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IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

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Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#671

Post by Nextgrid »

smackeyacky wrote: post #659
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur with the experience of dealing with IBM sales. Years ago my client wanted me to checkout out IBM mobile app builder - Worklight, The pricing wasn't available on website and so I had to contact them. Soon I was reached out by their sales department and before I could get any details on the pricing I was speaking with VP of sales. If I remember it correctly, It was priced ~>150K USD and even after repeatedly t…

IBM don't want to deal with startups. They need big, old, ossified, cashed up businesses who are in some kind of trouble. There isn't any money in most startups that bootstrapped off a pile of open source or free tech.

Startups are more likely to see through the bullshit. It's similar to why spam emails often have intentional spelling mistakes - to get the marks to self-select.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#672

Post by abdulhaq »

saberdancer wrote: post #670
smackeyacky wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew a couple of people who got fired after getting their org sucked into WebSphere. Long time ago but it does happen occasionally.

They were fired because of WebSphere? The quote I mentioned is just a quote, but it points to a part of a reason. If you are a CEO or a high level executive of a big company, going with IBM or Oracle is a safe bet. It's not very likely you will be blamed for failures of IBM or Oracle. It may be a money hole and bad for business but it's a much safer bet than going with some smaller vendor instead of big name vendors.

The "nobody got fired for buying IBM" thing expired decades ago, that mantle passed on to Microsoft. Last 5 - 10 years, nobody gets fired for architecting dozens of microservices in the cloud.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#674

Post by samarama »

californical wrote: post #359
samarama wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is infinitely printable FIAT, controlled by corrupt and incompetent politicians that is very slow and very expensive to to transact overseas and mutable. The solution is 100x faster, cheaper, more secure, immutable, less prone to fraud and limited in supply. It’s a very simple calculation.

Those are problems in theory, but I don’t think most people are concerned or affected by them. I’m certainly not. I never need to transfer money quickly between accounts — it’s never once been a problem to wait a couple days. And sure there are real economic problems with printing money, but again, the government does a decent enough job at keeping the dollar stable that it doesn’t affect me. And there’s the fact tha…

You’re saying that you trust the government a lot in making sure the dollar value stays stale, however, it has lost 30% or more since the start of the pandemic if you look at price increases of commodities, so you are already very wrong.

It might not matter to you that sending cross border transactions have very high fees, because you live in a first world country and are rich, but 99% of the world aren’t as rich as you.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#675

Post by fqye »

nradclif wrote: post #197
cube00 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But GPs often make astounding amounts of money while leaning heavily on their staff to actually handle patients and keep the business running. The private ones might the ones in the public system at least in my country need to see a patient every 10 minutes to keep their heads above water.

What country are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?

It is so in China and it is every 5 minutes in most cases. Precisely because of this, I chose doctors from good public hospitals because of their super rich experiences instead of fancy private hospitals.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#676

Post by conjectures »

stathibus wrote: post #345
tekstar wrote: post #260

I worked for a large e-commerce company. I wanted to investigate putting all our support data into Watson and see what sort of recommendations it could provide, maybe a sort of auto-suggestion to help our customers. Three really funny points stand out from the experience: 1) To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was s…

IBM is famous for charging people for the privilege of talking to them, even if you're trying to sell them something. This strategy makes sense if you consider that even in it's heyday Watson was 95% data science consulting firm and 5% actual valuable technology. I really think Watson is one of the biggest tech marketing bamboozles of the 21st century. Through Jeopardy they really had a segment of the business world…

> I really think Watson is one of the biggest tech marketing bamboozles of the 21st century.

The weird thing was that to anyone following ML this was detectable bs.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#677

Post by solididiot »

formeribmer wrote: post #479

I worked at IBM Watson as one of the early engineers when they first started commercializing the product. It was a fucking joke - Ginni Rometty would go up on stage and said that Watson can help diagnose cancer from CT scans and we would just look at each other and be like "Dude, Watson is just a glorified Lucene index, wtf is she talking about." They started selling Watson as the end-all for everything from cancer d…

The same Ginni who walked away with a huge bonus?

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#678

Post by curiousllama »

7thaccount wrote: post #519
ogogmad wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once went to a job interview at Accenture. I remember the recruiter told me they only considered me because I went to a prestigious university. When I got there, they practically IQ tested me, were rude to me, and never contacted me again even after they said they would. The job was to write GUIs in C#. Listen up Accenture, I will drink expensive champagne when you go bust, or get bought.

Not getting contacted again was probably a blessing in disguise. They don't really do much, but kind of act like PMs, but aren't very effective as they don't know the business very well. I think they're generally only used when a company temporarily needs like 20 warm bodies to assist with a large project.

You’re right, but off by a few orders of magnitude. Think “need 200, get 2000” warm bodies

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#679

Post by Phillipharryt »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #524
indigodaddy wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Deep Blue/Watson basically the starting point of AI/ML, or had that already been happening earlier or concurrently?

Deep Blue isn't ML at all, it's just a purpose built system for solving chess. It doesn't learn anything as such and just a fancy brute forcing machine that (smartly) goes through all possible chess moves and selects the best possible tree of outcomes. The work on actual ML happened independently of this.

That is a form of machine learning. It uses an algorithm with an enormous ability to look ahead, and selects the moves according to a heuristic that have been shown previously to be most likely to create the desired end state.

Chess is not a solved game from the starting state, so it has to make assumptions based on the data it has. This is machine learning. Please don't make such definite statements. You even say it in your own comment "selects the best possible true of outcomes", how do you think it selects this? It uses heuristics to assign values to different board states, and in the case of Deep Blue these values were created through previous game analysis. If a knight to c2 on turn 8 is rarely seen in the same game as a winning board state, then this is valued lower. Looking through the tree wasn't the ML part, but knowing how to pick the best node on the tree was. Deep Blue is ML.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#680

Post by gigaflop »

jasonladuke0311 wrote: post #588
akudha wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

640$, lol My entire wardrobe costs less than that, and no, I am not lying. It must be nice to have enough money to spend on such luxury. Is it really that much better than a $10 t-shirt?

I have multiple articles of clothing that cost more than that. I’m baffled as to why anyone would want a keyboard that costs more than $100. To each his own.

Keyboards that cost over $100 tend to be much, much nicer, and are more easily tailored to an individual's taste.

Around $200 and above, most are machined from aluminum, and require the user to supply their own switches and keycaps. My daily driver, whose USB connector seems to be reaching EOL, is a heavy-ass chunk of bright blue Alu, makes noise like a machine gun when I need to correct someone on the internet, and has limited edition keycaps in a fun (imo) purple-and-cyan color scheme. Total cost of this thing was probably $250~$300, but I'm happy.

I have over $1k worth of keyboards and related hardware strewn about my apartment, and the only reason I've considered selling some of my collection is to buy fancier pieces. To each their own.

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