> The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear, and so would the mechanisms that allow both commercial and political actors to create personalized, reality-distorting bubbles.
It's coupled to the financial incentives of the entities operating the platforms used to create and distribute this content (Google, Meta, ...). And as we depend on them in so many aspects of our life unfortunately, they'll initially start acting as usual when being "regulated":
"We're so sorry dear $REGION_OF_THE_WORLD, your legislators declared our products as ads. Due to how we've built these products (Pixel Phone, Gmail, WhatsApp, ...), we can't sell them to you in a legal way anymore. Yes, we made a ton of money from you, but it's your government's fault that you now loose access to what feels like essential communication services."
We all know it's been different in the early 2000s, but today these distribution/communication channels only exist because there's money to be made. We can't take them for granted and just expect different content on YouTube, non-addictive TikTok and less privacy-invasive Gmail or search engines.
I'm glad the author acknowledges this:
> Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.
Changing behavior and expectations will be necessary; and I'm all here for it. I'm hosting my own emails since 2013. *DAV works just fine and I never uploaded contacts or calendar events to iCloud. I pay for search results. And even though I like the iPhone or would prefer a MacBook, I could reactive my 10yrs old "gaming PC" as a Linux workstation to fulfill my computing needs.
I understand this is not for everyone, but I hope that after the band-aid got ripped off, the digital life will improve to become easily accessible again while staying privacy friendly and pro society.
E.g. Uber / UberEats offer lower fairs to drivers if the client is expected to tip higher. I'm not an insider, but it can be observed in the wild as discussed on Reddit.
I especially love the part of "instant responsiveness" where a UI changes on interaction an then just shows placeholders while actually fetching data for 2-5 seconds.
Honestly curious -- does your mileage vary that much on LinkedIn? It appears as though the feed is mostly a rolling dumpster fire + couple invites every week.
> I’m assuming these days AWS is just fleecing the big companies who feel like there’s only one option.
My employer is a customer at a scale that AWS calls us strategic industry or something. Some years ago, the young engineer in me was all hyped about the range of serverless, managed services being very accessible in one place. Piecing together those resources felt very unixy. I bought into the coolness so much, I could hardly believe such tech was actually used in my industry.
I could've known better all along. Any of our solutions would work just as fine in an open-source stack. And in the bigger picture -I moved to a platform-focused role- it doesn't even matter that much. Two-thirds of our consumption is 24x7 EC2 on-demand. For sure, many projects in the company are wasting a lot by simply holding it wrong. But even if not, we're also left wondering
This. I've been in a similar situation working as a data scientist for 2.5 years and went back to software engineering a couple of years ago.
I'm not trying to say that data science and analytics are necessarily bad environments; I just came to realize that I had different expectations for my work than my organization.
While the skills of a software engineer — e.g. quickly comprehending technical references, operating APIs, ability to type more than three lines of code straight — are highly valuable for a data analyst to be productive, I had to realize that my organization did not appreciate the craftsmanship of producing code as much as I still do.
Over time, I had to witness my analyses end up on slides or in Excel workbooks, only to be looked at once. They'd done their job and weren't needed anymore. I was effectively "prompt completing" analytic requests from management to understand the organization/business/whatever better — always with the same result for "my work".
Providing an organization with the intelligence to understand their business is for sure not a bad motivation and can be fulfilling. It's just not a good fit if — instead of the analytics — you consider the software you create for the analytics as your work.
@nineteen999 makes a valid point, but I don't think this is a case of protectionism.
From what I can tell, it's more about RH's ludicrous licensing policy and the economic practicality of using something "application binary compatible." (•_• )
I'm really not sure how to feel about the fact that, meanwhile in Germany, RH has made its way onto the non-preferred vendor list of at least one large enterprise in the automotive industry.
Just because the L2-norm yields the same rankings as cosine similarity for the particular case of normalized embeddings when retrieving relevant documents doesn't mean that any other L-norm or commonly used measure in the field of (un)supervised learning or information retrieval presents itself as a viable alternative for the problem at hand — which, by the way, had to be guessed too.
Looking at the "history" of this development (e.g. bag-of-words model, curse of dimensionality etc.) provides a solid explanation for why we've ended up using embeddings and cosine similarity for retrieval.
Though, I'm curious to see any advancements and new approaches in this area. This might sound snarky, but I still commend the author for doing what I wasn't able to by now: writing down their view of the world and putting it out for public scrutiny.
It's coupled to the financial incentives of the entities operating the platforms used to create and distribute this content (Google, Meta, ...). And as we depend on them in so many aspects of our life unfortunately, they'll initially start acting as usual when being "regulated":
"We're so sorry dear $REGION_OF_THE_WORLD, your legislators declared our products as ads. Due to how we've built these products (Pixel Phone, Gmail, WhatsApp, ...), we can't sell them to you in a legal way anymore. Yes, we made a ton of money from you, but it's your government's fault that you now loose access to what feels like essential communication services."
We all know it's been different in the early 2000s, but today these distribution/communication channels only exist because there's money to be made. We can't take them for granted and just expect different content on YouTube, non-addictive TikTok and less privacy-invasive Gmail or search engines.
I'm glad the author acknowledges this:
> Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.
Changing behavior and expectations will be necessary; and I'm all here for it. I'm hosting my own emails since 2013. *DAV works just fine and I never uploaded contacts or calendar events to iCloud. I pay for search results. And even though I like the iPhone or would prefer a MacBook, I could reactive my 10yrs old "gaming PC" as a Linux workstation to fulfill my computing needs.
I understand this is not for everyone, but I hope that after the band-aid got ripped off, the digital life will improve to become easily accessible again while staying privacy friendly and pro society.