zifnab25 [he/him, any]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2020

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  • yeah, the comic describes it as “the virtually impossible”

    We are a lot better at it now than we were, say, ten years ago. But it is nearly trivial to outwit a “bird detecting algorithm” by holding up a vague facsimile of a bird. That gets us back to the old TrashFuture line about AI just being “some dude at a computer filling out captchas”.

    I’m not saying we aren’t building on centuries of work, i’m saying the rate of recent progress is remarkable.

    The recent progress is heavily overstated. More often than not, what a computer does today to recognize a bird is to pull on a large library of data labeled “birds” and ask if there’s a close-enough match. But that large library is not AI driven. Its the consequence of a bunch of manual labeling done by humans with eyes and brains. A novel or rare species of bird, or a bird that’s camouflaged, or even just a bird that’s out-of-focus or badly rendered, will still consistently fail the “Is this a bird?” test.





  • Fu Linghui, a spokesman for the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said the release of data would be suspended while authorities look to “optimise” collection methods.

    “In recent years, the number of university students has continued to expand,” Fu said. “The main responsibility of current students is studying. Society has different views on whether students looking for jobs before graduation should be included in labour force surveys and statistics.”

    This issue, as well as the definition of the age range currently set at 16-24, “needs further research,” Fu said.

    Isn’t this basically consistent with the… I want to say U6 unemployment metric within the US? Basically, if you’re in school then you aren’t an active member of the labor force and don’t count as “unemployed” for the purpose of government statistics?

    I remember back during the '07/'08 US downturn, lots of young people re-entered academia in pursuit of MBAs / Law Degrees / etc, because the job market sucked and pay in professional fields was worth the time/cost of a higher caliber of degree. When they fell out of the labor market as a result, the US unemployment rate adjusted in response.