From TFA:

Computer Vision research has been behind other AI areas in its use of generalisable code, but current AI and machine learning algorithms are effective and efficient enough that image processing with them is finally practical. That's the novelty.

Even if you wrote wrappers to access all their libraries in (for example) Python, operating an inference engine and manipulating the results returned would be a complete pain. This is a high-level language designed as a problem-solver over a probabilistic domain. That in itself is a very far-removed abstraction from the processor's opcodes...

Your problem is that you're thinking to heavily in terms of C-like imperative programming. Picture sounds more comparable to Prolog to me -- an automated problem-solver. The core of Picture is an "inference engine" -- the core of Prolog is an inference engine too. The difference is that Prolog operates in pure predicate logic, whether Picture is a probabilistic language.

Probabilistic programming in even a relatively high-level C-like (eg Python) would be a total pain, because you have to explicitly call all calculations. An inference engine will do the calculations implicitly and will prune any unsuccessful branches off your search tree without you having to worry about it. The end result is very complete solutions to problems with a low bug count, but (in general) relatively high execution times.

This sort of very-high-level language isn't suitable for every task, but it serves its task exceptionally well.

Er, OK.

Kids are kids. Kids cry a lot. If any kid that cried was instantly labeled a failure, we would have no successful people at all.

The problem is a little bit more complex, because a non-white kid in a room full of white kids with a white teacher might feel alienated. A classroom full of white kids wouldn't feel alienated by a single teacher from a minority.

So you're saying that schools never celebrate the founding fathers, or Abe Lincoln, or the winning of various wars by white-led armies?

As long as Thanksgiving is celebrated (a feast to mark the massacre of a bunch of native Americans), your whining sounds like bullshit.

Women don't tend to be as keen on wars as men, though....

This is quite a common pattern. But in these societies, the number of "humans" is limited by Dunbar's number. Renaissance racism expands the pool of identified "humans" into the millions, and post-Renaissance racism pushes into the thousands of millions and billions, and it draws the boundary in an arbitrary way. Some Indo-Europeans are dismissed as "not white", and some non-Indo-Europeans are allowed into the privileged club because of a lighter pigmentation than others. Modern racism isn't the same as natural pack mentality.

The existence of outliers does little to prove the general case. In elite sports, where only one out of 7 billion people can get the gold, deals with exceptions. We need to deal with the rule.

In Scotland, segregation of the children of Scottish and immigrant communities (Irish, Italian, Polish) was done for a combination of right and wrong reasons. Partly it was the established elite not wanting their kids mixing with the funny foreigners, but it also did protect the poor immigrants from inherited xenophobia in the local families. The surface detail of the segregation was the mainstream (effectively protestant) schools and the catholic schools. Over the generations, the need for this system has burnt itself out. The mainstream schools have mostly become genuinely non-denominational, and most of the children of both sides have left their religions. Which country handled segregation better, Scotland or the US? I do not know. But I don't believe now is a time for increasing segregation. But that's not the point of diversity in education. The point is that all kids need to see that education is relevant to them. A poor kid from a minority slum the majority of whose adult role models are all of the same minority and are either unemployed or criminal is not going to be swayed by a clean-cut WASP sitting in front of them and telling them that they can be whatever they want.

Feeling like a foreigner in a foreign country is not a problem. Feeling like a foreigner in your own country is a problem. It alienates and results in low achievement.

Christ, no. Italians are snappy dressers.

You mean Signore Giuseppe Obama, Presidente di Italia...?

Lo-Earth has a sea salted with magnesium instead of sodium. The black stuff coming out of the ground is a bit like molasses, as sugar was added to compensate for the low volume of fats and oils.