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Colorer in which it'd scale thing"> -
I like when Land of Contrasts uses its category map with only one category to make a point.
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Computers plus humans always beat computers. You can see this in particular in the realm of chess, where a human and computer pair of players can beat a computer.
Now suddenly launching a recommendation algorithm to silently chug along and produce recommendations looks like a fools errand, as there will always be groups that have an incentive, either monetary or otherwise, to use humans and computers together to subvert your algorithm. See for example Russia’s Internet Research Agency and their computer generated troll army.
I never thought of the chess analogy here.
However, I think corporations, at least social media ones, know their recommendation systems can be "beaten" by people; they just don't think they've actually lost as long as engagement is high, therefore growth continues and speculative value of the company rises. GROWTH FOR THE GROWTH GOD as my friend Matt says.
Again, this is the real reason Twitter and other social media companies place equal value on Nazi speech and normal speech. Nazi speech gets condemned, and condemnation is engagement. Every time people tweet "Get rid of the Nazis, @jack!", they are:
- Participating on the platform
- Getting others to participate on the platform, both racist and not
- Giving Twitter a chance to (truthfully) tell advertisers they have more active users. (Advertisers do not give a fuck if you are angry or not; they just care if you will see their (often non-Promoted) tweets.)
- Making investors see that, hey, they keep on piling users that look at shit! Someone may want to buy them! -
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I like to think that there's a business guy out there that refers to their salt and pepper shakers as The S&P 500.
And that there's also an extra-obsessive one that keeps only 250 grains in each shaker. -
Well, I haven't checked the social medias in a couple of days. I think I'll now note when I have and just not say anything if I haven't because that's the new norm. Which reminds me, I should get the checkin app Erik and I have been talking about going fairly soon.
I am definitely going to quit social media for daily use. What it is right to use it for is still a question I haven't decided. Certainly, I'm not going to share my life there so they can use it to feed those behavioral conditioning machines.
Should I promote stuff? The clever things about those businesses is that you advertise their business when you use it to promote your projects; you convince its users they should use it so they can find out about projects like yours.
And I don't think users can meaningfully decide whether or not they want to be on social media if they are still in the habit of checking social media. And I do mean habit. As in something you do without thinking about; something that it is hard to resist doing. It took me months to get to this point personally.
That is why companies work so hard to train users into developing habits. It's another way in which this is such an insidious thing. -
The guy and the cats did not Fall Back. The designations of mankind are nothing to them!
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I went out to get an iced coffee, and dropped that iced coffee a couple blocks from my house. It was a good walk, though!
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This is a thing I assume people know about me, but I'm not sure they do.
I like to listen to old Idle Thumbs episodes when I need to hear something that is lighthearted but not dumb. I like to listen to Ear Hustle and Talking Politics when I feel like I can take some bad news (which both podcasts dole out responsibly, not manipulatively), but there's times where I just need some escapism.
Idle Thumbs is great for this because it's friendly, relatable (to me) people talking about video games, which is like a fond homeland that I have emigrated from. Some of the really old episodes are jarring because there is are some old 2008 values are in play, re: saying things like "I got raped" to express "I lost at a video game".
However, there is also an "ambient lack of doom". It's from a time when democracy as we know it was not in danger, and when right-wing racists were not seizing power throughout the world. This gives it a lightness (perhaps imagined by me in part?) that is refreshing at times. -
