The last bit about Netflix is really depressing and matches my experience with their recommendations and some of my response.
so the job of most modern recommendation algorithms is to return the closest thing to porn that is still Safe For Work
So, this is the best of all possible worlds.
It seems like algorithms tend to start out strong and then get progressively worse over time because whatever they incentivize inevitably gets gamed. For example, I've been kind of amazed at how bad Google search has been lately. It started out great, but after decades of incentivizing shitty spam websites, that's what most of the internet is. And Google can't really pick its way through all the horse shit any better than Bing.
But what's really amazing to me is the amount of damage that Google's algorithm has done to the internet as a whole. You can't find a recipe online these days that isn't prefaced by 16 paragraphs about the author's life-changing experience on vacation in Thailand. Nobody wants that, but the algorithm rewards it so there it is.
And how many lifetimes-worth of hours have been wasted by blog owners and small website operators picking spam out of their comments sections, when the primary reason the spam exists is to game search engine results? Its a massive externality that Google has not answered for, and likely never will.
Back from the innocent days of the late 90s I recall a story about an aspiring author who created a personal web page. Some of his friends understood how search algorithms worked and created a bunch of web pages containing the phrase "no talent hack", which they linked back to his page. So for a few weeks or months he was the number one result if you googled "no talent hack".
You can't find a recipe online these days that isn't prefaced by 16 paragraphs about the author's life-changing experience on vacation in Thailand.
All the recipe narratives I find are by plucky-cloyingly-exasperated moms who are. so. DONE. but even their man-boy husband and picky eaters will all eat this recipe! In one very specific narrative voice.
As a man-boy husband I get offended at those, especially because I'm the one doing the cooking.
3: $recipefoo site:www.seriouseats.com
7: I am broken, because nothing I have made from there has tasted particularly good. (I have not made the infinitely optimized chocolate chip cookies.)
I search for "$food recipe" all the time and get almost exclusively links for allrecipes.com. Usually, the top hit displays the recipe on the search page itself. I do have a favorite quick recipe that involves scrolling through pages of what heebie describes.
8. I like serious eats, but their relentless optimization is tiresome and doesn't always render the best results. I once tried chilling my dough for the 3 days KLA recommends, and while the texture was nice, the cookies tasted mildly fermented. 12-24 hours is plenty of time to solidify the fat and hydrate the sugar.
SeriousEats is an example of how the content you get by searching on a specific, reputable website is so much better than whatever the Google search algorithm will barf up. But Google's algorithm isn't smart enough to just give you that instead of extended plucky-mom-visits-Thailand stories from AllRecipies.com.
True story: Last week I got the following Goodreads recommendation: "Because you read Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph: Beezus and Ramona (Ramona#1)"
I bought a camera semi-online - in-store pickup, but purchased online outside of business hours - and that meant creating an account, which meant getting signed up for marketing emails. I could have opted out immediately but let the marketing emails run for about a week. Oddly, they just sent me generic product deals and advertisements when they could have tailored things to the one fact they knew, which is that I bought a camera. I later bought a higher grade SD card and a case from a different retailer.
Not a recommendation story, but there was a publisher site, I think maybe Penguin, that had a generic "don't miss the latest" pop up ad regardless of author. So if you were looking at classics you'd get things like: "Don't miss new books by Herodotus!"
I mean, that would be quite an event.
I recently found those incessant webads for "thing you just recently purchased" actually useful, since the one I bought from Amazon showed up to the door as just an empty box and was sold out there when I went get a replacement.
I figure I'd hear about new books from Herodotus even if I didn't sign up for the special alert email.
The article made me think of something I read- an article or blog post or comment (possibly here) or something. About how sellers and advertisers now are all desperately counting clicks and click-throughs and follow-up purchases and constantly being disappointed by the numbers and then harassing the web marketers to get better placement and do more exciting popups or something, because the ads are not reaching enough people.
But the thing is, they're comparing those numbers to the numbers of people reached prior to the internet (and still, probably, for printed things) where if you put an ad in the paper, the paper tells you how many papers were sold and you count that as how many people you reached. Or magazine or whatever. But nobody ever had any idea how many people looked at any ads, or how many people bought stuff because of the ads. They were always just guessing.
