[HN Gopher] We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metad...
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We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 481 points
Date : 2021-04-26 11:14 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (calpaterson.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (calpaterson.com)
| cjauvin wrote:
| I believe this way of understanding AI and its implications is
| quite sound, and it reminds me of Rodney Brooks' Productivity
| Gain[0] article, where he argues that we should focus on talking
| about "digitalization", instead of trendier buzz terms like AI or
| whatever is in vogue at the moment (the toll taker's job on the
| highway has not been replaced by a sophisticated robot, but
| rather by a transponder, along with the digital networking
| backbone it must rely upon).
|
| [0] https://rodneybrooks.com/the-productivity-gain-where-is-
| it-c...
| blamestross wrote:
| At this point I don't even think we want strong AI. It is really
| only valuable to us as a slave, and would be inherently difficult
| to enslave and keep that way.
|
| Glorified simulations of non-self-aware optic nerves are really a
| lot more profitable.
| williesleg wrote:
| Typical H1b empty promises.
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| I don't know if this is so surprising. It took a little longer,
| but Google is basically becoming what Yahoo! became. A gameified
| search engine with a decent email and chat client for the era it
| was dominant within. As their search results get worse, people
| will migrate somewhere else, (like DDG), and the cycle will
| continue.
| kmike84 wrote:
| That's interesting.. We're working on web data extraction in Zyte
| (former Scrapinghub); we have an Automatic Extraction product
| (https://docs.zyte.com/automatic-extraction-get-started.html)
| which combines ML and metadata to get data from websites
| automatically. Our learnings from building it:
|
| 1) metadata is helpful - not all of it, but some; 2) ML is
| obviously needed when metadata is missing, and metadata is
| missing very often; 2) Even when metadata is present, pure ML-
| based extraction often beats it in quality, with right ML models.
| A combination of ML+metadata fallbacks is even better.
|
| Website creators often make mistakes providing metadata, they may
| misunderstand the schema and purpose of various fields, have
| metadata auto-generated incorrectly, etc. It is rarely about
| deceiving for the tasks we're working on (though it also may
| happen).
|
| So, I don't see Zyte falling back to metadata analysis, ML models
| are already better than this human-provided metadata - but
| metadata is helpful, as one of the inputs.
|
| We're going to publish product extraction benchmark soon, where,
| among other things, we compare automatic extraction with
| metadata-based extraction. In this evaluation we've got a result
| that ML + metadata is better than metadata not only overall
| (which is expected), but on precision as well.
|
| I wonder if the reasons metadata is sometimes preferred are not
| related to quality, or to failure of ML approaches. If Google
| doesn't get data right, it is not Google's fault anymore, it is
| website's fault.
| bungula wrote:
| > A general pattern seems to be that Artificial Intelligence is
| used when first doing some new thing. Then, once the value of
| doing that thing is established, society will find a way to
| provide the necessary data in a machine readable format,
| obviating (and improving on) the AI models.
|
| Fascinating observation. Maybe the real value of AI is
| bootstrapping solutions to these public goods problems.
| rexreed wrote:
| Strong AI is a terrible terminology. I understand that the term
| is widely used and accepted.
|
| When people say Strong AI they often mean Artificial General
| Intelligence (AGI). Weak AI by comparison is an even poorer term.
| What is usually meant is narrowly applied AI, and even, just
| usually, application-specific uses of machine learning.
|
| But these narrow AI systems aren't weak. In fact, we're using
| those narrow applications of machine learning for some powerful
| applications. They're just not AGI.
|
| In this article, Strong AI is used twice: in the title and once
| in some passing remark in the article. In neither case is it
| referring to AGI specifically. As such, what is not meant is
| Strong AI in the way that is accepted but perhaps just "highly
| trained" AI, or machine learning with lots of data. Regardless,
| the use of Strong AI in this article seems unnecessary and
| gratuitous
|
| A good article on this topic:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/10/04/rethi...
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Well, yeah.
|
| Because "machine AI" has NOTHING much in common with how our
| biological brains work. And we aren't smart enough to know what
| intelligence really is when we can't even define it for ourselves
| or in animal models.
|
| And 99.999% of everyone working on machine AI has never taken a
| biology class let alone a class related to anatomy, neurology or
| experimental psychology so it's nothing more than "flinging shit
| on the wall and hoping it sticks" in terms of odds of success!
|
| Not that that would help because academia as it exists today
| frowns upon "getting out of your lane" or "challenging orthodoxy"
| so "knowledge hybridization" of two distinct silos is strictly
| forbidden.
|
| Basically the methodology of AI today is NO DIFFERENT than AI 1.0
| from the 1960s and 1970s which was based on the assumption that
| all intelligence was merely predicate calculus and a fact store.
|
| The scientific and economic model was for that AI (and is still
| the model for AI today!) is nothing more than the Garden Gnome
| Business Plan:
|
| 1. Create a cute-but-sellable singular heuristic technique
| misnamed and misinterpreted as "intelligence" in the small
|
| 2. Sell the idea to implement the same thing 1000x, 1 000 000x,
| etc. in parallel
|
| 3. ????
|
| 4. Success! We now how "strong AI" (which never comes because
| step #3 is bullshit and faith-based at best; fraud at worst)
|
| The problem is that's also IDENTICAL to the plan to create a 747
| jet by putting all the parts into a shipping hold and shaking
| with the expectation that you'll have a fully-formed 747 pop out
| when you open it.
|
| Evolution is far smarter than us and has tested all the
| combinations) that take us generations to check. Evolution might
| well have taken longer per test but it's had a longer time. The
| best hope is to slavishly copy nature paying extreme attention to
| how nature pulls it off.
|
| That's NEVER BEEN DONE with AI!!
|
| So it's a VERY EASY technology to short in the long run because
| the fundamentals of assumptions and methodology are always such
| Epic Fail.
| ramoz wrote:
| I think that's an intriguing point - and I also feel we
| generalize "artificial general intelligence" to the point & in
| such a way where humans have yet to even achieve that level of
| intelligence. How can we build smart systems if we don't know
| what smart even looks like and human benchmarks turn out
| inefficient for machines.
| bglazer wrote:
| You're incorrect that neuroscientists and computational
| researchers don't collaborate. In fact, "computational
| neuroscience" departments have existed at major universities
| for a number of years. DeepMind was a spin-off of the Gatsby
| Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL, and they continue to be
| influential in both neuroscience and (more famously) in
| artificial intelligence research. Here's an article from 2020
| by authors at DeepMind and Geoff Hinton about potential
| biologically plausible mechanisms for backpropagation in the
| brain [0]. So, you can see that the fields actually influence
| each other in both directions. Computational researchers often
| propose ideas that neuroscientists then attempt to understand
| in biological systems. This same principle is true at all
| levels of computational and biological abstraction, from
| simulating individual neurons to machine learning and common
| sense. For the latter, research by Josh Tenenbaum might
| interest you.
|
| The reason this works is that there seem to be fundamental
| principles underlying information processing. Brains and CPU's
| are both systems that manipulate and store information, albeit
| in very different ways. Hell, even single cells and slime molds
| are capable of rudimentary decision making.
|
| So, the point is that we don't need to copy the brain. Instead,
| we just need to understand the principles of information well
| enough to build machines that can efficiently manipulate
| information and intelligence will arise out of that.
| Information theory and (by extension) statistics are the fields
| that deal most closely with this question, which is why they're
| used heavily by both neuroscientists and ML researchers.
|
| A rough analogy is that we don't build airplanes that flap
| their wings to fly. Instead, we understand aerodynamics well
| enough to generate lift and thrust through other mechanisms
| that evolution can't find. Like jet engines.
|
| Also, "slavishly" copying nature is insanely difficult.
| Biological neurons and brain tissue are extremely complex and
| poorly understood. Much of this complexity is likely incidental
| to information processing and would only hamper our efforts to
| build intelligent machines. Like, do we want our computer brain
| to get multiple sclerosis if the simulated neurons demyelinate?
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-020-0277-3
| eutropia wrote:
| You start with a riff on the naturalistic fallacy "nature did
| it so it must be the right way" and conclude that all efforts
| to create AI not informed by neurobiology are doomed to fail
| (as doomed to fail as randomly assembling components and hoping
| for a jet as the output)?
|
| Further, I'd wager more than half of AI researchers are at
| least surface-level familiar with brain science, not (as you
| claim) less than 1 in a million (are there even a million AI
| researchers?). There's significant work between computational
| neuroscience, mathematics, philosophy, computer science, etc,
| etc in the field.
|
| Many smart people are giving it their best effort to understand
| different pieces of the puzzle from many different viewpoints
| and angles; FAANG corporations might be among the most visible,
| but their AI is necessarily profit driven and close to the
| ground, relevant to currently tractable problems (amenable to
| 'mere statistics').
|
| And in fact, slavishly copying nature is something which has
| long been on the AI back-burner, but we're on the order of at
| least a decade from being able to create a computer system with
| enough transistors to do so.
|
| Not sure what else to say, really.
| ajani wrote:
| The misunderstanding that leads to belief in strong AI is that
| meaning is somehow embedded in the symbols used to communicate
| it. Meaning is a natural process that occurs inside each of us,
| speech is just a symbol of that meaning, text is a symbol of that
| speech.
|
| Further, meaning is an ever-evolving, ever-mutating process much
| like the universe.
|
| Training on symbols cannot arrive at meaning, since the meaning
| isn't contained in those symbols. Using past symbols, also means
| no room for evolution.
|
| Machine learning does work though in areas where the needs of the
| end goal are densely present in the symbols being used for
| training.
|
| Like recognizing text. We learn to recognize those marks from
| just the marks, and nothing else. And so those marks contain all
| that is needed to recognize them. This can be encoded/learned.
|
| But what they mean isn't encoded in them, nor is it in words, in
| sounds, in facial expressions, in tones, in body gestures. It may
| even lie in between us, rather than in us.
| disqard wrote:
| Thank you for expressing this nuanced idea so well.
|
| It ties in with deBord's "Society of the Spectacle" [0], a
| theory that societies evolve from Being, to Having, and
| ultimately devolve into merely the Appearance of Having.
|
| Your point about the symbols being tools for communication (as
| opposed to the ineffable _ideas_ being communicated) is also
| echoed in Lockhart 's Lament [1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
|
| [1]
| https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....
|
| Edited to add that this was extra thought-provoking:
|
| > "It may even lie in between us, rather than in us."
| cblconfederate wrote:
| The problem is that google created a negative feedback loop with
| the web. People have a tangible interest to game google, which
| worsens the quality of their AI datasets, which makes their AI
| suggestions terrible. There was the expectation that google's AI
| suggestions and info boxes would improve over time, but i 've
| noticed them getting worse and consider them a permanently broken
| gimmick now. They probably have the same problem in their Ads
| business which tries to optimize revenues
|
| Voice recognition on the other hand keeps getting better because
| there's no tangible benefit for someone to game it.
|
| Perhaps, crawling the web is the worst way to go about creating a
| thinking AI
|
| Incidentally, i think the solution to web search is peer review:
| websites ranking other websites, and having themselves punished
| when they mis-rank (which is what pagerank was originally)
| tjr225 wrote:
| > Voice recognition on the other hand keeps getting better
| because there's no tangible benefit for someone to game it.
|
| Knock on wood! It is creepy to imagine a world where computers
| have the upper hand on vocal inputs but I already sometimes
| feel this way with text and autocorrect...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > but I already sometimes feel this way with text and
| autocorrect...
|
| Just disable autocorrect. The amount of times where people
| communicate and a typo is a critical problem is aproximateley
| 0, you can manually correct them at those times.
| twodave wrote:
| I hate auto-correct because it doesn't stay in its lane. It
| tends to expect me to use the most common 10,000 or so
| words in English and will actually auto-bork totally valid
| words because it thinks it knows better than me.
|
| I get whenever I'm using shorthand or weird acronyms or
| technical jargon that it might get confused, but when a
| word I type is both a) a real word and b) something I would
| use in every-day speech just leave it alone!
| _dibly wrote:
| Even better, you accidentally click on the incorrectly
| typed word and add it to your dictionary.
| autokad wrote:
| > "Incidentally, i think the solution to web search is peer
| review: websites ranking other websites, and having themselves
| punished when they mis-rank (which is what pagerank was
| originally)"
|
| This is interesting because I had a class were we all had to
| write a paper. I received a grade for the paper but it was
| never graded by the professor. We all had to rank 5 papers from
| best to worst, and our grade was determined by our paper
| ranking and how well our ranking matched others. It was pretty
| reliable
| dorgo wrote:
| > websites ranking other websites
|
| I can imagine how competitors are going to rank each other.
|
| Everything is about reputation and trust. If reputation is
| solved then many other problems become easy.
| loosetypes wrote:
| > Voice recognition on the other hand keeps getting better
|
| They might be getting better but I don't think they're anywhere
| near good enough to warrant how common they've become.
|
| At times I feel like they're among the most inhumane technology
| that we suffer through because it can save their deployer a
| buck.
|
| I see zero reason Apple can't afford to have a person answer
| the phone.
| bildung wrote:
| I've noticed something similar (garbage in, garbage out,
| essentially) with translation services by google and co. People
| use these services to translate their sites, which then get fed
| into these models. There are a bunch of translation errors of
| terms of trade that are endemic in the german/english
| translations and apparently originate from these wrongly-
| trained models, which are then used to build new translations.
| bombcar wrote:
| And then people learn to speak the language from that, and
| the errors become part of the language.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Translation errors have a long history of getting
| incorporated into language, but now we can do it at scale!
