Using the Propser.com data set (a peer-to-peer lending market), I used MTurk to analyze the images of people applying for a loan. This was used in a finance research project with 3 University of Washington professors of Finance.
The idea was that the Prosper data set contained all of the information that a lending officer would have, but they also had user-submitted pictures. We wanted to see if there was value in the information conveyed in the pictures. For example, if they had a puppy or a child in the picture, did this increase the probability that the loan would get funded? That sort of thing. It was a very fun project!
How so? Read the paper. The methodology was entirely observational. They did not intervene in the prosper.com loan market or interact with the borrowers. If anything, the paper identified a form of bias that exists in the real world, namely that people commonly "perceived" as less trustworthy are penalized despite their actual creditworthiness.
The paper is a study of an existing market. They looked at data about people who had requested loans and data about which of those loans were funded, with the intent of seeing whether or not lenders were being biased by requester photos. They found that they were.
Say more about how studying that bias is hurting people?
Yeah, whenever there are human subjects there is an IRB which is necessary. But, beyond that, we didn't participate in the market in any way. We wanted to see if there was bias there, and how much of it. I think I may have used the word 'value' in a bad way in my description. Not 'value' as in 'can we exploit people?' but value as in statistical significance. E.g. if you applied for a loan and your profile picture contained yourself with a child, did that help you, hurt you, or was it neutral?
On the show Full House S05E25 the character Michelle was learning to cook. She made tuna flavored ice cream. Uncle Jesse says something to the effect of "It's great that you like tuna and great that you like ice cream. You don't have to combine them."
I try to remember that episode when building tech products. We all like solar. We all like trains. It doesn't mean that we need to have solar panels between the train tracks.
I think that although it could be cool, it seems like train right-of-ways is a particularly harsh environment for solar panels. There's dust, harsh vibrations, heavy cast iron components, and other things right next to a sensitive bit of electronics. It seems like it would be more economical to have a solar farm managed by the train company. This way the panels can be easily cleaned, angled properly, and maintained not in the proximity of giant rolling metal boxes.
It isn't clear that 'conserve water' is a reasonable default position. Perhaps 'keep doing what it was programmed to be doing' would be a better position?
Depends... the focus here isn't on convenience or utility, but on safety.
The furnace defaults to on to save the water pipes. The sprinkler defaults to off to conserve water as the system is potentially unmonitored and a burst pipe could cause issues.
Defaulting a furnace to on certainly shouldn't be considered safe. What if it's leaking CO into your house, what if it gets dangerously hot and causes a fire?
A thermostat and controls are a necessary requirement for HVAC systems and defaulting anything to "run" if your control plane doesn't exist anymore is definitely not the safe option.
The other issue is that in almost all situations (like this one) what you think is a safe and sane default won't align with what other people think.
There should be defaults and they should be clearly defined, but I don't think it's always obvious to determine what they are.
While I agree with your overall point, this clause is irrelevant to/not supportive of it. The presence of a thermostat wasn't going to help you here either and there are vastly more furnaces with connected thermostats than disconnected to worry about.
CO detectors and alarms are needed to address this risk.
Your thermostat is in a far less likely place to be overloaded with CO should the alarms start going off, though. If the thermostat is gone, you have to physically go to the furnace itself or shut off power at the circuit breaker.
Freezing water pipes are bad, but a furnace running non-stop is going to exceed its duty cycle and pose a greater hazard.
Whatever was implemented as this poorly-thought-through fail-safe would be implemented in the furnace itself, thus that furnace implementation could manage any safety-related concerns, though heating equipment is overwhelmingly rated to 100% duty cycle already. (My goal for my boiler is to have at least 22 hours per day of heating demand to ensure that I'm using the exact minimum temperature water to maintain temp in the house, to maximize efficiency.)
My furnace runs pretty close to non-stop when it’s below -30 outside, I imagine a bigger concern than duty cycles if it did that when it wasn’t -30 would be that it would still be pushing the indoor temperature to 50°C above the outdoor temp.
If something is leaking CO into your house, then it's a major safety issue and needs to be immediately scrapped. Whether or not it's internet connected is the least of your worries.
> What if it's leaking CO into your house, what if it gets dangerously hot and causes a fire?
Furnaces have multiple checks when they turned on, even on the dumbest furnaces. There are multiple safety mechanisms preventing it from getting too hot. CO leak - what thermostat will do for you here?
