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Re: Fook Google and its fookin' sheet
my apologies
…. texted postive
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Re: Fook Google and its fookin' sheet
It’s never personal, bici. I know that in the interest of giving goog another deserving knock you didn’t think twice about slippery Twitter.
But sometimes these things make for a good reminder about how much more (or less) people can do to not play into the hands of big tech, and especially not subject other people that try hard not to be played.
(Seeing all those tweets from right-wing nuts is what got to me. That’s the kind of thing that put me off shitter to begin with, but not only. Even the average person openly whining and crying all the time about every fricken thing to nobody in particular; or all the self-promoting humble-bragging that goes on constantly in the tech circles. Ugh. It just got to the point where I was questioning my self-respect and sanity for tolerating it. That’s when I killed the blue bird account, and have not missed it at all.)
Stay cool, rider!
Last edited by Destry (2021-03-18 07:42:53)
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Re: Fook Google and its fookin' sheet
How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation.
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Re: Fook Google and its fookin' sheet
For your edification: The End of AMP
(No affiliation, I read it last night.)
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Re: Fook Google and its fookin' sheet
That’s a great article, bici, thanks for sharing. Among all the gumph about advocating being more heavy-handed towards what the author sees as “good” reasons to censor content (e.g. Holocaust, vaccination, conspiracies) there are some important points raised about the role of AI when it’s used for monetization fueled by engagement.
Especially interesting to me – as a once-every-four-months-or-so-Facebook user – are how machine learning can almost be too good:
Facebook was not only hosting a large number of extremist groups but also promoting them to its users: “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools,” the presentation said, predominantly thanks to the models behind the “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” features.
And when constantly recommending the same stuff to people based on their interests is the dichotomy:
reducing polarization would mean taking a hit on engagement… models that maximize engagement increase polarization.
It’s the same the world over. If you have a particular political bias, you read a newspaper that supports your views. Why read something that’s pro-the-other-guys when you don’t like them? Unless there’s a catastrophic scandal that shakes your worldview foundations, nothing’s going to change your viewpoint.
What we read – the content we consume – can alter our perception, it’s just that with Facebook et al, the information spreads far more rapidly, which people seem to think makes them culpable if it’s “wrong”. In which case, we’d better rally to get rid of Wikipedia since what’s there now might be deemed wrong tomorrow by someone else.
This for me, from the article bici posted, sums up the productization of a person’s views:
Teams train up a new machine-learning model on FBLearner, whether to change the ranking order of posts or to better catch content that violates Facebook’s community standards… Then they test the new model on a small subset of Facebook’s users to measure how it changes engagement metrics… If a model reduces engagement too much, it’s discarded. Otherwise, it’s deployed and continually monitored.
Back in 2014 I likened this to magic supermarket shelves that only showed products you’d bought before. In the time since, things haven’t changed much. It’s just that the people behind the algorithms have at least acknowledged that tinkering with people’s choices shaped solely on their interests does have negative consequences.
Whether they learn from that, or whether they continue to toe the corporate party line and gun for growth above all costs, remains to be seen.
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Re: Fook Google and its fookin' sheet
Bloke wrote #329423:
[…] whether they continue to toe the corporate party line and gun for growth above all costs, remains to be seen.
Do you have any doubt about what will happen? A minor change in wording, a period changed into a semi-column, etc. some Orwellian wordsmithing and everything changed in order not to change anything.
I am sur a lot of people will believe that brave new world.
Same thing with that Google AMP change Gaekwad links above.
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Re: Fook Google and its fookin' sheet
phiw13 wrote #329428:
Do you have any doubt about what will happen?
Heh, I’m not holding my breath waiting. I might die.
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Re: Fook Google and its fookin' sheet
When will the full blown rebellion happen? When will the public rebel and kick facebook and google in the proverbial cojones.
There are many sites now that i will just not visit. overloaded with ad junk.
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Re: Fook Google and its fookin' sheet
bici wrote #329449:
When will the full blown rebellion happen?
