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I scraped 1.94M Airbnb photos for opium dens, pet cameos, and messy kitchens

burla-cloud.github.io

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Re: I scraped 1.94M Airbnb photos for opium dens, pet cameos, and messy kitchens

#21

Post by ericmcer »

NoLinkToMe wrote: post #9

What a waste of energy (money/resources)... Scraping and AI-scanning 2 million photos to identify animals in the advertisement pictures? What's the point. As an exercise a sample of 1000 photos would've been enough. As a database, knowing a listing has a cat in the picture or a funny review doesn't offer any real value. I wonder what the footprint is of such an exercise.

I dunno there are literally 100s of millions (billions?) of people who spend more than an hour per day just scrolling through social media feeds.

How much does it cost to send a billion people an hour of video every day? Almost all of the resources tech uses is for pointless or even negative things.

What % of compute/bandwidth do you think is used for "real value"? I would guess it is well below 1%.

Re: I scraped 1.94M Airbnb photos for opium dens, pet cameos, and messy kitchens

#23

Post by jperryjperry »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #15

This vanity scraping is fucking up the internet for everyone else. It's hardly the only thing, but it's part of the problem.

Fair feedback. Definitely more backlash than I expected. The intent was to experiment with large-scale analysis, not add noise or put strain on shared resources. I’ll be more thoughtful about this kind of thing going forward.

Re: I scraped 1.94M Airbnb photos for opium dens, pet cameos, and messy kitchens

#24

Post by zamadatix »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #18
jperryjperry wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the Burla founders here. Not a joint project with Airbnb. I’ve been experimenting with giving agents access to Burla clusters and letting them run with analysis ideas I find interesting. This was one of the results. The branding is a bit much, fair call, but the intent here was just to explore what these agents can actually build when you give them access to large amounts of compute.

How many accounts do you have spamming your projects here?

Looks like just 2 accounts with 11 total submissions in the last year, both with disclosures in the comments and/or profile https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

This post is a bit lighter on that disclosure than I'd like (and isn't as obvious as a Show HN would be) but I feel I missing some big portion of the backstory to this comment?

Re: I scraped 1.94M Airbnb photos for opium dens, pet cameos, and messy kitchens

#26

Post by danhon »

jperryjperry wrote: post #17
yodon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everything was parallelized on Burla, on a single dynamic cluster that scaled to ~1.7K CPU workers for photo download and CLIP, with 20 A100 GPUs running embedding clusters in parallel on the same cluster. That's a lot of budget - would have been nice if they'd made an actual donation to the project, instead of pounding the project's servers and bandwidth when there are much better ways to interact with the data.

Totally fair callout. I should’ve been more careful here and leaned on the provided datasets / bulk access instead of pulling things at scale. That’s on me. I’ll make a donation to support the project regardless. Appreciate you raising it.

... so you'd only end up making a donation if you ended up "stressing the project's infra more than expected"?!

Re: I scraped 1.94M Airbnb photos for opium dens, pet cameos, and messy kitchens

#27

Post by GrinningFool »

I'm struggling a bit with how the 'funniest' ranked reviews are genuine descriptions of people's miserable (and sometimes unsafe) experiences. Where's the funny?

As an experitisement, I guess it gets the name out there but not in any way I'd want for my business.

Re: I scraped 1.94M Airbnb photos for opium dens, pet cameos, and messy kitchens

#28

Post by happyopossum »

smrtinsert wrote: post #20
wheelerwj wrote: post #4

This thing is ripe for a lawsuit and has terrible methodology as far as I can tell.

On what grounds is there a lawsuit? Hasn't scraping been classified as legal?

Calling someone’s apartment an opium den is potentially libel, and if it results in a material financial impact, you’ve got a lawsuit.

Re: I scraped 1.94M Airbnb photos for opium dens, pet cameos, and messy kitchens

#29

Post by wheelerwj »

smrtinsert wrote: post #20
wheelerwj wrote: post #4

This thing is ripe for a lawsuit and has terrible methodology as far as I can tell.

On what grounds is there a lawsuit? Hasn't scraping been classified as legal?

classifying people's businesses as an "opium den" using a shitty LLM prompt seems like a pretty good way to piss some people off.

Re: I scraped 1.94M Airbnb photos for opium dens, pet cameos, and messy kitchens

#30

Post by wheelerwj »

devmor wrote: post #22

The author makes some pretty insane leaps in logic for classification, and it’s apparent in the photos. “Drug-Den vibes” apparently means the owner is poor or a photo is obscured or badly lit.

yeah, theres a lot of trash assumptions going on here.
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