| Old timer rant: IMO Machine learning mostly doesn't work (yet) with a couple exceptions where tremendous amounts of energy and talent have made that happen. For example, image processing with conv nets is really cool, but the data sets have been "dogs all the way down" until very recently. And for the past few years, just getting new data and tuning AlexNet on a bunch more categories was an instant $30-$50M acqui-hire. Beyond a few categories, its output amuses and annoys me roughly equally. But the real problem with ML algorithms IMO is that they cannot be deployed effectively as black boxes yet. The algorithms still require insanely finicky human tuning and parameter optimization to get a useful result out of any de novo data set. And such results frequently don't reproduce when the underlying code isn't given away on github. Finally, since the talent that can do that is literally worth more than its weight in gold in acqui-hire lucky bucks, it doesn't seem like there's a solution anytime soon. Voice input? You gotta be kidding me. IMO it works just well enough to enter the uncanny valley level of deceiving the user into trusting it and then fails sufficiently often to trigger unending rage. Baidu's TypeTalk is a bit better than the godawful default Google Keyboard though so maybe there's hope. GPUs? Yep, NVIDIA was a decade ahead of everyone by optimizing strong-scaling over weak-scaling (Sorry Intel, you suck here. AMD? Get in the ring, you'll do better than you think). Chance favored the prepared processor here when Deep Learning exploded. But now NVIDIA is betting the entire farm on it, and betting the entire farm on anything IMO is a bad idea. A $40B+ market is more than enough to summon a competent competitor into existence (But seriously Intel, you need an intervention at this point IMO). Machines with lots of CPUs: Well, um, I really really wish they had better single-core CPU performance because that ties in with working with GPUs. Sadly, I've seen sub-$500 consumer CPUs destroy $5000+ Xeon CPUs as GPU managers because of this, sigh. Container systems? Oh god make it stop. IMO they mostly (try to) solve a wacky dependency problem that should never have been allowed to exist in the first place. The web: getting crappier and slower by the day. IMO because the frameworks are increasingly abstracting the underlying dataflow which just gets more and more inefficient. Also, down with autoplay anything. Just make it stop. |
One of my favorite features now on my iPhone is "Reader View". Have a new iPhone 7, which is very fast, but some pages still take too long to load, and when it finally does, the content I want to read is obscured with something I have to click to go away, and then a good percentage of the screen is still taken up by headers and footers that don't go away. The Reader View loads faster, and generally has much better font and layout for actually reading the content I'm interested in.
All of which is to say, the sole purpose of what a lot of web developers are working on today seems to serve no purpose other than to annoy people.