Edge Impulse (https://edgeimpulse.com) is the top developer platform for edge AI: think HuggingFace but for models that process sensor data on the edge. We have a large and active community of hundreds of thousands of developers. We were recently acquired by Qualcomm, who have a crazy ambitious vision for bringing AI within reach of every embedded engineer.
This role will involve leadership, mentoring, and process design in addition to engineering, software architecture, and programming. There will be room to grow and potentially manage others as we expand the research team from 6 to 10+ researchers and engineers. Your role is to be the professional software engineer in a room full of researchers. You view writing great software as a craft, and you enjoy designing systems to facilitate quality code.
Our team literally wrote the book on AI at the Edge (from O’Reilly https://a.co/d/dIDZui0)—along with creating award-winning technologies like our FOMO constrained object detection architecture, FOMO-AD visual anomaly detection, and EON Compiler model optimization system. Our platform is cited in thousands of research papers, and we are a Gartner Cool Vendor in Edge Computing.
Like the rest of our team, you are naturally proactive and autonomous, and will go the extra mile when required: not by working late, but by going outside of your lane to help deliver the best possible product for our developers. We prize trust, collaboration, entrepreneurialism, and creativity.
I'd argue that effective written communication is a skill that can be learned and taught, and a best practice that can be enforced, rather than an innate property of a given human being.
If you can write code, you can create documents that include all the necessary details for a handover—without needing to be a brilliant writer—as long as you're aware that you're required to do so.
I couldn't agree more. Having grown up on IRC, forums, and eventually voice chat, I have no problem with "forging meaningful relationships" while working together in a text-based online world.
That said, I think it's a challenge for people who didn't exist in that space from a young age and figure out the patterns that make it manageable.
The sad thing is that these are probably easy things to learn, but there's no real movement to try and teach them. Instead, we try to replace our amazing battle-tested text-based tools with crappy multimedia substitutes.
It's definitely good to jump on a call sometimes, but I'd much rather have an in-depth technical discussion via writing. History is full of brilliant written correspondence between legendary figures in art, science, engineering, and business—but somehow we've decided that letters are not good enough for us.
The exception that proves the rule is Amazon, who apparently require written content to be submitted and read prior to in-person meetings in order to improve the discussion.
Not sure where you've been eating, but even Birmingham—my unfashionable British hometown—has nine Michelin star restaurants within a short drive.
I grew up in the UK but I've lived for 15 years all over the US, and it's always confused me that Americans are convinced that British food is bad. On a whole, British supermarkets have far better produce, in both quality and diversity. UK restaurants run the gamut from cutting edge fine dining and wonderful traditional food to home-grown variants of immigrant cuisine. It's a great place to eat.
My home town is legendary for Indian restaurants—to the extent that Birmingham-style Balti curries have made their way back to India. Before you claim that this is Indian food, not British, can you name an American dish that wasn't developed by immigrants?
Home cooking is far more popular in the UK than the US: anecdotally, most British people cook most meals at home, while few of my American friends know how to boil an egg and rely almost entirely on take-out. British celebrity chefs and cooking shows are famous worldwide. It's odd to claim that British food sucks while binge-watching our prime-time baking show!
I love America and a lot of things are better over here, but food—unfortunately for me—is not one of them.
When I read comments like yours I wonder how you define "all over the US." Obviously, that is nowhere near enough time to experience the breadth of culture that spans the US, so I'm guessing just a few specific locations. It's the only explanation I can come up with for your generalizations being completely opposed to my experience (and I've spent more like 50 years living all over the US...).
FWIW, I'd say that while Gordon Ramsey is a good cook, obviously, he's a celebrity because he's hilarious. That is definitely something I will give credit to the British for.
I've lived in California, Montana, Washington, and South Carolina (my home for the past few years). I've spent a ton of time with family in the Midwest and the Ozarks. So not everywhere, but a good cross section!
I'm not sure I made a generalization about America besides the quality and diversity of supermarket food, and an anecdote about how many of my friends cook at home.
> can you name an American dish that wasn't developed by immigrants?
I consider Tex-Mex as American and home grown. It also depends on your definition of "immigrants" since that path looks different everywhere (and across time). Texas was at one time Mexico (and even its own country plus a few others). But tortillas, beans, corn, cornbread are Native American. Many have simply lived here through generations and name changes.
I would also argue for BBQ[0]. I had to double check, but according to that wiki page it was from the Taíno who had inhabited Puerto Rico, which is part of America; which was acquired by Columbus, then brought to the mainland by the Spanish. Since Texas was a part of Spain for some time, there is a case to be made that the dish was not by immigrants if looked at from that angle.
Which all sounds very similar to Britain, repeatedly settled or invaded over thousands of years by people who left their unique mark on our cuisine and culture, from the Roman conquest to much more recent days.
