it seems like you dont care and that you have abandoned me you heartless fucking pig!

    Bonus:
    Here is a story that creimer told me when convincing me what a hard life he had:

    The tree was him and the tree knot was his butt hole!

    So, his uncle packed his fat ass with lard and with his cock! Not that it makes much of a difference but anyway, there it is!

    Signed:
    The girl that used to love you and now hates you, burn in hell where you belong you sexist pig!

  38. No by Jezral · · Score: 3, Insightful

    For computational linguistics (translation, analysis, etc), machine learning is not a net gain. What ML proponents forget to factor in is the vast time spent on gathering and hand-annotating large quantities of text (gold corpora).

    Even worse, for many many languages, these gold corpora simply do not exist and there are no plans on making them, or they are too small to be used for ML.

    And even when the gold corpora do exist, models trained on them become tightly coupled with the data. They become domain specific. In order to escape domains, you need an order of magnitude more data.

    Instead, one can make a domain-independent rule-based system in a fraction of the total time spent on machine-learning models. But rule-based has become this weird anathema - people will even write papers that use rule-based methods, while hiding it behind machine-learning terms.

    I'm sure this also holds for other fields.

  39. Re:Getting the most bang for your retirement dolla by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    Then later on you said marrying underage girls was as american as apple pie.

    It is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  40. The Promise of Deep learning is fairly shallow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    One advantage of procedural logic is that you know with a high level of confidence how a program is supposed to behave. With Deep Learning (TM) you train the software how to behave, but have no idea how it works. You still end up using procedural logic to fix the unexpected edge cases.

  41. Re:Getting the most bang for your retirement dolla by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Lawmakers are reluctant to change marriage laws because it would infringe on the religious freedom of having child brides.

  42. Going the way of tubes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Software engineering as we know will slowly go the way of Valves/Vacuum Tubes. At first valves started getting replaced by solid state in situations where miniaturization or environment where a bigger factor than price. Slowly we saw solid state replacing vacuum tube technology in low power applications but it was still necessary to use the older technology in very high power applications. About 50 years later and tubes are still in use, but only in extremely niche applications. Even radio broadcasting has switched over to silicon.

    You'll see the same play out in Deep Learning. We'll see it used in special applications that play to the strengths of Deep Learning. Being able to have an end user customize the data processing instead of developing custom software algorithms is a real strength. Over time we'll see it spread to more applications until the idea of an individual sitting there writing useful software is downright quaint.

    In a few decades, I'll only see my fellow C programmers at the Renaissance Faire.

  43. Re: Getting the most bang for your retirement doll by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Creimerâ(TM)s great! Always happy to provide additional information when the subject of marrying children is brought up by him!

  44. Re:Getting the most bang for your retirement dolla by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Look at your own page.
    That special case column next to the column where it says 18 all the way down.
    Those are meant to accommodate younger couples that are typically well within 10 years of age difference. Creimer is not legally having sex with anyone under the age of 18 in the USA and he's getting charged with child sex tourism if there is any evidence that he's leaving the country with the intent to do the same. Any hope of ever having a Mexican child bride was dashed the second he gleefully posted on the subject with his well established pen name :( Boo hoo hoo!

    (I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, if you're considering marrying a child you should speak to your attorney first)

  45. Re:Getting the most bang for your retirement dolla by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Those are meant to accommodate younger couples that are typically well within 10 years of age difference.

    Get your head out of your ass and educate yourself. Underage marriage is a serious problem in the US.

    A Tampa woman shared her story of how she was raped as a child, got pregnant at 10 years old, and then legally married her rapist at age 11. Sherry Johnson, now 57, told WTSP that she “was raped repeatedly” while living in an apartment attached to her church in Tampa. The deacon had keys, and so he would come in when he got ready, and guess where he would come? My room," she said to WTSP. When Johnson got pregnant, she told WTSP she didn’t even know what it meant. She was sent by her mother to Miami in 1970 to have the baby and then got legally married to her rapist, who was 20, in Pinellas County in 1971, WTSP reports.

    http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/new-florida-woman-forced-marry-rapist-years-old/xHeF9PdrhsoURVH6f2FDXK/

    NOTE: The special exception for Florida is still unchanged after 50 years: "No minimum age in case of pregnancy".

    Creimer is not legally having sex with anyone under the age of 18 in the USA and he's getting charged with child sex tourism if there is any evidence that he's leaving the country with the intent to do the same. Any hope of ever having a Mexican child bride was dashed the second he gleefully posted on the subject with his well established pen name :( Boo hoo hoo!

    Grow up, asshole.

  46. Don't joke about cosby rapes, it's not funny. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    All of that stuff happened ages ago. If someone got a child pregnant and is now legally permitted to marry a child then there is ample evidence that they've already broken the law. Not that they shouldn't remove the flordia exemption. If guys like you had their way you'd have shouted down Hannibal Buress for joking about the Cosby rapes and he'd still be dropping roofies all over hollywood. I will say it three more times cause you like to cry.

