I'm sorry to hear about your illness, I hope you're doing better now.
Personally I have found the market to be quite good recently, at least based on my LinkedIn inbound.
Something that might help is to condense your resume to 1-2 pages. There's a lot of detail in your resume and it's quite difficult to understand it at a glance.
Other than that it can help to reach out directly to people at a company your interested in working through LinkedIn rather than applying through forms. Having a coffee or online chat can open doors.
Based on your experience I'm also assuming that you've got a considerable network. Can you reach out to people you've enjoyed working with in the past?
I do have quite a big network, but haven't really tapped into that at the moment!
Do you mind sharing whats your profile like(FAANG/Start-ups, Frontend/Backend etc) and the kind of inbounds you've been getting on linked-in. I just get recruiter spam that they almost never reply to!
> I do have quite a big network, but haven't really tapped into that at the moment!
Your work network's primary purpose is to facilitate job placement. Use it! If you submit your resume to N companies every day, you should also send out a message to at least N people from your network, until you've exhausted your network.
What you’re describing is perfectly possible without a car.
I live in Amsterdam and have a young family. We own an electric cargo bike that we use for groceries and to cart around our daughter. You can use it with an infant car seat and for larger kids.
When we need a car we use a car sharing app. There are around 10 cars within walking distance of our flat.
Many people in cities _want_ a car but don’t need one.
Cargo bikes are dangerous for children, there is little protection in case of an accident (not necessarily with a car, a bollard is enough) and well once you have one child in, you can't really have groceries. You can't use it when it's freezing. What you describe is typical of a one-child family in Netherland, but doesn't fit the reality of most of European cities. Also Netherland has a rather high amount of cars per head, so not everyone thinks like you ;-)
> Also Netherland has a rather high amount of cars per head, so not everyone thinks like you ;-)
You can bet all those car users also ride bikes though. It's just very common in the NL to live in one city and work in another, things like that. I know people who have cars they use to go to work and back and then take all other journies via foot, bike or public transport.
Peter Jacobsen (2003) analyzed multiple datasets and found that the risk per cyclist decreased as the total number of cyclists increased. He observed this pattern across intersections, cities, and time periods.
Yes, if you focus on one see fragment alone then I'm actually saying the opposite of that I said.
But being car centric or not doesn't even matter here. The argument that car owners don't think like cyclists doesn't apply to car owners who spend a significant portion of their week on bicycles.
I’m not saying that everyone in the Netherlands agrees with me. I’m just illustrating that it’s perfectly possible to live in a city like Paris or Amsterdam with a family and without a car.
Where do you put the toilet paper? The diapers? I can fill a 400 L boot easily with weekly groceries for a family of 4. Most cargo bikes have max 300L space, you have no space left for children.
So go twice a week? I'm not sure what to call people when they can't solve problems that easy
There may be issues with my solution, but if that solution is so obvious, maybe you could have used more words in your comment.
Twice a week doesn't solve the problem that you can have groceries + kids in a cargo bike. And we aren't all retired or in a cosy 30h job that allows back and forth all week.
Are they very dangerous for children? Are there statistics?
It doesn’t really freeze in Paris anymore so it's a moot point, but you can ride bikes when it does (you need different tires, just like cars, and a city that clears the roads, just like for cars).
A bike going at full speed on the sidewalk is dangerous to children, yes. It is why many cities banned cyclists there, which as a result led to a decrease in accidents. Pedestrians don't go at the same pace and can be particularly vulnerable, so I don't see why you need a statistic to understand this basic fact.
An important distinction is that US and EU interests aligned on many important areas up until recently. So it was less of a subservient relationship, and more of a mutually beneficial one. Now that the US wants to turn it into a subservient relationship, the EU is naturally looking for other options.
No, Europe is a de facto vassal state to US since WW2.
What Europe didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand was the US agenda differs from Europe agenda , always has. But now they start to wake up facing this reality.
I remember during the Chirac presidency how viciously France was attacked by the other European countries, especially my own Sweden, for doing nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific.
Jump forward today and France is seen as a protector of Europe, especially in Sweden, because of its nuclear arsenal.
In fairness, he did so in part because this was going to go against Total's interests (see Oil, Power and War for that part of the story), but yeah, it was still the right stance to have and history proved him right.
As opposed to invading in order to support the interests of Halliburton? Tough choice..
Let's also not forget the absolutely absurd intervention of Colin Powell at the UN Security Council, holding up a vial containing the ultimate "proof" of WMD.
I think Europe was of the understanding that the "ongoing deal" was mutually beneficial.
The US paid by far the most for defense and so had by far the most influence and power in the world, and the peace (at least in the Western world) that US defense brought made sure both the US and the EU could freely trade and benefit financially.