> repeatedly settled or invaded over thousands of years
The difference with Tex-Mex is that its foundational items are Native American, so the distinction, imo, is that the main ingredients and how they are used is from America. Even though the Americas were populated by pacific islanders/Asians, no one would call Tex-Mex Asian food.
I don't know a lot about the making of Indian food, but I have not yet heard the argument that the base ingredients/spices and how they are used come from the British Isles. That's how I would "draw the line" in determining if it's British or Indian food.
That said, the best Indian food I have had was in London
Indian food uses lots of chilies, peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes—which are all native to the Americas, and were brought to Asia by European traders in the early modern period.
So while I see your point, I wouldn't say a cuisine is always "from" the same place as its ingredients.
I think the trope is that British cuisine, that is, dishes that are uniquely British, are bad. Not that there isn’t good food there. Being a rich country, an empire, and part of Europe means you can have many, many different cuisines there though, and like you said many are very good.
Requiring something to be "uniquely British" to count as British cuisine seems like a pretty high bar. Are burgers and apple pie "uniquely American"? Not sure – and who even cares?
You’re right, and that’s not the bad I meant to set. More like cuisine that is associated with Britain. So not a French restaurant that happens to be in London.
My Romanian grandma, born in the 1920s, that never traveled more than 100km from her birthplace and never saw even the Black Sea, would beg to differ :-p
I highly doubt that my almost illiterate grandma, that grew up in interwar Romania and lived afterwards behind the Iron Curtain, discovered apple pie through American media :-))
It's a trope for sure, but it doesn't really make sense: a lot of American dishes are traditional British foods. Roast dinners with stuffing and gravy, apple pie, pancakes, biscuits/scones, fried fish and potatoes, meat pies. Thanksgiving dinner is an ancient British harvest feast with some New World ingredients; Christmas dinner is the same format.
And since most American food has also made its way to the UK, there's really not a great deal of difference.
This is survivorship bias: art owned and protected by wealthy sponsors has a much higher chance of making it through the years. Most art is folk art, and has been lost to the centuries.
The did say "longest lasting art". It feels more survivor bias to mention the Picasso's of history over the many more wealthy who spent their time in the craft.
It's not fair, but it makes sense. And sure the most well known art is not the best art. But a place like this should know the best tech is rarely the most popular product.
Because it offers the content to everyone anywhere for free without authentication or a limit on the number of concurrent copies available.
Is this a good tradeoff between protecting IP to incentivize creation through monetization and the various societal goods of making it widely available? I don't know, but it is certainly a different point on the continuum than traditional libraries.
> Is this a good tradeoff between protecting IP to incentivize creation through monetization and the various societal goods of making it widely available? I don't know
The actual current status-quo is. Despite the most of the worthy books being available on pirate websites, people still buy books. Publishers still are not bankrupt. Even independent individuals post "I wrote a book" here every now and then, link to DRM-free purchase pages and seem happy.
I personally spent many hundreds dollars buying DRM-free ebooks on GumRoad and HumbleBundle (despite most of them being on LibGen!). I also bought numerous hardcover paper books after reading their pirated ebook versions.
Armchair anarchists aside, it's galling to see the work my co-authors, editors, designers, illustrators, translators, and reviewers poured months of our lives into available for free on this site.
Money is rarely an incentive for writing a textbook, but it's certainly important for the brilliant and under-appreciated people who work in publishing, maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.
>it's galling to see the work my co-authors, editors, designers, illustrators and translators poured months of our lives into available for free on this site.
I would be more empathetic if publishers gave the same lending rights to ebooks as they give to physical ones. As it is, the publishers basically extort libraries to the point where offering ebooks drains coffers way more than physical ones.
Given that, I don't feel too much guilt 'borrowing' from alternate sources.
> I would be more empathetic if publishers gave the same lending rights to ebooks as they give to physical ones. As it is, the publishers basically extort libraries to the point where offering ebooks drains coffers way more than physical ones.
Publishers give you no lending rights on physical books; legislation and common law give you rights to lend that stem from the first-sale doctrine where I live. Push your legislators (or courts) to establish first-sale doctrine over digital content and there you go.
> it's galling to see the work my co-authors, editors, designers, illustrators, translators, and reviewers poured months of our lives into available for free on this site.
Why? You may think your work is super unique/original/awesome, but the reality is 99% of the content of 99% of books is not unique or original, and those works wouldn't exist without massively relying on and borrowing from other works.
> it's certainly important for the brilliant and under-appreciated people who work in publishing, maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.
There are better ways of supporting work you find important than the parasitic publishing industry and copyright.
> maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.
Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.
I don't really care, but many different people, for many different reasons.
You may think this specific example, which you seem to think resembles the current publishing industry, negates my overall point, but... not even close.
