5 star and 1 star reviews are usually garbage - either fluffed fake reviews, or reviews outraged about something unrelated with the quality of the product itself.
There's a lot of gaming on those low star ratings by competitors. The trustability of reviews on Amazon has sunk so low over the years that for many products, reading many (tens or several tens of) reviews across star ratings is what may help have some idea about the product's quality and the seller.
The problem with this is the expectation of a 5 star review for adequate performance. A lot of reviewers view 3 stars as "I didn't like it, but at least customer service didn't screw me and it didn't burn my house." I'm aware that this is terrible because it leaves no room for superior delivery, but it's just the way of things.
> 2) Considering that so many companies slavishly build their whole culture on servicing engineers, color me skeptical.
Look deeper at the respect, and its most common proxies – money and hours: some places do seriously try to tackle developer productivity but there are quite a few where e.g. the average mid-level manager makes more than the most senior developer or the free food / foosball table is expected to make up for routine 60+ hour weeks or inability to fix long-term structural problems.
This is particularly of interest for younger developers: look at what happens to the older people at your company – do their careers mysteriously stall after their mid-30s, do they start getting flack for leaving on time to pick up their kids or actually using vacation/sick leave, etc. Most places say they value a good working environment but some of them are banking on you not taking them up on it.
As always, there's a happy balance. It is probably bad to be a social recluse, unless you are in crunch mode and not looking for hiring anytime soon, but at the same time it's probably bad to be out for events every night and spending too much time socializing.
Wouldn't that be a self-supervised learning? Yes, as the brain lears, it gets rewarded or not, but not by any external organism - rather by itself (or a part of itself). The "learning instruction manual" is in there somewhere.
So if you are able to code an AI so that it can run experiments over itself and gradually build this "learning instruction manual" eventually it will become able to do things you never though of in the first place.
I think that's what the AlphaGo team did - they trained their agent against itself, and it learned new moves not explicitly programmed in! With an evaluation function just saying ahead / not ahead.
IANAL, but I believe the burden is on Apple, not individual employees.
Apple will have however to show that they are doing their best effort, and so will be forced to fire/transfer them to other positions and hire engineers willing to do the job.
Well, debatable. Last major war before WWI was in 1870, however there was an arms race and escalation of military preparation since the last years of the 1890s. So you really only had a couple of decades of peace, then people started preparing for war again.
5 star and 1 star reviews are usually garbage - either fluffed fake reviews, or reviews outraged about something unrelated with the quality of the product itself.