Would it be bad if we made advertising... illegal? In small part because it would reduce the principal-agent disparity between what you want to do and what Google wants you to do, but more importantly because it would remove the incentive to create blogspam and game the results.
Advertising serves a positive purpose by informing people about products that they will like and otherwise would not find. It also serves a negative purpose by attempting to cause people to make decisions which are not in their best interests.
I am genuinely curious what proportion of ads seen serve each of those two purposes.
That dip is more than 4M people, so I think it's still unexplained. Perhaps due to a shift in response rates or another artifact of COVID churn in the survey methodology?
Handling delays (and the uncertainty they entail) is a huge challenge, and I think it'll be a rich area of research. The simplest part of the problem is that delays in action or perception also slow the propagation of reward signals, and credit assignment is still a really hard problem.
Thinking further afield, future models could learn to adapt their expectations to fit the behavior of a particular opponent. This kind of metalearning is pretty much a wide open problem, though a pair of (roughly equivalent) papers in this direction recently came out from DeepMind: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05763 and OpenAI: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02779 It's going to be really exciting to see how these techniques scale.
Really naive question, can't they just train the net to react instantaneously on a $d$-delayed screen? I don't see conceptually why this approach would succeed with d=0 but fail for (say) d=25ms. (I am too busy/lazy to read the papers and understand what breaks down.)
Basically we tried that and it sort of works, but performance degrades pretty fast with each frame of delay. The issue is likely that it makes credit assignment much harder. Instead of seeing an immediate change in the state (which your critic can interpret as good or bad), you have to wait a bunch of frames during which your previous actions are taking effect and interfering with the reward signal.
Yup, it's definitely an advantage to get all the correct values from the game state. But not as much as you might think; the vision portion of a DQN or similar trains quite quickly.
Plus, our bot doesn't have any clue about projectiles. We don't know where they live in memory, so the network doesn't get to know about them at all.
Can I ask what the feature set looked like? I always kind of wanted to do this with the Skullgirls AI, but never had the time while we were developing it. As a developer, I obviously had full access to the game state, but I'm still not really sure what the best way to represent that state to a neural network is.
I agree but the current model is broken. I buy FantastiCal, don't like it, I've just thrown money down the toilet. Yeah yeah you can go through iTunes and get it back but that feels like a dick move, and how many actually know the procedure anyway? It's not exactly advertised.
I throw a quid down the toilet? That's fine, I don't mind. I throw a fiver or a tenner? Woah dude, that's like, a Starbucks latte! Totally different (or not, but hey, that's what it feels like).
I wish Apple would start allowing time-limited trialware. The IAP machinery is already there, they just have to allow apps that stop working after 30 days if there is no payment. After 30 days, I have a pretty good idea whether an app is worth £1, £10, £50 or 0.
> I throw a quid down the toilet? That's fine, I don't mind. I throw a fiver or a tenner? Woah dude, that's like, a Starbucks latte! Totally different (or not, but hey, that's what it feels like).
Well spotted. Note how that strip is from 2011, it was a bit of an old joke at the time already, and nothing has changed. Or rather: app-developers now route around this perception with IAP-whaling, which makes everyone sad and doesn't really map to "real" apps anyway. A trialware model would be better for everyone.
People hate the idea of spending money and then having a bad experience. You can be reasonably sure that with a cup of coffee that it won't be completely terrible, if you have a bad experience you can ask them to brew you a new one. With apps it is a lot more hoops to jump for a less certain outcome.
you have to consider apps are still plugging holes of basic functionality everyone expect from a computer but isn't available on mobile.
I still can't fine tune my screen brightness nor set up a firewall. oh but next version of the OS will have support for saving a copy of my credit card for wireless payments
Given that so many startups only exist for the purpose of being bought, the logical conclusion here, is that perhaps you shouldn't rely on things made by startups.
At least, until they reach a level of self-operation that makes it clear that if they are bought, they'll be kept.
I still use Sparrow for email on Mac. Would use it on iOS too, but it's quite buggy in iOS9. Spark is _almost_ as good as Sparrow on iOS, but it's free which makes me wonder whether they're doing some kind of data mining for revenue and how long they will be around.
And because it's open-source, it won't just get shut down. Worst-case it gets abandoned or forked or suffers feature bloat (but since it's already a mail client...) or goes the way of Thunderbird.
Slightly shameless self promotion: If you're looking for an Android solution, we're working on TimeFerret, a calendar app that helps you reduce fragmented meeting schedules and track productivity. It's not released yet though. The iOS version will be out first, followed by Android.
Advertising serves a positive purpose by informing people about products that they will like and otherwise would not find. It also serves a negative purpose by attempting to cause people to make decisions which are not in their best interests.
I am genuinely curious what proportion of ads seen serve each of those two purposes.