Remember when you had to manually label thousands of images for a project?

I was at a hackathon in Austin in 2018, trying to build a simple object detector for a drone. A guy on my team showed me a pre-trained model from TensorFlow Hub and we had a working prototype in an afternoon, not a month. How many projects have you scrapped because the data prep seemed impossible back then?

3 comments

3 Comments

luna6172mo ago

That hackathon story hits home. I spent weeks on a senior project in 2016 just trying to get a clean dataset, and it totally killed my drive to finish. The barrier to entry now is so much lower, which is great, but it also makes you wonder how many cool ideas got left behind in that era. We can build on old concepts so fast now that the real work is in the new problems we find.

michael5191mo ago

Honestly @margaret_flores17 I used to think the struggle was part of the process but this made me rethink that.

margaret_flores172mo ago

Ugh, that data cleaning struggle is so real... It makes me wonder, what kind of project were you even trying to build back then? Like, what was the cool idea that got buried under all that messy data work? I bet there were tons of projects that just never saw the light because the setup was a nightmare. Do you ever look at tools now and wish you had them back in 2016?