NLP is great for many things, but, from my own experience as a NLP developer, machines are not even close to understand human language. They can interpret well some kind of written speech, but they will struggle to grasp two humans speaking to each other.
The progress we are make on building chatbots and vocal assistants is mainly due to the fact We are learning how to speaking to the machines, and not the contrary.
I had the same reaction, it really is what you want to read, for me somehow 'see' became 'saw', then I did a double take and realized what I got wrong.
As @throwawayr1188, me too, I'm born and raised in Rio, and I'm very surprised to see such article on Hacker News.
No doubt, a favela can be a very dangerous place from an foreign, but I understand the fact that many people are curious to see how it really looks in its innards, despite this danger. My grandfather lived his entire life in a favela called Acari in the North of Rio, and I used to go there visit him. About 50 milles distant from Copacabana, Acari is a shit place with an IDH lower than some poor countries in Africa. But, as described in The Economist article, Acari too has a very active economy. You can find all sort of businesses in there. Of course, I'm not talking about millions of dollars businesses, but there's an interesting cash flow running inside of the favela. However it's not enough to make people rich. The life condition in favela are really horrible. Besides all that has been said here, I have to add on point that hasn't been mentioned: Favela are extremely noisy places... It's pretty common bars playing music incredible loud. Besides that, some favelas organise parties called 'baile funks'. These parties have their pros and cons:
PROS
- people coming from outside (many spend money buying drinks, food, cigarettes, etc)
- it promotes some fun for young people living in the favela
CONS
- These partie are often organised by drug dealers... it attracts some drug adds to the location, and cocaine,
crack, etc run freely
- The music in the 'bailes' uses to be extremely loud. As it doesn't have acoustic protection the entire favela don't sleep during those parties which may go through an entire week-end. It very bad for those who have to wake up to go work.
My advice, do not visit favelas... The vast majority of its population, I'd say more than 99,9% of its habitants are honest people, but this 0,1% and their war with police and other drug dealers represent a real danger for your life.
Sometimes you don't realize how many thing are giving away for those side projects. With those side project don't make you any money, they are pure leisure you should see it like 'playing video games'. When start to refuse go out with friends or make simple home tasks to keep working in this side project, it becomes serious... Of course, those side project allow you to acquire or improve skills which may be useful in your professional life. But the way you balance it is very important.
The analogy of 'playing video games' should help you to see how serious and important these projects are to your life.
I get what you're saying, but don't really like the video game analogy. Video games are about following other people's rules, usually to achieve other people's goals (the exception is "sandbox" games). I don't think of it as a creative act, unless it's something extreme like speedrun glitches and demoscene-like arbitrary code execution.
You've elucidated the reason why I cannot get into videogames, even though I tried multiple times this last two decades.
I love the aesthetics of a well designed game. Pretty graphics are mesmerizing. But following arbitrarily designed rules and solving riddles created for the sole purpose of having an end goal for the game,—especially when one has a teenager-like disdain for authority—is more aggravating than having to follow rules in the real world.
Says who? Plenty of my side projects have made me quite a bit of money.
I'd say your mindset is equally as unhealthy as you'd never put any serious thought into it, making your statement about them not making money a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm quite sure it's a great book. But like I'm really impressed for the first thing this book has taught me and it's not about games... It's just unbelievable how much money Amazon makes selling books!
I went on to a publisher site to buy ebook because kindle version is not available, and during checkout I was thrown out because mysterious error message.
Same happened to me with the Pearson site recently. Customer service took days to reply and their response was some version 'try writing us back at this email since they handle your specific problem better than we do.' Its ridiculous how hard it gets to give people your money
Yeah, I know this is becoming common and online markets are a race to a bottom, but in stark numbers like this...it really feels like there isn't a good ending to this story.
As long as I can remember it’s been this way, authors have always made very tiny percentage royalties on physical books. I don’t know what the figures are like for digital distribution but if they aren’t better it’s a travesty.
Well, Richard Bach writes in The Bridge Across Forever that royalties from Jonathan Livingston Seagull made him rich (before he overspent it), so I assume this is more recent phenomena. Granted it's a bit different level of "bestseller" though...
It's huge, especially considering how much pushback Apple gets for charging app developers "only" 30%. Really shows how little leverage book publishers have today.
