Tony is a Geek

What was the question? Basically, the latest tech. companies use you as the user as the product - yes, everyone knows that - however, they wrap it up, they put you into a nice walled garden where you feel it's okay to keep popping in and out and you know, the app is where all the "other people are"... so you kind of have to go there, don't you... and well, if it costs you a bit of invisible data, what's the harm? I'll just leave this here: Now, there's not a lot we can do about companies like facebook - they provide a distraction service, where they crave you attention span.  The young'ens can replace facebook with TikTok or whatever fad is currently doing the rounds.  As we know the Gen Z-ers have an attention span of a gnat - they probably wouldn't have read this far before going off and checking something else that notified them that something else was far more important and needs their sole focus and attention for the next 60 seconds...before.....

"If we want to scale to more complex behaviour, we need to do better with less data, and we need to generalise more."(*1) During the 2015-2019 period, it was all about "AI is going to change the world", "AI is awesome, look at the amazing things it can do", "jump on the AI band-wagon".....etc...etc...etc... I worked on many a project during this time period and I often found myself sitting back (the ability to do that was a rare occasion, I can tell you) and asking, "Where is the AI in this solution?". Everyone else, the project stakeholders, executives, Data Scientists ( I still have beef with that job title, but I'll leave that for another day ) were all strutting around dropping the "AI" word and I just couldn't see it.  Yes, we had a few isolated "smart" bits, but they were just algorithms triggered by good old fashioned code on certain events that made life a bit easier / quicker for the end user -...