This is nonsense; Travis employees are the polar opposite of "codebros".
Lighthearted team profiles are absolutely not an insight into the employees' "mentality". If anything, your insinuations are in extremely bad faith and you should know better than to slander people you don't know, especially those whose livelihoods got snatched away.
Very lazy and bad stereotyping, 0/10 points, try again.
Yes, you're not alone. Oddly enough, it's been repurposed to mean something akin to value alignment or strategic cooperation. It used to mean thoughtful kindness, and this change seems to have suddenly happened in the last five years.
It's usage now makes me vaguely uncomfortable because it feels borderline sociopathic or manipulative.
Looks like they want to avoid changing gameplay as much as possible.
Considering their focus on preserving even minute details of game dynamics... I wish they'd made an exception for pathfinding - the algorithm in the original AoE is extremely bad.
In particular, I really wish they'd introduce some improved ways to command groups of units. IIRC the Rise of Rome expansion introduced double-click group selection of all similar units, so it's not without precedent.
If they change nothing else, my number one wish would be formations like in AoE II. I can't stand the way units just swarm like ants when told to move together.
I understand the idea of doing probablistic inference about people based on their demeanor. We do it all the time with our minds, indeed many aspects of society and culture are built around non-verbal communication.
I'm okay with how things currently are, because we are innately capable of learning behavior policies for social interactions, while preserving a lot of cognitive privacy. In other terms, you can consciously control your demeanor (as the word is currently understood).
I afraid of inferences drawn from sub-conscious demeanors and involuntary information leaks.
Normal humans will not be able to tell if someone is nervous or afraid or angry just by looking at them, if that someone wants to maintain a pokerface. But it is entirely possible to read someone's pulse by recording a video of their skin, thus taking away some privacy of the mind [1].
We haemorrhage a lot of information all the time. As far as I know, current polygraph tests are trash, but I would be unsurprised if some characteristic features were to be found in a video+audio stream of someone's face that would estimate with good accuracy and precision that they were lying.
We all lie. To others and to ourselves. Within limits, lying is an integral part of healthy life. A world where I cannot casually lie is not one where I can live in; cognitive privacy is important.
I loved how in Arrival, they build a statistical model to map between concepts in the two languages, ostensibly via a joint embedding space.
They don't elaborate on it in the movie, but I could totally see such ideas being explained with style (and tense background music) in future sci-fi films about AI. Make it as banal as possible.
This stuff sounds funny now, and some of us grad students had a good laugh.
But I am worried about the future of ML reporting. The "field" is growing fast and I think we don't have nearly as many science communicators for AI/ML in particular and CS in general, as in other fields.
I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, that we're "playing god"... etc. Also scary stuff things like the need to take action against evil scientists before it's too late.
There are genuinely bad things that could come of such reporting. Like knee-jerk regulations being imposed on AI research due to irrational fears, or worse - scared and angry vigilantes going after researchers personally.
It's not practical to educate everyone in ML, I wonder how we will solve this problem.
I don't know what kind of world you live in, where you cannot believe that people can take a principled stand about a policy. Why can I not worry about my family's data being shared free-for-all by random startups that use their "Open API"?
> Finally any Indian in USA simply has no right to criticize Aadhar since the US Visa process requires biometrics from all visitors.
This is BS because getting a visa is a conscious choice, Aadhar is forced upon India's residents. You're attacking people for having an opinion that's contrary to yours.
About your other points - no one is denying the benefits of having a strong unique ID system that lets people interface with government services; the problem is that Aadhar has no safeguards for privacy - which you would've focused on had you bothered to read the article.
Titles exist to provide an assurance to people that the services they get from title-holders will be above a certain standard, with the threat of a serious penalty if the work is sloppy.
This is the social expectation in many societies.
If I find that a doctor doesn't sterilize needles or wash hands, they should face a penalty (regardless of whether it actually caused damage). We shouldn't have to specify up-front in some contract that we want them to follow $RULES as a set of deliverables. This stuff is therefore regulated.
I used to think differently, but now I feel that software engineers should be similarly regulated. That doesn't mean everyone will now have to follow a ton of regulations to slap together the next nodejs app, those people can still be called developers. But whoever is an "engineer" should ensure that the work is well thought-out and should stop the developers they supervise from moving fast and breaking things.
It's time the industry "grew up" as a whole. If "software is eating the world", we need to be damn sure it's not sloppy.
For what it's worth, in Germany the title of Engineer is regulated and the correct term for those who write software (which goes in the contract) is "Software Entwickler" (Entwicklung means "development"). There's a few more complications here that I don't know very well.
I don't completely agree with this because serious engineering work on software happens in many industries. But most software jobs clearly do not fit the description nor the implied seriousness of an engineering role.
Other things that grind my gears:
1. The way the "Data Scientist" title is casually thrown around for those who are neither scientists nor know statistics. Everyone has a different idea of what the term means and (worst of all) feel that it probably applies to them.
2. "Tech" is a contraction for technology but people in the software industry (especially Americans) seem to use the term solely for Software.