What now changed is that apparently the US thinks it does not need this hegemony anymore (by forcing the EU to become a competing military power), or that they can replace the role the EU played with some other combination of countries. Or alternatively, the US is just looking for some "splendid isolation".
To European spectators, the above seems ridiculous. But who knows, maybe Trump is correct... Either way, the US had a good thing going and is now abandoning that. Not strange that Europe is surprised by that move.
>The US paid by far the most for defense and so had by far the most influence and power in the world
That's the thing, Americans have become very skeptical of our own influence and power, for good reason. Look what we did to the Middle East. Look at the shenanigans we were funding with USAID. There isn't actually a constituency for this imperialism stuff in the US. US voters don't like it.
In any case -- if we had so much influence, why were previous presidents like Bush and Obama unsuccessful in influencing the EU to fund its own defense?
>forcing the EU to become a competing military power
It's not about competition, it's about Europe taking responsibility for itself.
You want a global cop? How about you do it yourself for a bit? It's a terrible job. Maybe you should take a turn at it.
> unsuccessful in influencing the EU to fund its own defense
We did cut down too much on our defence, especially after the Cold war (not all European countries though, like Finland). But, many European countries have bought plenty of expensive US military equipment like fighter aircraft, helicopters, anti aircraft systems, etc. It’s not like those were a gift.
Ok, let’s hope you are right on the anti-imperialism front and that the US citizens will not tolerate all that saber rattling against Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal…
or maybe you are just misunderstanding and rationalizing what’s going on to tell yourself that everything is going fine on the US politics side of things while the rest of the world is waking up to the fact that you voted a narcissistic authoritarian into office.
>A "vassal state" is a state that has a mutual obligation to a superior state or empire, similar to a vassal in the feudal system, often involving tribute payments
Europe is not like that - we don't pay taxes to the US to defend us. The US kindly did so free of charge for many years which is a different thing, more of an alliance I guess.
Now the US is kind of switching allegiances we are having to recalculate.
The “tax” is enabling total American dominance economically and politically, not to mention huge leverage over all of Europe's military with vendor lock in.
Yeah, I don't understand how those people use reason (or maybe they don't).
If you look at the biggest/richest companies, it's all about US tech industry and associated, even though we have fronted a lot of the research and education.
And we ask them to pay taxes fairly they complain, and they don't want to open their stuff, they even work hard on malicious compliance.
It's a pretty bad deal.
What's a "de facto vassal state"? That's a pretty vague notion, one could fill it with any meaning. What Trump has shown is that Europe is not as dependent as to follow US politics whatever it is.
That is the unification treaty. If you accept that as a peace treaty then you need to at least accept that Germany, and as a consequence Europe, was vassal state until 1991. Thus the idea that Europe were equal partners with US is false.
Yes, among other things. It is the "Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany", and thing it finally settles is WW2 and the subsequent temporary arrangements.
> If you accept that as a peace treaty
The ~1955 treaties between the respective occupying powers and West and East Germany separately, which ended most of the powers of occupation but could not formally end the Potsdam arrangement because the Western allies weren't going to formalize the situation with East Germany and the USSR wasn't going to do the same for West Germany, effectively (but not completely formally) ended the occupation and were essentially peace treaties (but obviously neither addressed the whole of Germany or the whole of the belligerents against Germany in WW2.) Between 1955 and reunification, each of the Germanies was technically occupied as a consequence of the Cold War. But West Germany was generally treated as as much of an equal partner as other major Western nations with the US.
I only pointed to the 1991 treaty because it is simple and irrefutable and the most straightforward, uncomplicated way to rebut your originally clearly-wrong claim that Germany was currently occupied without any peace treaty.
West Germany wasn't, practically, occupied post-1955. It was formally occupied because the Cold War meant the USSR had no interest in signing off on the Western settlement with West Germany, just as the Western powers didn't with East Germany, and given the Potsdam Arrangement actually formally ending the occupation required that.
You have to be either naive or a shill if you believe the US didn't leverage any political control over (West) Germany with that kind of large occupational force.
See, this gets to the point others have made in this thread. Your reasoning implies that you should be happy if the US pulls out of NATO and leaves Europe, since Europe would no longer be "occupied" and would thus be an "equal partner".
Europeans are just impossible to satisfy, from my perspective. They will complain no matter what the US does.
Of course Europeans can hold different opinions, and this is part of what makes them impossible to satisfy. But I notice that their method of registering their opinion is always to complain about the US. Instead of saying "Good riddance", you could say "I'm glad we have a shared vision for Europe", since you and I are in alignment.
