You might be omitting the foreigners that are not in the United States that are being treated rather badly by the United States. I suspect that's what GP was referring to.
No joke, I use Facebook every year or so to access the marketplace and at the time my feed was roughly half rage-bait, and the other half being what I can only describe as AI-generated almost-pornography. Both had thousands of what looked like genuinely real interactions per post, mostly from developing country users.
I'm loathe to defend Facebook but most people's experience is not yours. The algorithm pushes content you're most likely to engage with, in your case it has nothing to go on so probably pushes whatever causes the most reaction in general.
> I'm loathe to defend Facebook but most people's experience is not yours. The algorithm pushes content you're most likely to engage with, in your case it has nothing to go on so probably pushes whatever causes the most reaction in general.
It think that's a contradiction: if your latter statement is correct, his experience is a peek at "most people's experience."
No, I don't think so. If Facebook has a dataset to work from, as it does with most people, it'll tailor your experience according to that. If it doesn't it has to just use everything.
No matter what you follow if FB thinks you are a man it's going to feed you those foreign near-porn shorts.
I'm not sure if it is just what escapes across national boundaries or if social media in other countries is just way more horny, but every time I see a post where the text has been auto-translated from a different language it is thirst trap content. This is true across multiple social media platforms. It's especially prevalent on X for example, especially as they seem to be trying to showcase their Grok translations or something.
> No matter what you follow if FB thinks you are a man it's going to feed you those foreign near-porn shorts.
Definitely not, FB knows I'm a man and I don't have anything remotely pornographic in my feed with any regularity because I don't interact with it when it does.
I've gotten the main feed under control, but the Reels have a mind of their own. It doesn't help that the reels don't have the "not interested" or even a thumbs down. The best you can do is a "hide reel" which seems to impart very little weight on the algorithm.
Then the algorithm is very broken for me. I post extremely benign and even somewhat boring things for my friends and family, scroll through the Marketplace scams occasionally, literally never watch Reels, and still--to this day--Facebook thinks I want to watch videos of teenage girls in loose-fitting bikinis jumping on trampolines.
My conclusion is not that the algorithm shows you things it THINKS you will engage with, but rather things they WANT you to engage with because it makes them money somehow.
Just trying to imagine any other business run this way. Imagine asking a doctor for a recommendation and they give you heroin since everyone seems to really dig it.
It's really amazing how different people's experiences with Facebook are. I have been on Facebook since it started (I was at one of the original schools, I was in that famous first million users).
My feed is entirely photos of friends' kids, invitations to local events (things I actually attend), folk-dancing groups I'm involved with, and the like. I have literally never, not once, not ever, seen any rage-bait or political content (other than that directly written by friends - not reposted) in my feed.
Same, i don't see any problem with my facebook feed, it's all just friends and family postings and local events and some local news posts and things like that.
No political content or anything I would consider rage bait.
Huh, I wonder if there's a flag on the first million users (or some proxy for "Zuck's cohort") from the worst of the slop shoveling. It would sure save him some pointed remarks.
The 3x2 is fascinating, it's the same resolution as braille, albeit rotated 90 degrees. I wonder if this could become a braille-like system that's both visually and finger-readable.
Note: there are repeat glyphs here like c and o, though the example actually uses a different c somehow. But perhaps repeats are ok given context.
In the 2x2 resolution (which can't support all of Braille, but does support the first 10 characters), A, B, C, E, and F are all the recognizable Braille shapes for those letters (though in offset positions).
At first, it seemed like an Easter egg, but it's probably just a natural happenstance of two people centuries apart deciding to represent the first ten letters of the alphabet in a 2x2 grid with a general idea to use fewer dots at the start than at the end.
The Hong Kong Metro is also very well planned, architected, and generally well run operationally. So much that the MTR corporation actually offers international consulting services. And for two decades, they have consulted with many mainland Chinese metro systems, hence it's no coincidence that the Shanghai and Shenzhen metros both look and feel very similar to HK's.
Even through college I've found that it's hard to optimize for grades vs learning. I've had teachers spite me for disagreeing with them.
Then I developed a formula that essentially went, "While {common sense assertion is true}, we need to consider the nuanced implications of {regurgitated pros/cons}." Combined with the smooth fluff and flow from using speech recognition with minimal edits, suddenly the A's started rolling in. I later found this of course works wonderfully with standardized testing essays in the GRE and GMAT.
Edit: I realize now why I get (even if I don't fully agree with) the 'stochastic parrot' dismissal of language transformer models, I basically lived it.
This is my experience as well. I remember one day completely zoning out and writing pages of drivel "defining what it means to be a X" or whatever. Got an A+. After that I realized professors didn't care about my original thoughts or ideas, but rather the appearance that I was thinking through the prompt deeply.
There are non-battery buffers available too--I recently got rooftop residential solar installed, and learned that my area is covered by a grid profile requiring that the solar system stay online through something like 60 +/- 2Hz before shutting down completely, and ramping down production linearly beyond a 1Hz deviation or so. The point is to avoid cascading shutdowns by riding through over/undersupply situations, whereas an older standard for my area would have the all solar systems cut off the moment frequency exceeded 60.5Hz (which would indicate oversupply from power plant generators spinning faster via lower resistance).
In my system's case, switching to this grid profile was just a software toggle.
This is grid following, very effective for small scale generation. It does not work for large scale generation though when the grid is relying on that voltage and frequency from the utility scale renewable generation ("grid forming"). When those large generators exceed their ride through tolerance, batteries step in to hold voltage and frequency up until the transient event ends or dispatchable generators called upon spin up (currently fossil gas primarily, but also nuclear if there is headroom to increase output). Thermal generators can take minutes to provide this support (called upon, fuel intake increased, spinning metal spins faster), batteries respond within 250-500ms.
Tesla’s Megapack system at the Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia was the first example of this being proven out at scale in prod. Batteries everywhere, as quickly as possible.
You put this well, now that you mention it, I sometimes find myself trying to defend my earlier work as "Pre-ChatGPT," as if that even matters. Relegating future such work to some sort of romanticized "artisanal craftsmanship" feels hollow. That being said, I'm more productive than ever and finally got projects that have stalled out going again, and these projects have made my own life easier as a result. More utility from the result than from having walked the journey perhaps.
Neural networks most certainly go through a process to transform input into output (even to mimic the results of another process) but it's a very different one from human neutral networks. But I think this is the crucial point of the debate, essentially unchanged from Searle's "Chinese Room" argument from decades ago.
The person in that room, looking up a dictionary with Chinese phrases and patterns, certainly follows a process, but it's easy to dismiss the notion that the person understands Chinese. But the question is if you zoom out, is the room itself intelligent because it is following a process, even if it's just a bunch of pattern recognition?
Ah, I thought you were just referring to the decades-long use of the most massive supercomputers to simulate nuclear arsenal maintenance and explosions (maybe literally at the molecular/atomic/sub-atomic level).
Exactly, where it crosses into ultranationalism, it's a coping drug. You may be a nobody on all other scales, but darned if you can't stand under the flag of your country and truly _be someone._
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