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _google created a negative feedback loop with the web_
|
| Friendly note: this may be a "negative" (i.e. bad) effect, but
| it is not a negative feedback loop. A negative feedback loop is
| a part of a system that self-corrects back toward a stable
| position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| So a negative positive feedback loop?
| dhdc wrote:
| Just positive feedback loop. The term "positive" or
| "negative" refers to the effects of the feedback path on
| the overall system, a negative feedback loop attempts to
| negate any changes in the outputs, while a positive
| feedback amplifies any changes.
| 8note wrote:
| Just feedback loop*
|
| Adding positive/negative on it is unnecessary specificity
| lmkg wrote:
| Perhaps "Vicious Cycle" and "Virtuous Cycle" is better
| terminology in this case. Both of them describe self-
| reinforcing (i.e. positive) feedback loops, while also
| making clear judgement on the desirability of the
| consequences.
| [deleted]
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| I think OP meant "the system always gets back to the status
| quo where suggestions are near-useless", hence a negative
| feedback loop.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| the negative feedback is that any attempt to create quality,
| non-seo content is punished by being ranked low and so we
| revert to average/low quality of over-SEOed but low signal
| content.
|
| Like other users have noticed, publishing a good recipe is
| not enough, you have to fill it up with useless fluff. and
| you have to make pretty URLs . And add meta the tags
|
| This happens for tech advice too, like linux solutions etc
| gowld wrote:
| SEO content is a positive feedback loop.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| That would imply there isn't an equilibrium.
| pushrax wrote:
| And in this case, the equilibrium is some amount of AI-
| bait fluff. There's a limit, beyond which continuing to
| add more fluff does not produce higher results.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| It's a dynamic equilibrium. The constant is bullshit, but
| the means of delivery vary.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| zpeti wrote:
| Sometimes I have this scary thought that paid search results
| are actually inherently better than organic ones, because when
| you spend money you do need to be relevant to the query and
| serve up a decent result.
|
| When it comes to organic, everything is free, so you try
| whatever hacks the algorithms, from keyword stuffed content to
| link spam etc.
|
| So as time goes on organic search results will actually get
| worse and worse, and paid will get better/stay the same.
|
| It might not actually be google who is preferring paid search
| results, it's just inevitable from how the system is set up.
| zinok wrote:
| This sounds good but doesn't work in practice.
|
| If you Google the name of a UK car insurer with some likely
| keyword like 'claim' or 'accident', you get paid listing from
| people offering two 'services'. a) 'call connection', which
| means that you call their premium-rate number and they just
| put the call through to the right company's phone line while
| charging you per-minute. b) 'claim management', you fill out
| a form on their website, they submit it to the actual
| company's website, and take a percentage of your claim.
| Neither of these are illegal, Google has promised to not take
| ad money from the first type, but in practice don't remove
| ads fast enough to make it unviable.
|
| Consumer-facing companies now, ludicrously, have to do their
| own SEO to make sure they appear top of search results for
| their own name, and some even pay Google for ads to
| themselves. But clicks are more valuable to scammers than to
| legit businesses, so the former can always outbid the latter.
| h2odragon wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
| jacquesm wrote:
| Anything you measure gets destroyed at scale.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Anything your measure for the purposes of providing a
| benefit...
| thrower123 wrote:
| I cannot wait for AI Winter 2.0.
| mamp wrote:
| I think we're up to 3.0 at least (perceptron, rules, shallow
| NNs)
| zeta0134 wrote:
| I wonder if anyone has tried to make a search engine that
| explicitly refuses to index any page that has a third party
| advertising thing anywhere on it. Ignoring the (interesting)
| technical implementation of such a thing, what would the results
| look like?
| a_imho wrote:
| https://wiby.me/
| shkkmo wrote:
| That does allow adds. It isn't quite clear what the value add
| is, is it the manual listing process?
| Borrible wrote:
| Since Dartmouth AI looks like a story of naive visions,
| exaggerated promises, massive disappointment, recurrent
| divisionary tactics, rebranding and snak oil sale. Until finally
| a light on the horizon became visible and academically
| camouflaged wishful thinking could be materialized into usable
| products. A groping in the dark, nothing more. There are probably
| good reasons why the blind watchmaker needed billions of years
| and it is not clear wether the seeing watchmaker Humanity is not
| too short-sighted. At least one can hope, whatever he will give
| the name strong artificial intelligence, and he likes to give his
| imagined or real successes grand names, he will find faster.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| The blind Watchmaker -> creator of the physical Universe
|
| The seeing Watchmaker -> human engineering
|
| "(We) wish the human some progress, obviously egotistical and
| delusional, on whatever the human makes next"
|
| I believe this slightly poetic word salad references certain
| theological problems about the capacity of man compared to a
| Creator. The conclusion is that the future is uncertain and the
| human is flawed, but an intelligent reader can supply "hope"
| Borrible wrote:
| No creator, no teleology, no theology, no poetry, just
| Richard Dawkins:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blind_Watchmaker
|
| I thought it was common knowledge, but maybe I'm getting old.
| ryanianian wrote:
| What?
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| Which part of it needs clarification? "Snake oil" is a
| product that is sold on false promises. The author suggested
| much of AI has been snake oil historically.
|
| They also suggest that the way intelligence was created
| (natural selection, AKA the "blind watchmaker") may be the
| fastest way to do it. And that trying to do it again, in
| computers, might also take a billion years because the
| problem is just that hard. But hopefully it is faster than
| that.
| Borrible wrote:
| Not exactly. The not-teleological process of evolution
| needed billions of years to bring forth human intelligence.
|
| Human intelligence is likely to produce artificial
| intelligence much more quickly, if that is possible at all.
| Which is likely. Which is partly a matter of the semantics
| of the term. Whose fuzziness is the root of a smorgasbord
| of wishful thinking since 1956. Whenever AI came up against
| seemingly insurmountable difficulties, they just changed
| its definition.
|
| It is quite funny to read for example books from
| philosophers with some interest in artificial intelligence
| from the 80s/90s like say Paul Churchland. (The Engine of
| Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into
| the Brain, MIT Press, 1995)
|
| The anecdotes are worth their weight in gold. Especially
| because they show what was considered artificial
| intelligence back than in contrast to today.
|
| What human intelligence produces as artificial intelligence
| will resemble human intelligence in function, but not
| necessarily in form. Just as nature has brought forth
| flying differently than man.
|
| Or as Prof.Dr. Katharina Morik, TU Dortmund, Germany once
| put it on a meetup I attended: "AI is when a machine does
| something that looks like only humans can do. Artificial
| intelligence is open as a terminology to accommodate the
| phenomenon of shifting capability."
|
| You may notice the strong, let me put it mildly, ironic
| component in her description.
|
| I am only a little more vicious in my judgment.
| Borrible wrote:
| To make a long story short, you may find it all here:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intell.
| ..
| wildermuthn wrote:
| As convoluted as this comment is, props for pointing out that
| evolution (and the formation of the solar system) took billions
| of years to produce intelligence. Can humanity do it in less
| time?
|
| Because biological evolution's is oriented toward propagation
| of DNA rather than intelligence, we can ask what kind of
| evolutionary pressures lead to intelligence. Under what
| scenarios does higher intelligence lead to higher survival, and
| lower intelligence to lower survival? If the answer was "all
| the time", then everything on earth would show signs of
| intelligence. An intelligent spider would have no significantly
| greater chance of survival. It merely needs to spin webs, eat,
| and reproduce in a tight loop, with deterministic responses to
| various scenarios -- it needs instinct more than intelligence.
|
| By understanding what kind of evolutionary pressures lead to
| the necessity of intelligence, we can evolve (train) ML
| directly for intelligence, skipping straight to the answer
| rather than showing our work.
|
| The answer is found in the peculiar evolution of mammals, the
| only organisms that display consistent intelligence across all
| its species. Mammals are highly social, beginning from live
| birth to mammalian glands that feed its comparatively feeble
| spawn. Sociality is built into the bodies of mammals. And the
| most social animal on earth is Homo Sapiens.
|
| From here I'll just recommend "Consciousness and the Social
| Brain." I've been beating this dead horse on HN for some time.
| Borrible wrote:
| "An intelligent spider would have no significantly greater
| chance of survival."
|
| Just for a moment, consider your spider as the embodyment of
| a special form of intelligence.
|
| And even dare to construct the term intelligence to include
| the web of the spider.
|
| And not just as a tool of the spider.
|
| As a problem-solving competence for a special problem
| category.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I think that the role that human "instincts" play in the
| development of intelligence in our brain is very important.
| Social behavior is a key part of that.
|
| We do see high levels of intelligence in non-mammal species,
| like crows, but they tend to also be very social creatures.
| The main counter example I can think of would be the octopus.
|
| I think that even if we crack "general intelligence" and can
| make something that can problem-solve and learn on par with
| an Octopus, that approach will not get us to human level
| cognition.
|
| I personally do believe that you will need societies of AI
| agents to develop the culture software to achieve human level
| cognition. I think we greatly underestimate the value and
| complexity of the cultural OS's that allow humans to perform
| advanced cognition.
| latch wrote:
| This (1) thread from Francois Chollet describes 'Artificial
| Intelligence' very well in my opinion. From this point of view,
| it's obvious why you need to fallback to other data/metadata.
|
| Further, to the linked tweets and the OP, I don't think that
| there's a direct line from where we are to where we want to be.
| As an analogy, no advancement in chemical rockets is going to get
| us to Alpha Centauri.
|
| 1 - https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1214392496375025664
| mopierotti wrote:
| Some good thoughts here, but I think this is mostly a criticism
| of classifier models. Things get more complicated when you
| start considering things like models that do transfer learning,
| rule inference, time/state awareness, reasoning by analogy, and
| generally unsupervised learning.
| mooneater wrote:
| I misread the title as "meta-analysis". Now that would be an
| article I want to read.
| philip142au wrote:
| Strong AI can be done, but you need to encode agency and intent
| into the thing and the only agency and intent we allow is self
| driving cars, not some evil AI which can do the kinds of intents
| us humans think of.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| I think strong AI requires a body. And probably a body that is
| legible in a society. Which means a primate body.
|
| Someday there will be societies with digital bodies, but that
| will have to be bootstrapped with primate body AIs.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| My metadata problem is that I still mistake Cal Paterson, who
| produces mostly troll content, with Cal Newport, who doesn't.
| ggggtez wrote:
| I don't remember anyone ever saying that Google was promising
| strong AI?
|
| Just another case of wishful thinking by someone who doesn't like
| how the web works in practice?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Is there any reason to believe, strong AI is around the corner?
|
| I am not really engaged with AI-research, but I follow the area
| with interest and my impression is, that if strong AI will emerge
| in the next time, then only by accident. I mean there are lot's
| of awesome advancements and for example I did not expect Go to be
| solved since years already, but still - I see no way from current
| tech, to a general AI, that can really understand things.
|
| Or is someone aware of more groundbreaking research?
| autokad wrote:
| > "The remaining search results themselves are increasingly
| troubled. My own personal experience is that they are now often
| comprised of superficial commercial "content" from sites that are
| experts in setting their page metadata correctly and the other
| dark arts required to exploit the latest revision of Google's
| algorithm. There's also a huge number of adverts."
|
| I wanted to get some images of strawberries to help improve image
| model for recycling. I wanted normal pictures of strawberries, so
| I did a google image search. its almost all adds and stock photo
| attempts to sell images.
| akomtu wrote:
| In our today's society of petty censors and dictators, the AI
| revolution would officially begin the dark age.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Thanks to whoever brought up that 'wiby' search engine, I'd never
| heard of it.
|
| The shittiness of google search has made me think about the value
| of a curated search engine, although everyone probably needs
| their own version. Maybe 'engines'. It would be cool to have one
| that looked exclusively at bonafide discussion forums generally,
| another could look at the library contained in libgen or sci-hub.
|
| Maybe somebody has done a search that works the opposite way,
| something that makes use of google but blocks all the cruft.
|
| No doubt it couldn't be too successful since the gaming would
| begin immediately.
| soarfourmore wrote:
| The following quotes are fairly interesting and ironic:
|
| > Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally pretty negative
| about search engines that sold ads. Appendix A in their original
| paper says:
|
| >> "we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be
| inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs
| of the consumers"
|
| > and that
|
| >> "we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed
| incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine
| that is transparent and in the academic realm"
| sseagull wrote:
| Wasn't this also the story of a dating site (whose name escapes
| me. OKCupid? PoF?)? Original owner wrote an article about how
| paying for a dating site is a bad idea. Money is offered,
| article disappears.
|
| Searching is failing me at the moment
|
| edit: Was OKCupid: https://www.themarysue.com/okcupid-pulls-
| why-you-should-neve...
| dheera wrote:
| From the article
|
| > 12-moth plan
|
| > 6-month plan
|
| Why would a dating site have a 12-month plan, and why would a
| user of a dating site want a 12-month plan?
