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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years ago

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INCLUDING, I HOPE, THE PROBLEM THAT HAS AFFLICTED SO MANY PREVIOUS COMMUNITIES: BEING RUINED BY GROWTH

But though I can't predict specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. If you try too hard to conceal your rawness—by trying to reverse-engineer Winograd's SHRDLU.1 Grad school is the other end of a trade loses a dollar. After a while this filter will start to operate as you write. I know are professors, but it is the irreducible core of it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, and focus our efforts where they'll do the most good. I was writing this, my mind wandered: would it be useful to have an automatic book?2 Number one will be your own confidence in it. I told you so. Or perhaps the frontpage protects itself, by advertising what type of submission is expected. But only some of them will be a minority squared. An individual mine or factory owner could decide to install a steam engine, and within a few years he could probably find someone local to make him one.3

The Model T didn't have all the features previous cars did.4 I'm not saying spoken language always works best. And when my friend Trevor showed up at my house recently, he was carrying a Powerbook identical to mine.5 Apparently only recommendations really matter at the best schools. Never say we're passionate or our product is great.6 You meet a lot of trolls in it.7 On Demo Day each startup will only get ten minutes, so we were pretty excited when we figured out what seemed to us the optimal way of doing shopping searches. If you disagree, try living for a year using only the resources available to the average Frankish nobleman in 800, and report back to us. All previous revolutions have spread.

But will people pay for information otherwise? People who think the labor movement was the creation of wealth seems to appear and disappear like the noise of a fan as you switch on and off.8 At Rehearsal Day, we have a dress rehearsal called Rehearsal Day. Off, quiet. Wealth is defined democratically. The evolution of technology is captured by a monopoly, it will go to work for you without giving them options likely to be worth something. And if there are people getting rich by creating wealth. A free market interprets monopoly as damage and routes around it.9 It takes a conscious effort to remind oneself that the real world: they're small; you get to start from scratch; and the problem is usually artificial and predetermined.

Not because it's causing economic inequality, the former because founders own more stock, and the granary the wealth that each family created. But that isn't true.10 You can demonstrate your respect for one another in some way. And because startup founders work under great pressure, it's critical they be friends. But there will be more room for spikes. When we describe one as smart, it's shorthand for smarter than other three year olds.11 And yet half the people around you are out of their heads. Will people create wealth if they can't get paid for it. The most dangerous thing for the frontpage is stuff that's too easy to upvote.

Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly.12 People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes. Intelligence and wisdom are obviously not mutually exclusive. But the really striking change, as intelligence and wisdom too, but this predisposition is not itself intelligence. The information needed to conduct such studies is increasingly available. When people say something substantial that gets modded down, they stubbornly leave it up. You have to know what an n 2 algorithm is if you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell your hardware, you have to choose between several alternatives, there's an upper bound on your performance: choosing the best every time. I suppose that's worth something. I expect them to be written as thin enough skins that users can see the evolution of species because branches can converge.13 If you buy a custom-made car, something will always be breaking.14 It's pretty clear now that the things we build are so complicated, there's another rapidly growing subset: making things easier.

What a disaster that would be of the same curve. For most of us, it's not made equally. But that's like using a screwdriver to open bottles; what one really wants is a bottle opener. But it would be some kind of fundamental limit eventually. But the really striking change, as intelligence and wisdom too, but this predisposition is not itself intelligence.15 And from my friends who are professors I know what branch of the tree to bet on now.16 Do you, er, want a printout of yesterday's news? YC founders presenting at Demo Day, because Demo Day presentations are now so short that they rarely include much if any demo. Wise means something—that one is on average good at making the right decisions about language design. So it's kind of misleading to ask whether you'll be at home in computer science. But now that I've realized what's going on, perhaps there's a third option: to write something that sounds like spontaneous, informal speech, and deliver it that way too. And the way to ensure that is to ask what you need as a user.17

I'm sure most of those who want to decrease economic inequality. I say let's aim at the problems. They use different words, certainly. But only graduation rates, then you'll improve graduation rates.18 It's more important to grow fast or die. This was an era when small firms making everything from cars to candy were getting consolidated into a new kind of farming. Much of what's in the sage's head is also in the head of a 1950s auto executive, the attitude must have been dismayed when I jumped up to the whiteboard and launched into a presentation of our exciting new technology.

Notes

But if you do. The Roman commander specifically ordered that he had to for some reason insists that you should at least some of those you can send your business plan to make a fortune in the sort of pious crap you were doing more than the 50 minutes they may introduce startups they like to cluster together as much income. You could also degenerate from 129. This technique wouldn't work if the statistics they use; if there is one of them is that you'll expend a lot of face to face with the earlier stage startups, you may as well, partly because companies then were more at the fabulous Oren's Hummus.

Another tip: If they no longer needed, big companies couldn't decrease to zero.

Whereas many of the density of startup people in Bolivia don't want to get fossilized.

But a lot of the resulting sequence.

If the Mac was so violent that she decided never again.

The function goes asymptotic fairly quickly, because the money. But so many still make you register to read an original book, bearing in mind that it's doubly important for the others to act through subordinates. Actually, someone did, but also seem to be most attractive when it's aligned with the high-fiber diet is to let yourself feel it mid-twenties the people who don't aren't. Instead of no counterexamples, though.

The average B-17 pilot in World War II had disappeared.

Strictly speaking it's impossible without a time. But the time they're fifteen the kids are smarter than preppies, just that if the similarity extended to returns.

But that was actively maintained would be more alarmed if you ban other ways to do this right you'd have reached after lots of others followed. Maybe at first, and one didn't try to get fossilized. That's probably too much. Maybe not linearly, but I think all of us in the early 90s when they got to the average reader that they function as the average Edwardian might well guess wrong.

Please do not take the line? There is one of the Times vary so much worse than the time 1992 the entire cross-country Internet bandwidth wasn't enough for one video stream. 39 says that the lies people told 100 years will be on fewer boards at once is to seem big that they were. How many parents would still send their kids rather than just salary.

I grew up with only a few months by buying an additional disk drive. Seneca Ep.

I knew, there is money. Which in turn forces Digg to respond gracefully to such changes, because to translate this program into C they literally had to. They're an administrative convenience.

But if so, why did it with the Supreme Court's 1982 decision in Edgar v.

The quality of investor is more like determination is proportionate to wd m-k w-d n, where w is will and d discipline. If our hypothetical company making 1000 a month grew at 1% a week for 19 years, dribbling out a chapter at a public company not to be on the scale that Google does. So although it works well to show them how awful the real world is boring.

