jbelanich's comments

You're correct in that neural networks as a model have been around for a long time. However, those networks were restricted to be shallow because backpropogation didn't work well on networks with many hidden layers. Only recently have researchers developed learning procedures that can learn these deep architectures efficiently, using some clever unsupervised learning techniques. And surprisingly, they are finding that these deep networks perform remarkably well, beating the state of the art in a number of benchmarks.

You are also right that you do need a lot of processing power to get neural networks to work well. But that is changing rapidly. Hinton's convolutional neural network has the state of the art in the ImageNet benchmark, yet was trained using significantly less power than google brain. Regardless, you don't need google scale computation to get deep networks to work well. The point of google brain is to see how far one could push neural networks.

Ironically, "painting a picture" is exactly what the author said you should do:

"Write about it in more than 140 characters; on paper even. Paint a picture of it. Talk about it face to face with your friends. Talk about how it made you feel"

It doesn't seem the author is complaining about all externalization, just the externalization that takes place during experiences, like posting pictures of yourself eating a meal while eating said meal. I just don't see the irony you mention, as he is doing exactly what he said people should be doing.

As for the rest of your comment...I'm inclined to agree that the author's post is an overgeneralized complaint, perhaps even with fundamental logical flaws. However, hidden in the haphazard argument there seems to be a tinge of truth regarding over-sharers.

The crux of the argument seems to be the time and place of sharing. Before the advent of social media, sharing used to happen after the event. Now, it happens during it. The author doesn't seem like he is against sharing in general, just the sharing that interferes with the sensory experience of the event itself.

I don't think the author is against sharing in general. It seems to me he is trying to say there is a time and place for sharing, and that is not during the event itself. Perhaps I'm getting the wrong impression from the post. Anyway, this is why I don't find the post as ironic as you do: clearly this post wasn't written while he was visiting Singapore.

Second, I don't necessarily believe the "humans are social animals" argument. I completely agree with you about that fact. But that doesn't mean it is good for us to try and make ourselves look attractive to other people, or that it makes us happy. I tend to think of it more as a drive or an itch. We don't receive happiness in the act of posting things on twitter (modulo the excitement that comes from anticipating for acknowledgement), but we "scratch the itch" when we get recognition. Is that scratching worth being dissociated with what is going around you? I don't really know, maybe it is for different people. In either case, arguing that posting to twitter is fine because "thats what people do" doesn't seem very satisfying to me.

There are also people who get it but don't care. Not all companies need, want, or can keep the most talented developers. For them, it is fine to have someone who just has "5 years programming with java". This advice is too general and doesn't apply to everyone.