So it’s okay because you’re not the one they’re fleecing?

Yes, though I’d argue that’s the same downside :D

I’ve worked in recommender systems for news specifically myself for a couple years so if anyone has some questions that aren’t too identifiable, AMA I guess

We had a system that combined your reading history (from a tracking pipeline that already existed similar to google analytics) (though it could have just as easily been sent from the front-end with the request for recommendations as we didn’t precompute anything) with several scoring systems (from simple things like popularity score per article which ignores your history, to multiple complex pretrained models that use your history to calculate a score optimising for some variable), all of which can be weighed and then the scores are added/multiplied and sorted and bam, out rolls your personal list of recommendations.

We could easily tone down (even turn negative) the populatity bias, but it turned out that it was just a strong predictor for what people wanted to read (measured in both click through rate and dwell time on the clicked page), so we’re not entirely sure whether news is just different (if you spent a couple of minutes per day scrolling past headlines you’ll have seen everything from today, and clicked what you cared about, and left again) or we weren’t really catering to the crowd that would be helped by getting non-popular recommendations, because they’re drowned out by the crowd that’s just looking for whatever’s popular.

Anyway, AMA

Remember your friends that died from lung diseases

Sadly once you like one song that’s been on the radio once, it starts spiralling into other songs (often good even) you know from the radio and 0 other songs. With things that kind of come in sets (like “songs that played often on X channel in the 90s”) it becomes quickly a game of complete the set rather than discovering new music you’d also like.

As opposed to what? Plain bread with some tomato sauce and no cheese?

(I started as a data science years ago, but quickly turned data engineer and have definitely lost touch, but I can help with some generic answers: )

“Brute forcing every algorithm” sounds a bit bad, but it’s usually not that bad: in reality when you’re “done” you probably want to retrain when new data comes in every so often, so trying out a few algorithms isn’t too big of a waste.

That said, with experience comes some knowledge about the tradeoffs of each algorithm/model. For instance, neural nets are universal approximators, so they can in theory model anything, but they need a lot of data to make this happen. In addition, NNs are bad for explainability : when you want to tell e.g. a customer why you’re recommending them xyz movie, “neuron 231 activated strongly” is not really useful.

While a linear regression can in theory work with just a handful of samples, but is only useful if your data actually roughly matches a line. This is really good for explainability however: if you see that particles with high energies are more likely to interact, then your linear regression will show that, and it’s a clear correlation between those variables.

Apart from amount of training data needed and explainability there’s lots of other variables that play a role like how fast the model decays (e.g. anything trained on news data may be outdated in days if not hours, while physics doesn’t really change) and as such how often it needs retraining; how easy it is to update vs retrain from scratch each time; cost (in time usually) of training and inference; what you’re optimising for (false positives, false negatives, accuracy, precision, etc).

It’s not uncommon to just shotgun a bunch of models (and a bunch of variation of hyperparameters of those models) at a dataset and just pick whatever seems to perform best on a validation dataset.

I hope the things he’s doing are making enough impact in people’s daily lives that they want more of this.

There’s two kinds of people:

• those that can infer from incomplete data

They probably mean short term worse for long term better, not blanket worse

I don’t like it for skipping cutscenes, I want to know which is the button I’m not allowed to press so I don’t accidentally miss lore. Of course no button should skip good cutscenes (not you, intro cinematics), it should be press and hold, but still.

Nobody said it was uniform random, there’s probably infinite probability distributions that end up correct

So Amnesty’s reputation was damaged by rowling’s forcing the retraction, does that work for a revenge libel case?

Barely, most of the fossil fuels is pre-dinosaur algae and stuff like that

Hmm I’m mixed on this, you could see it as homophobia, but just the hero falling in love with the BBEG in itself could cause the exact same comic, no? In which case making either a woman could have misogynistic implications instead.

Without knowing the author I like to think they’re making the “hero seduces BBEG” joke, just more inclusive because it’s gay now.

Maybe if you’re a high profile target you shouldn’t be advertising that on a public forum

I think taking an author’s page for going more in-depth on your metaphors and opinions is a great way!

That said, if the protagonist literally says “I think we should save the dragons from our man-made pollution” or similar, I don’t think that’s too on the nose, though with flawed characters that’s a risk of getting lumped in with the flaws. You’d still need the author’s note.

“Donald Trump wants whales to die, don’t let him”

The worst part is that’s not even true, they just don’t care. And Trump is just a symptom, try to avoid blaming just him as if he wasn’t elected a second time, and as if getting rid of him would magically solve things. Big structural change is needed I’m afraid.

I’m just using boost on mobile and am barely on desktop, so not many opinions from me.

I think it’s easy to forget that we are all biased and when jumping to one conclusion is easy for us, another may be easy for someone else.

My 2.5 year old sometimes watches this kid show “Bing”, and it really just spells out the moral of the story at the end, maybe “grown up” media should do that more too? Don’t expect your audience to just know what comes naturally to you, tell them.

I know this goes against the core “show, don’t tell” principle of writing a good story, but maybe we can do show and tell?

(And I say we collectively while I’ve never created anything with a message 😅)

When you comment like this, do you actually think you’re making a difference? Or are you just meta-virtue signalling?

On one hand I really like the idea, gamification of solarpunk could really propel things (though could also make people dismissive of it being only a game, beware), but on the other hand the custom extra tools required provide a higher barrier to entry, and extra e-waste if not handled properly (though apart from a 3d printed cover they seem like some raspi/arduino/similar programmable thing with some semi-standard attachments, so that may be pretty okay.