The point being, advertisers aren't used to having actual data about how well their ads are working, and the numbers are telling them that the whole industry has mostly been a waste of time all along.
"I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. Problem is I don't know which half."
Oh, hey, I know this guy a bit from before he quit. Good person.
I've always enjoyed looking at creative, well-done ads, but I don't think I've ever considered buying the thing being advertised. (unless I'd considered it already of course)
Hilariously newspapers used to argue that each paper copy was read by something like 2 or 3 people, whether passing it around or leaving it on a bench for someone else to pick up. I worked on the student paper with a print run of 9000 and I think we told our advertisers that we had a readership of 20k.
and lots of magazines would end up in doctors' offices and be read by hundreds of waiting patients, so each one counts as like 50 at least. (I think it's actually 5 or something). The whole thing is a scam. Poor foolish advertisers.
Anyway, I always found modeling shit to be difficult and whenever I tried methods where an algorithm picked the model, like a regression tree, the output was either too confusing to interpret or too obvious to care about. I'm glad to know it wasn't my fault.
My favorite model suggested that the best way to avoid knee arthritis was to avoiding falling down hard enough to injure your knee.
I bought something online from a store I've never bought online from and today, one week later, I got a text message phishing scam "offer" referring to my recent purchase from that store. Doesn't that mean that scammers have an inside track into the purchasing system of the store? There's no way it's coincidence that I got targeted by this particular phishing campaign just now.
I want to start a phishing campaign for fake Phish tickets.
I guess maybe defrauding people with money works better.
The important point is that if your doctor tells you to intentionally injure your knee, look at the medical literature before you listen uncritically.
I want to start a phishing campaign for fake Phish tickets.
"Dear Fellow Traveler: Have you ever read an email? I mean really stopped and read an email..."
5: The Ree Drummond effect is horrible. Horrible. Let me tell you reader, when you read this comment, you won't believe it. But you will read it. All. And then you will believe.
What is the Ree Drummond effect? I didn't know who Ree Drummond was, but on looking her up she certainly seems an indicator of a lot of hateful trends. (Aside from her career, her husband is in the league of the super-rich - 23rd-biggest landowning family in the country, apparently.)
33!
I actually tried listening to a bunch go Phish the other day, the way junkies used to grind up codeine tablets when they couldn't get anything else. They're a great cover band who should never be allowed to write their own songs.
@24 logically if you send enough free copies to dentists and doctors offices then you never have to actually sell your paper to use it as an advertising platform.
In tin foil hat, territory, I recently had an experience of that phenomenon I've seen described elsewhere online, where I start getting ads for things I've only ever discussed verbally, with someone, and never searched for online.
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/wjbzzy/your-phone-is-listening-and-its-not-paranoia
^ that kind of thing.
I was visiting a friend, and his daughter came into the room with a harmonica, and tunelessly played it for a few minutes, and left the room. We had a short conversation about harmonicas, and I mentioned that I used to play, really badly, but I wasn't sure where my harmonica was. Next day, I had ads in my Facebook feed for harmonicas. I've never googled for, searched for, purchased or browsed anything harmonica related. In fact, the first time I've typed anything harmonica related anywhere, is this comment.
YOU SAY "I WISH TO PURCHASE AN HARMONICA" OUT LOUD ONCE AND IT'S STILL FOLLOWING YOU AROUND DECADES LATER
This is basically it. The problem with scale is that once you scale up enough, everything starts to look like the average characteristics of the general population, in much the same way that if you put more and more money into a winning trade you eventually move the market so it's not a winner any more. Big eventually leads to basic. The Holy Grail of product management is escaping this and managing to be cool at scale, but that's just as hard as it sounds, both because the overwhelming dullness of the majority catches up with you and because the bigger you get the easier it is to tread on more people's toes. (The people who really understand this are all in fashion where it's a way of life; there's a reason Teen Vogue is super woke.)
The thing about good search/recommendation (which are the same ML problem from different perspectives) is that there is a fundamental tradeoff between efficiency (aka put the Wikipedia article for x at the top of the results) and serendipity (turn up the unexpected, because information is by definition that which is unexpected), and it's infinitely easier to pursue the first goal than the second. Your ML model will, by its own nature, hone in on it! More subtly, it's the kind of thing that businesses and organizations know how to manage and reward. Also, saying you want to add more randomness to the recommendations sounds a lot like taking a risk. What if it recommends the bad stuff?