Furthermore, my strong suspicion is that there is actually a great deal of overlap between the Europeans who used to say "America is exploiting Europe through its presence there", and the Europeans who now say "America is exploiting Europe by pulling out". There seems to be a surprising amount of continuity behind Europe's anti-American thinking, even when it points in diametrically opposite directions. The "de Gaulle was right" Europeans never actually argue with the Europeans who say "the US needs to stay", even though they would appear to be taking opposite sides of the issue. Somehow, anti-Americanism is a far more powerful force than the major underlying policy difference between these two camps.
Anyway, I appreciate your comment. I'll try and link to it elsewhere to explain why we're leaving. Hopefully it will help clarify for some people.
Many tools that increase your productivity as a developer take a while to master. For example, it takes a while to become proficient with a debugger, but I'd still wager that it's worth it to learn to use a debugger over just relying on print debugging.
40+ years of successful coding with only print debugging FTW!
A tool that helps you by iteratively guessing the next token is not a "developer tool" any more than a slot machine is a wealth buidling tool.
Even when I was using Visual Studio Ultimate (that has a fantastic step-through debugging environment), the debugger was only useful for the very initial tests, in order to correct dumb mistakes.
Finding dumb mistakes is a different order of magnitude of the dev process than building a complex edifice of working code.
I would say printf debugging is the functional equivalent of "guessing the next token". I only reach for it when my deductive reasoning (and gdb) skills fail and I'm just shining a flashlight in the dark hoping to see the bugs scurrying around.
Ironically, I used it to help the robots find a pretty deep bug in some code they authored in which the whole "this code isn't working, fix it" prompt didn't gain any traction. Giving them the code with the debug statements and the output set them on the right path. Easy peasy...true, they were responsible for the bug in the first place so I guess the humans who write bug free code have the advantage.
> I would say printf debugging is the functional equivalent of "guessing the next token".
The output of the code print statments, as the code is iteratively built up from skeleton to ever greater levels of functionality, is analyzed to ensure that things are working properly, in a stepwise fashion. There is no guessing in this whatsoever. It is a logical design progression from minimal functionality to complete implementation.
Standard commercial computers never guess, so that puts constraints on my adding to their intrinsic logical data flows, i.e. I should never be guessing either.
> I guess the humans who write bug free code have the advantage.
We fanatical perfectionists are the only ones who write successful software, though perfection in function is the only perfection that can be attained. Other metrics about, for example, code structure, or implementation environment, or UI design, and the like, are merely ancillary to the functioning of the data flows.
And I need not guess to know this fundamental truth, which is common for all engineering endeavors, though software is the only engineering pursuit (not discipline, yet) where there is only a binary result: either it works perfectly as designed or it doesn't. We don't get to be "off by 0.1mm", unless our design specs say we have some grey area, and I've never seen that in all my years of developing/modifying various n-tiered RDBMS topologies, desktop apps, and even a materials science equipment test data capture system.
I saw the term "fuzzy logic" crop up a few decades ago, but have never had the occasion to use anything like that, though even that is a specific kind of algorithm that will either be implemented precisely or not.
You missed the part about unreliable results. Never in software engineering have we had to put a lot of effort into a tool that gives unpredictable, unreliable results like LLMs.
As the car is sold outside of North America (with a promise of FSD) , you don't think it's fair to expect it to recognise the speed limit signs in the country that the car is sold?
I had never heard the term before but Wikipedia says this:
> There were two main types of company that provided services digitally: companies that applied for their own banking license and companies in a relationship with a traditional bank to provide those financial services. The former were called challenger banks and the latter were called neobanks.
That (as well as this article) seems to suggest that neobanks are by definition companies that do not have a banking licence. But I have no idea if that is the correct or current usage. Wikipedia also describes N26 (for example) as a neobank - N26 originally launched without a banking licence but now has one.
I'm on board with assuming that the intent of Google / the engineers who built the classifier is not racist. However the outcome — labelling a black person as a gorilla — certainly is racist. What makes you think otherwise?
The reason I don’t think the actual act of the program bugging is racist is I imagine it’s just some stupid rule based on shape (primates have a similar shape) and skin color and isn’t smart enough to distinguish humans vs gorillas vs Gumby toys with black/grey skin closer to a gorilla.
I think intent is important for labeling something racist and a function doesn’t have intent. And it doesn’t seem like the programmer had intent.
So I agree that a human seeing a person and labeling it as a gorilla is racist, it’s because the human is making an inappropriate value judgement.
The reason I don’t think the actual act of the program bugging is racist is I imagine it’s just some stupid rule based on shape (primates have a similar shape) and skin color and isn’t smart enough to distinguish humans vs gorillas vs Gumby toys with black/grey skin closer to a gorilla.
But this is AI -- so the stupid rule is not pre-programmed, but rather curve-fit to the data (uh, "learned").
So ultimately it's a matter of (1) failing to find the right training data (or procedure) and (2) more fundamentally, choosing not to correct the problem after 8 years.