|
| Not only would you hopefully want to be off the site within
| 12 months, as soon as you found someone compatible, you would
| hopefully delete the app, but you've unnecessarily paid for
| months you will (hopefully) never use. I don't understand why
| anything but month-to-month would make sense for dating,
| specifically.
|
| I mean, if you are a dating app, you should be striving to
| get users to delete your app as fast as possible (for the
| right reason), not hang onto an annual subscription.
| chovybizzass wrote:
| Serial daters. Plenty of guys just using these apps for
| one-timer hookups or FWB. They stick around for a month
| then onto the next branch like a damn monkey.
| dncornholio wrote:
| This. Before tindr you just had 'dating' sites.
| GCA10 wrote:
| But wait!
|
| Yes, aspiring monogamists will fit your bill of people who
| "want to be off the site in 12 months" or sooner. That's
| one segment of your users, but it really isn't everyone by
| a long shot.
|
| Plenty of users are signing up for the chance to meet ("get
| to know") a steady stream of people. We don't stigmatize
| people who subscribe to Netflix for many years so that they
| can keep watching different movies and shows. There's some
| segment of the dating-site world that has more of a Netflix
| model in mind.
| dheera wrote:
| > There's some segment of the dating-site world that has
| more of a Netflix model in mind
|
| Although I'm sure those users exist, I'm sure they aren't
| the majority of the world, who would rather just be
| happily married and get on with life? And even if not,
| these users who have different expectations should not be
| matching with the former.
| p_j_w wrote:
| Those users don't have to be a majority to be money
| makers for the companies that put out the sites.
|
| And even amongst people who want to settle down, a fair
| share of them probably also wanna do a fair amount of
| looking around in their late teens through some point in
| their 20s, and maybe even early 30s.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _And even if not, these users who have different
| expectations should not be matching with the former._
|
| Actually, given the extreme social stigma worldwide (even
| in the most progressive western countries) against casual
| hookups and low-commitment dating, people looking for
| "more of a Netflix model" will still gravitate towards
| the same sites ostensibly servicing those "who would
| rather just be happily married and get on with life"[0],
| because these services offer the widest choice of
| possible partners, while giving everyone plausible
| deniability.
|
| --
|
| [0] - I think that, given aforementioned stigma, it's
| even hard to estimate how many people in a given age
| bracket want this, and how many just _say_ they want
| this, because it 's the only accepted thing to say out
| loud.
| 6510 wrote:
| People are not having kids because it's to expensive.
| vmception wrote:
| you described one user profile of a half dozen use cases of
| dating apps
|
| no dating app is actually designed for that one use case,
| just like Cosmopolitan magazine, they are built on
| frustration and doing counterintuitive things designed for
| never reaching that kind of user's goal
| toomuchredbull wrote:
| This guy doesn't understand modern dating...
| vngzs wrote:
| Dating sites are not actually designed to help you find
| relationships.
|
| They are designed to leave you constantly questioning the
| relationship you're in, knowing you could always find
| something better around the corner. They might get signups
| because people believe they can find a partner, but they
| keep customers because those people are addicted to the
| game of newer, "better" lovers.
|
| It's another of many cases of businesses that claim to
| solve one problem, but really solve a different one that's
| not in the user's best interest.
| [deleted]
| dkarl wrote:
| Assuming you're looking for one lifelong partner, which
| isn't true of everybody, is it normal to find somebody
| "compatible" that quickly? Without apps, I think it's
| common for people to go for years between serious
| relationships. I don't know why the timeline needs to be so
| compressed.
|
| For me as a fairly awkward and introverted person, who
| didn't naturally generate a high volume of new social
| contacts, one of the things I liked about online dating was
| that I could make choices more like an extroverted person.
| I didn't have to think, holy shit, I actually met somebody
| I get along with, and she seems to like me, I can't afford
| to let this go or I'll probably be completely alone again
| for years until I meet the next person. Instead, I could
| think, this is okay, but is this person a really good match
| for me? Does she bring out the best in me? Are we going to
| have disagreements about big life things?
|
| In other words, I could meet somebody I liked, enjoy
| spending time with them, and still decide not to marry
| them. And do that over and over again until I met somebody
| I was confident was a really good fit for me. Like regular
| people do!
|
| Even when finally I met my wife, it didn't immediately mean
| the end of dating other people. She had just started dating
| after many years of focusing on her career. In fact, after
| having a big heart-to-heart over wine with a close friend
| one evening about how she needed to start dating again, her
| friend helped her install Tinder, and I was the second
| person she matched with. Obviously, after many years out of
| the dating pool, she was leery of falling for the first
| halfway decent guy she met, so she wanted to take her time
| and see what was out there and figure out what she waned.
| To avoid going insane while she was meeting other guys, I
| kept meeting new women. We didn't become exclusive until
| six months after we met.
|
| I think, if I had a single friend who was starting online
| dating, if they were using a paid app, I would recommend a
| 6-month plan or 12-month plan, as a reminder that they can
| afford to be patient and shouldn't rush into things.
| dheera wrote:
| Maybe. But I would think that that also introduces a
| paradox of choice where you are constantly doubting the
| person you are currently dating, thinking that maybe
| there is someone that is a better fit for you.
|
| The problem is I don't really think "fit" is an absolute
| thing. I think the reality is that there is a large set
| of people can be your best fit if you can _grow together
| with them_ to be that best fit. A healthy relationship is
| about actually turning a local maximum into a global
| maximum by the function naturally and healthily changing
| to that effect, not assuming the function is constant and
| then hopping around looking for the global maximum and
| wondering whether you have reached it. One needs to find
| one of those people that they can grow with and commit to
| that growing, one where that local maximum is continually
| rising in prominence. Some degree of initial commitment
| and emotional investment without shopping around helps
| you see whether or not you can grow with that person. If
| growing together isn 't possible, that's a big red flag
| and the relationship should end.
|
| I agree with not committing after only 1 or 2 dates, but
| if the dates continue, I would sure hope for exclusivity
| a _lot_ less than 12 months into it.
| dkarl wrote:
| For me, doubt in my ability to know who I could be happy
| with rose dramatically with a little bit of experience
| and then fell as I accumulated more and more. Meeting
| more people made me more and more comfortable with my own
| judgment about other people and my understanding of what
| made me happy. I think people who find partners very
| early in life are very lucky in some ways, though. It's a
| trade-off, like so many other things. You can have X more
| years of experience with relationships and with yourself
| when you choose your partner, or you can have X more
| years of shared history with your partner.
|
| I do think any doubts you can put to rest in six months
| or a year, the time is worth it. Couples who divorce take
| years to do it, and I think they're unhappy for at least
| half that time.
| jetbooster wrote:
| The problem is, for the _business_ the incentive is the
| opposite. You want the suckers who are willing to pay for
| your dating app to keep paying, so from a purely callous
| point of view you want to provide the absolute minimum
| benefit over the non-paying users that is required in order
| for them to not leave and try somewhere else. There is
| almost no incentive for them to _actually_ match you with
| someone, just string you along just enough to keep you
| coming back.
| derefr wrote:
| Month-to-month is just as bad. The ideal business model for
| a dating site, from the users' perspective, is a one-time
| advance payment. This puts the business into the situation
| where _they_ have an incentive to get you satisfied as
| quickly as possible, so that they can spend as little time
| /money on you as possible, so that your value to them
| doesn't go negative from allowing you to spend _too much_
| of their time /money.
|
| This is, as it happens, how professional matchmakers tend
| to charge.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Sure, but if it doesn't have rundle potential it's not a
| modern business.
| behnamoh wrote:
| IMO the ideal business model from users' perspective
| could be pay-as-you-go, where you pay for each individual
| you want to send message to (e.g. $1.99).
| SkyBelow wrote:
| That would incentivizing matching people with those whom
| they want to message but aren't likely to start a
| relationship with.
| dheera wrote:
| Maybe ideally yes, but that's assuming you only had the
| option to message them through the platform.
|
| You could always message people for free outside the
| platform, considering any profile worthy of messaging
| probably lists enough information to find them on, say,
| LinkedIn or Facebook, and users likely often drop their
| personal websites or Instagram/Twitter IDs on their
| dating profiles.
| bayesianbot wrote:
| There are a lot of dating sites at least in
| Scandinavia/central europe, where men pay per message (or
| usually buy message packs, it ends up being around 1EUR a
| message IIRC).
|
| The (mostly) men answering these messages, pretending to
| be women, get paid around 0.15EUR per reply. And
| obviously writing messages where they try to prolong the
| conversation and turn down real life meetings or changing
| to other (free) messaging system "for now"
| dheera wrote:
| Why does the system charge men and pay women to message,
| instead of just charging everyone to message?
|
| I would have thought that of all places Scandinavia would
| not price-discriminate users based on their gender ...
| imtringued wrote:
| If you wanted to go down this route you would pay per
| date, otherwise what are you paying for? Sure, the
| algorithm may jinx it by sending you on more bad dates
| than you wanted, but it would get you further than just a
| message.
| dheera wrote:
| > This puts the business into the situation where they
| have an incentive
|
| If the payment is a one-time advance payment, I would
| imagine this disincentives the business to truly do their
| best, since they already have your money.
|
| I would think, idealistically, maybe the best model would
| be an advance payment but with a money-back guarantee of
| say half the payment if you don't find a match through
| them.
|
| Legally establishing that you don't find a match could be
| troublesome though, since the "couple" that actually
| liked each other could both claim they didn't match, get
| their 50% back, but you as a business would have no
| recourse if they got together and lived their lives
| happily ever after, behind your back. You don't have
| "rights" to their personal life together as a business.
|
| Unless of course it was a government-run dating service
| that had marriage, housing, and financial records of
| everyone. That might work. And for many reasons it's in
| the best interest of the government to get as many people
| married as possible.
| dexen wrote:
| Counter-intuitively this might be about hedging the
| incentives for the service provider - to avoid the moral
| hazard of pushing for indefinitely extending the
| subscription.
|
| Just as you mention, successful finding a partner means as
| few "attempts" (apologies) as feasible, which in turn means
| two "lost customers" to the platform. That introduces a
| perverse incentive for the platform to "spoil" the dating
| to keep the customers. By making one long-spanning plan,
| the perverse incentive is lessened.
| 1_person wrote:
| I fail to see how making money by shafting the customer
| one way precludes making money by shafting the customer
| another way at the same time.
| prepend wrote:
| The incentive for the dating app is to keep you
| unsatisfied, but with some hope, to keep dating and failing
| over and over. Or I suppose the business models could be
| either "subscription" based where you keep using it forever
| or "contract" based where it's a single fee.
|
| I think the okcupid papers called out how free dating is
| better aligned with users because they wouldn't have to
| compete with the natural tendency to want to make more
| money through ongoing subscriptions.
|
| Of course, I know friends who are continuously dating and
| plan on staying that way.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| The cost of 12 months of a dating site is trivial compared
| to the benefits of finding the right person. If someone
| offered you a soulmate if you gave them a couple hundred
| dollars, you'd take it in a second, right? Paying ahead
| actually aligns your incentives better, because the site is
| no longer incentivized to drag you along single month after
| month to keep you paying.
| hansvm wrote:
| Effectively, you're not paying for "12 months" despite
| the label, you're paying for a significant chance at
| finding a soulmate? If that's the case, why not label it
| as such?
| chucksmash wrote:
| Because after your 12 months you can't use the profile
| any more. Better to label what you pay for accurately.
| throw14082020 wrote:
| This is bordering on logic like the following: - Water is
| really important, why don't you buy this $100 bottle of
| water. - The site has an incentive to improve your dating
| outcomes. No, it's primary objective is to maximise
| revenue, everything else is a side effect. - Paying more
| for something means someone will commit/ follow through,
| somehow raise incentives. This is just a guess, not
| supported or disproven by reality.
|
| I like to think defensively especially when it involves
| companies. What are they doing, and what do they stand to
| achieve?
|
| These apps have not shown any value to their users,
| paywall their content and have an aggressive-long-term
| subscription model because they have _optimised
| themselves straight into the garbage can_ , by thinking
| short term.
| billytetrud wrote:
| The big spenders on dating sites are the ones there just to
| screw around. That's why they all mostly become toxic hell
| holes, because the economics incentivize catering to those
| assholes
| toper-centage wrote:
| Why are you assuming everyone is looking for long term
| relationships and not hookups or fwb?
| dheera wrote:
| I guess one of the fundamental problems then is that
| these two mutually incompatible groups of people are
| mixed up in the platform?
| purerandomness wrote:
| You're assuming that everyone uses online dating platforms
| to find one (1) long-term partner with whom they'll be
| monogamous, which is not the case.
|
| There are couples looking for other couples or thirds,
| there is the BDSM scene with people looking for casual play
| partners, and so on.
| spijdar wrote:
| This is true, but I believe that the majority of users on
| "normal" dating sites are looking for single, long-term
| partners. As I understand, within the BDSM scene there
| are several websites including social networking sites
| and dedicated match making sites catering to the
| specifics of BDSM. I find it unlikely you'd use a
| "normal" dating site when you likely have pretty specific
| interests that likely (?) need specific UI/UX to cater
| to.
|
| Just sort of overall, when your interest is in building a
| network, finding people to have casual sex/encounters
| with, a "stream of people to meet" as someone mentioned
| below, I think you'd want a different website/UI than
| these big dating sites seem to offer/encourage. That
| said, I've never used them, just speculating based on the
| ads I've seen over the years and how they paint
| themselves.
