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When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

jazco.dev

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Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#191
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'll have to pay a team millions to figure that out, it is unlikely to be a static rate but rather decided based on multiple traits like time of year, time of flight, distance of flight, cost of ticket, etc.

The airline has literally all of the data on this, they definitely do not have to pay a team millions.

They probably do pay millions of dollars in wages for business analysts to figure out what this rate is on their flights.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No additional fees, but the cost of the ticket is typically sky-high. In many cases the company could purchase 3 restricted-fare tickets for less than the unrestricted fare. (And also, the consultants want to get home, they HATE staying extra nights, so they have inherent motivation to catch the original flight). You'd think that management consulting firms, you know, who are supposed to be good at optimization and r…

* A massive bulk of flex rates is different price than a single flex ticket * when I travelled to a single city with 20+ colleagues for several years, our nightly hotel rate was less than quarter of published rate. I don't think we got anything like that on Airlines, but nevertheless, bulk gets discounts. * I forget details but between specific frequent cities which had hourly flights, we had full flexibility and we…

* Hotels are required by law to have a published "rack rate" and it's common for both leisure and business travelers to book at more than half, or more, off those rates. Airlines don't have that.

* Yes of course there are negotiated discounts for major corporations- but full flexibility is still far more expensive than restricted tickets, just like business is still far more expensive than economy.

* Most airlines offer guaranteed same-day changes, or at least priority standby, to high-status loyalty members (which most consultants are) so buying full-flex tickets to get an hour earlier/later flexibility is redundant - basically, paying for a benefit you already have.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny because from my experience airline systems are very imperfect (timing wise). I (unwisely) tried to purchase an Icelandair ticket via the Chase travel portal. I would get a reservation number, go buy seats on Icelandair's website, and a few days later the entire reservation would vanish into the ether. Rinse and repeat 3x. I can't remember the exact verbiage, but basically tickets can be "reserved" and "boo…

(Replying to both you and the parent poster) Airlines are far from perfect. They overbook flights and sometimes have to ask people leave and pay them for the inconvenience. My wife and I once got $1000 a piece and a hotel and food voucher to volunteer to take a flight the next day on a layover in Atlanta. As far as your particular situation, the number one rule of using a third party portal to book flights or hotels…

Overbooking is not a mistake, though. People miss flights for many reasons, and the airlines predict this with impressive accuracy, to the point that they can afford to pay tremendous sums for being wrong and yet still come out ahead.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#194

An airline reservation system has to be perfect (no slack in today's skies), a hotel reservation can be 98% perfect so long as there is some slack and you don't mind putting somebody up in a better room than they paid for from time to time. A social media system doesn't need to be perfect at all. It was clear to me from the beginning that Bluesky's feeds aren't very fast, not like they are crazy slow, but if it saves…

Does the fact that an airline booking system must be perfect explain why so many flights are overbooked or cancelled?

[deleted]

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 2019 study of 5 European airports in 2019 had no-show rates of 14.4%: https://www.ozion-airport.com/product/comparative-analysis-n... However, my understanding is that airlines have much more sophisticated per-flight and per-passenger models that calculate the predicted no-show factor based on the historical rates for that particular route (e.g. you're more likely to get more no-shows in business class flying from…

That blows my mind, I would expect maybe 1 or 2 passengers per plane at most. I'm trying to think of what factors would cause that many no-shows, it has to be mostly missed connections? I can't imagine spending hundreds of dollars and just not showing up.

Remember lots of business travelers have connections or flex schedules. When I had to go to the West coast for business, I usually have full fare tickets and book a later flight. If I had flexibility, I’d switch to an earlier plane or first class.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#197
post #146

I wonder why timelines aren't implemented as a hybrid gather-scatter choosing strategy depending on account popularity (a combination of fan-out to followers and a lazy fetch of popular followed accounts when follower's timeline is served). When you have a celebrity account, instead of fanning out every message to millions of followers' timelines, it would be cheaper to do nothing when the celebrity posts, and later…

Why do they "insert" even non-celebrity posts into each follower's timeline? That is not intuitive to me.