Of course, though, as the OP points out, optimizing for the safe option will eventually give you the bad stuff anyway because the bad stuff is itself optimized to push people's buttons, it's therefore popular, and people search for it!
This is kind of my meta-theory of everything. In the 2ks TV still dominated everything. The Obama years were the reflection of when the Internet was still good, but now it was big enough to actually matter. Now, though, the iron law of doom through scale has caught up, and the Internet audience is basically equivalent to the TV audience, just with Internet characteristics. Which is of course *completely terrible*. And that gave us Trump, Brexit, a bunch of similar parallel phenomena.
(I remember someone writing around 2011-2012 that The Valley is finished: the pretty people have got here.)
re: 40
This is a problem I have to work in cultural heritage collection delivery projects. There's an influential article, by Mitchell Whitelaw, from a few years ago on "generous interfaces" for digital collections: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/1/000205/000205.html
For CH organisations, it's much less sophisticated than the sort of thing big commercial content providers are doing, but it's the same basic problem. How to surface content in a way that lets serendipity and relevance both play a role.
19 was basically my position for most of the aughts, but I'm not so sure any more. My assumption was that rates for TV and print ads would collapse as advertisers woke up to the implications of the data, while rates for online advertising would increase pretty dramatically (at least for the sort of niche/product based advertising that doesn't do well in old media except for the most basic goods), so they'd end up meeting somewhere in the middle. That doesn't really seem to have panned out, however. Old media ad rates still command a massive premium, and my understanding is that outside of a few very specific areas that don't really scale, online ad rates haven't gone up much at all. To the extent more money is going into online ads, it's going to a combination of increased inventory and middlemen (eg the tracking firms in the article), not headline CPM ad rates.
Oh and, obviously, Google and Facebook, rather than publishers or other websites.
it's infinitely easier to pursue the first goal than the second. Your ML model will, by its own nature, hone in on it!
Triggered.
41: the Internet audience is basically equivalent to the TV audience, just with Internet characteristics
Always September, never Christmas ....
So, the hidden downside to keeping $190 million in crypto-currency in an account that is very secure because only one person has the password is that like the sands of time through the hourglass, so are the Days of Our Lives.
What is the Ree Drummond effect? I didn't know who Ree Drummond was, but on looking her up she certainly seems an indicator of a lot of hateful trends. (Aside from her career, her husband is in the league of the super-rich - 23rd-biggest landowning family in the country, apparently.)
Ree Drummond is The Pioneer Woman. She was a City Girl who married a Rancher and had to adapt to Ranch Life. She had a super popular blog about her lifestyle which turned into mostly recipes. Then she got a TV show where she mostly drives around the ranch in an enormous truck telling the camera what she made the boys for lunch today. I don't know at what point it became clear to her fans that her Rancher husband is a member of a super-wealthy dynasty, maybe never but it sure makes ranch life both aspirational and accessible.
So, the hidden downside to keeping $190 million in crypto-currency in an account that is very secure because only one person has the password is that like the sands of time through the hourglass, so are the Days of Our Lives.
Funny how one would create a will leaving $100K to one's dogs not 10 days before allegedly "dying in India" whilst in sole possession of that $190 million key.
Either way, chalk up another win for, um, trustless decentralised currencies.
At first I thought you guys were talking about this story, about a "crypto-anarchist" who was shot and killed in Mexico:
Bathed in the sunlight of Mexico's dry season, his dreadlocks tumbling down his back, a man who went by the name "John Galton," an apparent nod to the hero of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," observed almost two years ago, "There's pockets of freedom all over the world if you're willing to live in freedom."
[...]
Joining a community of like-minded expatriates, Galton had sought to build a life as a self-made man. He advocated drug liberalization and taught classes on cryptocurrencies. He was set to be featured in a documentary called "Stateless."
[...]
As for the locals, "They don't seem to mind us living here. We've lived here a year with no issues."
[...]
