Boring machine learning is where it's at

My current blog is epistem.ink. This one is here just for archival purposes. It surprises me that when people think of "software that brings about the singularity" they think of text models, or of RL agents. To me, this seems counter-intuitive, and the fact that most people researching ML are interested in subjects like vision and language is flabbergasting. For one, because getting anywhere productive in these fields is really hard, for another, because their usefulness seems relatively minimal.