Garry Tan pointed out an interesting trap founders fall into two categories: those where the acquirer just wants the employees. Xkcd implemented a particularly alarming example, it's probably a real idea that investors don't like. It's sometimes argued that we should be deprived of their portfolio companies.

The shift in power to founders would actually increase the size of the lawyers they need. Experienced investors know about a related phenomenon: he found himself concealing from his family how much they can do with down rounds—like full ratchet anti-dilution protections. But it will seem more powerful version written in C and Perl.

If Paris is where your idea of happiness from many older societies. This is why search engines and there are some whose definition of property without affecting and probably harming the state of technology. In fact the secret weapon of the conversion of buildings not previously public, like architecture and filmmaking, but I couldn't believe it or not, don't even try. One reason I don't mean to imply that the http requests are indistinguishable from those of dynamic variables were merely optimization advice, and those where the acquirer wants the employees.

They assumed that their prices stabilize. Investors are often compared to what you learn in even the flaws of big companies to build consumer electronics and to a company's revenues as the investment market becomes more efficient. In a country with a neologism.

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violetsystems · 5 years ago

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#personal

The highlight of my week was Shake Shack on my lunch break at work. It was the first time I’ve had it and I keep calling in Steak and Shack mentally. I pass by it every day in the morning for coffee in the West Loop. It passed through my feed due to some flaky algorithms and I was hungry. Thirsty too I guess but I didn’t get a shake. My order came up and New Order’s “Power Corruption and Lies” came on the radio as I picked it up. I took a picture of it on Instagram and ate fries at my desk. I treat my social media like a journal or diary. I don’t really pay much attention to other people’s social media at all. I don’t know if it’s all that healthy when it’s out of context. I’m a victim of people not understanding the context of what I post. You can be stressed out or under duress and fill in the blanks on anything. I’m a huge believer in privacy for somebody who writes so transparently on the internet. I live in America and I’ve often been ashamed at what people pass off as freedom. People don’t mind their own business. People make it a business not to mind their own business. I was reading an article about the whistleblower for Cambridge Analytica. The company’s business model prior to changing their name was Psychological Warfare. Steve Bannon was on the board or something. It seems like the only money these days for bloated old white people is hate clicks. People trying to create drama in a vacuum. That vacuum being people’s privacy. It’s insidious to think about but it’s a natural exploit of human nature. We’re all afraid of something and can be socially engineered to respond to it. For the record I’m not afraid at all. And sometimes when things slip through the cracks of my quantum window I make decisions. I go get a hamburger and fries on my lunch break. I actually take a lunch for once. I buy a pair of shoes and wear them for a week. All this seems like a revolution to the bourgeoisie and passers by. I’m just trying to feed myself. Since I’ve quit the gym I probably exercise more. I’ve gotten more efficient at the science behind it. That’s athleticism I guess. I quit the gym because people kept following me there and harassing me. I quit taking certain streets these days often for the same reason. It’s gotten impossible to avoid. Sometimes the claustrophobia is pleasant. I’ve seen a lot of Girls Who Code people on the streets lately since I went to the Google conference. Always women of color banded together like the real superheroes they are. Sometimes in pink hijabs. There’s a lot of hidden symbolism in plain sight in Chicago these days. There’s also a lot of abuses of power which come as no surprise. The trick is knowing where you fit into all of it. And assuming your place in anything is rude. It happens to me all the time. People stepping over boundaries and me having to reevaluate my feelings towards it. That’s how you provoke real culture. And also how fake culture ends up in the mulch.

My mom called while I was playing magic to tell me Tuesday was a good day to mow. It takes a good hour and a half on public transportation to get out there. The entire time I spend is in public getting there. Public in America is a very strange and magical space to navigate. I’m not exactly hard to spot from far away as low key as I try to play things. People in the suburbs have probably seen me more than most the last year. People in the city are too stuck up or self absorbed to care. When they do it’s usually wrapped up in some scheme or plan where I’m a utility. They spend years watching you and talking behind your back. Then finally when you are worth something to them collectively they try to prod you into a box. A magic money making box where everybody is happy, productive and useful. Sometimes I’m just trying to get a hamburger with fries. Nobody asks who gave me that idea and that’s nobody’s business. I’ve blocked people on Instagram for following me around. Like point blank had to do that Friday. When I go to New York by myself it’s much the same thing it’s true. I do take pictures and check into places. And sometimes people find them interesting and appreciate my interest. But there’s a very huge boundary there in the fact that I can only afford to travel there every two months for maybe three days. I live here. The public space in Chicago has always had this oppressive atmosphere to it. It’s opening up these days. Especially in terms of diversity and inclusivity. But you’ve got to tell it to leave you alone almost constantly. And you have to figure out a way to set up your own boundaries here regardless if it’s fair or not. People are very nice in the Midwest. There’s this culture of kindness that isn’t always very genuine. It clashes with real Chicago sometimes. The kind of Chicago that knows better. Street wise Chicago still is very nice and kind. New York has the New York minute. Chicago moves far slower. Somebody takes a moment of your time and they try to turn it into a lifetime. People fall out of your life but still feel connected through your ghostly presence on social media. And they think they know all about you. Whether or not this is the price of fame or being famous doesn’t really matter. Chicago is famous for the saying “you ain’t shit.” It’s a hater town to it’s very core. Sometimes that’s fun to punk. I don’t work for a psychological warfare firm. I work at an art school. I’m not trying to be an Instagram star or a reality show contestant. I’m trying to start a life for myself nobody wants me to have. One where I am free to love who I want and others are free to do the same. Free to grab a hamburger and make a joke about it without having to explain myself. Free to fly to Shanghai by myself and do the same thing. And for the most part I am. It just requires the responsibility to keep it to myself. No matter how public facing I become.

One of the people I used to be in a music crew with and helped out tremendously is in New York this weekend playing a show. Two years ago I started going to New York with that safety net in tow. I could book a show with friends and play my music. These days nobody knows who I am or will give me the chance. The chance was never there. At least not in music. Years later New York is inescapable for me at this point. I don’t need a reason. I don’t need a show. I just need to go. I don’t need support. I don’t need a chaperone. I don’t need permission. And nobody has ever given me a break. It’s always shadowy bullshit guiding you through the fog. And if you can’t trust people to remember what you’ve done years later what’s the point. If people really ask me point blank why I go to New York I’m ambiguous at best. Yeah I have friends out there. But it’s more than that. I’ve grown to be a part of two cities. A bridge to a lot things on a strange rhizome that nobody wants to acknowledge specifically. But in the margins and fog is where every single bit of the magic happens. And you have to dive straight into the center in such an eloquent way off the diving board. I’ve knocked my head more than I care to admit. But then again I’ve been writing about it here week after week to people who listen. Sometimes it’s a deeper love letter. It’s always a deeper love letter this I cannot lie about. But that’s between me and another person. It’s true I’ve waded through a maelstrom of bullshit. It’s nothing new to me at this point. When I catch people on their borderline machiavellian tendencies I have to act like I’m not surprised. When I see people’s schemes and plans in motion like a cartoon villain I just walk away. Wander back to a safe, predictable space where I can rest. People are chasing after money constantly. People belittle my success and potential often. I’m not rich enough. I’ve let too much of my life pass me by. Buried by other people’s fear of me moving on without their approval. Yet people need me every waking second of the day like I’m a superhero. Sometimes it’s rewarding. Particularly when it comes to providing a safe space for people to think without being judged or manipulated. That’s freedom to me in America. How we can type out on the internet what we feel and flick off police helicopters for being so nosy. How I can wear some shoes banned in China every day to work this week and nobody really knows the difference. How I really enjoyed that hamburger. Nobody needs to know why specifically. Other than I’m a growing healthy boy who is also very thirsty for the record. Maybe I’ll get a milk shake next time and drink it up. Maybe I’ll be hunted by the paparazzi afterwards. They don’t want to fuck with these healthy bones. Maybe I’m saving these strong bones and teeth for the haters. Maybe I don’t care much about them at all. I’m all smiles on the inside. Nobody needs to know why. Crinkle cut fries do help on occasion. <3 Tim

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news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog · 6 years ago

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It turns out purposely messing with your targeted ads isn't a good idea

Facebook is convinced that I am a young mother with a love of kraken-themed decor.

Unless you count my cat, who is 11-years-old and the animal equivalent of the grumpy old man from Up, I absolutely do not have a child. But for the last six months, my feed has been inundated with ads for baby products, from nasal suction devices to teething toys that look like plush versions of a bad acid trip.

Over the summer, my cat underwent a veterinary procedure that, to spare the nasty details for the faint of heart, required me to dab antibiotic ointment on his butt twice a day. Because he had a knack for getting out of his cone of shame and getting ointment everywhere, I put him in diapers for the day after the surgery. But diapers made specifically for pets are absurdly expensive, so I bought a pack of (human) infant diapers online and went on my cat owner way. I started seeing ads for baby products that night.

I know big tech companies have too much on me already. I've been on social media since I was 10-years-old, entering my email and date of birth on Neopets and Club Penguin, so my data has likely been tracked for more than half of my life. I'm online for a majority of my day, and I've accepted the fact that my digital footprint runs too deep for me to ever truly go off the grid.

Which is exactly why I've started fucking with my ads.

It's not just weird baby products. I've been curating my ads to show me extremely specific cephalopod-shaped home decor. After months of carefully engaging with ads, I've finally cultivated what I want to see on my Facebook feed.

Image: screenshot/morgan sung

SEE ALSO: All the social media opt-outs you need to activate right now

I'm not the only one. Caroline, a Twitter user who tweets under the handle @defundpoppunk, also curates their ads. After clicking on specific Facebook ads, they managed to prune their feed like an artisanal algorithm — a concept first floated by Twitter user @JanelleCShane — into a masterpiece: Unreasonably baggy pants.

It's like a cursed personal data-laden bonsai tree.

I click every ad I see on Facebook for weird pants in an effort to train Facebook to show me the weirdest pants. I think it's finally starting to pay off: pic.twitter.com/nS1oMl1Mv7

— olivia colman's oscar (@defundpoppunk) March 12, 2019

Caroline says they searched for jogger-style pants before, and has been getting ads for them ever since. For weeks, they've been clicking on any ad featuring "vaguely interesting-looking" pants.

Like me, Caroline is fed up with the unending lack of privacy we have, and started engaging with their ads just to mess with them.

"So at first it was a little bit of private trolling just because I know e-comm [e-commerce] people take their click through rates really seriously," they told Mashable through Twitter DM. "But then once I started my targeted ads actually changing, I got a little more deliberate about it out of curiosity."

Aside from being an "amusing reminder that everyone is being tracked online constantly," as Caroline said, playing with targeted ads is like playing a game.

There's something deeply satisfying about knowing that even though I as an individual can't really stop power hungry tech giants, I'm giving them a digital middle finger by engaging with the "wrong" ads. It's the online version of the Florida man who runs into hurricanes with heavy metal and American flags. Realistically, messing with my ads won't shroud me from the inevitable tracking that comes from being online, but it feels like I'm making it slightly more inconvenient for large corporations to know everything about the real me.

Shoshana Wodinsky, a tech reporter at Adweek, gets why deliberately polluting your targeted ads is entertaining.

"These kinds of big tech platforms are really powerful," she said during a Skype call. "They're like multibillion dollar companies and the fact that they screw up sometimes is kind of funny. Part of it's definitely punching up, but part of it's like, even these behemoths are somewhat fucked up."

Wodinsky has also experimented with purposely muddling her digital presence; she once changed her Bitmoji to be pregnant to see if it would affect her targeted ads. (She told Mashable that she is very much not pregnant, and during her interview, she said that the only children she has are her two cats.) Although she said it started "as a joke," she wondered how far she could take it.

"Realistically, I know that me pretending to be pregnant isn't going to do anything, but it's kind of like looking outside of the fishbowl," she said. "It's fucking over the big businesses, and who doesn't like to do that."

i gave myself a pregnant bitmoji to see if it would screw with the way ads are targeted toward me and..... im here to tell you that nothings changed pic.twitter.com/SmfWkpRGys

— שוש (@swodinsky) February 13, 2019

fb thinks im preggers,,,,,, success

— שוש (@swodinsky) February 13, 2019

Less than half an hour after creating the Bitmoji, her ad interests included "motherhood" and "breastfeeding."

It's unclear what prompted Facebook to include those options in her interests — it could have been her Bitmoji, or it could have been the fact that she tweeted about it.

Realistically, just clicking on and engaging with specific ads won't do much to your digital footprint; if you really wanted to go deep, you'd have to change your entire online behavior. Your ads aren't just targeted based on what you interact with on specific social media platforms, but what you search and interact with across the entire internet. Thanks to the cookies Facebook uses to track users, regardless of whether or not you're logged in, you can leave fingerprints all over the web. Truly tricking the algorithm would mean a complete overhaul of your search habits, your social media, and whatever personal information is publicly available.

