That's what I was expecting too. I was excited to see some kind of topographic map, or an open web map with pins for particularly good skating areas, etc. Could be a cool project.
Do you have any recommended resources on those topics? I'm coming from a strong ~30 year software engineering background which has been excellent, until now, as ML requires a completely different background. I'm trying to decide if I should start a new game+ with academic background, or get some expansion packs with what I already know and move into ML that way. I've found plenty of resources for the former and practically nothing for the latter.
I don't see a software engineer's skills becoming redundant in this field, especially if you have a good level of experience in cloud infra and tooling. It seems more valuable that ever to me (e.g. I have worked with ML Researchers who don't grasp HTTP let alone could set up a fleet of severs to run their model developed entirely in Jupyter Notebook).
I have found it helpful to equate myself with the correct tools and terminology in order to speak the right language - there's specific tools lots of people use such as Weights & Biases for "Experiment Tracking", terms like "Model Repository" which is just what it sounds like. "Vector Databases" (Elastic Search had this feature for years), "Feature Stores" - feel familiar to big table type databases.
Reading up on a typical use case like "RAG - Retrieval Augmented Generation" is a good idea - alongside starting to think about how you'd actually build and deploy one.
Above all having a decent background in cloud infra, engineering and how to optimise systems and code for production deployment at scale is a very in demand at the moment.
Being the person helping these teams of PHDs (many of whom have little industry experience) to productionise and deploy is where I am at right now - it feels like a fruitful place to be :)
I remember a sci-fi book where they were talking about one of the characters hacking on thousand-year-old code, but I could never remember what book it was from. Maybe this was it and it's time for a reread.
Continuing on from the sibling comment about the 0 second...
So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.
“We should rewrite it all,” said Pham.
“It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation.
“It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.”
Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.”
“Almost precisely.” Bret was grinning again. “With some minor revisions.”
I am a longtime developer but I'm passionate about design and UX. I'm always on the lookout for materials that I can give my team and other developers to help them get better at design. It's not a course, but "The Non-Designer's Design Book" (ISBN 978-0133966152, Robin Williams) is the best material for design fundamentals I've found. It's very approachable for anyone and it's broadly applicable across all kinds of design. Everyone I have convinced to read it has loved it, and I've seen an improvement in output and understanding. I highly recommend this if you have an interest in design.
Refactoring UI is also valuable and can be impactful, though it's heavily web focused and is more like a Web Component Design Cookbook rather than foundational knowledge.
Do you have any more information about this? It would explain the challenge I've been experiencing as I enter my early 40s with a family history of hypertension; my blood pressure has been going up, which makes sense, but my ADHD has also been getting harder to manage, which doesn't.
Sorry for the late response, but I don't have any more information about it as it's mostly anecdotal based on my experience. The best explanation I have come up with is the high blood pressure lowers the amount of oxygenated blood in the brain making it harder to produce dopamine, which it is already struggling to do.
I have a similar issue. Amphetamine gives me more side effects and seems to help less these days despite being a wonder drug thru my 20s. I’ve optimized my diet and exercise regularly, half because of this, but it only goes so far. I’m running out of levers to pull.
I enjoy the sound of crickets and cicadas (which are much louder) except for the one particular kind of cicadas we get occasionally in Texas that make a singular unwavering high pitched ambient buzzing sound, like the whine of an old tv cranked to 11, coming from everywhere. It's a horribly unpleasant sound, but thankfully they don't stick around long. The other cicada sounds are nice.
I had heard about this before my son was born. We didn't try to teach him anything, anytime we remembered (which was sporadic) we just used the gestures when talking to him. I was amazed at how quickly he picked up on it, and he was able to communicate his needs to us months before he was able to verbalize.
It took very minimal effort on our part, and was very rewarding for him; certainly a lot better than him crying with the hope that we could guess what he wanted. Definitely recommended for any new parents.
The best moment was when he was sitting on the floor, and looked up at his mom and made the "together" sign, it was heart melting.
I love seeing how language develops in my kids and how they start to invent ways to communicate. Our first, she would say "hold you" when she wanted to be picked up, which she learned from us saying "do you want me to hold you?" My 2 year old now says "huggy" when he wants to be picked up.
They might not have the dexterity required for some of the more complex signs, I would guess. If you devise your own gestures they can be much simpler.
No, the basics like hungry and please/thank you are fairly simple. The daycare my son goes to teaches all the kids sign language starting at like 6 months.
Until I read all the way down here to the bottom of the comment thread, I was thinking about the older people who didn't get this reference since I've been hearing it for decades. But now I see, thanks to your comment, that it is I that is the old one, and it's the youngsters that don't know it.
You can change the default of Safari, but not for Siri. "Search the Internet" voice command always uses Google. I'm personally hoping that either part of this lawsuit or part of their Siri upgrade allows us to change it.
