Advances in NLP to better connect people • Hacker News Board

Re: Advances in NLP to better connect people

#31

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 1:08 AM UTC

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #27

thrower1919 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duck cannot afford you because the pay scales are now set by the very companies you despise, and those companies can afford those pay scales both they are able to extract monopoly profits (market structure issue) and your privacy is not a concern for them (which marketers are willing to pay for). When we fix the market structure issue and address the legal issue of privacy, ironically, the pay issue of Duck not being…

It's not just FAANG paying those numbers.

[deleted]

Re: Advances in NLP to better connect people

#32

Post by skybrian » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 5:54 AM UTC

spinningslate wrote: post #4

not_a_cop75 wrote: post #2

Hey, we're using NLP to help you rather than spy on you. No...really!

I’m afraid that’s pretty close to my initial reaction too. When I read the headline, there was an implied suffix of “so we can more effectively intrude on your privacy”. It’s a great shame. There are clearly some very talented people at Facebook. But all that work is paid for by a dystopian business model that has moved effortlessly and insidiously from connecting people for benign social good (or at least relatively…

The interesting part of this story for me is that computer proficiency on language tasks is improving so rapidly that a benchmark introduced just last year has become too easy. It seems like there is little reason to think this research will hit a wall any time soon? Will we have computers acing SAT's and writing college essays?

It hardly matters which tech giant paid for it this time, since they are publishing the results and the others will build from there. Next year it might be Google's turn again?

Here is the part I find scary: consider that they're publishing the models and the code, so anyone could use it. What might malware authors or nation-state actors build? (Sometimes working together.)

Re: Advances in NLP to better connect people

#33

Post by batatati » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 12:26 PM UTC

farazbabar wrote: post #13

I have refused to get hired by google and Facebook because they give me the creeps. Duck duck go cannot afford me. Maybe, we can start our own search/social/nlp startup? I don't care about making any money, if you are in the same boat as I am (dreading the status quo, wanting to do something, don't need or not driven by money, reply to this and we will try to make it happen - reminds me of the hypersane post from a c…

If that's true, I have a huge respect for people like you. I can't say the same for some of my friends at university who have no issue working for such unethical companies

Re: Advances in NLP to better connect people

#34

Post by MR4D » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 2:02 AM UTC

doctor_eval wrote: post #28

farazbabar wrote: post #13

I have refused to get hired by google and Facebook because they give me the creeps. Duck duck go cannot afford me. Maybe, we can start our own search/social/nlp startup? I don't care about making any money, if you are in the same boat as I am (dreading the status quo, wanting to do something, don't need or not driven by money, reply to this and we will try to make it happen - reminds me of the hypersane post from a c…

Hell yeah. Since deleting my FB account - and thereby being ostracised socially - I’ve spent a lot of my idle time thinking about what a decentralised, private-by-design, Facebook-like social network might look like. Is it feasible to host on-device? Does it need coordination or centralisation at all? How does privacy work? If central servers are required, can they be reliably funded? Can it be both ethical and profi…

It looks a lot like Usenet with HTML & encryption.

Start there. You’ll probably build something incredible.