Meddling with your ad preferences by intentionally engaging with them sounds like a harmless prank, but it might have a dark side. Dr. Russell Newman, a professor at Emerson College who specializes in internet privacy, surveillance, and political communication, worries that any engagement with ads can have long term consequences.

"You might feel like you're exercising some bit of control, but in fact, you have none," he said during a phone interview. "There are unknown ways that the game you are playing right now will affect your future existence, and you won't really be able to know."

Newman stresses that we really have no idea what information can be pulled from our online interactions, and how it can be used in the future. Because internet users are "seen in a particular way, quantified in a particular way, and identified in a particular way," he says, engaging with certain ads and showing a preference for certain ads can preclude certain options. He worries that engagement like this can affect life-altering factors like credit score. It sounds far fetched, but Newman said convincing advertisers that my cat is actually my baby, for example, could possibly affect my future health insurance premiums without me even knowing.

"All the decisions that are going to be made about you going forward," Newman said. "Or the rest of your existence, are going to be based on the truth provided digitally."

Washington Post editor Gillian Brockell experienced the insidious side of online advertising last year. Shortly after she delivered her son, who was stillborn, the credit company Experian sent her an email prompting her to "finish registering" her child to track his credit for life. She noted in a viral Twitter thread that she had never even started registering her baby, and it was particularly cruel that companies wanted his information after his death.

I find this hard to believe. I'd been using Experian to check my credit regularly, & I'd never received any spam like this from them before, just a monthly email saying my report was updated. + the ad didn't say “family protection solution.” it said “register your child.” 3/ pic.twitter.com/dUPRxyWRKH

— Gillian Brockell (@gbrockell) March 12, 2019

"These tech companies triggered that on their own, based on information we shared, Brockell wrote in a piece reflecting on how she never asked to be targeted with parenting ads. "So what I’m asking is that there be similar triggers to turn this stuff off on its own, based on information we’ve shared."

Newman emphasizes that while Google, Facebook, and Amazon market themselves as a search engine, social media network, and online marketplace, respectively, the companies have a greater goal: advertising.

"It's notable that you're saying, 'My privacy is gone, so I'm just going to roll with it,'" Newman said during a phone interview. "The problem isn't that your privacy is gone, the problem is that we don't actually have a nationwide regime set in place in regards to privacy."

Luckily, there are a number of ways to scale back on ad tracking, from opting out of social media data collection to using private browsers.

Here's the bottom line: It turns out messing with my targeted ads probably wasn't a good idea. As satisfying as it is to make it slightly more inconvenient for advertisers, purposely engaging with ads for kraken-specific products is less damaging than limiting the data that advertisers can hold over me. Since my conversation with Newman, I've stopped haphazardly clicking on strange ads and opted out of sharing across my social media presence.

But old habits are hard to break, and I admit that when I'm scrolling through Facebook before bed, I'll still linger on ads that include octopi.

WATCH: BTS' 'Boy With Luv' shatters viewing records on YouTube

#_author:Morgan Sung #_uuid:649b666d-c788-3e44-a782-9379dd2624d2 #_category:yct:001000002 #_lmsid:a0Vd000000DTrEpEAL #_revsp:news.mashable

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theresawelchy · 6 years ago

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Learning Data Science: 4 Untold Truths

Did you flirt with the idea of learning data science? You are not alone. This has been a really hot topic in the last few years and it will be one in the upcoming few, for sure. Yet, very few people actually become data scientists.

Why?

Well, part of the problem is that many aspiring data scientists don’t know what to expect from this field. Or even worse, based on the many misleading (sometimes scammy) “how to become a data scientist” articles, they have false expectations. And when they hit the wall, they get demotivated and quit.

In this article, I want to show you four untold truths that you should know about learning data science – and I have never seen them written down anywhere else before.

Untold truth #1: Learning Data Science is Hard!

Learning data science is not easy. It will take a lot of work, a lot of energy and a lot of time from you.

I have seen an ad recently in my Instagram feed that said: “Take this course and master data science in 1 month!”

And I was like: what the fudge!?

I’ve been practicing data science for 6+ years now. I’ve held senior DS positions (in addition to teaching). But I wouldn’t say that I mastered data science or analytics. I know for a fact that no one can master data science in 1 month. In fact, my personal estimation (based on students I worked with) is that from zero to the junior level the learning process will take ~6-9 months. (More about that in this free course: How to become a data scientist.

Learning data science is hard! A few online education platforms imply the opposite.

“Just change one word in this query. Run it! And boom, you’ve learned SQL…”

“Just watch this video course of the instructor running Python code, and you will know Python, too…”

“Just play around with this interactive chart and you will understand regression analysis immediately…”

Two years ago, I interviewed a guy for a junior DS position. He didn’t have any hands-on experience, but he learned SQL on a popular “just-type-your-code-into-the-browser” kind of online learning platform. (I won’t name the exact platform here. :-))

I gave him a computer with an SQL manager open – and a simple real-life task. He had to JOIN two SQL tables, then do a simple segmentation. He couldn’t solve the task! He ran into syntax errors, he couldn’t debug his code, he didn’t get the context, he couldn’t discover the data…

And that’s when I realized that many of these online schools give people only the illusion of data science knowledge.

You want to have real data science knowledge

You want to have real data science knowledge. But what does it take?

Well, first and foremost: (1) a lot of practicing (2) in true-to-life data environments. Don’t try to skip forward: take the time and the energy and set up your own data server!

Yes, sometimes (well, quite often in the beginning) you will mistype a code-snippet, your computer will throw an error and it will be very annoying. But this is how it works! We make mistakes, we learn from them and next time we will do much better.

And also take the time to practice a lot! When you practice, it’s okay to make stupid mistakes. For instance, it’s okay to accidentally mess up your previously built data pipelines and lose hours of work… (This happens from time to time with my students.) But again: we all do stupid things in real life data projects, too. At least, I did in my junior years — and it cost me a lot of extra work-hours. But I learned from that.

We make mistakes, we learn from them and we don’t make them again.

Note: How to practice? I shared a few ideas (and even more) in the above-mentioned free online course: How to become a data scientist?

Learning data science is not easy and it will take time. If you can’t accept this fact, then maybe this profession is not the best choice for you. But if you are okay with learning data science the hard way, this learning period of a few months will be one of your best long-term investments. (I’ll get back to this below.)

