Red line: Estimated average number of daily active users on Twitter in 2013.
Green line: About the time Twitter introduced the algorithmically sorted home timeline that users where up in arms against.
People today: Social media without algorithms just doesn't work! We have to let the ruling class control what information we receive, there's just no other choice. Deciding for ourselves, hah, so naïve!
Who has seen the algorithm?
Who has pointed to the algorithm
and said, "There it is!"?
It has no form, that we should see it.
It has no substance, that we should feel it.
It has no flavor, that we should taste it.
It has no odor, that we should smell it.
It has no sound, that we should hear it.
Yet the algorithm creates that which we
see, feel, taste, smell and hear.
Created and replicated,
the algorithm is everywhere.
The copy is the original, and
the original is but a copy.
It has no location - we cannot go to it.
The algorithm is at no place, and every place.
Without the algorithm, there is nothing.
With the algorithm, there is everything.
Nothing new, but maybe a little unusual: Using boids as alternative to Lloyd relaxation and/or Poisson-disk sampling. The boids here are using only two behaviors: local separation, plus a randomized attractor to create global disturbances. Cell density could also be varied by spatially adjusting the separation distance between boids. Overall convergence/relaxation can be much faster than shown here...
“Algorithms have been around since antiquity; the digital computer merely automates the execution of algorithms using increasingly large sets of inputs and variables. But digital algorithms represents a crystallization of social relations. In effect, implicit rules, protocols, and norms embedded in our social structure find their way into digital algorithms, often without being noticed or considered.”
I have a process that generates a JSON document (> 1 MB, < 1 GB) once per week. These documents will be pretty similar. Some data will be modified, some will be added.
I'd like to keep all of these documents, in a compressed way, benefiting from the similarities between them, as if I'd compressed a concatenation of all of them, but without having to recompress everything each week.
Ideas? If possible, only using #Python's standard lib.
I love that posts on Mastodon are in chronological order in the feeds. I feel like I discover interesting accounts that I wouldn't find on other platforms because the other platforms have an algorithm.
There were a lot of people on Mastodon doubting federation would happen (despite a lot of incentives for Meta to federate), but this is a very definitive statement.
Maybe this is the kind of question that only someone who is computer illiterate would ask, but...
Since #Mastodon is #AdFree and #Threads is manipulated by an advertiser-driven #algorithm, how (if at all) do you foresee ads from those other platforms showing up on Mastodon and/or the algorithms of the advertiser platforms affecting feed in the #Fediverse at large?
« #UK police chiefs have announced plans to equip officers with a mobile-based #FacialRecognition tool that will enable them to cross reference photos of suspects against a database of millions of custody images from their phones.
Imho all #governments in all countries on all levels should communicate via the #fediverse, instead of via commercial services. Why should a profit-maximizing feed #algorithm, and an ad placement algorithm get between the citizen and their government in a democracy?
A developer of medical monitoring systems with data from wearable devices will soon start asking individuals with epilepsy to offer data for an algorithm that predicts seizures.
Google has a mountain of behavior data on me, and probably knows how viciously anti-diamond I am. Yet these ads regularly pop up in my news feed.
Google charging a client for an ad hit that will never materialize into traffic for their company, and frustrating me to make more money on totally fake metrics.
Both consumers and advertisers are getting squeezed for a more enshittified experience.