Month: May 2017

May 19 2017, 23:22

What else to do on a plane. How to study English grammar. While I was sitting at the airport, I was working on a document for work, and I stumbled upon a banner “a business opportunity open for everyone”. Question – where did the “is” go in the middle? Why is it in the active voice? Just found out why. At the same time, I learned some other useful rules. Can be used not only in headlines, but also in meeting follow-ups, for example.

http://www.englishlessonsbrighton.co.uk/8-grammar-rules-writing-newspaper-headlines/

May 19 2017, 20:48

Here’s a niche for those who want to create a useful utility over the weekend.

Every mobile has apps that allow you to photograph a sheet of paper and automatically correct the perspective. There seems to be no such app for Windows or on the web.

There is only one that allows doing it interactively, not automatically. But it’s extremely buggy. There is a plugin for Lightwave, but LW is paid. There’s ImageMagick, which can fix the perspective based on a template, but it uses the command line and you need to specify the trapezoid in coordinates. It would already be useful if you could click this trapezoid once with a mouse. But ideally, it should detect it automatically.

If someone were to create a simple interface for this ImageMagick and then publish it on the web, it would be a useful tool. You won’t make money off it, but a student would learn something ) @[100001539238582:2048:Dmitry Voloshin] to your inspiration box, just in case it comes in handy.

Look, they almost did it: http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/unperspective/index.php

May 19 2017, 19:25

Moreover, I encountered that some operations on the web from a phone are simply impossible to do in 2017. For example, try writing a post in another language on Facebook (there’s a “Write post in another language” at the bottom of the desktop version). Not only is this feature missing in the app and mobile version, but it also does not work at all in desktop emulation. That is, writing in two languages with Chrome on Android is impossible.

Or take Advanced Search on Twitter. I need to search for tweets from Monday to Thursday. And it’s impossible to do that on mobile. Not at all. Well, at least the desktop emulation works here.

May 19 2017, 19:21

While driving to the airport, I talked with the driver about Uber and the development of services in general. He, by the way, is a former Cobol programmer 🙂

I came to three thoughts:

First. The business of providing “traditional” services should consolidate because the bar for service quality and customer expectations for these services will continuously rise, as will the cost of maintaining that standard. For small companies, this starts to become insurmountable, and they merge with larger ones to maintain the infrastructure at the necessary level.

In this case, competition essentially occurs between the major players, while the small ones only operate in niches that are hard to classify as traditional. For example, women’s or social taxi services. Thus, the fate of “Uberization” awaits most traditional businesses.

Along with consolidation, the volume of data grows. And the big data, which was still being buzzed about five to seven years ago, is really working: machine learning in action is already widespread.

A serious downside that I see here is that large entities start using knowledge from small players’ sales for “neighbors” of these small players, and this might backfire on the small players. For instance, a small player introduces a new product, and it sells wildly, like, say, fidget spinners, and the issue becomes how to offer smart procurement services to others while keeping trade secrets. Questionable.

The second thought that came to my mind after endless discussions about machine learning is that it will indeed be increasingly prevalent, but there’s a downside – people will gradually stop understanding how it works. Including developers – they too will stop understanding why the system made a wrong decision. Because historical data trained it wrongly. Fixing this is possible, but then you need to retrain the system with previous data, and that can be very expensive. For example, if your autonomous vehicle suddenly crashes into a tree, perhaps no one will be able to tell why. It so happened that some wrong conditions at the entry of the decision-making system coincided, which operates on an extract from hundreds of terabytes of original data over decades, and taught it wrongly. Now the data processing algorithms have been adjusted not to learn from bad examples, but retraining the model for decision-making is already complex and expensive.

The third thought I have is that in the near future, retail will be automatic. Like playing the stock market. You set a million parameters and go to sleep. The system does everything else. If you’re lazy to set up, you choose the “minimum yield, minimum risks” package and go to sleep. If you want more money – you play with the parameters, sometimes make mistakes, but still go to sleep. Actually, you don’t sleep, instead, you worry and think and think and think. Something like that. Auto pricing, automatic warehouse replenishment, call center outsourcing, etc. – all components are already there.

What do you think?

May 19 2017, 15:09

During the business trip, I got buried under a mountain of work. Found a deserted spot with a socket and internet

UPDATE: Ah, I’ll have to leave this place. It’s an island, accessible by a narrow path on stilts, with a beach, hammocks, and a large palm shelter on it. However, there are two downsides: the internet is indeed poor, making conferencing difficult, plus there’s no drinking water available.