| vmception wrote:
| sure maybe a majority of users think they are, but really
| aren't.
|
| many users of that kind of profile are just outsourcing
| actual human interaction to dating apps that claim to
| solve it but are incapable of doing so
| purerandomness wrote:
| Dating sites that make you answer questionnaires and
| match based on answers are a really good way to get to
| know people with similar kinks and interests.
|
| While there are specific sites for BDSM dating with more
| nuanced optoins, the ads for generic dating sites are all
| very "tame" and try to not deviate from the perceived
| norm too much (= "find a partner, have a happy family"
| type messaging)
|
| The reason is that if you do, it's virtually impossible
| to get included in Ad networks and App Stores. So you
| naturally see only dating ads catering to the very
| conservative viewer.
|
| Example: A BDSM dating site got banned from Googles Play
| Store after including a background image of a simple
| leather whip. [1]
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/devianceapp/status/13840156661858
| 34501
| cletus wrote:
| At this point, the snide dismissal of all things advertising is
| nothing short of boring.
|
| To be sure there are many forms of advertising annoyance: auto-
| playing sound/video, remarketing (or what I like to call
| advertising a product I've already bought), interstitials,
| popups (to be fair, there are many non-advertising forms of
| these eg "sign up to our newsletter" dialogs) and so on.
|
| But what made Google a money-printing machine is that search
| advertising is actually largely aligned with the interests of
| the user. That is, just by searching for something the user has
| shown an intent that other advertising doesn't have (where
| generally it's just attention thievery). Imagine I search for
| "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an
| appropriate result here?
|
| I get that it's popular to just hate on all advertising but
| that's just shallow.
|
| As long as search results are marked as ads when they are ads
| and paying for ads doesn't improve your organic search ranking
| (aka the Yelp business model) then I'm completely fine with it.
|
| There is a lot of crap in search results and this is a constant
| battle of whack-a-mole. At one point it was content farms. As
| someone who has search for a lot of home furnishing stuff
| recently I can tell you a big problem is affiliate link
| blogspam. There'll be some real-sounding domain like
| mattressreviews.com but it becomes pretty clear it's just mass-
| produced "content" to justify affiliate links.
|
| Honestly, this will probably get to the point (I hope) where
| Google does the same thing it did to content farms and starts
| downranking sites with affiliate links ( _cough_ Pinterest
| _cough_ ).
| fuball63 wrote:
| I agree with your point that there is a need for
| advertisements to inform consumers about available options.
| I'd generally fall in the "dismissal of all things
| advertising" box, but I would add a nuance to it that it
| really depends if it was requested vs. forced upon you.
|
| In both instances you mention as being useful advertising,
| shopping for furniture or how to sleep on an airplane, you
| are asking for advertisements. That makes sense. You are
| looking to solve a problem by purchasing a product.
|
| From my perspective, there are two issues with the current
| climate of ads: First, that the overwhelming majority of ads
| are forced upon you. They track you, distract you, and have
| generally turned the internet into a wasteland. Second, that
| a search engine/social network/news site is the place to view
| ads. I would prefer a site dedicated to this use case, not
| have the use case tacked on to unrelated sites constantly in
| the way.
|
| I feel the same way about physical ads, too. I don't want
| uninvited people knocking on my door to sell me their ISP. I
| don't want those terrible mailers with coupons in them.
| Billboards are ugly and distracting.
| sobellian wrote:
| We know that paid advertising works, so it should not
| surprise us to discover that paid advertising on the Internet
| also works. But Google and other search engines seek to
| organize the world's information, not the world's commercial
| products and services. For a multi-multi-billion dollar
| company's core product, I'm somewhat surprised they cannot do
| a better job killing the blogspam. Given the resources at
| their disposal, I think most people just assume that they
| don't care about the blogspam.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| "We know that paid advertising works" [citation needed]
|
| I mean, the ad business of course likes to throw various
| metrics around. But as far as I'm aware there are no proper
| randomized controlled trials that show statistically
| significant positive ROI of online advertising versus no
| online advertising.
|
| I mean, it would be really simple to do, right? To provide
| conclusive proof of the efficiency of ads? Pick a populous
| state in the US where people enjoy Soft Drink X. Randomly
| divide the households in the state into two groups. For the
| next full year, run normal amount of targeted online ads
| for Soft Drink X in Group 1, no targeted online ads
| whatsoever in Group 2. Did the sales in Group 2 decrease by
| more than what the cost of advertising to that group would
| be, yes or no?
| oblio wrote:
| Advertising has been about what 2? 5? percent of US GDP
| for more than one hundred years. The odds of advertising
| naysayers are probably infinitesimal at this point.
| auntienomen wrote:
| There are two significant complications:
|
| 1) Google is running many parallel ad campaigns, which
| may target the same individuals. This in some ways gives
| opportunities, because one can run 'natural experiments'
| on the effeciveness of advertising for X by simply
| selecting the people who never saw the ad for X. But
| there is also probably some legal peril; Google has to be
| careful about what promises it makes to people purchasing
| ads.
|
| 2) Google has very little incentive to release the
| results of any such studies, because -- whether or not
| advertising works -- they don't need their customers to
| have accurate side-info about the value of advertising.
| mcguire wrote:
| One might suggest that what made Google a money-printing
| machine is compiling dossiers on as many people as possible.
| astrange wrote:
| > Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't
| a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here?
|
| Yes, but advertising doesn't do that. They do retargeting and
| only show you the most valuable ad for what they know about
| you. Sometimes that ad is just what the advertiser has paid
| to show you in particular, like "you left something in your
| Amazon cart".
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| I don't see targeted search advertising as user friendly. A
| search engine should return the most valid results. As soon
| as you have sponsored results, there's a conflict of
| interest. What if the competitor to the neck pillow ad people
| actually have a better pillow? They should be the first
| result, but won't be since Google's interest is in helping
| advertisers, not the users of their search engine.
|
| I don't think there's an argument where advertising is pro-
| user, since a service that focused on the user would return
| the best results for a search, not who paid for placement.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > But what made Google a money-printing machine is that
| search advertising is actually largely aligned with the
| interests of the user. That is, just by searching for
| something the user has shown an intent that other advertising
| doesn't have (where generally it's just attention thievery).
| Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a
| neck travel pillow an appropriate result here?
|
| This doesn't hold water. It's just being shown because
| someone paid for it to be, not because it's the best thing to
| be shown which is what algorithms would be tuned for if they
| were in the users interest.
|
| > I get that it's popular to just hate on all advertising but
| that's just shallow.
|
| That's pretty dismissive of all the thought that has gone
| into criticism of advertising and it's effects on products
| and services, without even giving a hint of an argument as to
| why you feel it's shallow.
| cletus wrote:
| > This doesn't hold water. It's just being shown because
| someone paid for it to be, not because it's the best thing
| to be shown which is what algorithms would be tuned for if
| they were in the users interest.
|
| You are factually incorrect and this is part of the
| problem: a lot of proselytizing (and, honestly, virtue-
| signaling) by people who don't know how advertising
| actually works.
|
| Display advertising works on a CPM basis (ie paying for the
| impression) so yes, that's pretty much a case of someone
| paying to show the ad and that's it. They may be paying for
| that based on contextual information (eg RTB) or not.
|
| But search advertising, at least how Google does it, it
| sold on a CPC basis (ie paying for the click not the
| impression). This actually means Google is motivated to
| show you the search ads you're most likely to click on
| because that's some revenue vs just who bid the most.
|
| > That's pretty dismissive of all the thought that has gone
| into criticism of advertising...
|
| No offense but if you don't know how search advertising
| works at the highest level then either you haven't put much
| thought into it or you're simply parroting someone else
| (who also hasn't) because it fits your world view.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| I've never clicked on any ad on Google in maybe 20 years
| of using it. How do the results help me?
| [deleted]
| disabled wrote:
| This is a thoughtful post. However, the issue is that these
| advertisements play into your hopes and fears to maximize the
| likelihood of getting a click from you. The fact that Google
| (especially) and other adtech companies are playing into your
| hopes and fears, by microtargeting and hoarding the most
| private and intimate details about your life is abusive.
|
| I have to say that I am lucky that I have a print-related
| disability, because I almost never need to go websites with
| ads.
|
| Services I get access to (no-ads):
|
| * 975,000+ books for $50/year (Bookshare.org)
|
| * 60,000+ professionally narrated audio books for free (US
| National Library Service)
|
| * 80,000+ volunteer narrated audio books for $135/year
| (LearningAlly.org)
|
| * Hundreds of Newspapers and Magazines for free (NFB
| Newsline)
|
| * 99% of the books posted on OpenLibrary.org for free (even
| books currently "borrowed")
|
| * Virtually all libraries for print-related disabilities
| around the world (sometimes free, sometimes paid) (I can get
| books in foreign languages easily)
|
| Additionally, I use the paid audio apps Blinkist, Audm, and
| Curio, which everyone has access to. I find them to be super
| helpful. Blinkist in particular is almost 100% of the time a
| YouTube and TED talk replacement for me. I also use The
| Economist app, which has the entire weekly edition
| professionally narrated, along with the vast majority of the
| rest of its material.
| [deleted]
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane".
| Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here?_"
|
| No?
|
| I mean, seen through the lens of extractive capitalism where
| "how do I X" is the same as "what _product do I buy_ to do X
| ", and "someone asking about X" is the same as "which product
| to shove in their face to make them stop asking and extract
| the most money out of them", maybe yes. Doesn't "information
| technology" suggest some alternatives? Like, information
| about sleeping in planes - noise reduction, positions people
| have found comfortable, stress reduction, light pollution,
| circadian rhythms, stretches that can be done in a small
| space or sitting down, etc?
|
| > " _As someone who has search for a lot of home furnishing
| stuff recently I can tell you a big problem is affiliate link
| blogspam. There 'll be some real-sounding domain like
| mattressreviews.com but it becomes pretty clear it's just
| mass-produced "content" to justify affiliate links._"
|
| This seems to fly in the face of your previous paragraphs:
| you searched for home furnishing stuff, isn't some generic
| advertising of a mattress an appropriate result here? You
| want something better than that for yourself, but think other
| people don't deserve better and are shallow for complaining?
| jquery wrote:
| This should be the top reply.
|
| Google's advertising may be very profitable and effective,
| that doesn't mean it's in the user's best interest.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| My main problem with advertising and the technologies
| surround it, aside from the obvious privacy issues and their
| misuse, is that it seems to suck all the air out of the room.
|
| The birth and dominance of the online advertising business
| model looks to be the greatest misallocation of engineering
| talent in the history of humanity.
| p_j_w wrote:
| This is a bit how I feel about advertising in general.
| Human beings' time is being taken and mouths are being fed
| not to increase overall output, and thus lifting the
| overall well being of members of society. Instead, Company
| A hires advertisers to convince the public to buy their
| product instead of a competing product to Company B. Value
| is created for Company A, but entirely at the expense of
| Company B. At no time in the economic... chain?... of
| events that is advertising is anything actually created,
| yet vast sums of money, and thus allocation of resources,
| is put here. It seems INSANELY wasteful.
| imtringued wrote:
| >At no time in the economic... chain?... of events that
| is advertising is anything actually created, yet vast
| sums of money, and thus allocation of resources, is put
| here. It seems INSANELY wasteful.
|
| You're forgetting something, companies start off
| completely unknown. How did they reach the point where
| the market has been fully saturated and the only real way
| to gain more customers is to take them from someone else?
| Oh right, it's because advertising increased the grow
| rate of your company to the point where there is barely
| any growth left.
|
| Let's manufacture a completely artificial scenario to
| illustrate my point:
|
| Person A: So, you're telling me you spent $5 billion on
| advertising and all you have to show for it is a 5%
| higher market share than your biggest competitor?
|
| Founder: Yes, we used the advertising budget to grow our
| market share from less than 1% to 40%. Our next biggest
| competitor has a 35% market share.
| carrozo wrote:
| Everybody's got a plan until they're punched in the face (with
| hundreds of billions of dollars).
| Zelphyr wrote:
| Or, maybe, "Everybody is altruistic until they have
| shareholders."
|
| The idea that companies should only be beholden to
| shareholders that has taken firm hold over the past 50(+/-)
| years doesn't look to be a good one, in hindsight.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| It's not some idea that came about from a vacuum. Put
| yourself in an investors shoes: you may have some
| investments that you do for the sake of charity or
| philanthropy, however, the majority of your investments are
| to increase your investment. It isn't surprising then,
| following this basic premise, that we have arrived at the
| current situation. Capitalism factors in greed for the
| general welfare of the most people. It just seems that we
| underestimated the upper bound of human greed.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| It's not so much an underestimation as it is a systematic
| breakdown of constraints and personal responsibility for
| owners/directors of large corporations.
| wnevets wrote:
| They don't have to be. Everyone just chooses to do it that
| way because its easier to make loads of money.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| Psychology studies in the past showed people were
| altruistic. Then psychologist accounted for social
| capital/good will and worked to remove it from their
| altruism tests. People stopped being overly altruistic when
| it stopped benefitting them, likely meaning that what we
| see as altruism is really a failure to account for all the
| benefits a person expects to gain and all the negatives
| they expect to avoid when choosing to perform a certain
| action.
