Managers are taught to live in a world of emergencies. I believe that someone who takes a measured and thoughtful approach to things is excluded from management out of principal.
Only from a very narrow perspective. Opening yourself up and being real with people is how relationships form. If you test every conversation you are going to have with someone before having it, then the 3rd party basically has a relationship with an AI, not with you.
Now testing every conversation is extreme, but there is harm any time a human reaches out to a computer for social interaction instead of other humans.
That "instead of other humans" part is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What if it's "instead of total isolation" or "instead of parasocial interactions" or "instead of exploitative interactions"? There are many cases that are worse than a person chatting with a robot.
I disagree with my sibling comment. The trick is beautiful. If you generate UUIDs such that each bit in the result can be reliably traced back to a single bit in the input, then you can take a substring of the UUID and use that to infer which bits of the input integer must be set to produce that substring. So you can produce a whole list of input bytes that meet the criteria and those become your search results.
The real magic trick here is that the uuids on the page only look random to us because of some bit twiddling and XOR trickery. If we had a better intuition for such things we would notice that successive UUIDs are just as correlated as successive integers.
> I disagree with my sibling comment. The trick is beautiful. If you generate UUIDs such that each bit in the result can be reliably traced back to a single bit in the input, then you can take a substring of the UUID and use that to infer which bits of the input integer must be set to produce that substring.
...but that has nothing to do with what the website is doing. The accompanying article specifically calls out the fact that it can't be done while maintaining the appearance of an unordered list, and therefore it isn't attempted.
I know two (educated and hard-working) people in my immediate circle who intentionally keep their income below $30k/year so they qualify for state healthcare programs that they couldn’t otherwise afford unless they were making upwards of $150k.
So we have accountants and scientists who need back surgery intentionally working part-time barista hours.
As a programmer I’m all for gaming the system by knowing and navigating the rules, but the situation is comical.
I agree, but some people use social media to follow 1000s of other users. Some kind of “hot right now” or “high engagement since you last logged on” setting might be nice for them.
I think it's super interesting you believe the social companies care about what is 'nice for the user' as opposed to what is nice for the advertisers, audience/data brokers, and the investors.
The reason algorithmic ordering is so common is because that's what gives the most runway for advertising, behavior manipulation/tracking, and its downstream financial effects.
> reason algorithmic ordering is so common is because that's what gives the most runway for advertising
You’re both right. Algorithmic feeds boost engagement, both by surfacing the most-engaging content and removing the burden of trimming one’s follow list, and also aids in serving ads. (Both by making them easier to sneak in and in the same engine that surfaces engaging organic content being useful for serving engaging ads.)
An experience that is super shitty for the user isn't going to result in any users.
If you are trying to take users away from twitter, you're going to focus on some 'nice for the user' things (or, at least, 'nicer than twitter for the user').
Like most things in life, this isn't a binary choice (user or advertiser). They're going to try to optimize for both, striking a balance.
The pattern can be useful for multiple parties, for different reasons, some nefarious. Some users are definitely interested in higher "signal" content, especially when you follow enough accounts that consuming even a small fraction of the content isn't feasible.
This is basically right, but if there's a takeaway from Twitter/X's decline it's that users will only tolerate so much and that platform inertia has its limits.
> switching back to a rarely used and much more inefficient manual process is extremely disruptive, and even itself raises the risk of catastrophic mistakes.
Catastrophe is most likely to strike when you try to fix a small mistake: pushing a hot-fix that takes down the server; burning yourself trying to take overdone cookies from the oven; offending someone you are trying to apologize to.
