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We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

calpaterson.com

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Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#291

Post by thereddaikon »

edgyquant wrote: post #231
the_lonely_road wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#292

Post by 6510 »

dheera wrote: post #217
GCA10 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

People are not having kids because it's to expensive.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#293

Post by jeffbee »

asdff wrote: post #289
jeffbee wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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,…

My garmin does this instant speed change, and it is pulling GPS.

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.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#294

Post by mcguire »

cletus wrote: post #126
soarfourmore wrote: post #49

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…

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-printi…

One might suggest that what made Google a money-printing machine is compiling dossiers on as many people as possible.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#295

Post by 1_person »

dexen wrote: post #140
dheera wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-m…

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 cus…

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.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#296

Post by 6510 »

daenz wrote: post #273
uoaei wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#297

Post by heavyset_go »

throwaway3699 wrote: post #191
erikpukinskis wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t really explain anything, given there are millions of deaths under capitalism too.

Big difference.

Tell that to the people who were enslaved and to the people who starved to death.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#298

Post by oblio »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #272
sobellian wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dispo…

"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…

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.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#299

Post by p_j_w »

dheera wrote: post #217
GCA10 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

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.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#300

Post by ltbarcly3 »

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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