zaphos

"just a matter of adding more 9s" is a wild place to use a "just" ...

The article you linked indicates the reason for him not finishing is specifically that he didn't like his game design, which seems orthogonal to coding practices.

He appears to have shipped middleware projects for RAD, and other contract work where he was not in charge of game design.

They're just saying they won't encourage news/politics, not that they'll police them off:

> "Politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads - they have on Instagram as well to some extent - but we're not going to do anything to encourage those verticals."

The article does not advocate tuning out the results; it is advocating awareness of the results and careful consideration of how to proceed. See the detailing of options at the end of the second case study:

>> "As with Tia, Tamera has several choices she can make. She could simply accept these biases as is and do nothing, though at least now she won't be caught off-guard if users complain. She could make changes in the user interface, for example by having it present two gendered responses instead of just one, though she might not want to do that if the input message has a gendered pronoun (e.g., "Will she be there today?"). She could try retraining the embedding model using a bias mitigation technique (e.g., as in Bolukbasi et al.) and examining how this affects downstream performance, or she might mitigate bias in the classifier directly when training her classifier (e.g., as in Dixon et al. [1], Beutel et al. [10], or Zhang et al. [11]). No matter what she decides to do, it's important that Tamera has done this type of analysis so that she's aware of what her product does and can make informed decisions."

This type being ... something like PCA? It's up to the user how much to actually reduce the dimensionality.

The pixel analogy is bad, but to use it anyway -- you get to choose how many pixels you keep. You could keep literally all of them.

This experiment just sounds like "what if fraud were not fraud"

Oh, okay ... but everyone having perfect information AND fraud being possible to get away with are fundamentally contradictory assumptions; fraud is based on exploiting some people not having perfect information.

Even if it's relatively easy to not get caught, you can't be sure exactly how easy it is, and the downside is catastrophic. So no, I don't think every entity in your thought experiment would be committing fraud. Only ones that knew for sure exactly how easy it is and that they would not get caught for sure. And those ones, by definition, would never be caught so the public would never know ...

> (since you could learn most of it just by reading or watching videos)

I think this misunderstands how most people learn -- people generally learn much more effectively by "active learning," aka actually trying to do the thing they are learning, and getting dynamic guidance alongside that active process, not canned lecture / video content.