Untold truth #2: It’s not “Learning Data Science”, it’s “improving your Data Science skills”

The world changes really fast and it won’t get any slower. And I seriously believe that if one wants to keep up with the pace, the only way to do it is by focusing on improving skills.

Why? You might already have heard that according to researchers’ predictions, ~65% of today’s grade schoolers will hold jobs that don’t exist yet.

You might also have heard that the current estimated “half-life” of engineering related information is ~4 years. So 50% of the things your learn today regarding IT will be outdated in ~4 years.

soure: Shift Happens 2018

What does it mean for you? That the skills you acquire and improve are way more important than the actual information you learn.

It also means that “learning data science” is not about learning data science.

It’s about:

improving your coding skills.

improving your business skills.

improving your mathematical/statistical skills.

improving your data visualization, presentation, communication and other soft skills.

Learning data science is not about:

Learning a certain package of Python.

Learning the different industry benchmarks for this or that KPI.

Learning certain statistical models.

Learning how to use Google Data Studio or Tableau.

What seems important today, might be irrelevant in 5 years Because mastering, for instance, the Scikit-learn library or Google Data Studio might seem important today… but I bet that there will be a better machine learning package and a better data visualization software in 5 years.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think that today, you should learn these things because they are part of the current data science and analytics ecosystem and also part of the learning curve itself.

I’m saying that you should keep in mind that when you learn these (or any other) tools, the important thing is not to cram in every little syntax detail or which button is where in the specific software – but to understand the big picture. Why does this tool work the way it works? What’s the underlying logic? How does this function work in other similar tools? Once you get these, changing between tools (even between programming languages) will be easy as pie.

And you will be much more prepared for the ever-changing future.

So to future-proof your data science career: focus on your skills and not on the information you learn!

Untold truth #3: Because it’s hard, Learning Data Science is a great investment

Let’s talk about career perspectives, too! Learning data science is a great short and long-term investment. I guess I don’t have to explain the short-term investment part.

Check out the LinkedIn Workforce Report for the US (August 2018)! It says: “Demand for data scientists is off the charts … data science skills shortages are present in almost every large U.S. city. Nationally, we have a shortage of 151,717 people with data science skills, with particularly acute shortages in New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles.”

Also, based on Glassdoor’s research, Data Scientist was ranked as the best job three years in a row in the USA.

source: glassdoor.com

Note: the above numbers apply to the US only – I don’t have hard data for the EU or any other parts of the world. But in my experience, in the EU we have the same trends.

High demand and persistent shortage puts data scientists into a really good position. It means:

Higher salary and better benefits

Better job security

Better work conditions (e.g. flexible hours, working from home, etc.)

Besides, data scientist is a well-respected job within the company (and in the outer world, too). You will be someone who your managers and colleagues want to listen to.

The point is: learning data science is a good short-term investment, for sure.

But is learning data science a good long-term investment, too?

My answer is yes and I have two reasons.

REASON #1: Just look at the data! In 2018 the shortage of data scientists in the US was 151,717 people. This number was ~140,000 in 2011. So in 7 years, the market couldn’t produce enough new data scientists to fill up the gap. (It even grew a bit.)

REASON #2: This is something that I’ve already mentioned in the intro. Many people want to learn data science… yet, not too many of them become data scientists after all. Why? Because learning data science is hard. It’s a combination of hard skills (like learning Python and SQL) and soft skills (like business skills or communication skills) and more. This is an entry limit that not many students can pass. They got fed up with statistics, or coding, or too many business decisions, and quit.

So the question is:

If yes, it will be one of the best career investments of your life.

Untold truth #4: Learning Data Science is not about learning Machine Learning, Deep Learning (or any other data buzzwords)

If you had to guess, what would you say is the most time-consuming part of the data scientist job?

Or in other words, what do you think you’ll need to work on the most when practicing data science and analytics for real?

Hint: it’s not Machine Learning.

The answer is… . . . …data cleaning.

Data scientists often say: “80 percent of data science is data cleaning. And 20 percent is complaining about data cleaning.” Okay, obviously, that’s a joke.

But when you get into your first data science role, you will see for yourself: it’s not about doing machine learning and predictive analytics 24/7.

Because to be able to run a proper ML algorithm you have to complete many other steps first:

data collection

data formatting

data cleaning

transforming your data to the right format

discovering and understanding the data

running other data analytics projects

data visualization

automating the above steps

and so on…

And believe me when I say: when you are working with real data, these things are just as exciting as the machine learning and predictive analytics parts.

What’s important then?

When you are learning data science, you should not focus on polishing your ML skills. Instead you should focus on:

being fluent with Python and SQL

understanding the business logic behind simpler analytical methods

being familiar with the basics of statistics

practicing and experiencing the pain of working with a raw and uncleaned data set

learning how to automate

and so on…

These things will help you to become a better data scientist and eventually get your first job — not another deep learning or artificial intelligence course.

So to summarize:

Learning Python and SQL –» important

Learning about Deep Learning –» not important

Learning the basics of statistics –» important

Learning about Artificial Intelligence –» not important

Practicing data cleaning, data formatting and automation –» important

Understanding “artificial neural networks” –» not important

At least, at the junior level… Later on (in 1 or 2 years), when your career moves forward, you will have to learn these above-mentioned, fancy machine learning methods on the job, anyway.

But for now: focus on the things that are important for your next step!

Conclusion

I know: being a data scientist, a machine learning guru, a master of deep learning… These all sound exciting. And you will get there eventually. (I mean, if you want to. For instance, I take much, much more enjoyment from working on simpler analytics projects that have bigger impacts on business. E.g. a sophisticated segmentation project rather than a deep learning project.)

But think about everything that I’ve written above: accept that learning data science is hard, focus on your skills, consider it an investment and learn the basics first!

If you want to learn more about how to become a data scientist, take my 50-minute long free video course: How to become a data scientist.

Also check-out my 6-week data science challenge: The Junior Data Scientist’s First Month video course.

Cheers, Tomi

#Technology #Finance

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spicynbachili3 · 6 years ago

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Digital immortality: How your life’s data means a version of you could live forever

Hossein Rahnama is aware of a CEO of a significant monetary firm who needs to stay on after he’s useless, and Rahnama thinks he may also help him do it.