Guerrero State police said in a statement Saturday that the survivors reported armed men showing up at a "cannabis greenhouse" and targeting Galton. The attorney's office, which confirmed that Galton had been killed, said in a statement Sunday that it had found a marijuana laboratory on the premises, including white lights and gas tanks. No suspects had been named, and a motive for the killing remained unknown.
Among their projects were organizing "Meat Ups," which advocated a carnivorous diet, and creating "an uncensorable Wikipedia."
In retrospect, moving to Acapulco to compete with the local drug cartels seems ill-advised.
I don't put it past the phone complex to be targeting ads based on undisclosed monitoring, but one pattern that could also explain a lot of the instances like 38 is other people in the conversation doing the searching. Could the friend, or his daughter, have searched "harmonica" after leaving that evening, and then due to the specificity, a seller thought it was a good bet to blast their entire social network with harmonica ads?
(Thinking of all the times people used to go on social media and ask "Why is LinkedIn suggesting I should connect with this person? I never shared my info with them!" and the answer was "Probably you're in their contacts and they shared it.")
An armed society is a polite society. Presumably he was shot politely.
"The motive for the murder of this drug lab owner is unknown" is up there with "What first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?"
I think if you're going to be successful as an anarchist, you need lots more guns. This guy's guns-to-weed ratio was way, way off.
50: It seems there are no bitcoins and the whole thing is a classic Ponzi scheme: https://medium.com/@zeroresearchproof/quadrigacx-chain-analysis-report-pt-1-bitcoin-wallets-19d3a375d389
Also, on 53:
His lawyer gave him several books that put him on a "fast track toward anarchy," he said, including Machiavelli's "The Prince" and Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People."
If he could be radicalized by Dale Carnegie I suspect exposure to pretty much *any* book would have done the trick.
Dale Carnegie sent the Pinkertons in to shoot strikers.
53: OMG, is it John Galt + Francis Galton? Too fabulous. My old quip was that Galton "wrote a book whose only known reader destroyed it," but that's not quite true.
I am genuinely sorry he met such a bad end. That's like shooting a puppy.
Given Carnegie is also a major cited influence of Trump, I wonder how much blood he has on his hands overall.
Both blood and practice in his hands.
a seller thought it was a good bet to blast their entire social network with harmonica ads?
They wouldn't even need to blast the whole social network if they could detect who, specifically, the searcher had been interacting with in recent days. And I can think of at least a couple of ways they can detect that.
I actually tried listening to a bunch go Phish the other day, the way junkies used to grind up codeine tablets when they couldn't get anything else. They're a great cover band who should never be allowed to write their own songs.
This is very true.
In tin foil hat, territory, I recently had an experience of that phenomenon I've seen described elsewhere online, where I start getting ads for things I've only ever discussed verbally, with someone, and never searched for online.
I've totally had this happen. It's so goddamn creepy.
Two votes for grinding up codeine tablets. I guess I will try it.
Also, I did not realize that Pioneer Woman was such an empire with such a reach. I knew she had a book out or two, but that seemed reasonable.
It's interesting how non-tech people just accept it as fact that the phone is listening to all our conversations and giving us ads based on them, while tech people come up with alternate explanations of how this might not be happening. And yet it's tech people who are supposedly worried about privacy. Everyone is worried about privacy but tech people keep maintaining some hope for a rule-based regime, and non-tech people have already given up all hope and added it to our permanent worries.
It seems there are no bitcoins and the whole thing is a classic Ponzi scheme
Its funny that the reason they now know this is because bitcoin is so traceable. Maybe they could have used these techniques to figure out Quadriga had no money before their money into it?
If you know the emperor isn't wearing any clothes, maybe you don't look until you're reasonably sure you won't see taint.
That's a metaphor, not an analogy.
75: I don't think I count as a tech person, although that is a thing.
Everyone is worried about privacy but tech people keep maintaining some hope for a rule-based regime, and non-tech people have already given up all hope and added it to our permanent worries.
Maybe it's because they are actually, physically, right now involved with complying with an actually existing rules-based regime? If you have any EEA users at all, GDPR is for you.
I am genuinely sorry he met such a bad end. That's like shooting a puppy.