I was generalizing the bug but my basis is an assumption that the programmer didn’t make some conscious or unconscious racist decision, but just something basic like “match shapes and colors” and the training data had a bunch of gorillas for one reason or another.
I think this gets fixed by better training data and more pictures of really dark skinned people. So with more supervised labels of dark skinned people to people, properly so the matching doesn’t think people are closer to gorillas.
Comically/sadly, we’ll know we get closer to fixing the training sets to be more inclusive when google starts labeling gorillas as people.
I think there are some systemic reasons why there aren’t more diverse populations in training data. And those are more society issues than AI issues (ie, rich people are more represented, rich people are certain races, therefore races are more represented).
And finally, I’ve worked in software that people just test what they are and know so I’ve seen so many test plans that are too simple and only test the programmers dob and address. This doesn’t mean racist because all the programmers are Asian males. It just means the quality review wasn’t thorough enough to include proper test conditions.
I might be inappropriately conflating software bugs from different areas but this is what makes me think “stupidity or weakness more likely than racism.”
The racism comes from the fact non-white people were not properly considered when the model was developed and trained. This comes up time and time again in AI, ranging from face ID that only works on white people, to porn classifiers that associate black people with NSFW images.
No matter how good or well trained on good data with good representation of all skin colors a classifier is, it’s going to misclassify people and things periodically, and it’s definitely going to misclassify black people as gorillas more often than other races.
But, white people get misclassified as animals by the classifier too. Typically white people aren't misclassified as gorillas but as other animals. So i don't think the cause is as simple as non-white people not being considered during training.
If a system consistently misclassifies persons black persons far more than white persons -- and does so in a way that's obviously provocative and offensive -- then by definition it's racist in its effect (regardless of intent). The fact that the smartest company in the world cannot seem to get a handle on this problem after 8 years is also not unreasonable grounds to suspect that something's up.
Like that they don't appreciate the gravity of the problem, for example.
These are dangerous grounds to discuss, but I don't think it's racist (colloquially) at all. If gorillas were like yetis and covered in white fur and it started labeling anglos as gorillas, it's not racist either. Racism (colloquially) comes from bad people's intentions. Who would've thought that a creature that is very similar to us humans and has a color that matches some humans would accidentally classify something poorly.
What would be racist from this outcome is if it kept doing this and no one did anything. Clearly it hurts people's feelings and that is a very valid issue. Googles option to just nuke it is a great start until they can hammer out the kinks.
Isn't the point of the article that it just refuses to recognize gorillas outright? That prevents exactly what you're talking about. And I made that point in my post. It is hurtful so Google prevent google photos from classifying anything as a Gorilla is a good bandaid. Some things are just too risky to solve for little gain.
Racism isn't an objective order existing in the universe separate from us. It's part of human experience and exists where humans experience it.
Given the recent history of equating black people with non-human primates, and using that to deny them rights & full participation in society, making this error is going to be experienced as racist. It's not a matter of individual malice or taxonomic classification, but of history and social relations.
I think we can all agree that the classifier is horribly broken.
But it seems like if nobody is working on this, how will we ever fix this gaping hole in image classifiers? And don't we want to fix it? And to fix it, research will continue to get it wrong until they get it less wrong and more right, but can only iterate without a massive backlash. It seems like being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I am rhetorically asking, wouldn't we have to allow researchers to iterate on this problem to fix it? That simply won't happen until we are able to allow them leeway understanding that this is an incrementally improving model. Otherwise what we have is just a sledgehammer solution (just banning all primate classifications) which actually never addressed the problem, that these models do have a race-based bias (probably in their input datasets.)
I'm simply answering the question of how it is racist, not currently trying to tackle the appropriateness of fixing the racism or the technical hurdles involved in that. It's outside my expertise and not particularly relevant to the comment I was responding to.
Because racism is about harm, not an estimation of a thing's motivations and prejudices -- which it's why it's still racist even if you didn't mean it or didn't know. It doesn't actually require a mind at all. Anything that confers, amplifies, or perpetuates harmful stereotypes or negative associations with people of a specific race is racist.
The thing you're calling racism is actually hate speech as it's typically defined in law.
Leaving the current situation aside, it's an interesting philosophical point. In law you have the concept of "mens rea" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
That's a good question. The ML bias this isn't necessarily due to one prejudiced person doing this on purpose. It's connected to systemic racism where history and culture added up to the status quo that is biased.
The fact is that training sets usually contain many more white men than black women, especially if they're just scraped off the web. People who guided the training may have just used datasets that reflect their own culture and demographics of their own country, and didn't see a problem with that. The opposite would have been be seen as "pandering to diversity" in their country, so they've ended up with a biased dataset and a biased algorithm.