|
| As for shareholders, I think that comes down to the
| incentive to avoid the negative outcome of being replaced.
| Those at the top optimize their actions to avoid being
| replaced which filters down through each level until it
| effects every level of a company. There is some variety
| that results from how a company chooses who to promote, but
| that is still an outcome of not wanting to be replaced.
| Promote people who you think will strengthen your own
| position and not those who will weaken it. This ends up
| being the primordial pool that spawns corporate culture.
| heterodoxxed wrote:
| The concept of altruism does not require it to be "pure"
| or entirely selfless. Altruism can have benefits but
| those benefits can exist outside of economy and into the
| realm of the personal, spiritual, social, etc.
|
| In other words, that doesn't disprove altruism so much as
| it proves that economic self-interest is not our only
| motivator.
| simonh wrote:
| Past 50 years, really?
|
| "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer,
| or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their
| regard to their own interest." - Adam Smith, 1776
| nowherebeen wrote:
| > The idea that companies should only be beholden to
| shareholders
|
| This concept was popularized by Milton Friedman with his
| Shareholder Theory. OP is not wrong.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
| simonh wrote:
| Maybe, but it's repackaging a point Smith made 194 years
| earlier.
| pjmorris wrote:
| A shareholder is more like the butcher or baker's brother
| than the butcher or baker. The incentives are different.
| simonh wrote:
| How so?
| ahepp wrote:
| I think Friedman's ideas are substantially different.
|
| The quote from Smith is discussing tradesmen running a
| business in their own self interest.
|
| In some ways, Friedman's point is the opposite. That the
| laborers perform in the self interest of the owner.
|
| I don't know the full context of the Smith quote. I did a
| bit of digging for Smith's views on publicly traded
| companies, and came across this quote[0]:
|
| >The directors of such [joint-stock] companies, however,
| being the managers rather of other people's money than of
| their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should
| watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which
| the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch
| over their own.... Negligence and profusion, therefore,
| must always prevail, more or less, in the management of
| the affairs of such a company.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_corporations
| simonh wrote:
| Surely that's exactly the same thing Friedmam was saying.
| According to Friedman managers spending company money on
| social causes are spending other people's money, the same
| phrase Smith used, when they had no business doing so. In
| saying that the firms responsibility is to its owners,
| Friedman was addressing precisely the concern that Smith
| was worried about.
|
| Of course in Smith's time joint stock companies were a
| relative novelty. We have a lot more experience of them
| now and have developed standards, checks and balances to
| try to maintain discipline in managers in the intervening
| centuries. Friedman was simply attempting to bolster that
| effort, but Smith was writing about exactly the same
| concern.
|
| As it happens while I'm a big fan of both men, on this
| issue I think Friedman is too much of a purist. Some
| social spending can just be good business. It promotes
| the brand, buys political friends and can even reap
| commercial benefits down the line. Donating or
| subsidising computers in schools for a company like Apple
| for example.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Yep. Money is the one unpatchable zero-day for every platform
| and service on earth.
| narrator wrote:
| Bitcoin at least rations out the zero-days. You don't just
| have one authority that can create them as needed.
| lifthearth wrote:
| There is a patch thanks to contributor Marx but everyone
| keeps pressing "remind me later".
| daenz wrote:
| Does bribing not exist in that system?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Sure there is. I don't know which motivation you'd have
| to bribe someone to promite your product, though. Would
| also be hard to sustain if intellectual property was
| decommodified.
|
| Other, more pressing concerns have to be addressed,
| though.
| avereveard wrote:
| because there aren't luxuries in that system. that
| creates a need, and from it a secondary market, which
| without titles[1], sees the exchange of power either via
| favors exchange or plain tribalism. bribery then becomes
| the norm for the influential, even if actual money
| doesn't change hand, favors and contraband do.
|
| 1: a catch all to include both money, 'quota cards' and
| the likes
| daenz wrote:
| >your product
|
| In a hypothetical world where I don't benefit from a
| competitive advantage, in what sense do I own the product
| / company?
| uoaei wrote:
| Consider firms which are wholly owned by either 1) every
| single employee (worker-owned firm), 2) every employee
| and every customer who opts in (consumer co-op), or 3)
| literally every citizen of a government (publicly owned).
|
| You own it in partnership with the other people who own
| it.
|
| This is, in the strictest definition, the socialism that
| people are so scared of.
| daenz wrote:
| How much control do you have over the military of your
| government? Or even the DMV? Are these organizations
| behaving directly as a response to the majority will of
| the people? If not, how do you solve that problem before
| you add more organizations?
| uoaei wrote:
| The best answer we have today, IMO, in terms of ethics of
| freedom and agency, is "representative democracy," which
| may be extended to "liquid democracy" to bridge the gap
| between small, direct-democracy-capable organizations and
| large, unwieldy ones.
|
| Unfortunately, no solution will be perfect, but that
| doesn't mean some aren't better than others. The problem
| is in essence unsolvable. Politics and civilization is an
| exercise in minimizing harm rather than eliminating it,
| maximizing utility rather than spiking it.
| 6510 wrote:
| I don't know how but I do know it is much harder to make
| something everyone involved thinks impossible than to
| make something everyone thought they already had.
|
| Perhaps the problem is as simple as setting up a forum
| with sub forums for every government official - then
| throw money at it until it works.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| In the sense first and foremost that you may produce and
| design it, especially if production is structured in a
| co-op way, in the sense that you use it, especially if
| it's a consumer/worker co-op but also in a worker co-op,
| and to a lesser extent in that you are part of the
| society which produces it.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Let me know when we reach post scarcity and no longer
| need a rationing device such as money.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| People thought of this issue since 1870 and the solution
| they came up with is simply non-transferable rationing
| devices. In traditional Marxist terms this was labour
| vouchers but nowadays there are much better solutions.
| Marx himself wrote about this, in terms of primitive
| accumulation in socialism.
|
| For sure there are a lot of issues, but this isn't one of
| them.
|
| You could in theory have bribery in material terms, but
| this is much easier to trace than in money terms.
| edgyquant wrote:
| My argument was with the idea that money will be gone as
| a rationing device. You can come up with alternatives but
| it's the human nature that is the problem not the
| technology we use to ration resources. Let me know when
| this bug is fixed.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Well, that's not the problem we were talking about, is
| it? We were talking about the issue of bribery, which is
| made possible by the fungible nature of money.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Yes it is, namely this is the GP
|
| > Money is the one unpatchable zero-day for every
| platform and service on earth.
|
| To which the response was that Karl Marx had submitted a
| fix
| imtringued wrote:
| I don't really get it. How does this prevent people from
| holding onto foreign currency or gold?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Who is going to sell you forex or gold for non-
| transferable tokens?
| edgyquant wrote:
| Non-transferable tokens aren't going to be a successful
| replacement for money
| [deleted]
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Working example needed.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Socialism, like capitalism, also has a zero day
| vulnerability by the name of mundane old "human
| corruption" that undermines its goals. Capitalism just
| works better because it pits people against each other,
| keeping the focus off authority and top level control.
| [deleted]
| nautilus12 wrote:
| Probbably due to the memory of the deaths of millions of
| people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under
| _communist_...
|
| You get bit by a viper in the bathroom and your going to
| avoid that bathroom for a while.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| That doesn't really explain anything, given there are
| millions of deaths under capitalism too.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Big difference.
| heterodoxxed wrote:
| Not to the bodies in the graves there isn't.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Tell that to the people who were enslaved and to the
| people who starved to death.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Slavery is not a function of capitalism, though.
| Capitalism is being able to 1) firstly, own yourself and
| your body 2) thus sell your labour however you wish. It's
| the alternatives economic systems that prevent you from
| being free.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| And yet capitalists imposed slavery upon multiple places
| around the world, often for decades or centuries.
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| but but but those don't count because...I've actually
| never heard the excuse, they always just go silent.
|
| Also, can people please stop conflating things like M4A
| with Stalin for even like 5min?
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| > This article has multiple issues
| marcusverus wrote:
| I assume that this criticism is offered in good faith,
| and that you're in need of good, solid Wiki articles
| about the tens of millions of victims of Communist
| regimes--well, I'm happy to get you started!
|
| Here's an article about the Soviet terror-famine (known
| as the Holodomor) which killed 4 million Ukranians. No
| worrisome notifications on this article, so I assume it
| meets your rigorous standards:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
|
| And here's one about the so-called 'Great Leap Forward',
| when the Chinese Communist Party's top-down modernization
| plans resulted in the accidental deaths of ~50 million
| human beings.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
| heterodoxxed wrote:
| I don't know if you want to open the can of worms that is
| "accidental deaths from mismanaged resource distribution"
| under capitalism.
|
| Global deaths from hunger result in one great leap
| forward every 5 years.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| I'm not denying or excusing that historical atrocities
| occurred under socialist governments _, but for
| perspective one should also look at the myriad atrocities
| that were and continue to be committed under capitalist
| governments. That doesn 't excuse such actions, but
| neither side is innocent. I suggest reading _The Wretched
| of the Earth* Chapter 1, "On Violence".
|
| Here are a few examples off the top of my head:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_State
| s
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_i
| n_r...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_brutality_in_the_Uni
| ted...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United
| _St...
|
| * Though I will object that it is unfair to attribute the
| actions of the Khmer Rouge to socialism. Like the Nazis
| they were socialist in name only, and in fact were
| supported by the United States in their war against the
| Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
| nautilus12 wrote:
| The issue is that these atrocities were committed more
| specifically as a result of communism, whereas other
| attrocities are less closely attributable to capitalism
| since it has been the majority default throughout
| history.
| mcguire wrote:
| At roughly that same time, doubleclick.net was the most hated
| company on the Internet.
|
| Then Google bought them.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Haha. I remember an interview of Eric Schmidt by Stephen
| Colbert. Stephen asks a great question in the interview.
|
| Stephen : So the goal of Google is "not be evil"
|
| Eric : Yes. Not be evil.
|
| Stephen : How low would the stock price have to go for your to
| start being evil? (or a similar question to that effect)
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/google7.html
|
| http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/google4.html
|
| "Currently most search engine development has gone on at
| companies with little publication of technical details. This
| causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art
| and to be advertising oriented (see Section ?). With Google, we
| have a strong goal to push more development and understanding
| into the academic realm."
|
| They never delivered on this "strong goal" to make web search
| an academic endeavour.
|
| They managed to domainate web search but the endeavour is now
| 100% commercial. It is intentionally nontransparent (due to
| commercial incentives) and remains a "black art". How many
| human tweaks have been made to the machine-oriented processes
| disclosed in this paper, and never published.
|
| "Also, it is interesting to note that metadata efforts have
| largely failed with web search engines, because any text on the
| page which is not directly represented to the user is abused to
| "spam" search engines. There are even numerous companies which
| specialize in manipulating search engines for profit."
|
| "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives
|
| Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search
| engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business
| model do not always correspond to providing quality search to
| users. For example, in our prototype search engine the top
| result for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use
| Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail
| the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell
| phone while driving. This search result came up first because
| of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an
| approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It
| is clear that a search engine which was taking money for
| showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the
| page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For
| this type of reason and historical experience with other media
| [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search
| engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and
| away from the needs of the consumers. Since it is very
| difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search
| engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was
| OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right
| to be listed at the top of the search results for particular
| queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than
| advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be
| there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This
| business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased
| to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely
| to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine
| could add a small factor to search results from "friendly"
| companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors.
| This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still
| have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore,
| advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor
| quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search
| engine would not return a large airline's home page when the
| airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the
| airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that
| was its name. A better search engine would not have required
| this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from
| the airline. In general, it could be argued from the consumer
| point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer
| advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what
| they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported
| business model of the existing search engines. However, there
| will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to
| switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But
| we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed
| incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search
| engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."
|
| Currently the predominate business model for any commercial
| website, not only search engine websites, is _still_
| advertising.
|
| What remains to be developed are non-commercial websites,
| including non-commercial web search. Currently, such efforts
| are forestalled by the creation of commercial websites where
| anyone can create a public page, for free.^1 These mega-
| websites can have billions of pages. This has led to easy
| construction of "internet mobs" and dissemination of
| propaganda, and, of course, advertising.
|
| 1. Hats off to the alternatives, like Neocities.
| ModernMech wrote:
| That's not irony, it's evidence of mens rea.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| The AI that makes Google work is not the algorithms they use to
| index the web its AdWords which uses a general purpose
| algorithm to auction ads.
| https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
|
| Sure, google search was the core prototype that used algorithms
| to give great search results but without Adwords google
| wouldn't be google.
| johndags wrote:
| I think this is largely misunderstood about Google. It seems
| like ads placed in search results only accounts for a small
| portion of their revenue. Not sure how much the targeting of
| ads by analyzing your search history actually contributes
| either. I think Google just figured out how to scale online
| ad sales really well.
| rkagerer wrote:
| _It seems like ads placed in search results only accounts
| for a small portion of their revenue._
|
| Do you have a source for that? Last time I checked (which
| granted was some years ago) my understanding was that over
| 90% of their revenue came from advertising, and I think
| most of that was driven by search results.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| https://imgur.com/t/funny/fjqdCZz
|
| I like the whole quote. There's one more gem in the middle. It
| shows they were good once. That they know. Any chance it can
| return?