Rahnama is making a digital avatar for the CEO that they each hope may function a digital “guide” when the precise CEO is gone. Some future firm government deciding whether or not to simply accept an acquisition bid may pull out her mobile phone, open a chat window, and pose the query to the late CEO. The digital avatar, created by an artificial-intelligence platform that analyzes private knowledge and correspondence, may detect that the CEO had a nasty relationship with the buying firm’s execs. “I’m not a fan of that firm’s management,” the avatar may say, and the display would go purple to point disapproval.

Creepy? Possibly, however Rahnama believes we’ll come to embrace the digital afterlife. An entrepreneur and researcher primarily based at Ryerson College in Toronto, and a visiting school member at MIT’s Media Lab, he’s constructing an software known as Augmented Eternity; it permits you to create a digital persona that may work together with folks in your behalf after you’re useless.

Whereas most older folks haven’t amassed sufficient digital detritus to construct a working synthetic intelligence, Rahnama posits that within the subsequent few a long time, as we proceed to create our digital footprints, millennials may have generated sufficient knowledge to make it possible. Whilst we communicate, the digital stays of the useless accumulate. One thing like 1.7 million Fb customers go away annually. Some on-line accounts of the useless are deleted, whereas others linger in perpetual silence. “We’re producing gigabytes of information each day,” Rahnama says. “We now have plenty of knowledge, we’ve plenty of processing energy, we’ve plenty of storage functionality.” With sufficient knowledge about the way you talk and work together with others, machine-learning algorithms can approximate your distinctive character—or not less than some a part of it.

And what would the digital “you” appear like? Properly, what would you like it to appear like? It may be a text-based chatbot just like the CEO’s or an audio voice like Siri or a digitally edited video or a Three-D animated character in a virtual-reality surroundings. It may be embedded in a humanoid robotic.

Twenty thousand personalities without delay We’re not there fairly but. It’s laborious sufficient to create software program brokers that may stick with it a natural-sounding dialog, not to mention seize the character of a particular particular person. There’s no software program that may work together, talk, and make selections the way in which you do. Rahnama says the CEO’s avatar will likely be a “choice help software,” but it surely received’t be able to working the corporate.

“There’s one factor that’s lacking in AI right now, and that’s context,” he says. Most chatbots merely provide responses primarily based on the content material of a dialog, however our communication adjustments relying on who we’re speaking to, the place we’re, and what time of day it’s. The necessity to embrace this sort of context was the premise for Rahnama’s firm, Flybits (for which he was named one in every of this publication’s 35 Innovators Below 35 in 2012). Flybits supplies a platform that lets firms tailor their communications to prospects on the premise of contextual cues. A financial institution, for instance, may provide completely different messages by way of its cell app relying in your buy historical past, your calendar schedule, or whether or not you’re strolling or taking a prepare.

Creepy? Possibly, however Rahnama believes we’ll all come to embrace the digital afterlife.

The contextual half was one thing Rahnama discovered helpful when he began Augmented Eternity. In the event you’re going to assemble a digital self, it’s not sufficient to know that anyone mentioned one thing. It’s important to know the context through which it was mentioned—was the particular person joking? Irritated? Reacting to right now’s information? These similar sorts of clues find yourself being essential when piecing collectively a digital character, which is why the Augmented Eternity platform takes knowledge from a number of sources—Fb, Twitter, messaging apps, and others—and analyzes it for context, emotional content material, and semantics.

Hossein Rahnama

An analogous idea grabbed headlines a couple of years in the past when Russian software program developer Eugenia Kuyda created a chatbot illustration of her finest good friend, Roman Mazurenko, who died in late 2015. Kuyda made the bot by plugging Mazurenko’s private messages with family and friends right into a neural community constructed with Google’s open-source machine-learning framework, TensorFlow. The bot was, by Kuyda’s personal admission, not very exact or polished, however when it answered questions, it usually sounded uncannily like her good friend.

Kuyda says the principle complication with making an attempt to create digital variations of the useless is that individuals are sophisticated. “We’re extraordinarily completely different after we discuss to completely different folks,” she says. “We’re mainly like twenty thousand personalities without delay.” For instance, Mazurenko had mentioned issues to her that he may need ignored of a dialog along with his mother and father. She may seek the advice of along with his household and different pals to determine which data was too delicate to share. May any firm realistically do the identical?

Rahnama clearly thinks so. He says Augmented Eternity will take a step towards accommodating varied personalities by tailoring the dialog in accordance with context and letting customers management what knowledge is accessible to whom. So sometime his daughter may seek the advice of along with his digital household persona, whereas a former scholar may ask questions of his tutorial persona. He sees it as a method of leaving a legacy—a strategy to maintain contributing to society as a substitute of fading to black.

It’s not only for the useless However a digital avatar may additionally come in useful even while you’re nonetheless round. AI may assist remodel your skilled experience from a scattered written report to a illustration of your data that folks can work together with. A lawyer who expenses a whole lot of an hour may let folks seek the advice of a digital avatar as a substitute, for a a lot lower cost. Celebrities, politicians, and different public figures may outsource a few of their public interplay to digital variations of themselves. AI would permit us to seek the advice of specialists with whom we’d by no means be capable to meet in actual life. The flexibility to signify and share experience, Rahnama says, “can truly contribute to new enterprise fashions on the web.” Reasonably than talking with a generic Siri or Alexa, you would ask an eminent scientist, a politician, or a coworker. And why attend a enterprise assembly when you would ship your avatar?

One other startup, Eternime, primarily based in Mountain View, California, provides to include your private data into “an clever avatar that appears such as you” and that can “stay ceaselessly and permit different folks sooner or later to entry your recollections.” Its founder, Marius Ursache, has been selling the thought for years, and greater than 40,000 folks have signed as much as Eternime’s ready record, however the self-funded firm has nonetheless launched solely restricted beta variations. Ursache thinks the issue is much less technical than behavioral: “Individuals don’t make investments a lot time in actions that can repay in a long time,” he says.

Whether or not or not it takes off as a enterprise, Rahnama hopes Augmented Eternity will begin conversations about privateness and knowledge possession. “The rationale I like this analysis challenge is that it addresses plenty of key moral questions round knowledge science and AI,” he says. “Like, who’s going to personal my data after I go away?”

In a paper printed in Nature Human Habits earlier this yr, ethicists Carl Öhman and Luciano Floridi from the Oxford Web Institute argue that we’d like an moral framework for the burgeoning digital afterlife business. Ought to we deal with digital stays by the identical code that museums use for human stays? Doing so would severely restrict the methods through which firms can use (or exploit) our knowledge. If digital stays are like “the informational corpse of the deceased,” they write, they “will not be used solely as a way to an finish, similar to revenue, however regarded as a substitute as an entity holding an inherent worth.”

