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by Graphon1 3348 days ago
Pinning stickers! I am so glad the USA is still leading in innovation. Thank you to all the hard workers who devoted their time to solving this problem as opposed to working on some vague or diffuse health-related issue. The world is so much better now that we can pin stickers on instagram gifs.
2 comments
tomhoward 3348 days ago
This is not just a tiresome sneer, but a myopic one.

Leave aside that interpersonal communication is one of the most fundamental of human needs, and thus any new medium or mechanism that enables people to do that more effectively and enjoyably is valuable.

What matters more is that many of the the technologies that have been developed by companies like Google and Facebook, in order to (sneer) get people to click on more ads, or (sneer) let teenagers share duckfaced, princess-filtered selfies with their friends, have been open-sourced and can now be freely used by researchers working in medicine, climate science, energy, cleantech, particle physics, etc.

I'll bet the medical researchers who are using TensorFlow to improve cancer detection [1], or the CERN researchers who use Cassandra to store and process data gathered in the ATLAS experiment [2], aren't sneering when they see Google and Facebook doing things that make themselves more popular and commercially successful.

[1] https://blog.altoros.com/tensorflow-and-openpower-driving-fa...

[2] https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1432912

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fiblye 3348 days ago
Same goes for fast food workers. Serving up cheap meals instead of curing cancer. Really, guys? That's the best you can do?

But surprise, not everyone wants to jump into the medical field and the field certainly isn't hiring every damn person out there. Not everyone has to or wants to work the same job or towards the same goal, and that's okay.

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