Don’t hold your breath… might be painful. Next week that outrage will die down and everybody’s back to normal chatting till the next outrage. rinse and repeat. The plutocrats keep filling their bank accounts in fiscal paradises.
Remember that outrage back in what December 2020 when FB announced they would fully merge Whatsapp with their main tracking thing ? People were supposed to leave __en masse __. Guess what, Telegram traffic is back to what it was a few months earlier.
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Re: Fook Google and its fookin' sheet
bici wrote #329449:
When will the public rebel and kick facebook and google in the proverbial cojones.
They won’t. We’re outliers, here. It would take something really special for an outlier to influence the public at large.
Facebook and / or Google will be replaced if / when something better comes along, and not because of any issue that peaks on a 24-hour news cycle. Google is so engrained in most people’s workflows that it’ll take many years to unpick that.
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Re: Fook Google and its fookin' sheet
If anyone is confused about who is ruling the world, this article should make it quite clear that it isn’t government leaders. It’s not about whether you agree or disagree with what these Presidents are saying, but it’s about banning anyone’s free speech and opinion that might possibly interfere with the rulers’ agenda.
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Re: Fook Google and its fookin' sheet
gaekwad wrote #329421:
And with that we can rename this thread (and correct the typo that’s been there forever).
And to mark the occasion, FLoC
I don’t know much about browser tech, but it seems like Chrome itself can now analyze your browsing behavior and serve that all neat and tidy as ‘cohorts’ to anyone who will gladly pay Google for it. And guess who that would be.
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Re: Fook Google and its fookin' sheet
Destry wrote #329676:
And with that we can rename this thread (and correct the typo that’s been there forever).
And to mark the occasion, FLoC
I don’t know much about browser tech, but it seems like Chrome itself can now analyze your browsing behavior and serve that all neat and tidy as ‘cohorts’ to anyone who will gladly pay Google for it. And guess who that would be.
More reasons to wean people off that browser!
What’s the state with Gmail? I always try and help people set up their own domain-based email, but many, many people use gmail and prefer it and whenever there’s an email hiccup with regular IMAP email for whatever reason, that’s what they return to…
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Re: Fook Google and its fookin' sheet
FLoC sounds fun. Not.
If automatic democratization is done at the browser level, I wonder if it can be circumvented to randomize which pot you’re put in?
Imagine a browser ‘helper’ (or even script, potentially) that just visits random sites on the internet. Like, totally random. Plucked from the web, based on absolutely nothing. Just generating a random stream of ‘clicks’ to sites at random intervals.
Would that be enough to mask your browsing habits? To put you in a different set of FloC bucket(s) and confuse advertisers into just delivering untargeted ads or at least ads based on what is perceived to be your browsing habits? Sounds like it’d work. Depends if it calculates and delivers FLoC IDs to advertisers from your actual history file and if that’s accessible to plugins when they generate clicks on your behalf.
I presume Big G have thought of that and made it impossible. In which case, I’m kinda glad that Chrome stopped working when I upgraded my Mac to Mojave. I uninstalled the damn browser and haven’t used it since.
Last edited by Bloke (2021-04-06 09:37:50)
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Re: Fook Google and its fookin' sheet
jakob wrote #329679:
More reasons to wean people off that browser!
Yeah. Hearing from some people at Safari and Brave and it is probably worse that what is publicly know. But all nicely wrapped in lovely inclusive bla-bla double-plus good. Orwell feels unwell in his grave. It is probably much worse for Brave, tied as they are to the Blink rendering engine.
What’s the state with Gmail? I always try and help people set up their own domain-based email, but many, many people use gmail and prefer it and whenever there’s an email hiccup with regular IMAP email for whatever reason, that’s what they return to…
I try the same as you but then, so many servers block email from those “small-fish” domains. My wife has lots of problems using our co.jp domain email (hosted in Jpn, and emails addressed to .jp sites) – bouncing and vanishing. It is one reason why I still use Dreamhost for some of my own domains.
Where is that emoji for a solar powered submarine when you need it ?
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