It's really odd that this is making the media rounds now, granted this is the most fair headline I've seen on it to date.
The fact that Focals v2 were being cancelled, and that all customers would receive refunds for their existing purchase was announced with the acquisition months ago...
I love this, but it struck me in the opening paragraph how similar it is to the challenges around training AI on higher-level abstraction goals, with tons of examples of AI's basically "cheating" and passing information discretely to itself to yield answers, rather than actually solving the problem as the human had hoped!
Is real estate still a "great investment" in China when you can't own property but merely buy 75 year leases? (this is my understanding of how real estate works at least in Shanghai)
That's literally the point. Because of reactions like yours (specifically that last line re-paraphrasing), anyone on the conservative spectrum is now afraid to express their opinions or reveal such information
It's a little bit different if your job is to design and build a product intended to be arbiters of free speech, and the govt is pressuring your industry and company specifically to maybe take a heavier hand in moderating... In that case your job probably largely involves thinking through and talking through these issues with open-minded peers, wherein lies the rub
You are right, however that is a systemic bias in equal opportunity – not representation.
Foot in the door is a huge step, and it's totally okay for companies to push initiatives that allow more minorities to get their foot in the door / exposure to the company and industry. It's not okay for them to push that agenda in assessment to reach better distribution numbers in representation.
They do this already at a fairly large scale, for example the BOLD internship and development program where the goal is to "expose historically underrepresented students in this field to career opportunities in the industry." [https://www.google.com/about/careers/students/bold.html]
These programs are fantastic, and I think a great (albeit no silver bullet) strategy to grant greater OPPORTUNITY to underrepresented groups who may never be exposed to CompSci & Tech industries.
Things that are discussed in this article (if true) are clearly about reaching equal REPRESENTATION more than opportunity – and yeah, that's very disappointing since at the end of the day the only way to do that with immediate gratification is discrimination. (pipeline & societal problems don't get fixed overnight)
No one is arguing it's not – but most people agree its warranted given Amazon's previous anti-competitive behavior, i.e. de-listing competing Google + Apple streaming boxes + Nest products + never offering integration of Prime Video on the Apple/Android TV in a clear move to promote FireTV + Prime membership
Fiat money is just a concept made up by governments, so no – the resource is not finite, and I think that's the crucial point in lots of these conversations. Innovators create and deliver value to large populations of people and are rewarded for it economically – this is supposed to be fair, and arguably is "the american dream" because the premise is that they are being "fairly" compensated for the overall value they've delivered to society at large.
The closer you get to individual transactions as examples, the easier it is to ignore that it's not a zero-sum game. I think we all agree we're probably paying too much for an individual iPhone X or whatever, but few disagree that the creators of these devices deserve at least the amount of wealth that their creations "gave back" to society through value, convenience, efficiency, and so forth on a society-level scale.
It's been years since Apple has started sitting back and raking in the money by letting other players mostly test out technology on smartphones before they adopt.
My only major concern with iPhone X is that I don't think FaceID is actually a valid replacement for TouchID from a usability/convenience perspective – I'll leave security concerns to the experts. There's just too many situations where it will definitely be slower and/or someone next to me wants to use my phone while I'm driving, etc etc