41–50 of 482 posts
I work in the field of Data Science and one upsetting reality has started to sink into my mind over the last year. In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs. The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than the value of top line people. The easiest w…
Sorry to hear about the lay-off. I can't stress enough how influential Eric Lippert was on my early career. His work on C# and .NET, but more importantly his openness and engagement with the community played a big part in me continuing on the Microsoft stack. Just jumping into any random month[1] in his blog archive from my formative years is incredible nostalgia for me. It's not the kind of high-concept "a monad is…
Thank you, that's kind of you to say.
You shared a lot of insights that made the internals of the systems we build upon much more accessible to me and helped shape my relationship with all programming languages I have used since then.
> But after >26 years of thinking about programming languages for corporations, and the last three years of my work being thrown away, I need a good long corporate detox before I go looking again.
OMG, can I relate to this.
The chances are good, that, if he can support himself; even if not at oriental levels of luxury, he will not want to return.
That has been my experience.
Come on in, Eric, the water's fine...
Eric Lippert was my hero back when his blog was hosted on MSDN. Sad to see him go into retirement when he's at his prime. Hope he finds some new exciting project.
Getting old is rough. At no point in your life will it be easier to scuba dive, take nature photography, travel, or whatever your passion is. Eric's done this for 25+ years and presumably has a good amount of savings; why not take advantage of other parts of life?
Such a weird decision given the results they indicate. Was there any rational thought behind the layoffs beyond giving the metaverse more dollars?
It wouldn't surprise me if someone glanced at the "Probabilistic Programming Team" name and said "I don't know what that is but I doubt we need it" and added them to the chopping block.
Scene from Youtube: https://youtu.be/9ZUw8LYOQ-g
I work in the field of Data Science and one upsetting reality has started to sink into my mind over the last year. In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs. The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than the value of top line people. The easiest w…
A common theme for commiserating, the only investment we get are complaints
Make it work again with what you had or we have problems, must avoid OpEx at any cost
For instance, say you want to be able to vectorize logos, e.g. find the SVG representation of a raster image. If you wanted to link a text model of the characters that make up SVG files to their raster representation via a modern deep learning system, you'd need a heck of a lot of data and training time. But if you could instead just write a (subset of a) SVG parser and renderer as simply as you'd write it in any other programming language, but where the compiler instead creates a chain of conditional probability distributions that can be traversed with gradient descent, you can reach a highly reliable predictive model with significantly less training time and data.
This is where the massive cost savings come in. You get a forward-deployed engineer who knows this stuff and can dig into the compiler for features not yet implemented, they can work magic on any domain problem. I would have loved to have seen the spinoff they mentioned. Sigh.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12774459 is an old comment that goes more into detail on the tech and has a number of links!
EDIT: see also https://beanmachine.org/ which is OP's team's work
3 years of work being thrown away is not a big deal. Imagine a retail employee complaining about how nobody cares what they did the past 3 years. I don't see a difference.