In Halford's absence, I'm afraid I'll have to step up to rebuke this. For a smug anarchist, death by lawlessness is poetic justice.
Right -- do I fall on the "tech person" side if my immediate reaction is to quibble about the fuzziness of those categories? I had not registered the fall's mini-crash as a thing, so I may not actually be a tech person. (H/t.) (See how I am self-consciously employing outmoded internet slang to underscore my liminal status as an aging idiot.)
81: oh, and I suppose you cheered when the grizzly ate that guy in the movie too, you heartless monster.
75: From some article I read that appeared to be the reasoning of the kids and young adults that agreed to give Facebook total access to their online activity -- they all assumed that companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon etc all had total access anyway, so they might as well make a few bucks.
82.2: No spoilers. I haven't seen "Christopher Robin" yet.
Further evidence of my ignorance: that Economist article I linked was not the first I'd ever heard of Tencent, because the first I'd ever heard of Tencent was seeing its name on the brand-new building on my way to the office not long ago.
84: Eeyore had it coming.
I was just reading how Tencent owns a chunk of Fortnight and is making a go at creating a competitor for the Steam store. Apparently the store sucks, but the draw for developers is that it only takes 12% of revenue instead of Steam's 22%. Its nice to see platform fees coming down. If only Apple, Android, and Amazon would get the memo.
||
I just finished the CBC podcast series "Bomb on Board", where they investigated the extremely cold case of CP21. Spoiler alert, they never came up with a preferred suspect, but when going over all the major suspects at the end, co-host Ian Hanomansing wanted to eliminate one of them on grounds of his evident compassion toward his family, that he saw as inconsistent with intentionally killing not only himself but 51 other innocent people. (The motive would have been insurance for his family.) I was like, man, have you not realized in your decades of existence how people compartmentalize how they regard different chunks of humanity based on level of connection? Altruism isn't a binary proposition! The co-host Sarah Wagstaffe did not agree to rule him out, though for different reasons.
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I was just reading how Tencent owns a chunk of Fortnight and is making a go at creating a competitor for the Steam store.
Kind of. Tencent owns a big chunk of Epic, the developer and publisher of Fortnite, and the company that's creating a new store on the back of the Fortnite launcher (you can't buy Fortnite through Steam, or from Google Play for that matter). I'm pretty sure that Tencent has its own platform in China, but China's weird for videogames right now -- they stopped approving new videogames for something like 9 months last year, which really hurt Tencent.
The Epic store has really pissed off a lot of gamers, because lots of games have become temporarily exclusive to the store, including some which were until recently being pre-sold on Steam. I don't really get the anger to be honest. The Steam sales are still being fulfilled and will get patches and DLC and so on, so there's no real direct harm to the customers, just a loss of opportunity to buy something in a particular place. It's not like you have to buy new hardware to play the games now. Sure it's better to have price competition than not, but I find this far less egregious than, say, outlet exclusive game content, or even true platform exclusives like you see on consoles.
Gamers will bitch about anything. A lot of times they are even right, though in this case they are perhaps overlooking the advantage of having a new and aggressive competitor for Steam.
I don't really believe the ad targeting stories. Does that make me a techie? But it seems to me that ttaM will have music interests on his advertising profile; his friends' daughter will have been incontinent about harmonicas all over the internet, as well as all over visitors, and the phones will have made the two of them in close proximity for a couple of hours.
That's all spooky and disgusting enough but it doesn't require the permanent recording of anything said near a microphone. I mean, where would even Amazon get the storage space? And why hasn't it been subpoena'd yet? Law enforcement has, we know, grabbed some recordings from suspected murder scenes. You'd have thought they'd be all over this if it existed.
On the other hand, I would love to know what all the traffic is that my Amazon TV stick seems to be sending over the network on the days (almost all of them) when I am not using it nor even switching the television on.
where would even Amazon get the storage space
I think that, at least, is not a barrier given that they are also marketing storage to all and sundry these days. (To use voice recordings for marketing they wouldn't have to store all recordings indefinitely, just listen for keywords, retain the keywords, and delete the audio.)
I wonder what lists "How to make your own shake and bake pork chops" will get you on. Because I have pork chops, an oven, various spice, and breadcrumbs.