    It doesn't make sense that you're going to call me an asshole and cry about how evil and childish I am when clearly creimer was in the middle of the a government datacenter talking with some other old man w/ clearance about his plans to move to mexico and bequeath his meager possessions to the village in exchange for an underage girl's hand in marriage. Jokes aside that's pretty fucking disturbing. If guys like you had their way you'd have shouted down Hannibal Buress for joking about the Cosby rapes and he'd still be dropping roofies all over hollywood. I will say it three more times cause you like to cry.

    See you're not mad at me, or creimer, you're just a big crybaby that had a meltdown when someone was making too many off topic posts. If it wasn't that it would be something else, get off my lawn etc etc etc. If guys like you had their way you'd have shouted down Hannibal Buress for joking about the Cosby rapes and he'd still be dropping roofies all over hollywood. I will say it three more times cause you like to cry.

    1. Re:Don't joke about cosby rapes, it's not funny. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bill Clinton! Bill Clinton! Bill Clinton!

    2. Re:Don't joke about cosby rapes, it's not funny. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Trump! Trump! Trump!

    3. Re:Don't joke about cosby rapes, it's not funny. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're comparing creimer to Bill Crosby? Jesus Christ on a tricycle... Slashdot is in the shitter.

    4. Re:Don't joke about cosby rapes, it's not funny. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, Bill Cosby was an actual content creator, author, and funny. creimer is.... um... none of that.

      So Chris, you don't like it? Leave.

    5. Re:Don't joke about cosby rapes, it's not funny. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why is every AC is called Chris? Whatever happened to Lilly?

    6. Re:Don't joke about cosby rapes, it's not funny. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Creimer ate Lilly. He needed a snatch before dinner.

    7. Re:Don't joke about cosby rapes, it's not funny. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Creimer replies to himself! Sad!

  47. Pretty common epiphany by HuguesT · · Score: 2

    In my line of work I use a lot of mathematical optimisation. As Stephen Boyd says in his course, everybody working in optimisation has at some point this epiphany: "everything is an optimisation problem". And this is true. However to make it work you need to be very good at mathematical modelling, you need to know your methods, and most of the time the problem is unsolvable anyway by the classic methods.

    In this instance maybe a lot of programming can be modelled by some deep NN. However you have to come up with a relevant architecture for your problem, you need to train it, and you need to evaluate it. It may save you time to do so, but if you need so solve something like FizzBuzz, that may not be the best way.

  48. Re:Deep learning is hungry... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A fat man is a lamer
    shitposts all day
    His name creimer

  49. Re:Deep learning is hungry... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You sound bitter, sour tits.

  50. Re:Deep learning is hungry... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A fat man repeats the same phrase
    over and over like an Asperger's
    His name is Chris

  51. oblig xkcd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    https://xkcd.com/1838/

    sorry, couldn't resist.

  52. replacing program logic with some deep-larnin' by grep+-v+'.*'+* · · Score: 1

    Oh dear God please no. The Basic, PHP and Microsoft paper admins who can't program their way out of a paper bag will now all become Subject Matter Experts on everything to help us all out.

    "Why does that go there? Things doesn't work unless it does." "Wha's your problem, bud? Those leaks in the damn have always just been there, don't worry about them."

    And you thought things were bad now -- just wait until NO ONE knows what's actually going on, they only know what's SUPPOSED to be happening.

    Of course with all of the multitude of languages, support libraries, and computer inter-connects maybe we've already got that now.

    ------

    What if the light you see when you die is the headline of an oncoming train?

    --
    If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
  53. like upgrading search ranking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Oh that's why on Google my incognito browser always shows am*zon at the first 3 positions in results on most ecommerce queries. It's an upgrade!

  54. heh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'll just sit here and wait I guess while Silicon Valley bullshit artists plunge AI into another dark age for 25 years with their idiotic promises and expectations they themselves don't understand.

  55. Deep learning hype is eating human objectivity by thisisauniqueid · · Score: 1

    Public Service Announcement: deep learning is not even Turing complete. It is simply fancy nonlinear regression that works well on hierarchically-ordered domains.

  56. Re:Deep learning is hungry... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    https://imgur.com/a/jSlkt

    FYI - Link is broken. Did someone violate the TOS?

  57. Re:Deep learning is hungry... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    https://imgur.com/a/EsCSr

  58. Burning up lots of storage by ebvwfbw · · Score: 1

    Not only eating software, it's eating disk like crazy. I've seen millions poured into this deep learning stuff at a governmental level and after a year of buying expensive servers with lots of CPU and lots of memory and lots of NVidia drivers running Linux with even big frickin' Oracle databases or hadoop we get - TRASH!

    Sounding more like it did in the 1980s... bit promises... short on reality.