shoguning's comments

Advertising and media? Robots bid on the ads that billions see every day, and decide what videos billions of people watch.

I'm guessing low expertise programmers whose main contribution was googling stackoverflow will get less valuable, while high expertise programmers with real design skill will become even more valuable.

What you're saying is consistent with my hypothesis. Ie that casual public transmission on subways and in restaurants is low. Rather, it's "behind closed doors", at extended private gatherings, via domestic workers and so on. Those are the only such cases I have direct knowledge of (California USA). It could be that Japanese don't gather as much, or have chosen to skip it during pandemic.

According to a study in PNAS, shelter-in-place policies in the US did not work: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/15/e2019706118

Another study in Eur J Clin Inv had similar findings comparing countries: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484

COVID went wild basically everywhere. There were a few strong exceptions: China (apparently), Australia, New Zealand and some others. What these had in common was very strict police enforcement, which led to some dramatic scenes like people getting welded into their houses in China, or houses in Australia getting broken into by police on suspicion of too many people gathering.

In my _opinion_, lockdowns didn't work elsewhere because most cases are not from casual public transmission in places like stores, restaurants etc. Rather, events like kickbacks, dinner parties, and practices like in-home workers (nannies, cleaners etc) continued throughout the pandemic, or resumed shortly after the original March 2020 shockwave. While strident police enforcement of physical distancing could eliminate cases, and seemed to in a few places, the half measures used by most of the world did little-to-nothing positive while being an economic and cultural disaster.

Personally, I never caught COVID and rarely socialized during the pandemic. All the cases I heard of stemmed from the kind of thing I mention above: private dinner parties, nannies and so forth, rather than casual public transmission.

You, or any individual may have taken social distancing seriously but it's clear many or most did not, including people on both political "sides", up to and including governors, members of congress etc.

I think there is a proper level of conviviality/cordiality and fun that you can bring to work without getting too personally invested. A lot of first-time employees may have trouble with this balance, but after a tough break or two you learn the ropes.

Is there any reason to use a 3rd party recruiter? The listings are all public, just submit a resume.

All my offers came from applying direct. Always got the runaround from recruiters.

Or they believe (possibly correctly) that you don't have as strong a negotiating position because there are fewer options for you based on location.

> The reason excess deaths are only 3x higher is because of our precautions.

It's a hard case to make. Sweden for example has had less excess death than harsher lockdown countries like Spain & UK.

Lockdowns have done little if anything in US states. New York and Florida have similar stats (worse in NY if anything).

> We also outlaw speeding because speeding increases the odds that you kill someone else.

We could go further and outlaw cars that don't have speed governors. That would save lives. Lower speed limits would save more lives as well. Now we have a balance between freedom and safety.

> Tens of thousands of people are dying a day right now because not everyone is taking the precautions they have been asked to take.

That was true during the flu season of 2018 as well. The excess deaths from COVID are higher, but not orders of magnitude higher (more like 3x) [1]. The response is off the charts, economically and culturally devastating. Not the right balance.

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

It's not selfish to be out and about if you are young and healthy. The recovery rate for 20-30 YO is 99.99%+, and if you are healthy it's likely higher[1].

It's on the same order of risk as driving. Many young people die driving every year, yet we still do it plenty, with reasonable precautions. If you take reasonable precautions, are young and healthy, it is a risk worth taking to many.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0/figures/2

California and SF are doomed, but the recent news of HPE and ORCL moving are not a big deal. IMO these are stationary phase companies trying to cut cost. They are not growing revenue, they are not really dynamic companies anymore. Who cares? The swashbuckling SV types never would have worked at these companies anyway. Stability-seeking workers in other states are a much better fit for these companies. Win-win-win.

> The bottom is still decently high even in Midwest cities

Yes, and I also see the push for remote work also affecting the demand side of the software labor market as well as the supply. There will be even more push for good collaboration/communication work process software. It's still a fast growing market.

Yeah, that is mentioned as "one of the downsides of renewables".

That is like saying, "one of the downsides of using a cooked noodle as a fork is that it doesn't hold its shape". It's disqualifying until that issue is sorted.

The value of solar right now is that it provides energy at the hottest, most energy use part of the day. But there is a tipping point where marginal solar is not really valuable for a grid anymore. California and Germany are at that point.

Hopefully we get cost-effective day-scale energy storage, it's not going to happen in the next few years unfortunately.

IMO, this is huge. One of the biggest applications of ML to science that I know of for sure. People used to manually crystallize proteins at great effort to solve for structures.

Of course, there is a caveat. The static, crystallized structure is only one aspect of a protein. The dynamic behavior dissolved in H2O, at different pH, different ionic strength, with different ligands/cofactors are all also important, and not (afaik) directly addressed by this research.

All I can say is, good luck.

I discourage everyone from doing a PhD, but it sounds like you've made your mind up.

Be very careful with your choice of advisor and department, and if it isn't working, be ready to walk away--sounds like you have a career to go back to.

I was pleasantly surprised by this recently. Just worked using my touchscreen laptop. So rare on Windows.

Thanks! And yes, I agree. The ability to write ad hoc SQL is a great skill.

Pardon my ignorance--is inspections some concept that relates to database management, or are you referring to a query like "select * from inspections where status = 'open';". Honestly asking.

Most people don't care about climate change. They may say they do but the majority wouldn't do anything if it meant a sacrifice, even a very small one. 68% wouldn't pay even $10 per month [1]. Imagine how few would pay $25, $100, or live in a smaller house.

The people running big companies aren't "nice guys" and that's true in all sectors. But the oil and gas cos are just selling people what they want. If they are evil for selling it then so are the customers for buying it.

[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/68-americans-wouldnt-pay-10-month-...

> it's in the keywords

This assumes that the source and target listings definitely have accurate keywords.

There would be plenty of value in a model that can use either keywords OR images to effectively make recs.

> Considering the data gathering, it seems easier to do user-product collaborative filtering.

What user data are you talking about here? The customer doesn't necessarily have user data.

I personally think this approach makes a lot of sense. If it works, a one-size-fits all recommender would be really useful and easy to sell.