Just back from WWDC17 and I have this takeaway: leave the creating/training/designing/refining machine learning models to the academics and companies with deep pockets. You're not going to catch up with the PhDs that have a head start on you, especially without a unique authentic problem at hand that nobody else is working on yet. Instead, USE the models that exist. Maybe train 'em with new/different data if you feel compelled, but mainly learn what models exist (natural language processing? Sentiment analysis? Image recognition? Speech recognition? Real-time identification of objects in video?). Learn how to use those models to solve the problems you're working with, or another team is dealing with, or that isn't even being considered for technology and humans are still doing it. The PhDs will keep creating new and better building blocks, just like we started out with basic web tools and now we have WebRTC. Our jobs will be to apply them. And that requires a lot less linear algebra. I think we can all say amen to that.

I agree with Kozz. I would also add that while a comment submission form or the like might not need or even benefit much from the use of JavaScript, there's plenty of other things that do. Putting out a request such as "we're launching a campaign to demand that companies, governments, and organizations make their sites work without proprietary JavaScript" seems so baseless and ill-conceived that when I first read it I checked the date on the post to see if it was April 1st. What's the proposal for the alternative? The web platform is built on open standards, the majority of which (more than in any other ecosystem), is driven by open source implementations. For those hackers among us, the web is our oyster and it has fostered a great deal of innovation in the exact way that the FSF has worked to foster it in other ecosystems (e.g. Linux). Assuming that there is a noble and sane goal behind this call to action (which I'm still having a hard time believing), the way this article is written does it no justice. I imagine that this article has become the laughing stock in offices across the country and the world this morning. Presumably not the effect the FSF was looking for ...

Let's welcome them home from this situation properly -- with pomp and circumstance. To say they deserve at least that much is an understatement. If we can manage to make this happen for the Yankees, then we need to make sure it happens for the troops.

http://www.change.org/petitions/nyc-mayors-office-welcome-home-parade-in-canyon-of-heroes-for-iraq-vets

+1.

Like gp, I was also "almost" diagnosed ADHD as a kid, but my physician decided against it on the grounds that I was "too smart"; ADHD symptoms make kids do badly in school. But as school got harder, my performance did eventually slip terribly. I didn't need a diagnosis to "stick to me" -- the symptoms did that all by themselves. Depression set in, because there was no explanation for my behavior other than me being a shitty, lazy person with no "common sense" who was often admonished to just "stop being an idiot." But that's the dividing line between an illness and a mere maturity issue -- I *wanted* to do well. I was not consistently able to, in spite of an unwavering, categorically declared willingness to do so.

The real idiots are those who see only see one side of the "overdiagnosis problem" -- really, it's just a "diagnosis problem." Other than denialism, do these people have a solution to the difficulty in making the right call? Which side of caution do we want to err on?

Yeah, SSRI effects can be nasty. In my particular case, they have never approached anything resembling the nastiness of depression. Another anecdote - I don't personally know anyone whose life has been ruined by an unneeded Ritalin or SSRI prescription, but I have known many people whose lives have been turned upside down (in some cases, completely ruined) by an acute outburst of a previously undiagnosed mental illness.