Yeah, as someone who is on the extreme end of introverted (not shy, just happy to be alone) this was the case for me. I got a membership to the co-working space, did many of the social events, attended some meetups even, but the connections just wouldn't stick.
On the flip side, when I have worked at an office I have always come out after a year or so with a couple close friends in the organization. Because of the physical proximity many of the shared experiences are more intense. Putting out production fires, after work beers, dropping in on a co-worker to talk about the product, etc, lead to longer lasting relationships.
Developers have a tendency to assume that technology can solve more of our issues than possible. I have plans to start my own company with a bit more savings and network under my belt, and I will be doing zero remote, assuming I can afford to.
Humans are not robots, we may be some sort of an algorithm but a very complicated one: we need emotional bonding and physical proximity is very important for that.
Here's the real problem. The JS tools got really powerful and the majority of users now experience faster dev cycles and richer features. Now users cannot go back. If we started serving smaller sites with less js people would complain about all the little features they liked that don't exist anymore.
A developer now has a choice: use the big framework where you can satisfy those now entitled users or give up some success and make a tiny site with limited use of js. I'm all for the free web but I know which choice I would make when running a for-profit company.
Ya this kinda sumarizes the Crux of the problem pretty well. I'm getting a bit worn with seeing anti JavaScript what nots on HN. It's here to stay guys for better or worse (and will proceed to consume UI development _everywhere_)
I disagree wholeheartedly. So many diseases today are preventable when you consider that most people take no action to improve their health through any kind of diet or exercise. Its a probabilities game. If you eat fast food frequently, drink/smoke too much, and don't exercise you cannot expect to have the same odds of a long life as someone who is doing those things.
Now if we accept the above argument, even if only to a small degree, than we can conclude that individual decisions have should result in a widespread increase in demand for chronic healthcare needs, such as heart disease. This in turn causes insurance rates to go up for those individuals taking care of their health. Furthermore it funnels more and more human capital away from the rest of the economy by raising demand for doctors, nurses, and all other kinds of medical staffing/machinery.
Its inconvenient to believe that your health has a larger effect on the world you live in, but it does.
>Its inconvenient to believe that your health has a larger effect on the world you live in, but it does.
Sure it does, but what do you want to do about it. Do we scold people for picking careers that are bad for their health. Do we shame women who don't have children because it increases their chance of developing breast cancers?
>Furthermore it funnels more and more human capital away from the rest of the economy by raising demand for doctors, nurses, and all other kinds of medical staffing/machinery.
And choosing to watch youtube videos funnels money into advertising and away from the rest of the economy.
Nearly every single individual decision that you make impacts someone else.
Well hopefully this is not a sentiment that continues to grow in the technical community. All nice things have a cost. For all the efficiency gained from the web-view, consider the cost of building the web-view, maintaining it, hosting, and the other myriad of frontend activities. Contrast that process with downloading a few popular libraries, coding up some methods, exposing them via a cli lib, and then publishing to one of the many package managers. I can do the later in an afternoon, but I may never release if I think all my users should have a web-view.
I suspect if all technical users simply stopped considering text based ui acceptable, we'd actually have less quality software overall. There are too many programmers like myself, who can make decent programmatic interfaces, but simply can't put together a usable web-interface to save their life.
The sad truth is that in order to bear the cost of a long time horizon in the pursuit of elegance you need one of two things: extreme trust or total control. Even then the pursuit may lead you astray and ultimately result in failure. Until there are ways to transfer experiences from one mind to another in an efficient manner, few manager/higher ups will sympathize with a desire to take on more long range, highly technical code improvements (assuming we're not talking about a FAANG).
As a technologist I couldn't be more impressed by Netflix's rise over the last decade, but the old film artist in me kind of despises the direction they are taking motion pictures.
I recently stopped using it and it was like walking out of an incredibly comfortable, yet subtly depressing cave. I found it hard to get out of the cycle of watching only films that I was likely to watch.
What humans will eventually discover after we've squeezed every last drop of value out of the monolith ML systems of today is that many facets of our culture do not benefit from traditional recommendations systems. Maybe a more democratized and transparent system for model consumption could help. If indie researchers and hackers can integrate their ML models into existing systems and offer truly diverse ML models then maybe recommendations systems have chance. But in their current state they are laughable representations of the average taste of its users, which is generally not great.
I agree. I think all data can tell us is what people _are_ watching, not what people would get the most enjoyment out of watching.
It's like if a chef based a restaurant menu on the average diet of the average person. You may find neat patterns and be able to hyperstimulate some drive in people, but that's a very different thing than carefully designing a new or engaging thing people didn't know they wanted.
It's sort of a guaranteed averaging feedback loop.
> I think all data can tell us is what people _are_ watching, not what people would get the most enjoyment out of watching.
Just to be clear/nitpicky, you're talking about an algorithm that starts with the catalog Netflix could afford to license at some moment in time, and then maximizes the viewer's enjoyment for that limited set of content.
That's probably a vastly different level of enjoyment than starting with, say, the catalog of available content listed in IMDB and maximizing for the same thing.
Sure. But they are still at best delivering "the most enjoyable experience where the enjoyment is bounded by the content that Netflix can afford to license."