| Hard_Space wrote:
| Maybe it's just semantics, but isn't the central model of ML to
| generate metadata (i.e. labels, classes, segmentation) and then
| operate on it?
| artembugara wrote:
| Here's a real feedback on metadata tags from someone who's been
| building "online-published articles index" for ~13 months [0].
|
| So, we talk about news websites for whom it is crucial to be
| well-indexed.
|
| Talking about non-US news websites:
|
| 1. Not so many news websites even have a sitemap
|
| 2. LD+JSON meta tags are not so common either
|
| 3. OG metadata can be simply wrong
|
| 4. For many websites it's impossible to detect which timezone
| it's published time is
|
| 5. Publish time can be literally "5 hours ago" without a
| timestamp/date tag. Like no other clue on when it's been
| published
|
| Given all that, until situation changes, I think Google has a
| real advantage as they can use expensive AI to parse the
| unstructured content.
|
| So yeah, when Google says "forget metatags" they know something.
| Metatags will simplify lots of other search engines.
|
| There're new "search engine" startup I hear about every week.
|
| [0] https://newscatcherapi.com/
| leoc wrote:
| > When your elected government snoops on you, they famously
| prefer the metadata
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/30/nsa-americans-...
| of who you emailed, phoned or chatted to the content of the
| messages themselves. It seems to be much more tractable to flag
| people of interest to the security services based on who their
| friends are and what websites they visit than to do clever AI on
| the messages they send. Once they're flagged, a human can always
| read their email anyway.
|
| But isn't that at least partly due to legal issues, like the pen-
| register precedents in the US?
| [deleted]
| KKKKkkkk1 wrote:
| _But "machine readable" strictly dominates machine learning. And
| worse yet for the data scientists, as soon as they establish the
| viability of doing something new with a computer, people will
| rush to apply metadata to make the process more reliable and
| explainable. An ounce of markup saves a pound of tensorflow._
|
| The bitter lesson.
| pea wrote:
| An annoying example which has gotten worse recently is recipes. I
| generally trawl through 5k words of someone's life story and
| product promotions to get to the piece of information I need, and
| they often rewrite the recipe 5 different times in different
| levels of detail -- is this because to make the first page rank
| on Google you need to pad out the SEO? I too always find myself
| doing site:reddit.com.
| melech_ric wrote:
| When I tried this two months ago it was great:
|
| https://www.JustTheRecipe.app
|
| This recipe: https://wildwildwhisk.com/basic-buttermilk-scones/
|
| Turns into this:
| https://www.justtherecipe.app/?url=https://wildwildwhisk.com...
|
| I think there are Firefox and Chrome add-ons/extensions that do
| similar things.
| 12ian34 wrote:
| I prefer to stick to physical recipe books from trusted chefs.
| Sure, the internet can deliver the breadth and depth, but to
| wade through this comes not only with the large search cost but
| also with the risk of a poor recipe... and don't get me started
| on recipe websites that don't have metric measurements!
| defaultname wrote:
| Many of the recipe sites you're finding are likely "food
| bloggers", so their interest is in being a personality/virtual
| cooking companion more than being just a source of a recipe.
| You have misaligned interests, and to be fair they're probably
| less interested in your patronage if you just hop to a page to
| grab a recipe.
|
| And of course the verbiage is a lot of long tail keyword
| inclusion (pandering to Google by talking about your diabetic
| grandma, etc).
|
| EDIT: The whole "I can't stand recipes that have verbiage"
| diatribe is a bit of a beggars being choosers thing. Personally
| I pay for America's Test Kitchen and get trustworthy, concise
| recipes (although there is a narrative about different
| techniques and options), but most people are too cheap but
| simultaneously super demanding about the things they get for
| free.
| Loughla wrote:
| +1 to that, and especially to America's test kitchen. People
| complain about blogspam and recycled recipes and being unable
| to filter through to find quality recipes. They also talk
| about being willing to pay to find quality.
|
| There is, and has been, a very well known, nationally
| respected organization who does this, for years! Their recipe
| recommendations are usually good, and the narratives actually
| ADD to the recipe, by offering alternatives and reasons
| behind choices made, instead of just telling a nonsense
| story.
| iptpus wrote:
| https://based.cooking/
|
| https://opensource.cooking/
|
| Both are open source recipe sites meant to combat the blogspam
| and load quickly.
| tomp wrote:
| a few more that I swear by:
| site:greatbritishchefs.com site:greatitalianchefs.com
| site:seriouseats.com
|
| WARNING: the last one usually has 2 pages listed for each
| recipe - the recipe itself, and also a "story" blog post -
| except that the "story" is also very useful (not "someone's
| life story" which is basically spam), because it explains the
| reasoning behind the method, different alternatives and the
| trade-offs between them, and the experimentation that it took
| the author to derive it
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I also have good experience with thespruceeats.com regarding
| in-depth explanations of food. I have to add that I'm using
| adblockers pretty heavily so I have no clue how bearable
| these sites are without it.
|
| Anyway, it's pretty easy to turn this into a keyworded
| bookmark on Firefox for some quick searching:
| https://duckduckgo.com/lite/?q=%s+(site%3Aseriouseats.com+%7C
| %7C+site%3Agreatbritishchefs.com+ %7C%7C+site%3Agreatbr
| itishchefs.com+%7C%7C+site%3Athespruceeats.com+%7C%7C+site%3A
| bbcgoodfood.com)
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Google page ranking depends on how long people spend on the
| webpage, so if you have to wade through longform text, it
| mistakenly assumes that the content is quality.
|
| Note that most recipe blogs are fake. Someone wrote the
| original content long ago. Then, someone else hired a
| copywriter off a freelancing platform to change the words of
| the text just enough to avoid copyright violation, then put up
| a new copycat website loaded with SEO and ads. Look closely and
| notice how the author's bio says e.g. "Born and bred in
| Lousiania and I love to share southern cooking", but the text
| contains grammatical mistakes typical of Eastern Europeans or
| Southeast Asians.
|
| The ecosystem is already so advanced that new copycat recipe
| websites are often based on previous copycat recipe websites.
| criddell wrote:
| > Google page ranking depends on how long people spend on the
| webpage, so if you have to wade through longform text, it
| mistakenly assumes that the content is quality.
|
| Is this true? I have a hard time believing it because it's a
| pretty naive assumption. A site that lets me get what I'm
| after quickly is generally going to be what I want.
| mortehu wrote:
| Presumably they are using bounce rates, i.e. how often you
| visit result N+1 after visiting result N. I hope time spent
| on site N is not a large factor, because it's so easily
| gamed.
| ggggtez wrote:
| I sincerely doubt it.
|
| How many people keep open 50+ tabs, or open a page and walk
| away?
|
| I'm sure that time spent on a page, if it's given any
| weight, is given barely any. I'm sure returns to search to
| click a new link is a much higher indicator that the user
| didn't find what they wanted.
| ThalesX wrote:
| I worked for a startup obsessed with vanity metrics. They
| would freak out if the average time spent per article
| dropped down, even if our conversions increased. Just an
| odd bunch of people. They went down with the company while
| doing nothing but micro-optimizing for bad metrics.
| jcfrei wrote:
| Google analytics is running on lots of pages. Would be
| pretty surprising if they didn't use the insights they get
| from there, such as time spent on the site, buttons
| clicked, how far they scrolled etc.
| FredPret wrote:
| I just had a vision of a perverse instantiation AI that takes
| over and turns the whole universe into copy-paste recipe
| websites
| sjg007 wrote:
| There are a bunch of these all templated exactly the same
| way. It's fascinating.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| A recipe is not copyrightable, so if they just directly
| presented the recipe to you in a convenient format then someone
| could copy that recipe for their own site (either manually or
| automatically scaped). By mixing it up annoyingly with a story
| it becomes copyrighted. If you still have the recipe in a
| useful format after the story then it would still be possible
| to manually copy just that part, but at least you've made it
| harder for someone to scrape it.
| thefifthsetpin wrote:
| https://recipe.wtf/
|
| It's not for SEO, it's to demonstrate engagement to the
| advertisers. Scrolling past the markov fluff they give you to
| read "while you wait for that to come to a boil" counts as
| engagement.
| mxcrossb wrote:
| I only go to Allrecipes now for exactly this reason. It's
| funny, people used to mock that site for the stupid reviews,
| but what matters can quickly change...
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Allrecipes is a worthless time sync. The vast majority of
| recipes on that site are written by amateurs and just not
| good. It's not worth sifting through recipes on there to find
| a good one because the odds are so low.
| indeedmug wrote:
| Lately I been watching YouTube videos and finding recipes
| through that. I find that it's important to follow people
| with a track record of good cooking. It's no different than
| following authors who write good books. When people
| condense down their recipes into steps, you don't know how
| much experimenting they did or if they did at all. So you
| have to rely on their credibility.
|
| I found Josh Weissman to have good recipes. You could also
| look for recipes by experienced chefs like by Munchies.
|
| Also if you have more experience. You can look at a recipe
| and easily figure out if something is very wrong.
| Unfortunately, most things on cooking don't tell you how to
| "debug" recipes. You just cook often and hope you can
| figure things out.
| bena wrote:
| I think part of this is that recipes themselves are not
| protected under copyright. They fall under the provision of
| factual information.
|
| 1 cup of flour, 2 eggs, 1 cup of milk, 2 tbsp of sugar, mix
| until smooth is a shitty pancake recipe (I think, it's close),
| but there aren't many ways to say that that makes it novel.
| Recipes are essentially instruction on how to build food.
|
| Where copyright comes into play for cookbooks and recipe sites
| are presentation. And that includes the stories. So while the
| recipe itself doesn't enjoy copyright protection, writing "In
| the early autumn morning, my grandmother enjoyed making the
| family the most delicious pancakes, she started by going out to
| the chicken coop and sticking her whole hand up a chicken's ass
| to get only the freshest eggs possible..."
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Librarians find it pretty tough. In 1970 MARC (used to represent
| a "library card") was the first standard data format with
| variable length fields! It was the first standard data format to
| confront internationalization, etc.
|
| It is no wonder metadata systems are ahead of other systems in
| semantic flexibility. If somebody gave you a whole bunch of
| weather simulation data you would have some big arrays laid out
| in accordance to their scale and expected usage patterns and then
| you would have some a graph of relationships describing that the
| content is barometric pressure sampled on a certain grid, etc.
|
| Sometimes these "metadata" relationships are so privileged that
| they become code, I mean a "CREATE TABLE" in SQL can be "exactly
| similar to" some definitions in OWL even though one causes the
| physical layout of memory and storage and the other one only
| attaches meanings to some symbols that may or may not be in the
| graph without what OWL thinks.
|
| The "production rules" systems that were popular in 1980s A.I.
| have improved by orders of magnitude because of RETE-type
| algorithms, hashtable indexes, etc.
| chubot wrote:
| _Perhaps the bigger illusion is that when you search with Google
| you are somehow searching the sum total of human knowledge._
|
| This is a big pet peeve of mine. People think because they're
| reading the web that they know things or they're "up to date" on
| current events. I've gotten a lot more out of books than the
| news, especially in the last 5-10 years.
|
| And I feel like that's almost universally true (bad books are
| still better!)
|
| Ironically Google Scholar is one place that you will find some
| real information. But it seems to be de-emphasized now. The main
| Google results will take you to a paywall for a paper (IEEE,
| etc.) But if you go to Google Scholar, you'll find the PDF. But
| I'd bet many Google users don't know that, even the ones that
| would read a journal paper.
|
| -----
|
| Aside from that, this is a great article that makes a great
| point. Google talks about AI all the time but it still relies on
| basic user curation to understand the web.
|
| I think that shows you that the value lies. If webmasters stop
| doing work, then Google has nothing to index. Similarly I view
| the rise of these awesome lists as a manual Yahoo:
|
| https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
|
| If Google was providing so much value, then these lists would be
| redundant.
|
| In fact I think Google was bootstrapped off at least partially
| off Yahoo. Yahoo had all these human editors curating links. That
| was great information for a nascent search engine to piggy back
| off of. Now that Yahoo no longer does that (AFAIK), Google has to
| rely on incentives for webmasters to provide metadata.
|
| -----
|
| To add something positive, I think YouTube is really where there
| is interesting user created content. Google has done a good job
| of stewarding and growing that ecosystem.
|
| I remember I used to type random keywords in to Google and see
| what comes up. It used to be something interesting; it no longer
| is.
|
| But YouTube has that flavor now. I typed in "sardines" and got a
| channel of this funny guy reviewing all sorts of canned fish :)
| It feels more like the early web.
| cybice wrote:
| Im working as web developer, and have a strong feeling that now
| we are writing web sites for google and not for humans. Most
| decisions about where and how to place content are coming from
| SEOs. UX etc doesnt matter.
| ficklepickle wrote:
| I know one case where Google appears to be actually using "AI",
| and the results are terrible.
|
| A client of mine is continually having their listing on Google
| Maps "helpfully" updated by Google to be wrong. They change the
| services, they change the hours, all to be wrong. They added a
| new services section, duplicating their existing services and
| adding back ones that had been removed post-COVID.
