Asked about Learning taste from how good work was chosen
Name a direction a lot of people worked on that did not pay off. What signals were visible at the time?
An answer that works
Pick one and be fair to it, since the useful cases are the ones where the argument was good. Then name the signals: results demonstrated only at small scale, a cost that grows rather than shrinks as hardware improves, or a direction motivated by a defect in the incumbent rather than by a measured bottleneck on a task anyone cared about. The last is the one worth carrying, because it is what your own ideas will feel like from the inside.
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