I feel like such a novice, but what exactly do lobbyists do? Do they bombard gov't officials with emails, show up in-person, convince people to follow their clients' agendas, etc.? How will they be employed by Reddit? Why is lobbying even a thing?
They tend to serve as subject matter experts when it comes time for legislation to be drafted. It's not practical to expect a 50/60-year old Senator to be able to architect nuanced regulations of social media platforms which didn't exist when he or she was in law school so they outsource the details to lobbyists or similar organizations like think tanks.
There is a legitimate or at least semi-legitimate function of having businesses educate legislators on what impact their existing, proposed or "needed" legislation has on their business. e.g. what would happen to Disney, Universal, et al if Copyright term were reduced to 1 year-after-first-publication? "OMG end of days and we will fire all your constituents!"
Sorry, to be a bit more serious: other groups like EFF, AARP, etc can also lobby legislators to tell them "our members would suffer greatly if you passed H.R. 9999 because it would restrict our access to Xyz and cause them harm. Could you amend your bill to include exclusions for these purposes?" The details of these things can be subtle and it's worth paying someone to hound the legislator to make sure all of the details are covered and they don't try to sweep your group's needs under the rug.
To expand on this, calling and complaining to the intern at your local reps office is lobbying. Asking your school board member to consider adding more snow days when you see them at church is lobbying. Lobbying is any time anyone seeks to influence an elected official. It is not inherently good nor bad.
Right. Buy lunch, invite out to baseball games, write bill drafts, analyze progress of legislation, learn about lawmakers favorite hobbies, that kind of thing.
Or at least that's how I imagine it working since that's basically personal influence 101.
I hope that changes in the future! Looking for a really good course on TensorFlow. Udacity's Self-Driving Car nanodegree is also very hands-on in terms of learning TensorFlow. You build your own mini version.
Awesome! I'm also currently taking Udacity's self-driving car nanodegree, but I think I only intend on doing the first of three semesters because I want to concentrate on the fundamentals, and not necessarily self-driving cars. Do you recommend enrolling or checking out the AI nanodegree? Have you looked at the ML one?
It's too early to evaluate AI nanodegree as it has just started and so far we did Sudoku solver ;-) As for ML, I have it on my mind after SDC & AI, though already took Ng's first run of ML one so I am not sure it would be that beneficial.
So far SDC is the best fun I had in a while, getting a car drive all by itself on a circuit feels absolutely cool! ;-) Have fun as well, I hope they have more cool stuff prepared for us!
Exciting stuff! Thank you for publicly releasing this. Deep learning and self-driving cars are exciting spaces, and will definitely see more activity in the future.
I'm in the same situation. We're a very small team (8 total), so I barely find time to contribute back among other events like trying to relax, personal development, entertainment, etc. I think I might have to carve out one day or a couple hours on a specific day of the week that'll be my "open source time". I look at it almost every day, but don't have enough alone time with the open source software (like React.js) I want to work on.
