Posts by phillipao

We give up, Progressive Web Apps can track you, says W3C: After 5 years, it decides privacy is too much bother

Isn't this something that native apps can do trivially, by generating a uid and storing it locally? Or is the issue that a server generates the url, and it has access to other info? I'm curious about that isolation mechanism you mentioned in webkit.

Mything the point: The AI renaissance is simply expensive hardware and PR thrown at an old idea

I appreciate the debunking of hype, but there has been a genuine breakthrough in machine learning that has led to amazing results in image recognition, speech recognition, OCR, and translation.

Geoff Hinton discovered that neural nets could be trained in a greedy, layer-wise fashion (https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/fastnc.pdf). Neural nets were previously limited to two or three layers, and now they can be deeper. This moved some problems from the realm of "too hard" to merely "hard".

There's a lot of noise and hype and businesses trying to sell crap marketed as "AI". But behind all that, there is something truly amazing. I don't normally comment, but I felt like this piece missed that, and I think it's a shame. The positive thing behind all of this hype is so much more fun than complaining about the hype.