YouTube is not a clear pass-through from one's truly held interests to the computer screen. I am not interested in fake news, Peppa the Pig, superhero movies, Logan Paul, Lil Durk, Time Magazine, and yet, loading up the YouTube home page just now, there they are.
YouTube profits from showing people things they might be likely to click on, and from collecting money from people who want people to click on their things. This has something to do with "interests" in some sense of the word but I do not think YouTube's recommendation engine is an unmediated expression of a user's true desires.
> YouTube is not a clear pass-through from one's truly held interests to the computer screen. I am not interested in fake news, Peppa the Pig, superhero movies, Logan Paul, Lil Durk, Time Magazine, and yet, loading up the YouTube home page just now, there they are.
With respect, there is no way this is correct - at least not in a meaningful sense.
Are you logged in with a YouTube account? Does anyone else pass YouTube traffic through your IP address, ie do you have children, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc? Do you purposefully block ads and analytics that would make suggestions like this random? Lil durk and Peppa pig are simply not going to be recommended next to each other without reason.
I just loaded YouTube.com and scrolled for _dozens of pages_. There is nothing remotley bizzarre. The most annoying thing is that it supports cut-and-pasters, who take clips from source videos that I watch and repost them.
> I do not think YouTube's recommendation engine is an unmediated expression of a user's true desires.
Cynically, I disagree. i think their recommendation engine is a reflection of a collection of people's true desires. People reveal their preferences through actions (clicking on things) more than thought, which is generally rationalization for a decision already made.
Despite a few quibbles (especially re: the prominence of browser settings menus), following these recommendations would be a great help. The clock bar at the top of the screen in GNOME 3 is a weird half measure, and its uselessness drives inconsistency in app UI since every app has to implement its own menu.
I would gladly hitch my wagon to the author's star if they wanted to organize a project to implement these improvements. Does anyone with more Linux development experience know where such a project would start? Is it already in progress somewhere?
It's a fine idea that public money will not be spent, but you don't have to look very far to find an example of the city and a development partner breaking the same promise (Obama Presidential Center: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kamin/ct-met-o...).
You have had good financial planning habits in your family for two generations. That is in some sense "training" that many first-world poor people don't get.
You know you have a weak point when you rely on "my interlocutor has an unpopular opinion" and "my interlocutor just lacks common sense" as means of argument.
Just so I don't misunderstand, you are saying I have a weak argument? Do you believe that the perspective of white people holding fortunes in their houses is widely held and that violent acts of crime to redistribute this wealth are justified?
It appears that they're attempting to apply Socrate's quote, "When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser", to invalidate your argument, but they are failing to realize that "devoid of common sense" is not an insult or slander, much like those that fail to realize the same about being called ignorant when they argue out of ignorance.
My point is that whether a belief is popular, or whether you think a belief is common sensical has no bearing on the truth value, social value, rationality, or perspicacity of that belief. I don't think the GP is slandering the GGP, I think they are both missing the point and making an irrelevant quasi-argument.
He plans to "give away" money to an LLC he controls, which makes donations and invests in companies with some kind of social mission.
Not saying an LLC that makes investments in for-profit tutoring companies is bad, really, just not a charity in the usual sense, and not a gift to the public good.
Everybody who comes to know about systems calls will have learned the concept for the first time. Some people come to that knowledge by becoming a web developer, gaining some rudimentary understanding of the command line, typing `which cd`, and eventually reading the bash source. The fact that this is even possible is a testament to the author's curiosity and the value of free software.
Others come to that knowledge by reading a 650 page book about System V after graduating from university. Maybe they already learned it before getting the book, in some practical circumstance, like the author. Maybe they have always known it. But for me, an article by someone in the midst of their learning is a great help, an opportunity for others to share what they know, and exemplary of the hacker spirit.
I think gp is not ragging on the blog's author for being a novice at Unix systems internals but lamenting the " I looked into this but then it all seemed so complicated so I stopped" attitude that is present in this as well as the sibling posts on sudo and ls. I would much prefer to read three posts delving deeper into the inner workings of any one of these commands than the existing three muddled surface level treatments.
I had some of the same thoughts. But I learned C and Unix a long time ago, back when you could more easily understand the source code. I think we used a very early version of Minix, just a few thousand lines. It was a simpler time ;-).
Coming to it now, with all the layers that have built up -- the side-track for the script that uses tr, and the idiom with ${1+"$@"}, and all the cruft build up within sh(1) -- it must be pretty hard to separate what is incidental from what is fundamental.
Yes, thanks for putting it more succinctly than I could. I got the impression the author set out to understand 'cd' (which I would love to read about) then didn't, and I don't think we can tell from her article how much she got out of it. I quoted the part about higher-level languages because it's been my experience that a lot of those libraries are ultimately implemented in C somewhere down at the bottom as well.
I will say I did learn about some shell along the way and the bit about processes was interesting and starting to get at the core of 'cd'. It just seems like there are many other pieces of the puzzle, and I encourage the author to keep researching and keep writing about them.
You may be interested in reading Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, which says (roughly speaking, and after Kierkegaard) that the striving to find a meaning in life is the primary motivating force in the lives of people, and its frustration creates an existential vacuum that leads to boredom, distress, depression, aggression, addiction, and the rest. He would agree that there has been a sort of crisis of meaning since around the middle of the last century, loss of religion and other societal conventions having a lot to do with it.
I think what you regard as "people engaged rabidly in the consumption of fiction" he might interpret as people living passively, bored and confused, abdicating a sense of responsibility for their own lives. I think he is a precursor to the Neil Postman line of cultural criticism, if anyone's looking for more books.
Man's Search for Meaning is a short and compelling book, he describes a way forward that doesn't involve resurgent nationalism or religious fundamentalism, and I've gotten a lot out of it personally.
It is possible to include minority groups in a community without pandering or using reductive caricatures. It can be difficult if the community has little familiarity with the actual experiences of those minority groups. In that case, it would be important to seek out people who are from those minority groups, or who at least have a great familiarity with those groups, to direct efforts to grow the community in their direction.
If a person is anxious about being reprimanded for using an offensive stereotype, they do not have the expertise to employ "culturally appropriate" materials and ought to do more research/inquiry or delegate the responsibility of the outreach to somebody else.
YouTube profits from showing people things they might be likely to click on, and from collecting money from people who want people to click on their things. This has something to do with "interests" in some sense of the word but I do not think YouTube's recommendation engine is an unmediated expression of a user's true desires.