> The authors of antiquity had no rights concerning their published works; there were neither authors' nor publishing rights. Anyone could have a text recopied, and even alter its contents. Scribes earned money and authors earned mostly glory unless a patron provided cash; a book made its author famous. This followed the traditional concept of the culture: an author stuck to several models, which he imitated and attempted to improve. The status of the author was not regarded as absolutely personal.
> Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.
We are living in the most productive time ever for the book industry, I think comparing the current industry to the past when we produce several orders of magnitude more works that many people highly value is nonsensical.
That point was specifically in response to the suggestion that we need publishers and copyright for books to exist - which is obviously false. Not sure how the size of the current industry relates to that point.
I'm saying that even though books would exist without copyright and publishers, it allows for several times more books to exist by providing an incentive. Authors could give their books for free if they really felt that it was important for their book to be free.
> I'm saying that even though books would exist without copyright and publishers, it allows for several times more books to exist by providing an incentive.
Having the maximum number of books possible is not really something I would consider a success metric. Or do you think the endless stream of AI-generated books happening right now is a good thing? Also, publishers and copyright are not the only way to monetize your work.
> Authors could give their books for free if they really felt that it was important for their book to be free.
Can they? Or does the publisher control that right? That being said, some of the best technical books/works I've read were free.
> Having the maximum number of books possible is not really something I would consider a success metric. Or do you think the endless stream of AI-generated books happening right now is a good thing? Also, publishers and copyright are not the only way to monetize your work.
Obviously I think that the combination of value and quantity of books today is much higher in the past, you don't need to nitpick my phrasing. Additionally, the book industry has been in its new peak of written work since before AI became good in 2020.
> Can they? Or does the publisher control that right? That being said, some of the best technical books/works I've read were free.
Its 2024. An author doesn't need a publisher outside of academia if they want to publish a book for free. They might not have an editor or translator, but those things cost money. But most authors like money and since most books loose publishers money its not like the author is loosing out.
> That being said, some of the best technical books/works I've read were free.
I'm glad you liked them. The best fiction works I read I paid for, and trust me I've read a lot of free fiction works.
> Obviously I think that the combination of value and quantity of books today is much higher in the past, you don't need to nitpick my phrasing.
It's not obvious at all when all you mentioned was quantity (two times in a row). And I think the reason that was all you mentioned is because that's the only 'obvious' increased metric you have. Not to mention, there are many other things that are different now, so chalking it all up to copyright and publishers is illogical.
> Additionally, the book industry has been in its new peak of written work since before AI became good in 2020.
Again, you're making claims about 'peak' and 'book health', etc. without actually defining what that means... is it supposed to be 'obvious'?
> Its 2024. An author doesn't need a publisher outside of academia if they want to publish a book for free.
> I'm saying that even though books would exist without copyright and publishers, it allows for several times more books to exist by providing an incentive.
Does it though? The current deluge of books is mainly due to the easy of creating them and getting them to readers. That is, thank computers not copyright.
> You may think your work is super unique/original/awesome, but the reality is 99% of the content of 99% of books is not unique or original, and those works wouldn't exist without massively relying on and borrowing from other works.
Cool so you won't miss it when libgen is gone then? I mean if there's nothing unique or original there then what's to miss right?
> Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.
I don't know how else to measure the health of books other than measuring the health of publishing, and it doesn't seem like it's doing so great:
> Cool so you won't miss it when libgen is gone then?
I personally won't, because I've never used it. I am 100% against it being shut down though.
> I mean if there's nothing unique or original there then what's to miss right?
Read my comment again and find the spot where I said 'nothing'.
> I don't know how else to measure the health of books other than measuring the health of publishing
You can start by defining what 'health of books' even means, but your conclusion here seems seriously perverse.
> how does belittling the work of the authors help anything?
What is belittling about acknowledging the fact that current works (especially technical/non-fiction) heavily draw from previous works? The last few technical books I read literally had zero original/unique information - they were just re-organization/re-phrasing/compilation of other works. That's not a bad thing - I think it's great, and the books are great, but is that justification for restricting access to this information - when it is literally 100% based on other works?
If there was a way I could give the authors a few dollars for their work, I totally would. Instead in the system we have, I have to give a publisher $100 so they can give the author $0.50. The publisher uses the money to make rich people richer, and scaring people by suing for violating laws that they themselves wrote.
Whenever possible, I try to but stuff from the authors & creators directly. I haven't been in the market for textbooks in a long time, but even 20 years ago it was a ripoff, and it seems to have only gotten worse.
I'm an author, and the compensation you're quoting is wildly low.
Beyond that: I've co-written two reasonably successful technical books. The amount of non-writing work that went into them is staggering: editing, reviewing, laying them out, creating illustrations, translating them into different languages, making them available for sale across the world, etc. It requires an unbelievable amount of skill, talent, and hard work.
