bjorney @ bjorney @lemmy.ca

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2 yr. ago

Reddit has way more data than you would have been exposed to via the API though - they can look at things like user ARN (is it coming from a datacenter), whether they were using a VPN, they track things like scroll position, cursor movements, read time before posting a comment, how long it takes to type that comment, etc.

no one at reddit is going to hunt these sophisticated bots because they inflate numbers

You are conflating "don't care about bots" with "don't care about showing bot generated content to users". If the latter increases activity and engagement there is no reason to put a stop to it, however, when it comes to building predictive models, A/B testing, and other internal decisions they have a vested financial interest in making sure they are focusing on organic users - how humans interact with humans and/or bots is meaningful data, how bots interact with other bots is not

Not with 64gb ram and 16+ cores on that budget

To compare every comment on reddit to every other comment in reddit's entire history would require an index

You think in Reddit's 20 year history no one has thought of indexing comments for data science workloads? A cursory glance at their engineering blog indicates they perform much more computationally demanding tasks on comment data already for purposes of content filtering

you need to duplicate all of that data in a separate database and keep it in sync with your main database without affecting performance too much

Analytics workflows are never run on the production database, always on read replicas which are taken asynchronously and built from the transaction logs so as not to affect production database read/write performance

Programmers just do what they're told. If the managers don't care about something, the programmers won't work on it.

Reddit's entire monetization strategy is collecting user data and selling it to advertisers - It's incredibly naive to think that they don't have a vested interest in identifying organic engagement

Look at the picture above - this is trivially easy. We are talking about identifying repost bots, not seeing if users pass/fail the Turing test

If 99% of a user's posts can be found elsewhere, word for word, with the same parent comment, you are looking at a repost bot

I know everyone here likes to circle jerk over "le Reddit so incompetent" but at the end of the day they are a (multi) billion dollar company and it's willfully ignorant to infer that there isn't a single engineer at the company who knows how to measure string similarity between two comment trees (hint: import difflib in python)

If you have access to the entire Reddit comment corpus it's trivial to see which users are only reposting carbon copies of content that appears elsewhere on the site

Reddit has access to its own data - they absolutely know which users are posting unique content and which user's content is a 100% copy of data that exists elsewhere on their own platform

Reddit probably omits bot accounts when it sells its data to AI companies

English is not my native language, and I don't understand what "Have taken up farming."

It means they aren't developing software anymore because they are growing vegetables instead

To add: Bluetooth and WiFi both use the 2.4ghz spectrum. They are on the same chipset because otherwise you would need two antennas

The plaintiff(s) in a class action usually gets a pretty decent chunk - substantially more than the class members because they are the one's doing all the work on the class's behalf

The payout for class members depends on the number of people who sign up, which generally depends on the burden of proof. If you need to provide a receipt the payout is generally much higher because it gets split up fewer ways. I've gotten class action payouts as high as $300 when all I had to do was dig up through my bank records to find out the date of a transaction, and as low as $2, when all I had to do was click a link and enter my email address

Doing two timelines in parallel

3

So the "biologists and pharmacologists" you are citing are just armchair scientists in the Lemmy comment section

A couple of them fall into the "technically true, but misleading territory" - I'm sure the person handing this out couldn't identify which though - broken clock right twice a day and all

"Can you reverse effects" - no you can't make your immune system forget how to work. Probably not what they are going for here though.

"Risk of [...] or other side effects?" - yeah the vaccines generally give people a headache and short lived fever symptoms

"Have there been deaths?" - The astrazeneca vaccine had like a 0.000001% mortality risk (more likely to die driving to the pharmacy), and was pulled in many countries because that was deemed too dangerous. Person handing out the flyer has likely been parroting "mRNA vaccines cause blood clots" nonsense for years while being completely unaware that AZ was a traditional viral vector vaccine

"Are there doctors recommending NOT taking it" - yeah, there are many notable anti-vaccine doctors, what they typically have in common is they earned their doctorate in computer science, social studies, or some other field that gives them no qualifications to talk about immunology

Microsoft seemingly completely oblivious to the fact that people aren't buying MacBooks because of their hardware benchmarks

Yeah, when I first read the book I did that thing where you space out and read a page and a half while absorbing nothing, and I was similarly taken aback how it progressed from "let's blow up the shield wall" to "Irulan and I are married and ruling the galaxy now" in basically a 30 second lapse of attention

The "Nike Vaporfly 4%" was the shoe - and it was 4% as the name implies

They aren't being made anymore - people are just reselling old hoarded stock

https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-standing-in-the-floppy-disk-business/

She has north of 3m in sponsorship deals right now, and we can only assume that number will go up in the WNBA

They aren't talking about system administrators. They are talking about 3rd party software presenting a privilege escalation prompt (administrator access) and changing your default browser without you knowing about it