throwaway556179

Do you get mad, if you look into a mirror?

There is no correct, unbiased way to rank images (or anything). There may be a "homogenizer" which reshuffles the ranking based on image features but you would have to introduce an artificial category, e.g. nationality.

But I doubt a "de-bias-reshuffler" is a clearly defined "thing" let alone something that is easy to explain to the algorithm-scared public.

Reading the essay it felt very ressentiment-driven, that is, while some phenomena were described with wit, they lacked a somewhat sympathetic grounding - it all screamed: I just do not like it.

For one, a strong society is one that allows both the subject and its critique to live without fear.

Beside: There exist far deeper dissections of society, even darker, containing more uncomfortable truth, and not grounded in ressentiments at all.

It concerns the generic "information asymmetry" - we want your relations, dreams, illnesses, loves, pulse, voice, basically anything we can get - but let silence be the only thing you will know about us.

Sometimes, I wish someone would hack into the FB C-Levels homes and live-stream their lives to the world - like everything they say and do, just to make the world a bit more open, connected and transparent.

The first use case mentions: "effortless selfies" -- call me stuck in the past, is that what I need high tech for?

I recently saw an FB "data engineer" talking about "experiment review sessions", where the - presumably engagement related - results of interface changes are discussed (he also expressed hope that all companies work that way).

It's very rational. The user needs a good user interface, the best that can be built. What is the best? The one the user likes to use, day in day out. Is that a problem? Obviously not for the platform.

When FB CEO announced that he want's to make users happy, he acknowledged his real intents: mass, aggregate control of behavior. I cannot deny that it carries a purely instrumental view of humans - but that's again only rational in the context of business.

We had something like 24G of RAM, but we have 500GB RAM machines as well (we own the hardware) and the job would have been even more of a breeze there.

We recently ran a large clustering job over billions of records (and a few TBs of data on spinning disks) on a single machine with minimal command line tooling in a few hours. Not really optimized yet. People forget how fast modern hardware is and overestimate how much useful data they have (or need).

I think I should start a company around minimalistic data tooling or the like - the amount of waste seems large across the industry.

I saw the de-skilling a few year ago, where a guy stiched together a compete application from a couple of SaaS APIs. Cool, but it somehow does not impress me.