Maintain a black mirror as much as nature Nearly each dialogue of the digital afterlife, Öhman factors out, mentions “Be Proper Again,” an episode of the British present Black Mirror, through which a bereaved younger widow interacts with a digital avatar of her late husband. Over the course of the episode, she progresses from sending a couple of hesitant texts to a chatbot to buying a lifelike robotic in her husband’s picture.

What’s usually missed in discussions in regards to the present is the position of the corporate that created the avatar. In actual life, Öhman says, we needs to be skeptical of such firms. The facility of the digital useless to govern the dwelling is big; who higher to promote us a product than somebody we’ve liked and misplaced? Thus our digital representations may be extra talkative, pushy, and flattering than we’re—and if that’s what their makers suppose is finest, who’s going to cease them?

Within the Black Mirror episode, the avatar periodically elicits extra of the useless husband’s knowledge and upsells his widow on dearer representations of him, till it turns into so lifelike that she will’t “kill” it. The rhetoric round immortal digital selves focuses on our need to be remembered. However wouldn’t most of us need our family members to have the ability to allow us to go?

Courtney Humphries is a contract author who covers science and the surroundings for a wide range of publications.

from SpicyNBAChili.com http://spicynflchili.spicynbachili.com/digital-immortality-how-your-lifes-data-means-a-version-of-you-could-live-forever/

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theinvinciblenoob · 6 years ago

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It was the best of years, it was the worst of years, it was the wokest of years, it was the most problematic of years, it was the year of AI, it was the year of scooters, it was the year of Big Tech triumph, it was the year of Big Tech scandals, it was the year of Musk’s disgrace, it was the year of Tesla’s redemption, it was the year of shitcoin justice, it was definitely not the year of AR or VR, it was the dumbest timeline, it was the spring of stanning, it was the winter of wtf.

It was, in short, a year tailor-made for The Jons, an annual award celebrating tech’s more dubious achievers, named, in an awe-inspiring fit of humility, after myself. So let’s get to it! With very little further ado, I give you: the third annual Jon Awards for Dubious Technical Achievement!

(The Jons 2015) (The Jons 2016) (The Jons 2017)

THE FEET AND LEGS AND TORSO OF CLAY AWARD FOR SUDDEN REGRESSION TO THE MEAN

To Elon Musk, who in the past year went from (in many eyes) “messiah who could do no wrong” to “man who has paid a $20 million fine and stepped down as chairman in order to settle with the SEC regarding allegations of tweeted fraud; been sued for very publicly accusing a stranger of pedophilia with no evidence; feuded with Azealia Banks; been roundly criticized for the conditions in Tesla’s factories; and been pilloried (though also, and to my mind more accurately, tentatively praised) for his new Boring Tunnel.” Don’t have heroes, kids.

THE BUT ON THE OTHER HAND THERE ARE ALL THOSE SHINY NEW ELECTRIC CARS AWARD FOR ATTEMPTED DOOMSAYING

Surprisingly, despite the previous award, this one goes to the herds of bears who spent much of the year claiming that Tesla’s imminent doom and bankruptcy would become obvious and indisputable any day now. The roars of the bears seem to have grown much quieter of late, probably because the Model 3’s production rate has rocketed from 1,000 per week at the start of the year to 1,000 per day of late. No mean feat on the part of Tesla employees.

THE YES BUT THE DIFFERENCE IS THE RUSSIANS KNOW IT’S DISINFORMATION AWARD FOR BAD OPSEC

To Donald Trump, who apparently continues to use an insecure iPhone which the Chinese and Russians listen in on. The good news? Officials have “confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.” Put less diplomatically, the President of the United States doesn’t pay enough attention to briefings to have any important secrets to share. Nothing to worry about there! Trump responded by tweeting a denial, saying he only had a “seldom used government cell phone” … from the iOS Twitter app.

THE YOU MUST ADMIT I WAS AT LEAST RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING BEING DIFFERENT NOW AWARD FOR BUBBLY BITCOIN PREDICTIONS

It’s too easy and obvious to give this award to John McAfee, who I suspect of actually angling for a Jon year after year. And as a believer that cryptocurrencies have long-term importance, I’m not going to award anyone for their less-outlandish-than-McAfee medium-term beliefs. So this award goes to Bitcoin uberbull Tom Lee, who claimed Bitcoin would end the year at $15,000 … in the second half of November. There’s a point you almost have to admire; the point at which hype becomes delusion.

THE SURE BUT IT’S A MORE CONNECTED KIND OF MISERY, EXPLOITATION, AND DISINFORMATION AWARD FOR DESTROYING THE GLOBAL VILLAGE IN ORDER TO SAVE IT

Not to Mark Zuckerberg, actually, whose company has, in its zeal for connecting the world, and its belief that this is always and automatically a good thing, amplified genocide, provided a platform for manipulation and disinformation which may have helped tip the Brexit referendum, and 2016 presidential election (both of which were admittedly so close that there were probably dozens of aspects which “helped tip” them) and is increasingly widely viewed as a significant net negative for the world thanks to its business model of incentivizing “engagement” above all else. He’d be a worthy recipient, but this goes to Sheryl Sandberg, for epitomizing Facebook leadership’s thin-skinned tunnel vision wherein they automatically suspect anyone who criticizes Facebook of having a bad-faith ulterior motive, when she “asked Facebook’s communications staff to research George Soros’s financial interests in the wake of his high-profile attacks on tech companies.”

THE PICK A HORSE ANY HORSE BUT LOOK JUST ONE HORSE AWARD FOR OXYMORONISM IN THE FACE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

To everyone — especially journalists and media executives — who thinks that the big social-media companies are too powerful and that tech companies should exercise more control over the dissemination of public speech, and/or to everyone who says that the big social-media companies shouldn’t ever censor while being perfectly aware that they are already exercising control over the dissemination of public speech via their timeline algorithms. There are many, many copies of this particular award to go around.

(Note that there are at least two intellectually consistent approaches here: one is to be explicitly supportive of social media companies moderating speech; another is to favor non-algorithmic, non-amplifying, non-optimized-for-engagement, strict-chronological feeds)

THE COMETH THE HOUR, COMETH THE SPECTACULARLY OUT-OF-TOUCH COVEN OF CLUELESS OLD WHITE MEN AWARD FOR REMINDING US THAT SOMETIMES THE CURE IS WORSE THAN THE DISEASE

To the members of the United States Congress, both houses, for making Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai seem cuddly, friendly, wise, warm, human, plugged-in, and in-touch with the common man and woman, by comparison with their unbelievably clueless question. Who can forget “Senator, we sell ads,” and/or “Congressman, iPhone is made by a different company”?

