Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible

Posted on Leave a comment

Michael O. Church

Follow-up post: here

It’s probably not a secret that I dislike the “Agile” fad that has infested programming. One of the worst varieties of it, Scrum, is a nightmare that I’ve seen actually kill companies. By “kill” I don’t mean “the culture wasn’t as good afterward”; I mean a drop in the stock’s value of more than 85 percent. This shit is toxic and it needs to die yesterday. For those unfamiliar, let’s first define our terms. Then I’ll get into why this stuff is terrible and often detrimental to actual agility. Then I’ll discuss a single, temporary use case under which “Agile” development actually is a good idea, and from there explain why it is so harmful as a permanent arrangement.

So what is Agile?

The “Agile” fad grew up in web consulting, where it had a certain amount of value: when dealing with finicky clients who don’t…

View original post 3,303 more words

[1412.5567] Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognition

Posted on Leave a comment

We present a state-of-the-art speech recognition system developed using end-to-end deep learning. Our architecture is significantly simpler than traditional speech systems, which rely on laboriously engineered processing pipelines; these traditional systems also tend to perform poorly when used in noisy environments. In contrast, our system does not need hand-designed components to model background noise, reverberation, or speaker variation, but instead directly learns a function that is robust to such effects. We do not need a phoneme dictionary, nor even the concept of a “phoneme.” Key to our approach is a well-optimized RNN training system that uses multiple GPUs, as well as a set of novel data synthesis techniques that allow us to efficiently obtain a large amount of varied data for training. Our system, called Deep Speech, outperforms previously published results on the widely studied Switchboard Hub5’00, achieving 16.0% error on the full test set. Deep Speech also handles challenging noisy environments better than widely used, state-of-the-art commercial speech systems.

via[1412.5567] Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognition.