It appears that, as expected, a young millennial is trying to blame this on human accelerated climate change. (not necessarily you, but someone in the above comment chain).
And yes, I agree that human accelerated climate change is causing faster extensions. However, I could care less. When does the new MacBook Pro refresh come out?
> So the value of ivory going up as a result of being tougher on poachers would be proof that it is working.
Have you taken Economics 101? You do remember what happens when the selling price of a good gets too high? Lots of profit to be made will encourage poachers to hunt. They will take even larger risks (e.g. Being shot by drone) to obtain ivory since the profits are too high.
I know for a fact (and you can check online too), that Google's non-public datasets are magnitudes larger in training size and far superior in learning signal (labels are very close to their task).
Google has thousands of real robotic manipulator arms to train their reinforcement learning algorithms. Algorithms trained using the OpenAI gym are practically guaranteed to fail in the real world since OpenAI gym is (designed as) a perfect simulator. Don't even get me started on internal image and speech recognition datasets collected from YouTube, search indexing, and Hangouts/Duo calls.
There is no way in hell you can compete with this. The closest you have is Facebook. But they've built an AI that has just learned how to play Go. Let alone defeat a world champion. Hell, Google is already working on beating humans at Starcraft.
It sure as hell seems like natural evolution is being applied to the social sphere. Statistically, children from "well off" families do consistently better across all life pillars (health, money, family, friends) than poorer families. Come on, financially richer families are less fat/obese than poorer families. This is a direct link to living and longevity (Darwinism).
I'm rich and part of the financial 1%. I can indeed confirm the rich get richer. I'm not going to enumerate the specific methods, but I do feel bad that middle class or bay area software engineers cannot employ certain financial tricks that only the rich can do.
As a teaser, one important thing is to not share information (i.e. Don't blog about financial "hacks"). Call it a corrupt moral compass or whatever you like, but the fact is this behavior is rampant.
Everyone thinks they can download tensorflow, hook it up to some stock market or Twitter api, hack a system in a week, and become a ML engineer. It is simply not this simple. It takes many months or years to achieve this experience.
Sometimes software engineers need to accept they aren't the smartest ones anymore. This is why they can't get the "smart" and "cool cutting edge" ML/DL jobs.
> What I'm finding is that in the end, most of the good / important stuff ends up condensed into a nice O'Reilly (or similar) volume that you can read at you leisure' later on when the hype has evaporated.
If you are okay with median compensation and median project importance (internally and externally), then sure, wait a couple years when the interest has died down.
> If you are a great software engineer that can solve hard problems yourself [...] then people will hire with no questions asked.
False. Being a great software engineer is not enough to get a job in deep learning. For the same price, or a little more, you can hire an "expert" scientist or engineer with a PhD in CS/stats/ML.