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When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

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

#211

Post by NetOpWibby »

chrisweekly wrote: post #142
ChuckMcM wrote: post #135

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…

Not my Q but thanks for the interesting history. Also, (for other readers), I'm a huge fan of Kagi. Highly recommended.

I really thought Neeva was gonna make it. I'm glad Kagi swooped in when they exited.

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

#212

Post by scarface_74 »

branko_d wrote: post #209
ericpauley wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> afford to pay tremendous sums for being wrong Or they can just haul you forcefully from the flight you paid for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_Express_passenger_...

This is ridiculous. There must have been some amount of money that would have convinced four people to deplane voluntarily. $800 was ridiculously low.

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

#213

Post by dsauerbrun »

I'm a bit confused.

The lossy timeline solution basically means you skip updating the feed for some people who are above the number of reasonable followers. I get that

Seeing them get 96% improvements is insane, does that mean they have a ton of users following an unreasonable number of people or do they just have a very low number for reasonable followers. I doubt it's the latter since that would mean a lot of people would be missing updates.

How is it possible to get such massive improvements when you're only skipping a presumably small % of people per new post?

EDIT: nvm, I rethought about it, the issue is that a single user with millions of follows will constantly be written to which will slow down the fanout service when a celebrity makes a post since you're going through many db pages.

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

#214

Post by listenallyall »

lukas099 wrote: post #203
listenallyall wrote: post #154

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…

> You'd think that management consulting firms, you know, who are supposed to be good at optimization and reducing costs, would have figured this out. Maybe they've figured out that enabling their employees to stay a few extra hours without worry to finish a deal is worth it.

Vast majority of consultants are working on engagements where "the deal" was negotiated weeks/months earlier.

The goal isn't to eliminate flexibility, it's understanding probabilities. If fully-flexible/refundable flights are 3x the fare of restricted, then in aggregate, the company could have a chunk of consultants throw out their original reservations and rebook later flights, and still save money. Yes- sometimes consultants need to stay longer than planned, but in an age of prioritizing "work-life balance," most consultants are encouraged to stick to their schedule and get back home when originally planned.

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

#215

Post by thmrtz »

That’s quite interesting and a challenge I have not thought of. I understand the need for a solution and I believe this works reasonably well, but I am wondering what is happening to users that follow a lot of accounts with below-average activity. This may naturally happen on new social media platforms with people trying out the service and possibly abandoning it.

The „reasonable limit“ is likely set to account for such an effect, but I am wondering if a per-user limit based on the activity of the accounts one follows will be an improvement on this approach.

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

#216

Post by flaburgan »

The solution to this problem is known and implemented already: the social web should be distributed between thousands of pods which should contain at the maximum a few thousands users. Diaspora is already working like this for 15 years. It is technically harder to build initially but it then divide all the problems (maintenance, moderation, load, censorship, trust of the owner...) Which makes the network much more resilient. Bluesky knows that and they are allowing other people to host their software but they are really not pushing for it and it highly doubt that the experience of a user on a small external pod is the same than on bluesky.com.

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

#217

Post by friendzis »

dsauerbrun wrote: post #213

I'm a bit confused. The lossy timeline solution basically means you skip updating the feed for some people who are above the number of reasonable followers. I get that Seeing them get 96% improvements is insane, does that mean they have a ton of users following an unreasonable number of people or do they just have a very low number for reasonable followers. I doubt it's the latter since that would mean a lot of peopl…

When a system gets "overloaded", typically it enters exponential degradation of performance state, i.e. performs self ddos.

> Seeing them get 96% improvements is insane

TFA is talking about P99 tail latencies. It does not sound too insane to reduce tail latencies by extraordinary margins. Remember, it's just reshaping of latency distribution. In this case pathological cases get dropped.

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

#218

Post by grishka »

flaburgan wrote: post #216

The solution to this problem is known and implemented already: the social web should be distributed between thousands of pods which should contain at the maximum a few thousands users. Diaspora is already working like this for 15 years. It is technically harder to build initially but it then divide all the problems (maintenance, moderation, load, censorship, trust of the owner...) Which makes the network much more re…

This particular problem will still exist for a fediverse server. You follow 10k people? Nice, now you're getting ddos'd by their activities. Though, most fediverse servers being monolithic applications definitely helps.

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

#219

Post by listenallyall »

pests wrote: post #207
lukas099 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'd think that management consulting firms, you know, who are supposed to be good at optimization and reducing costs, would have figured this out. Maybe they've figured out that enabling their employees to stay a few extra hours without worry to finish a deal is worth it.

Similar reasons people buy overnight sleeper tickets from the west coast to asia for sky-high prices. That person has to be there, and they have to be rested. If they are negotiating 100m+ dollar contracts its a no-brainer.

Intercontinental business-class tickets have a tangible benefit, guaranteed lie-down seat and relaxing accommodations that enable rest, as you correctly point out. Flexible airline tickets have no tangible benefit, it is simply risk mitigation (avoiding wasting a nonrefundable ticket if a person can't make a flight) and like other risk-mitigation products such as insurance, extended warranties, car rental protection, etc, it is priced so that the cost exceeds the benefit.

And as stated elsewhere, the majority of consultants are relatively junior people whose role has nothing to do with negotiating contracts.

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

#220

Post by verdverm »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #199
verdverm wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 im…

I was using the indeterminate "you" for a hypothetical question, one that gets asked often

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ATProto moderation is technically and fundamentally different from ActivityPub: https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...

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