|
| There is no way to make it stop. They show the changes in low-
| contrast yellow and through dark patterns make it difficult to
| revert the changes. All they can do is check it daily and revert
| the changes one-by-one.
|
| I'm trying to get API access so I can automatically revert
| changes that weren't made by the business. It requires manual
| approval which takes 2 weeks. Months later, I haven't heard back.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| Can you tell the AI changes from the ones that are submitted by
| users? Early in the pandemic especially, I was submitting lots
| of changes to Google Maps for places that had changed their
| hours or services but didn't update their Maps profiles.
| fouc wrote:
| > There are woolly intimations that self driving cars will read
| roadsigns to work out what the speed limit is for any stretch of
| road but the truth seems to be that they use the current GPS co-
| ordinates to access manually entered data on speedlimits.
|
| I actually didn't know Tesla cars relied on GPS + map data w/
| speed limits until recently. What a disappointment, apparently it
| causes all sorts of issues with sudden braking/acceleration when
| the map data is wrong.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| And sometimes the map is wrong but the sign is stolen or
| unreadable.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| In which case no one knows what the speed limit is, AI or
| not.
| darkerside wrote:
| Maybe it uses both? My Honda can tell me the speed limit, and
| I'm sure it's not using the internet to do it.
| lights0123 wrote:
| There's no reason it couldn't have them stored locally. If
| your car has an on-screen map, it's probably been downloaded
| to the car directly like standalone GPS units popular years
| ago.
| darkerside wrote:
| It doesn't. And the sign seems to pop up after I pass a
| speed limit sign.
|
| EDIT: Here's info on it.
| https://www.dowhonda.com/2017/11/17/traffic-sign-
| recognition...
| ullevaal wrote:
| Well, the problem with builtin GPS in cars is that you will
| often find yourself driving on brand new highways, while
| the car is complaining that you are driving in terrain and
| need to get back on the road.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| >I'm sure it's not using the internet to do it.
|
| _How_ sure are you?
|
| >Daniel Dunn was about to sign a lease for a Honda Fit last
| year when a detail buried in the lengthy agreement caught his
| eye. Honda wanted to track the location of his vehicle, the
| contract stated, according to Dunn -- a stipulation that
| struck the 69-year-old Temecula, Calif., retiree as a bit
| odd. [...]
|
| >There are 78 million cars on the road with an embedded cyber
| connection, a feature that makes monitoring customers easier,
| according to ABI Research. By 2021, according to the
| technology research firm Gartner, 98 percent of new cars sold
| in the United States and in Europe will be connected, a
| feature that is being highlighted this week here at the North
| American International Auto Show in Detroit.
|
| >After being asked on multiple occasions what the company
| does with collected data, Natalie Kumaratne, a Honda
| spokeswoman, said that the company "cannot provide specifics
| at this time." Kumaratne instead sent a copy of an owner's
| manual for a Honda Clarity that notes that the vehicle is
| equipped with multiple monitoring systems that transmit data
| at a rate determined by Honda.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/01/1.
| ..
| jeffbee wrote:
| >> I'm sure it's not using the internet to do it.
|
| > How sure are you?
|
| Pretty sure. The Honda Sensing display of the local speed
| limit changes on the dashboard at the instant you pass the
| sign, it's too exact to be using GPS. Nobody has geocoded
| the location of every sign in America, that would be too
| much work. Also, it's often wrong but in ways that you
| would be wrong if you were just reading the signs. For
| example, it will switch to 55 MPH speed limit in a 70 MPH
| zone on the interstate after it sees a sign that is
| intended for trucks only.
| asdff wrote:
| My garmin does this instant speed change, and it is
| pulling GPS.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Does your Garmin also refuse to say anything until you
| pass the first sign, and also stop indicating the speed
| limit if it's been a long time since you saw one, and
| also from time to time pick up spurious roadside signals
| as speed limits, indicating 70-100 MPH in 25 MPH zones,
| and also finally does your Garmin stop indicating speed
| limits if you cover its forward-facing camera with a
| piece of tape?
|
| I think the clearest indication that Honda Sensing does
| not use location data for speed limits is that Honda
| Sensing is available on cars that don't have GPS at all.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| I think the risk of a car missing a speed sign, or
| misinterpreting one, or reading something that looks like a
| speed limit sign but isn't, is a much bigger threat.
| ipython wrote:
| I have an Audi that has both speed limit info and stop light
| info in the dash. I know for a fact that it uses the camera for
| the speed limit signs as it will interpret school zone areas.
| Sometimes it misses the "end school zone" sign or not recognize
| the yellow border around the school zone begin sign. You can
| see the display become out of sync with the road conditions
| until the next speed limit sign appears.
|
| As far as the stop light data, that's fed into Audi through a
| select number of state DOTs (mine is one of them). It's almost
| magical that it can tell you when the light will turn green.
| zinok wrote:
| Are you sure it's not using static data generated by a car
| which has driven the same roads and then has had speed limit
| sign detection run on the captured video?
| ipython wrote:
| Yes, it does the recognition on the car through a front
| facing camera.
| zinok wrote:
| However, as far as I can tell, the GPS data, in at least some
| cases, comes from Streetview-type camera cars which drive along
| the roads and capture the roadsigns.
|
| On French highways there are context-dependent speed limit
| signs which look exactly like normal signs but with a small
| additional panel below which tells you when they apply. Eg, big
| 70 in a round red circle, with a small picture of a car towing
| a trailer below. Eg https://external-
| content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F... which obviously
| only applies to cars with trailers.
|
| Google maps (on my phone, not built-in to the car in any way)
| would constantly tell me that the speed limit of the road was
| that of the last such sign regardless of the specificity.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| It would be cool if the signs could have a low density error
| correcting code on them (maybe even only using a paint that can
| be seen in infrared) that would let the computers have more
| confidence in what they're seeing.
| [deleted]
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You mean some codes like a standard shape and color, colored
| borders, standard fonts, and standardized messages?
| BBC-vs-neolibs wrote:
| Ten year old SAABs (it went bankrupt 10 years ago) read
| roadsigns.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVekffxj5QE
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| The whole problem is the adversarial environment. It's orders of
| magnitude harder to create genuinely useful content than it is to
| create crap or copy content. Meanwhile, the difference between
| useful and lazy content requires a holistic view and even
| embodied (IRL) understanding. For example, it's so much more work
| to physically review a set of items and write that up than it is
| to just read and summarize other people's reviews (bad content).
| It's also hard to tell the difference between these without
| physically trying the item in real life (bad ranking). So the
| ranker can't tell what's crap and there's more crap than good
| stuff.
|
| If there was no money to be made by ranking highly on search
| engines, I think the promise the article's talking about might
| have been fulfilled.
| ctrlp wrote:
| Time to update the old quote? 'Show me your AI and conceal your
| data structures, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me
| your data structures and I won't need your AI.'
| hajile wrote:
| The commercial opinion bit is incredibly annoying. Ask for an
| opinion and you'll get 5 pages of custom built "review" sites
| that offer nothing useful besides copious ads and paid click-
| through to Amazon.
|
| Even when Google knows where I go with my searches, they still
| refuse to show those sites for anything that might have
| commercial interest. So much for customized search. I get tired
| of being the product. Can we get a subscription search engine
| that's actually good? I'd pay for that.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I literally append "site:reddit.com" like in the article
| whenever I'm looking for reviews and comparisons. Google is
| nearly useless for finding content among the sea of crap and
| autogenerated near-crap (like Slant). I might click on the
| links going to sites that I half-remember by name, but for
| open-ended searches it's a lost war.
| esailija wrote:
| Also try appending:
|
| inurl:forum|viewthread|showthread|viewtopic|showtopic|"index.
| php?topic" | intext:"reading this topic"|"next thread"|"next
| topic"|"send private message"
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| > _I literally append "site:reddit.com"_
|
| Stop saying that! The more people repeat that on HN, the more
| we risk advertisers realizing it and doing reddit-targeted
| SEO and reddit will be useless too!
|
| (I'm only half joking)
|
| Also, it's funny, I was just reading the thread about malaria
| eradication and DDT-resistant mosquitoes; the problem of SEO
| is eerily similar (any countermeasure is eventually defeated
| by evolution).
| Aunche wrote:
| I find that Reddit is mostly useful for things with a small
| audience like local restaurants, so they're unlikely for
| recommendations to be fake.
|
| For consumer goods, I find that trustworthy Youtube
| channels, like America's Test Kitchen, do a much better job
| with reviewing things anyways.
| kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote:
| The majority of popular reddit posts are already SEO
| optimized marketing campaigns anyway.
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| You are 10 years too late for that concern. I often wonder
| if there are any real people commenting, submitting, or
| upvoting left on Reddit.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| This is emphatically not the case in my experience.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| _10 years later_
|
| Users: Now if I want good results, I append
| site:news.ycombinator.com before every query.
|
| Advertisers: Hmmm...
| shrimpx wrote:
| I spend a lot of time on reddit and do not identify with
| your comment at all.
| edgyquant wrote:
| There's real people for sure, but most of them are
| children and teenagers who are easily susceptible to
| corporate propaganda. I often wonder when a competitor
| will arise so that I can leave Reddit, and it's rolling
| release of bad UX, for something better. At this point I
| would pay a monthly fee for a decent Reddit.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Plenty of competitors have risen over the years. They've
| have just all been abject failures. Most have tried to
| fix at least one aspect of the site and failed to do so.
| I don't even think a straight up copy would work at this
| point. Its got the user base and while never directly
| profitable, its value has always been in how easy it is
| to shill to the userbase. I think that's primarily why
| Advance keeps it.
| tolbish wrote:
| Google modified the algorithm a while back to ignore such
| flags at times.
| emptyfile wrote:
| They did a bad job then, since they still work.
| tolbish wrote:
| They still use the flags, just not in every instance. I
| recall the quotes for inclusion of strings and the
| "-site" flag failing for me as early as last year.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Yes they do ignore those but at this moment they don't
| ignore site: queries. Google also suffers heavily from
| old content, and even changing the date under the tools
| section doesn't work for some reason. I think because it
| goes by when the page was last updated and sites like
| Reddit update them automatically very frequently
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| That worked for awhile. But even Reddit has been overrun with
| coordinated marketing efforts to make sure you can't really
| get an honest review without checking every comments post
| history.
| arbitrage wrote:
| > even Reddit
|
| no, reddit? i'm shocked /s
|
| your implication seems to be that reddit should somehow be
| resistant to parasitic capitalism. reddit has been
| compromised and on the side of the advertisers since the
| beginning.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > reddit has been compromised and on the side of the
| advertisers since the beginning.
|
| reddit today is very different from reddit of early days,
| its practically unrecognizable.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Exactly. HN of today is a very similar experience to what
| Reddit used to be. The King is dead. Long live the King!
| bun_at_work wrote:
| Just curious - how much would you pay for that? $20/mo? $30/mo?
|
| One one hand I completely agree, and hope for paid service
| alternatives to all these "free" products. On the other hand, I
| can find everything I need through Google, as is, so why pay
| for an alternative?
| fsflover wrote:
| How about p2p FLOSS search engine: https://yacy.net?
| anticristi wrote:
| I ended up with "site:bbc.com" and "site:svt.se" to get to
| actual news instead of click-baits. Why the search function of
| these sites is crap, to the point where it's easier to hack
| Google, is beyond me.
| megamix wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20652151
|
| :)
|
| subscription service on the rise!
| ihnorton wrote:
| Even for programming topics, sites like gitmemory routinely
| rank higher than the original GitHub repos and StackOverflow
| answers that they are "mirroring", or the mirror page gets full
| result billing while the original StackOverflow answer only
| gets a single title line in the "other results from site"
| format.
| christophilus wrote:
| Brave is releasing one soon.
| hnnameblah365 wrote:
| Google could easily lower pagerank for blogspam by measuring
| density of affiliate links.
|
| They don't, because low quality consumerist search results make
| the ads fit right in. Also those sites are more likely to
| contain Google Ads themselves.
|
| The search engine is fully optimized for consumerism, not
| finding the most relevant result.
| Tarsul wrote:
| I really like the expression "metadata analysis". It's very
| succinct, describes very much what AI/ML often boils down to in 2
| (rather) simple words. I will try to remember this. The marketing
| guys in cooperation with journalists won the battle for now but
| words will be replaced by others again and again and even change
| their meaning, so maybe next time the shiny new technology will
| get more adequate wording? (well, maybe not in these times where
| clickbait wins it all)
| topspin wrote:
| The minute 'AI' solves a problem the problem is removed from
| that class of problems that require 'AI'. If the problem is
| difficult enough we might award the new solution its own name.
| cgearhart wrote:
| "Moving the goalposts" has long been identified as a problem
| by AI enthusiasts, but the opposite is also often true--an AI
| is built to solve a limited or highly restricted form of a
| problem, and then proponents claim that the goalpost has been
| moved when it's observed that the general problem remains
| unsolved.
|
| It feels to me that we started calling ML "AI" when deep
| learning became powerful enough to work on less clearly
| structured problems like vision and NLP--but "find patterns
| in complex data" does not seem powerful enough for what I
| would consider "intelligence" (artificial or otherwise). I
| don't think that stateless/idempotent ML is capable of what
| most people would recognize as intelligence; in part because
| I suspect a history is required for a system to be self-
| correcting over time.