The raw draft we hand in looks embarrassing beside the finished product.
I certainly appreciate your efforts, and the efforts of everyone involved. I know a few authors and copy editors, and it seems like an incredible amount of work to deliver the finished product.
I suppose my snark was more in reference to the textbook market, which seems to be the primary focus of Libgen. Academic textbooks seem primarily to be a way to extract some student loan money into publishers' pockets, with plenty of obvious typos, problems that can't be completed, and new editions every year that simply change the order of chapters without fixing any of those issues.
When I was a student, in several of my technical classes, after every test we'd spend a class correcting the answers provided by the textbook that disagreed with more authoritative sources. Spending $100 for a book that was only half right when I could have bought a real technical book for $40 has made me cynical about the whole industry.
I've written numerous technical articles and had to publish them in particular journals for academic promotion/retention reasons, and almost universally the (paid) editors (not the working for free other academic reviewers) added negative value: they introduced errors and I had to spend hours of unnecessary time trying to catch these newly introduced errors, and even then tonnes remained. I distribute the preprints (that paid editors didn't get their hands on) because they're much less error- and typo-ridden then the official published versions.
Anyway, I've got a new list of publishers I'll never publish with, nor use anything they publish as required reading for a class I teach.
Ebook pricing is broken. Sell it for $0.99 and you'll get buyers. You can't sell ebooks when it costs only 5-10% less than a dead-tree hardcover variant. People don't like being ripped off.
Books are far cheaper to print than most people realize. If you see a publisher charging 5-10% less for an ebook than a physical book, it's because they're pricing the ebook at whatever the physical book's price is, minus the printing costs.
Before ebooks came abundant the publishers said some 10% of book price is their money, another 10-15% is for author and editors, and the rest is eaten up by print and distribution+shop. I guess the distribution through publishers' site can be done at 20% of sales price.
The major costs you're missing are marketing and "plate" (up front cost to produce the content). Those make up most of the total costs. For textbooks, the decision makers are professors (so door-to-door sales to get their attention), and the market is pretty small, especially for upper level content (so few units to amortize fixed costs over). Print, paper, and binding are cheap, say ~$10-12 average for a textbook. Typically, distribution channel takes a 20-25%, depending on channel partner, and many colleges mandate that sales go through the school bookstore because they get a cut, so publisher's website isn't necessarily a viable option (without a lot of student marketing). Author royalties run ~13-15% of revenue, and editors hit plate expense (they're publisher employees, so not a variable cost like authors). Textbook publisher Ebitda margins wind up running 20-25%, but most publisher's pay a lot of interest expense, partly because the major costs are up front, and partly because there's been a lot of PE ownership. Net margins can be tight as anyone else's.
Source: worked for a plaintiff publisher in this case. Think Pearson, Cengage, and MHE all publish financials also.
There's a fairly small pool of readers for a niche technical book. Selling it for $0.99 won't meaningfully increase the number of buyers, and it won't recover enough revenue to meet the cost of production.
Sell them at reasonable prices and people will buy them.
Ever seen someone photocopying an entire newspaper? Guess what would happen if newspapers prices suddenly were inflated to like 50 bucks.
The reality is that without the existence of publishers the price of almost all texts would drift toward a minimum far below the worthwhileness of any author.
So maybe, like art, texts will become sheer passion projects - even technical texts. Otherwise, I'm sure LLMs will be able to replace their usefulness soon.
The fact that artists/writers pearl clutch over their already non lucrative jobs while software folks are gleeful to sell their own earning potential out from under themselves shows you that artists/writers are wannabe Bolshevik’s and that software folks are the only honest “egalitarians” out there.
Edge Impulse (https://edgeimpulse.com) is the top developer platform for edge AI: think HuggingFace but for models that process sensor data on the edge. We have a large and active community of hundreds of thousands of developers. We were recently acquired by Qualcomm, who have a crazy ambitious vision for bringing AI within reach of every embedded engineer.
This role will involve leadership, mentoring, and process design in addition to engineering, software architecture, and programming. There will be room to grow and potentially manage others as we expand the research team from 6 to 10+ researchers and engineers. Your role is to be the professional software engineer in a room full of researchers. You view writing great software as a craft, and you enjoy designing systems to facilitate quality code.
Our team literally wrote the book on AI at the Edge (from O’Reilly https://a.co/d/dIDZui0)—along with creating award-winning technologies like our FOMO constrained object detection architecture, FOMO-AD visual anomaly detection, and EON Compiler model optimization system. Our platform is cited in thousands of research papers, and we are a Gartner Cool Vendor in Edge Computing.
Like the rest of our team, you are naturally proactive and autonomous, and will go the extra mile when required: not by working late, but by going outside of your lane to help deliver the best possible product for our developers. We prize trust, collaboration, entrepreneurialism, and creativity.