Think of it as pre-rendering. Of pre-rendering and JIT collecting, pre-rendering means more work but it's async, and it means the timeline is ready whenever a user requests it, to give a fast user experience.

(Although I don't understand the "non-celebrity" part of your comment -- the timeline contains (pointers to) posts from whoever someone follows, and doesn't care who those people are.)

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#198
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was acquired by IBM in March 2015, and the service was discontinued. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blekko Perhaps GP has a more interesting answer though.

That's the correct answer, IBM wanted the crawler mostly to feed Watson. Building a full search engine (crawler, indexer, ranker, API, web application) for the English language was a hell of an accomplishment but by the time Blekko was acquired Google was paying out tens of billions of dollars to people to send them and only them their search queries. For a service that nominally has to live on advertising revenue ge…

Blekko was gone by the time I learned about it. Recently (past few years) I emailed someone who worked on Blekko to get his opinion on a search engine concept I still have yet to start. His advice was to not bother competing with Google (obviously) LOL!

I don’t know if anyone’s embarked on a P2P search engine but that’s essentially my concept. Anyhoo, thanks for the inspiration!

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does not account for users banned from Bluesky by Bluesky for breaking the ToS or PDS abuse. Then you are missing the point. I am asking how much censorship power the largest node in the network has. If being blocked by the largest provider means 95% of users can't see me anymore then the situation is strictly worse than Mastodon vs ActivityPub-at-large.

What did you do to get banned? Most people who make this claim are unwilling to share the behavior that led to it. Bans are not arbitrary, nor is anyone obligated to host or show your speech ATProto is young compared to the alternatives, give the network time to build out an ecosystem and the resilience we need.

First you made incorrect and misleading statements. Then when I point it out you try to rhetorically shift blame on to me.

To answer your misleading and irrelevant question, I have never been banned by Bluesky. What did you do to get banned on Mastodon? Do you understand that "moderation" and "banned for violating the ToS" are one and the same?

ATProto is not any better than ActivityPub (ie Mastodon) regarding the impact of network effects on moderation. The "big few" retain their outsized influence with both protocols, at least as far as I am aware. If there is a technical misunderstanding about this on my part then do please point it out.

Moreover, the current situation is significantly worse on ATProto because the vast majority of the network currently relies on a single provider.

To be clear, I am not opposed to ATProto. I am only opposed to inaccurate technical comparisons.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the correct answer, IBM wanted the crawler mostly to feed Watson. Building a full search engine (crawler, indexer, ranker, API, web application) for the English language was a hell of an accomplishment but by the time Blekko was acquired Google was paying out tens of billions of dollars to people to send them and only them their search queries. For a service that nominally has to live on advertising revenue ge…

Blekko was gone by the time I learned about it. Recently (past few years) I emailed someone who worked on Blekko to get his opinion on a search engine concept I still have yet to start. His advice was to not bother competing with Google (obviously) LOL! I don’t know if anyone’s embarked on a P2P search engine but that’s essentially my concept. Anyhoo, thanks for the inspiration!

Peer to peer would be tough, you really need a 10G network connection to some tier 1 provider, and about 2500 machines to distribute the crawling/serving load. (that is if you want to do a full stack search engine). And while you can run that infrastructure for on the order of $100K/month (not counting depreciation) that means you need roughly $5K/day in revenue from that cluster. At $10 RPM ($10 revenue per thousand queries) you're looking at a minimum of 500,000 'real' search queries during 'English time' (roughly 7AM to 11PM GMT). That's 31,250 queries per hour or ~9 queries per second (average).

And that just pays to keep the lights on at the colocation center. If you're paying off the development costs (30 - 50 developers over 2 - 3 years) and the cost of an office somewhere. You'll want at least double that revenue or you'll go broke before you break even.

Ideally you are the 'go to' place for people looking to buy something as those queries make money. People researching Douglas Fairbanks for a high school essay consume queries but don't generate ad revenue.

It isn't for the faint of heart.

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