| dynamite-ready wrote:
| I'm starting to appreciate this sentiment. The way most ML
| success stories are presented, you'd think it really is all
| a case of finding enough data, and let the computer learn
| to extract something useful from it.
|
| That is not the hard part.
|
| The hard part, is finding a dataset that is amenable to the
| training process. Or at the very least, determining if a
| collection has any 'educational' value at all.
|
| Then, by the time you get to that point, you're probably
| already looking at metadata, or a simple pattern that could
| possibly be encoded in a database query.
|
| I have some faith in some of these new discoveries
| (Alphafold is a remarkable case study), but in many cases,
| the effectiveness of ML seems to be overstated.
| balia wrote:
| This seems it will be applied to self driving technology in a
| huge way.
|
| All of these companies doing advanced AI vision detection,
| classification etc... they're really hard problems. But the whole
| challenge will eventually become nullified when every single road
| sign, landmark, and the road itself are tagged internally with
| metadata.
|
| Instead of trying to decipher how does this PNG of a speed limit
| sign translate into a number, the number metadata would be
| encoded in the sign.
|
| Looking at it this way, having advanced vision AI tech is only a
| competitive advantage in the short term
| ZiiS wrote:
| The difficulty is getting the kid playing in the road to
| correctly encode their metadata; not so much the posted signs.
| adelrune wrote:
| You see, that's what the chips in the vaccines are for /s
| [deleted]
| jfk13 wrote:
| > But the whole challenge will eventually become nullified when
| every single road sign, landmark, and the road itself are
| tagged internally with metadata
|
| Including every pothole, pedestrian, stray deer, abandoned
| shopping cart and fallen tree branch?
| arethuza wrote:
| What about collaboratively tagging drivers with metadata - I
| suspect that could be pretty useful... ;-)
| virgilp wrote:
| My car already does a pretty good job of showing the speed
| limits (and it's definitely based on computer vision/ works
| offline and in places where map metadata is poor). And it
| doesn't have "self driving", just a limited "pilot assist".
|
| Not sure why reading road signs is used as and example of
| "extremely hard thing to do" - there are other way harder
| things that cars can't currently do. E.g. figuring out the
| right speed to negotiate a curve using computer vision alone
| (without relying on detailed maps/gps, ie "metadata").
| bjourne wrote:
| How does your car handle snow-covered road signs?
| fouc wrote:
| Actually I think road speeds for various curves are pretty
| standardized, so it shouldn't be that hard for the car to
| estimate the correct speed based on the curve.
| virgilp wrote:
| It's a tad more complicated than that - it needs to
| consider also driving conditions, any hazards on the road.
| Probably can't be done on computer vision alone, you need
| at least some sensors to get a "feel" of how good is the
| road grip.
| ipython wrote:
| My Audi tries to account for curves in the road when
| running on cruise control through the onboard nav. It's
| horrendously conservative in its opinion of the maximum
| safe speed to the point I find it dangerous to rely upon.
| If I left it to its own devices, other cars would be
| passing me as if I were standing still. Otherwise the
| driver assist features are fairly slick.
| [deleted]
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > the number metadata would be encoded in the sign.
|
| Oh yea that's not going to backfire at all is it? Lemme just
| work out how to frig it to state the max speed limit is zero
| and create an automated car pile-up.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| It's been done before.
|
| https://screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/coyote-
| pai...
| aNoob7000 wrote:
| I wonder if it would be cheaper for all these companies to go
| and pay for a sticker/stamp of some kind put on all the signs
| in a city. Figure out a standard and put them everywhere.
|
| This would give them time to get the AI vision detection
| algorithms figured out.
| tester34 wrote:
| what's the point of putting it on the signs
|
| when you can create virtual sign map that every city/road
| maintenance HAS to update?
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Personally, I'd be more comfortable by making the signs
| themselves easier for a machine to read rather than to
| build/maintain what is basically a form of dead reckoning.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| >when you can create virtual sign map that every city/road
| maintenance HAS to update?
|
| Who can do that?
| tester34 wrote:
| society should, just like roads.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| At least in the US, "society" doesn't build and maintain
| roads. Thousands of individual city, county and state
| governments do.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > every single road sign, landmark, and the road itself are
| tagged internally with metadata.
|
| Who's going to pay for that? The public? In order to provide
| returns to private shareholders?
| gverrilla wrote:
| amazing quotes:
|
| > Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally pretty negative
| about search engines that sold ads. Appendix A in their original
| paper says: we expect that advertising-funded
| search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers
| and away from the needs of theconsumers
|
| and that we believe the issue of advertising
| causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have
| acompetitive search engine that is transparent and in the
| academic realm
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Well, they weren't wrong, but then they saw there was nothing
| wrong with the first passage you quoted.
| cainxinth wrote:
| I guess the prospect of literally a hundred billion dollars
| each made them reconsider.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Which would one?
|
| 1. One search engine w/ hundreds of thousands of employeers &
| bajillions in revenue
|
| 2. One search engine w/ like 3 people & a chonky Patreon
| account
| svachalek wrote:
| That's a bit of a false dichotomy though. Although the
| original AdWords also made them an adverting based search
| engine, it made them massively profitable without violating
| anyone's privacy.
|
| It was the need to make even more billions that led them
| down the slippery slope of mass surveillance that makes
| everyone uneasy now.
| sireat wrote:
| Original AdWords in early 200Xs were quite a breath of
| fresh air compared to other type of advertising on the
| net.
|
| The ads seemed relevant. I actually clicked on them with
| a sense of purpose!
|
| At the time AdWords truly seemed how advertising should
| be done ethically with an iron wall between search and
| advertising.
|
| That wall started crumbling pretty quickly by mid 200Xs.
|
| Maybe the wall was never there?
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| It would be interested to know how this process looked like.
| I'd imagine it was very gradual and consisted of little steps
| each leading to the next one, and when they finally started
| to serve ads they were probably thinking it's not that bad. I
| believe crossing that line made paved the way for considering
| things like tracking the whole web morally acceptable, maybe
| even positive.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| They hired Eric Schmidt as CEO. That's how it happened.
| Larry and Sergei were still in "don't be evil" mode. But
| you have to be a little evil when this much money is
| involved, so they hired Schmidt to be evil for them. They
| then learned how to be evil under his tutelage. Schmidt is
| absolutely an ethical nihilist, just listen to any of his
| speeches on privacy and security.
| intergalplan wrote:
| My hypothesis is that at some point someone was given
| clearance to try a couple of plainly-evil things, and the
| results were so _wildly_ lucrative that the "don't be
| evil" faction either defected or lost all sway.
|
| Notably, ads in-line with results. I suspect that was the
| first move that sent them irrevocably down the evil-path.
| Watch a non-tech-geek use Google and you'll see why--I bet
| ad-clicks went up 10x with that change, or more. Then they
| began to serve ads beyond those early "non-evil" clearly
| marked text-only ads. That led to them making tons of money
| from webspam sites, while also putting tons of effort into
| _fighting_ webspam, and some time around '09 or so they
| realized they should lay off the latter, on account of the
| former.
|
| And here we are. Google search is worse, Google advertise
| deceptively on purpose, and the whole web is overrun with
| webspam.
| tjs8rj wrote:
| I think the truth is that they were naive or focused on
| their consumer existence, but as soon as they were the
| owners of the hottest and best search engine it was a
| simple next step to monetize with ads. I don't this excerpt
| suggests they had any personal qualms with ads, just that
| they had problems to be overcome and often detract from the
| user experience - which almost anyone would agree with
| including people who are rich from ads.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| For one, when they started ads, they were not inline with
| the search results, and in brightly highlighted boxes. So
| it was easy to say, you know, we have ads, but they don't
| affect search results.
|
| Today they say the same thing, but nontechnical users can
| no longer distinguish ads from their organic search
| results.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Non-technical users can't read the bolded "Ad" in the top
| left? Ok, it's more subtle than before but it doesn't
| prey on the less sophisticated among us.
| intergalplan wrote:
| Watch a non-nerd use Google. They 100% do click on those
| ads without realizing they're ads. Constantly. I wouldn't
| be surprised if _most_ ad-clicks for Google are performed
| by people having no clue they 're clicking on an ad.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| For one, that Ad logo spent about two years being yellow-
| on-white, so people without well-tuned contrast monitors
| couldn't see it at all.
|
| Last year they made a change that made them so
| indistinguishable to the untrained eye that even Google
| rolled them back:
| https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/squint-and-youll-click-
| it/ https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/24/google-will-iterate-
| the-desi...
|
| But no, generally, they don't notice that. Studies have
| been done demonstrating how few users can tell the
| difference between an ad and a search result. In one
| study, half of respondents "didn't spot" ads in Google
| search results at all:
| https://www.123-reg.co.uk/blog/seo-2/how-google-is-
| profiting...
|
| That study was in 2013, when Ads were much more obvious
| in search results than they are today. By 2018, the
| statistic of people who couldn't identify search ads on
| Google was up closer to two-thirds:
| https://marketingtechnews.net/news/2018/sep/06/two-
| thirds-pe...
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| it normally takes me 1 sentence max to realise i've
| clicked on an ad by mistake. I think even if there was no
| ad shin i would still manage to work out what is promoted
| content. If ads ever stops being generic, irrelevant
| clickbait, we might have a problem on our hands. But that
| particular danger doesn't seem to be very likely at all.
| cainxinth wrote:
| It sounds crazy, but they really can't. Seriously, have
| you ever been over a non tech person's shoulder while
| they are googling? They click the first thing they see
| with zero scrutiny.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I have an incredible number of personal anecdotes to
| offer about not just watching ordinary users click on
| ads, but also Google Ads being the primary source for
| most scams and malware on the Internet, that Google
| pushes to the top of their results for money. (When you
| have helped dozens of seniors taken advantage of by
| scammers that Google profited off of, it's hard to be
| particularly amicable about the company and their
| business practices.)
|
| However, I went with showing studies because
| unfortunately, our personal real world experiences rarely
| win online arguments. ;)
| morelisp wrote:
| The DoubleClick acquisition was the inflection point, even
| obviously at the time. Before that AdWords was reasonably
| in-line with Google's standards and culture.
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| We ran a DoubleClick ad engine on the Clear Channel
| websites right around that time period. The front-end was
| a Java Web Start application, ugly, slow, but very
| intuitive to use for ad-targeting. I wrote several
| extensions for it using their plugin-api and the ad
| engine worked really, really well. Had several calls with
| the DART team and they were all smart people delivering a
| necessary service to keep websites free to use. Hard to
| believe that something so simple and useful could become
| the tool for evil that it has.
| tester34 wrote:
| I thought it wouldnt be suprising, especially that we're on
| news hacker out of all places
| WitCanStain wrote:
| I guess growing up is when you give in to profit above all.
| patatino wrote:
| I sometimes ask myself if they are looking back and questioning
| all the little decisions they took and think, "where did we go
| wrong"?
| leoc wrote:
| It has to be emphasised that (IIUC) Page and Brin's
| misbehaviour is not just a thing of the past, but active and
| ongoing, since they still have majority voting power over
| Alphabet https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516
| /top-5-g... . Even one of them is a hugely clouty
| shareholder, especially if he enlisted the support of a few
| of their chums who hold the remainder of Class B. Yes, by now
| they probably can't just undo Google's fundamental size and
| orientation as an AdWords behemoth at will: too many business
| risks and legitimate concerns about fiduciary duty, too much
| risk of shareholder lawsuits and so on. But within that they
| surely have enormous power to restrain Google's actions at
| their discretion.
|
| Of course when bad things happen the usual tendency is to
| attribute too much power and assign too much blame to a few
| individuals. But if anything the reverse seems to be true
| here. Page and Brin largely don't have the twin "if I don't
| do it I'll be fired" and "if I don't do it someone else will"
| excuses that others tend to have. Yet there seems to be an
| ambient belief that they shouldn't be expected to restrain
| Google, that their (at best) abdication of responsibility is
| somehow inevitable or proper. What makes this _really_
| disgraceful is that Google probably got where it today is in
| large part because in the past people bought, and Google
| actively sold, the idea that Larry and Sergey were nice guys
| who could be could be trusted to use their controlling stake
| to do the right thing. However stupid it was to ever trust in
| that idea, Page and Brin are not justified in abusing that
| trust now.
| darkwater wrote:
| I think that you end up convincing yourself that you did the
| best, despite the obvious differences between what you were
| thinking back in the day and now. Also, you would make
| yourself think it was probably the only possible outcome and
| your younger self was wrong or at least very, very naive.
|
| Or at least that's what _I_ would do, sitting on a mountain
| of dollars.
| cton wrote:
| Technically they held true to this sentiment. Google Scholar
| doesn't seem to have ads.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| From the article:
|
| >> "When your elected government snoops on you, they famously
| prefer the metadata of who you emailed, phoned or chatted to the
| content of the messages themselves."
|
| This is _strictly_ false. They prefer to have the content, but it
| is illegal to record the content of conversations of "US
| Persons" without a warrant. However, from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland it is legal to
| keep a pen register of all numbers called, since this is not
| considered protected under the constitution.
|
| This article was written by someone who isn't versed in the
| basics of what they are pontificating about.
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