I'd use Watson as a great example of how deep learning systems won't make coding go away too soon. From the Wikipedia entry:

Watson uses IBM's DeepQA software and the Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) framework. The system was written in various languages, including Java, C++, and Prolog, and runs on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 operating system using Apache Hadoop framework to provide distributed computing.

Any guesses as to how many lines of code and development hours are behind that stack? How about a guess as to how long it'll be before Watson is able to make useful contributions to a significant part of that software stack? Is it worth thinking about the hardware stack, or the effort put into curating the database?

Watson is, basically, a sophisticated search engine built upon a massive mountain of human effort.

Experience says that the more complex systems become and the more ubiquitously they're deployed, the more you need people who can build them, expand them, bend them and glue them into place. It doesn't seem to follow a curve like agriculture where productivity can continuously increase while labour contracts. It probably will turn that way, eventually, but I don't expect to be around for it.

Coding is likely to be obsolete in a few years - replaced by deep learning systems as those systems increase in capability, and so the last thing we should do is steer kids away from math and toward coding.

One of my computer science profs said that, pretty much word for word, when I suggested I wasn't interested in grad school. Except at the time "CASE" was the big buzzword.

From the rate of progress I've seen with these "make coding obsolete" initiatives, I expect I'll be well retired before that happens. And, even if they get something working, there's still going to be a job market for coders in gluing all these deep learning systems together.

In her particular case, yes. That's why I said:

one might get a bit suspicious if this consistently happens to people in an under-represent demographic within the company.

But the US population isn't their hiring pool, people qualified to do the job are their hiring pool.

We're specifically talking about people interviewing at Google, not the general US population. These are people who are, by definition, in their hiring pool.

I can entirely understand that the demographics of Google employees won't match that of the more general population. But if the demographics going into the interview process consistently and noticeably fail to match the demographics actually being hired, then it looks like there might be a problem. Which exact problem, I don't know. Poor pre-interview screening? There's many other potential reasons than rampant age discrimination, but I think there's also enough merit to the complaint for someone to start digging.

We don't really know what the facts of the case are, but I wonder what it is about people that lead them to believe they're being discriminated against based on a particular factor, like age, race, etc?

Haven't read the article, but repeated "good" interviews from the same company could be taken as meaning that either HR records suck, or the company is going out of their way to not accurately tracking the reason they didn't hire her in those records.

Now, happening to a relatively small number of people wouldn't be a huge deal. But one might get a bit suspicious if this consistently happens to people in an under-represent demographic within the company.

I don't know the facts, either, but it strikes me as something worth digging into a bit more.

Unattended instrumentation in the Canadian arctic... to put the bandwidth constraints/costs in context, we're in the process of upgrading the gear to use TCP/IP over 2400 baud. It's tight.

We have phone systems and network switches that have serial, still configured for 9600-8-N-1.

We still have operational gear running at 110 baud.

Granted, it's being emulated over 2400 baud satellite networks, but the physical hardware can't go any faster than 110.

I hope for his sake that he is really just trying to push his magic sound machine and doesn't believe any of this.

Well, in his defence, streaming quality on dial-up is rather poor. Maybe even worse than AM radio.

I don't need my music to be devalued by the worst quality in the history of broadcasting or any other form of distribution.

Eh? Worse than mono AM radio? Worse than cassette tape? Yeah, we believe you Neil...

NYC should just ask Google to track children in real-time and let drivers know when one is nearby. And especially flag the ones who aren't being watched by an adult; they're way more likely to play in traffic.

Pervasive surveillance... it's for the children!

when I was a kid in Toronto in the mid-1960s we could (and did) go down to the local drug store and buy potassium nitrate in 1-pound containers

In the 80's you *could* still buy it, but they asked enough questions that it wasn't smart to become repeat customers.

A lot of them I don't fully understand, but I'm certain he's not making bombs

There's a lot of steps in making explosives which don't look pretty innocuous if you don't know what you're looking for.

For example, when I was a teen we used to make black powder in large batches. In Canada, a teen couldn't just go into a store and buy it, and even getting hold of large quantities of potassium nitrate was challenging. So we did chemistry using readily available things like fertilizer and drain cleaner.

The end result was large quantities of a controlled substance, but the process looked fairly tame.

I feel your pain; I have fiber running down the edge of my property, and the best Internet I can get is fixed wireless.

They must defend their trademark, and unfortunately, a lawsuit is the only way that the courts will recognize it. If they didn't, then anyone could use their non-response to the workbetter domain name as evidence to take their trademark.

It seems to me that if someone else was using the same name for 16 years prior to them and they claim that it's confusingly similar, they're effectively arguing that their trademark is invalid. Either they had a trademark and spent 16 years not enforcing it, or they failed to notice/mention prior art when they applied for it.

Google became better than everyone else but that only happened AFTER they became popular. Altavista was initially as good or better.

From what I recall at the time, Google was initially a good quality engine, but Altavista had a huge lead in the size of their index. At the time, the size of your web page index was considered the biggest factor in search quality and ranking algorithms were... important, but considered secondary. Once Google's bots reached a critical mass, their algorithms won.