Using AI to help humans sounds like a positive thing. Thanks, will look up Guillaume Chaslot. Wonder if Google are using geothermal energy to run AI farms?
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I’ve got a slight aversion to the indiscriminate use of the word “algorithm” in the context of machine learning systems. The recommenders that cause the damage here are not algorithmic in any except the most trivial ways. They are typically classic “big data” aggregators that look for patterns of affinity in multidimensional arrays of tagged data.
The classic use case is to recommend music or films or books that you’ll likely enjoy, given your previous history of consumption. An unforeseen consequence of this seemingly innocuous design is that credulous people who enjoy paranoid conspiracy theories are continuously bombarded with high yield nonsense that costs Google and Facebook and so on very little to produce.
These are statistical models, and typically quite opaque to those who write the very simple code. If they were algorithms it would be a relatively simple matter to tweak them to avoid adverse consequences. They’re far too complex and unfathomable for that.
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I will not lie - I am 100% addicted to Facebook and Youtube.
Facebook however - I do not own a phone - nor have I for over 7 or 8 years now, so that really is my main means of communication with the few people who I do actually talk to - and i mean few… @CTorp is like my best internet friend haha, I probably talk to him on FB more than my own fiance. LOL
I am also very much on FB for the modular and weird instrument groups.
I suppose though - I do not generally physically socialize with people - I go to work - come home - and thats it.
I’ve broken both feet (legs) both wrists, 1 arm, and many many other stiches and staples… im only 34 and im simply tired… lol I don’t really have it in me anymore to go out and do things because I am in pain throughout 90% of my day.
I do NOT take pain pills, and refuse to do so… so life kinda sucks - I guess the distractions are the only things kinda keeping me going?
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When I have needed to communicate with my family in textual form I usually have to cajole them into using their email accounts. This still astonishes me. Email is still the most versatile way to communicate with other people. The recipients don’t need to be present when your message arrives and there’s none of that nonsense with likes and walls and friending. You can choose your own user interface and including multimedia content is very easy.
FB, I stopped using many years ago because it was taking up too much of my time. Far too many people seemed to be posting photos of what they had for lunch!? These days, I use more direct communication like phone calls or text messages. A good chunk of my friends aren’t actually computer literate, so calls is a good way of catching up.
If I didn’t have pain killers, I’d be a wreck… they help me not to keep waking from pain, and there are so many different types of pain in my life since I developed chronic Sarcoid 12 ish years ago. A background dose of pain killers helps me do more stuff. This is good, but still have to spend quite a lot of time laying still and quiet.
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In today’s world it is of course outrageous that there’s no gate keeping. Literally anyone can contact you for a nominal cost of £/$0. Spam filters help, but I can see why the young’uns aren’t particularly enamored with the thing.
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Email is pretty awful when there are more than 2 participants in a chain.
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Then I must lead a charmed life. I’ve made my current email address available publicly for about 15 years but the amount of spam that’s got through the standard Google spam filters in all that time is negligible. My email address is literally my first name and surname followed by @gmail.com.
My brief excursions into Facebook, on the other hand, invariably produced a deluge of unreadable crap. I like email much better.
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Me too, I can just see the other side of it as well.
Hahaha dude I definitely text you more than my lady
I like fb for the groups functions and seeing what random friends from school are up to.
Also a YouTube fiend, I have the premium account to skip the ads lol. The “in video” ads are straight up unethical haha
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Are you saying that with a premium account, you still get adverts in the videos?
I tend to interlace my replies with what the other person said on a paragraph by paragraph basis. Then you can see as each point gets discussed… some just reply as a block at the start or the end of the email… that makes it hard to track a discussion properly. You end up having to scroll up and down a lot, which is annoying to me.
I gave up on most people learning this a long time ago as well. I still do it when appropriate, but I almost never see anyone else do it. And I practically never see it without a preamble that “answers are inline below”.
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I used to do this on Usenet, and in offline email clients that supported this. Then Microsoft’s email client became ubiquitous and the whole existing online email etiquette slowly died. I haven’t bothered with bottom posting, inline comments and the like for 17 years or so. He’s dead, Jim.
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It’s the only way that some highly complex and technical things can be discussed. Most people don’t know how, because they never need to know.
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Right. I do this all the time in lengthy discussions whether in email, GitHub, or a forum. It’s the clearest way to communicate in detail.
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