rspeer

There are healthy recommender systems, like Spotify.

YouTube is a _disastrously_ unhealthy recommender system, and they've let it go completely out of control.

That's not very much.

Well, it's not true. Bitcoin has increased the demand for coal power in China. Bitcoin miners flocked to New York State for cheap natural gas power.

Green energy is not necessarily the cheapest form of energy. If it were, it wouldn't even be _hard_ to stop burning fossil fuels and prevent climate change.

The person you're replying to is clearly aware of search ranking algorithms. You should try looking into the HITS algorithm they mentioned for some additional context.

Most of the projects you're thinking of probably never even generated high-resolution images. Until recently, the actual output layer for most of these systems would be something like a 256x256 array of pixels.

Yes. The arrest was for harassment and doxxing, not for misgendering.

paganel, when you say "Sorry for the Daily Mail link" it sounds like you know you're citing a source that will be extremely untrustworthy on this topic, and then did it anyway.

This is a revisionist and false narrative, and I believe it may be inspired by the "just world fallacy": you may be inclined to believe the world couldn't actually be unfair to women, so you search for another reason why their contributions would actually have been less important.

Your narrative is historically incorrect. Women invented many of the things that made software engineering _less_ tedious, such as debuggers (Betty Holberton, 1945), subroutines (Kay McNulty, circa 1947), assemblers (Kathleen Booth, 1947), linkers (Grace Hopper, 1952), and compilers (Grace Hopper, 1954). Programmers have always strived to make their job easier. If you don't see these inventions as creative effort, I don't know how to help you.

Even the parts of programming that were tedious were still important. If you saw someone tediously programming in assembly code today, you might celebrate the effort.

The flowcharts that these women were handed by their managers were not "program logic". There were many difficult details to work out about how to implement a program given the limited computing power of the time. You would not describe a manager today who draws a flowchart as having "written a program".

No, they weren't doing "tedious data entry", they were writing the entire program. And I'd say it would be less boring than programming in 2019, which is easier and pre-existing libraries solve most of it for us.

You are doing exactly the thing the article describes.

I've certainly encountered this issue.

When I release ConceptNet, I would like to follow SemVer, but it kind of has to be in a way that the second component of the version is the major version, because there are bigger things that happen in a multi-decade project than just API changes.

The project is ConceptNet 5. It is the fifth project named ConceptNet. What it has in common with ConceptNet 4 is some of the data and the spirit of the problem to be solved; the design is quite different.

It's on the sixth major version after the initial release, so I call it ConceptNet 5.6. The current version is 5.6.4. If I wanted to use tools that expect SemVer, I'd have to call it something like "ConceptNet 5 v6.4". I find that confusing, and I think other people would too.

okay what

And if I had gotten to choose the newspaper, I would have chosen one that is more friendly and more representative of the local community than the glorified blog operated out of another state that I was ordered to use

And it took me 3 months, $180, and being ordered to publish a notice in the local newspaper who was really uninterested in following through and then charged me another $170 for it.

It's different everywhere and it's usually not easy.

This comment sounds like Erlich Bachman on Silicon Valley.

This cheap food tastes really great when you put expensive food on top of it!

Huh. I don't have much of a problem going in to a bank branch, given that there's one every half mile. A quick in-person meeting is fine compared to the shitstorm of unusable menus and nearly unintelligible communication that is calling your bank on a cell phone.

(I mean it would be great if there were a bank that did all its customer service over text chat, but that's too much to ask for, right?)

Can confirm. I actually went and specifically informed a couple of ad-targeting networks that I'm a woman, in the cases where they allow that, around when I was updating many other people and institutions. That helped on some fronts.

So now some of the ad targeting networks have me targeted as "woman who's a successful professional and knows what she's doing in life", which, uh, is correct up until that last part.

The robots are just not expecting a woman in her thirties to still be baffled and overwhelmed by fashion and looking for the basics. I get my most useful recommendations by word of mouth, and yay, that sounds very nice and authentic, but it's a slow process.

So this is a different problem than the original article: we could be targeted _better_ and both we and the advertisers would be happy, for at least a moment.

But. We're trusting the advertisers to use that information responsibly. What if the kind of people who make those anti-trans reply videos on YouTube start taking out deliberately divisive ads, targeted at the trans community? On balance, I think it might be better for the ad networks to not quite understand.