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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

#261
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's semantics but I like to separate money from profits. You need money to pay people and to survive but you don't need to be raking in endlessly growing piles of it. This is something that was really demoralizing about working for a big company, they could be making like 50000000000 a year in just profits but still be ruthless in getting more. Like I just want to make a product I'm proud of and I'm happy living a s…

Once you take on investors, that’s not an option. VCs expect rapid growth and an exit - statistically through acquisition, but occasionally an IPO. Once you go public, then you have investor pressure and can be subject to activist investors unless the founder has controlling interests like in the case of Meta and Google.

Basically why I don't like to work for any public company anymore. You are there to be exploited by moneyed interests that most often don't even have any positive effect on the products itself.

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand the infatuation with blue sky. The minute they need money it’ll go the way of the Reddit and twitter.

My bluesky feed is somehow even more abhorrent than my twitter one, except that instead of right wing hate it's Facebook memes about "reading banned books"

Bluesky's 'Discover' feed (the default algo feed that you get when you create your account) is based on _likes_, not follows, so if you never like anything you'll get random nonsense.

You can try using other algo feeds from here: https://bsky.app/feeds and remove the discover feed, or of course you could just use the chronological one.

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason Bluesky has emulate what FB Newsfeed and Twitter/X did to solve engagement by promoting certain items over others. At the very least, they do have hindsight to learn from.

There's the profit motive. It's funded by venture capital, so it has to grow at all costs (check) and then cash out.

Twitter didn't start doing it (the pay-for-attention model) until 17 years after it was founded, so, I mean, bsky will probably be okay for a _while_.

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

#264

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.

European airports in 2019: A lot of these would be 10 euro Ryanair/Easyjet/Whatever flights, probably.

(The really ultra cheap Ryanair flights are less of a thing now, but in 2019 they were very much a factor)

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

#265
post #206
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the whole point of bs? Empowering users to take their data where they want. It's completely open-sourced and well-documented. If someone buys bluesky you can move all your data to a different service that follows the same protocol

You can move your data, but whoever controls the AppView controls what people see “on Bluesky”.

Yeah but anyone can make a GreenSky. The source code is all there

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

#266

As a systems enthusiast I enjoy articles like this. It is really easy to get into the mindset of "this must be perfect". In the Blekko search engine back end we built an index that was 'eventually consistent' which allowed updates to the index to be propagated to the user facing index more quickly, at the expense that two users doing the exact same query would get slightly different results. If they kept doing those…

I guess I hadn’t considered that search engines could be reranking pages on the fly as I click them. I’ve been seeing my DuckDuckGo results shuffle around for a while now thinking it’s an awful bug. Like I click one page, don’t find what I want, and go back thinking “no, I want that other result that was below” and it’s an entirely different page with shuffled results, missing the one that I think might have been goo…

Hi - I work on search at DuckDuckGo. Do you mind sharing a bit more detail about this issue? What steps would allow us to reproduce what you're seeing?

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

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bluesky feed is somehow even more abhorrent than my twitter one, except that instead of right wing hate it's Facebook memes about "reading banned books"

Bluesky's 'Discover' feed (the default algo feed that you get when you create your account) is based on _likes_, not follows, so if you never like anything you'll get random nonsense. You can try using other algo feeds from here: https://bsky.app/feeds and remove the discover feed, or of course you could just use the chronological one.

But when everything I see is awful, what do I like? I think that's my classic issue with feed style websites

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

#268

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…

They were specifically looking at worst-case performance. P99 means 99th percentile, so they saw 96% improvement on the longest 1% of jobs.

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

#269
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear, you are a Bluesky engineer, right? off-topic: how has been dealing with the influx of new users after X political/legals problems aftermath? Did you see an increase in toxicity around the network? And how has you (Bluesky moderation) dealing with it.

[flagged]

There's nothing wrong with being partisan if you're partisan against fascists who want to destroy democracy and the rule of law.
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