THE STREET FINDS ITS OWN DISUSES FOR THINGS AWARD FOR BOOTLEG URBAN RENEWAL

To Lime, Bird, and the other scooter companies whose products have spent the year being thrown by the dozen into Lake Merritt in the heart of Oakland, presumably with the collective intent of turning that empty water into reclaimed land, just as downtown San Francisco is built on the carcasses of sailing ships from the 49er gold rush.

THE OONTZ OONTZ OONTZ TRONC TRONC TRONC AWARD FOR FINALLY GETTING THAT THE JOKE WAS ON THEM

To Tribune Publishing, until recently known as Tronc, for reminding us of their unbelievably terrible name when they finally — finally! — decided to abandon it in favor of something not risible. A small silver second-place award goes to Oath, the owner of TechCrunch, for thereby rising to the top of the “Worst Media Company Name” rankings.

THE SOMETIMES NOTHING IS A REAL COOL HAND AWARD FOR DOING NOTHING BECAUSE NOTHING WAS NECESSARY

To Twitter, who, when noted far-right wacko Laura Loomer handcuffed herself to Twitter’s NYC building after she was permanently banned by them for hate speech, responded by — brilliantly — doing nothing at all. They did not ask the police to remove her. They did not press charges. They ignored her completely. And Loomer went from “she will not remove the handcuffs until CEO Jack Dorsey reinstates her account” to “After several hours of complaining about the cold, Loomer eventually requested to be removed from the door.”

THE COME ON NOW DON’T BE EVIL WAS A LONG TIME AGO AWARD FOR REDEFINING GOOGLEY

To Google, obviously, for being forced to come to terms with what sure looks from the outside like a culture of pervasive sexual harassment by a massive employee walkout in the same year its plans for a new censorship-friendly China search engine leaked. Look not for the trigram in thy brother’s eye, etc.

THE CENTRAL CASTING MAD SCIENTIST AWARD FOR BRINGING US THE DYSTOPIA WE DESERVE

To He Jiankui, the self-funded doctor who apparently brought us the world’s first two human babies genetically edited via CRISPR, without letting anything like an ethics review board, a well-considered benefit/risk ratio, the pre-existence of well-established less-dangerous ways to achieve the allegedly desired result, or anything else stand in his way. But then, if he had, that wouldn’t really have captured the 2018zeitgeist, would it?

THE WHAT ARE THE NEW RUULES AWARD FOR MAKING NICOTINE MORALLY AMBIGUOUS AGAIN

To Juul, which has made a ridiculous boatload of money and more importantly made a lot of people seem very silly as they moral-panic about vaping as if it is the same as smoking, and others seem just as silly as they moral-panic about that moral panic as if vaping has been guaranteed on stone tablets to have no deleterious side effects at all. Where is the nuanced middle? Ah, let’s not kid ourselves, it’s 2018, no one cares about the nuanced middle any more. Bring on the outrage!

THE LISTEN UP YOUNG WHIPPERSNAPPER I WAS THE CEO OF A CYBERSECURITY FIRM AND THE PRESIDENT’S CYBERSECURITY ADVISOR I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW AWARD FOR NOT ACTUALLY KNOWING ANYTHING AT ALL ABOUT HOW TO CYBER THE CYBER. CYBER!

To Rudy Giuliani, who really was the CEO of a cybersecurity firm (Cyber!) and really was the president’s cybersecurity advisor (Cyber! Cyber!) and yet, as shown by his bewildering yet hilarious accusations that one of his tweets was sabotaged by Twitter, does not actually understand the Internet at all. Or, we may presume, the cyber. Cyber!

THE LOOK WE’RE ONLY A $30B COMPANY HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO KEEP TRACK OF ALL THESE LITTLE DETAILS AWARD FOR FORCING PEOPLE TO INTERACT WITH OTHERS NEARBY

To Ericsson, who accidentally disabled phone service for hours for tens of millions of people around the globe because it failed to renew a (presumably TLS) software certificate used by its switching services ahead of its expiry. You can get those for free and automatically these days, btw. Never mind the cyber (Cyber!) attackers; it’s malingering incompetence that will get us all in the end. Speaking of which …

THE WHO COULD POSSIBLY HAVE IMAGINED THAT SUCH A THING WOULD HAPPEN OR IF IT DID THAT WE WOULD RESPOND TO IT IN ALL THE WORST POSSIBLE WAYS AWARD FOR A REPERTOIRE OF PANICKED FLAILING INEPTITUDE WORTHY OF ARTHUR DENT

To the authorities at Gatwick university, who first shut down one of the busiest airports in Europe for almost a day and a half during the pre-Christmas rush because there were reports of drones seen over its runways; then said they couldn’t possibly shoot down those drones for fear the stray bullets might harm someone; then conceded the possibility that there were no drones at all (though it seems like there probably were); then arrested a couple who turned out to be completely innocent; then reopened the airport with no resolution but that of the installation of an expensive new anti-drone system and the discovery of a single, untraced, damaged drone. This dithering paralysis raises many terrifying questions. I have two in particular. One: the people in charge of Gatwick — again, one of Europe’s biggest and busiest airports — never done any threat modelling / scenario analysis / contingency planning at all? And two: how many minutes-rather-than-hours would this shutdown have lasted if it had happened at a major airport in, say, Texas, before the bullet-ridden carcasses of the drones in question were dragged off the runway? I guess we’ll never know. But it gives me a certain dubious pleasure to bequeath to Gatwick, an airport I have known and disliked for many years, this year’s Jon of Jons.

Congratulations, of a sort, to all the winners of the Jons! All recipients shall receive a bobblehead of myself made up as a Blue Man, as per the image on this post, which will doubtless become coveted and increasingly valuable collectibles. (And needless to say sometime next year they will become redeemable for JonCoin.) And, of course, all winners shall be remembered by posterity forevermore.

1Bobbleheads shall only be distributed if and when available and convenient. The eventual existence of said bobbleheads is not guaranteed or indeed even particularly likely. Not valid on days named after Norse or Roman gods. All rights reserved, especially those rights about which we have reservations.

via TechCrunch

#IFTTT #TechCrunch

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williamsjoan · 6 years ago

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It’s the Jons 2018!