[gain_sky]

Reminds me a lot of the show Silicon Valley, where one of the characters has something like a Phd in artificial intelligence but ends up writing code for an app which dynamically turns your face into a smiley face (i.e. snapchat)..

[simsla]

If I remember correctly, the product in that episode was applying "snapchat filters" (deformation/modification/accessories) to animal faces. It was portrayed like this stupid job, but as an ML researcher myself my first thought was: "that's a pretty cool/challenging problem!"

It's funny how things that can seem hard can be so simple, and vice versa! I guess it depends on the person whether they're looking for an interesting challenge, or to make an impact - - because the two are often perpendicular.

[gain_sky]

I'm sure it is an interesting problem, but what happens when the majority of our technical talent goes towards solving useless but "interesting" problems?

Look at the engineers credited at the bottom of the article: "graduate of Carnegie Mellon University with a degree in Computer Science", "Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley", "Ph.D. in statistical machine learning from Duke University" these are some extremely intelligent and educated people but they are using their skills to help you choose between Chinese food and Indian?

We've already seen this situation described as the "Internet of Stuff Your Mom Won’t Do for You Anymore” and stuff like this doesn't really help. I really think that innovation is dead in silicon valley, its more about catering to needs of nerdy man-boys with lots of money to blow.

[TeMPOraL]

> I really think that innovation is dead in silicon valley, its more about catering to needs of nerdy man-boys with lots of money to blow.

I disagree. I think it's about catering to the needs of normals with lots of money to blow. The only nerdy aspect here is this post. The product itself? Totally for smartphone-using normies.

[gain_sky]

Its 2018, normal people do not have money to blow. The "normals" are the ones delivering your food, driving you around, doing your laundry, walking your dog, cleaning your house etc.

[TeMPOraL]

The "normals" are also people working in management, marketing, and other high-paying professions. SV might have extremely high density of tech people, but programmers are not the only (or even the majority of) high-earners in the West.