> The sprinkler defaults to off to conserve water as the system is potentially unmonitored and a burst pipe could cause issues.
I had a friend in Australia who ran cattle on his farm. Failing open would waste water, but failing closed would mean dead cattle (and hundreds of thousands in losses). It depends on the application.
Amazon's revenue in 2024 was about the size of Belgium's GDP. Higher than Sweden or Ireland. It makes a profit similar to Norway, without drilling for offshore oil or maintaining a navy. I think they've got plenty of juice left.
You’re right about that. I guess what I mean is, how long will people be enthusiastic about AWS and its ability to innovate. But AWS undeniably has some really strong product offerings - it’s just that their pace of innovation has slowed. Their managed solutions for open source applications is generally good, but some of their bespoke alternatives are lacking over the last few years (ecs kinesis code* tools) - it wasn’t always like that (sqs ddb s3 ec2).
The universe's metaphysical poeticism holds that it's slightly more likely than it otherwise would be that the company that replaced Sears would one day go the way of Sears.
Ha! I started with CHV, then moved to Bloglines, then to Google Reader, then to NewsBlur, then to TT-RSS, then to Feedly, then to Inoreader, where I've stayed since 2016. I get an itch every time one of these RSS discussions happens, but it passes.
> "Blue text, while also a widely recognizable clickable-text indicator, is crass and distracting. Luckily, it is also rendered unnecessary by the use of underlining."
Can someone explain this to me? I don't get the 'crass' part of it. I find that having different colors for things really helps me parse things quickly. By removing the color dimension from the equation, it seems to make it more difficult to know what is what.
Let's use "time travel" for `$X` and see if we come to a useful forecast: Sure, one could hope that someday we'll have enough major breakthroughs to achieve either one. But "maybe we'll discover something we don't currently know or understand and it will change everything and we will go back in time" isn't a very promising or useful forecast if your aim is fixing a current problem.
You could perform the same exercise substituting "perpetual motion" as `$X`, and come up with an forecast equally useless for solving current problems.
Also: you replaced "major breakthroughs" with "technologies" when paraphrasing. What do you think the difference is between those two different terms? Do you feel your refutation would be as strong if you spoke to the original point, rather than rephrasing it and responding to your own, differently-phrased version (essentially responding only to yourself) ?
This analogy does not seem to be very strong. No one is making any progress on time travel, which may well be totally physically impossible.
On the other hand, our knowledge of mechanisms of aging has been growing fairly rapidly in the last decade or so, and if history is any teacher, such a growing heap of discoveries usually produces some concrete applications sooner or later.
We can already rejuvenate individual cells and smaller samples of tissues in vitro. That is not yet a recipe for a functional treatment of a living organism, but it is a (necessary) step in that direction.
There is also Sima the rat, breaking the longevity record for Sprague-Dawley rats by living for 1464 days after Katcher's treatment. Out of 8 subjects total.
Could be a random occurence, but the chances to break the longevity record in just eight rats are very, very low. And if it wasn't a random occurence, we already saw a meaningful life extension in an ordinary mammal.
The study takes all the advancements you mention into account, and says that even with that rate of progression, the specified life extension target (100y) is unlikely. Just like perpetual motion or time travel.
On the other hand, people have been claiming "breakthroughs" in all 3, so if that is what you want to hope for, that's cool. It just doesn't factor into our forecasts for any of the 3.
"takes all the advancements you mention into account"
And I think that prophecies like this are fundamentally unsound and unscientific. There is no way you can extrapolate from basic experiments like Katcher's to the year 2080.
It does not. There is a lot of useless papers produced because of the "publish or perish" pressure, and even harder sciences have a massive reproduction crisis.
Feynman diagnosed this sort of cosplay as "cargo-cult science" decades ago.
There are a greater number of useless internet posts produced within the same period, and the `useless/total` ratio is higher for internet posts than for scientific papers.
I just saw Weird Al in concert, and one of my favorite songs of his is "Everything You Know is Wrong." This is the AWS version of that song! Nice work Corey!
The idea was that the Prosper data set contained all of the information that a lending officer would have, but they also had user-submitted pictures. We wanted to see if there was value in the information conveyed in the pictures. For example, if they had a puppy or a child in the picture, did this increase the probability that the loan would get funded? That sort of thing. It was a very fun project!
Paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1343275