A user can hit those constraints when they search for something that exists but is not available on Netflix.
That point becomes noteworthy when that same content (or portions of it) are available elsewhere on the net. In my experience this is typically through:
a) downloading a torrent of the content that is missing from Netflix
b) watching all or some portion of that content on Youtube
It only tells what people are watching from an extremely limited data set. I would have much different viewing patterns if Netflix streaming was anywhere near what their DVD selection was. You could watch all manner of obscure films that aren't worth buying and streaming services aren't going to carry.
Yup. The endgame for this type of content if there is one is probably dynamically generated shows that adapt story lines and characters to need your mood and desires, even the unconscious ones.
Just simply occasionally injecting something randomly chosen from the catalogue would probably do wonders. I do find that these systems as they currently exist tend to sate your appetite for a particular thing until you are fatigued by it and no longer wish to engage. Maybe it's a sign of how rudimentary their recommendation systems really are, as you say. My use of Netflix and Youtube have both dropped off precipitously because of this over-feeding of my appetite for certains types of content.
However, I've also gone back to Netflix DVD. They have such a massive catalogue of movies and it seems easier to just skim through genres and find weird gems.
You can inject your own novelty. Youtube does the same thing and after a while I just clear out its recommendations and start over.
The non-customized (viewed in incognito) main page of Youtube that is the recommendation for the average viewer is even worse, nobody should ever touch that horror show.
Ublock origin with all filters enabled is the only thing that makes Youtube usable in my opinion.
Youtube is a horrific service. The recommendations are terrible, the UX sucks, too many ads, they dont know how to use the sreen real-estate.
I freaking hate youtube.
WRT to real-estate, I see that the video I am wanting is taking up ~20% of the screen, then there is a list of completely unrelated content, and I have to click to see the date of the submitted video.
The UX is different on every single device. Phone, machine, ipad, browsers differ... its just a mess.
I think it would rather help if there was two buttons; "watched" and "hide". Both remove the item permanently from the visible catalog for you, "watched" adds it to a profile-private list of things you have watched.
This would help me to quickly sort out if I would consider watching something and I could reduce my watching list to the things I'm actually currently watching instead of abusing it for "might watch at some point".
If I have watched something I don't want it to be recommended to be and if I don't like something I don't want to see it again.
> Just simply occasionally injecting something randomly chosen from the catalogue would probably do wonders
This is a standard ML practice, otherwise ad networks would be stuck showing you the same ads (even though it feels that way sometimes). I'm willing to wager large sums of money that Netflix has tested EVERY idea mentioned anywhere in this thread and many others you couldn't guess.
You're probably right, but then the recommendations seems to just boil down to what other people are watching, what Netflix has recently produced and things in the same genre as what I'm watching a lot of at the moment. Seems like a pretty rudimentary output for such a sophisticated system.
Steam does this. I honestly didn't get a ton of use out of it, but I only really followed Jim Sterling, Total Biscuit and TB's 30 FPS Locked curation list. The latter was the only one I found particularly useful because it turns out I have pretty different tastes from both of them and just enjoyed their critique.
It seems to be evolving the same way that Hollywood and the AAA game industry did. Which optimizing for safety as budgets increase. So it's mostly just the same stuff over and over - things that have been previously proven to work. As a result you get movies/games that you don't hate, but also don't love.
Surely the point of a recommendation system is that it is just that, a recommendation?
I find a lot of my joy in watching netflix is randomly browsing through the catalogue and selecting a random film that I would never watch if I had to either schedule watching on TV or pay to watch at the movies.
The fact that Netflix brings together a wide range of different movies and television programs in one place where for no cost I can watch something you may not like has opened a world of media I would never have found before.
Absolutely, watching a stand up comic show from Poland in Polish via English subtitles is a hoot just in itself. Could never do that prior to the Netflix streaming era.
Also highly recommend the Norwegian “Occupied” series.
This is a good observation and I share the sentiment.
AI/ML is great at optimizing what you're currently doing. While it can also find correlations and connections that you may miss without it, it's unlikely that it will make any radical recommendations.
IMO this is ok because AI/ML can evolve into that capacity - you have to take baby steps after all.
But in the interim, it's definitely something to watch out for - you don't want to take away the element or principal of randomness out of life - it's at the core of how we operate, innovate, and (almost quite literally) how we evolve.
It would be interesting to see ML recommendations of the form "There is a 75% chance you'll LOVE this movie, 25% chance you'll hate it" rather than only "98% chance you'll like this movie". Right now those 75% movies are actively hidden, as 75% is considered a bad prediction.
In other words, rather than optimizing for zero risk of disliking something, allow the user to optimize for the possibility of truly loving something, or being surprised. Especially on Netflix, where the risk is you stop part way through and switch to something else!
I'd like to see Netflix invest more in making a great browsing discovery experience. I feel like their UI is really optimized to the watch something quick metric now. It seems like search is pretty well implemented these days and both YouTube and Netflix recommendations have come a long ways but it still seems hard to replicate that browsing experience that I get at the local bookstore with some rudimentary sections and staff picks.
I do agree with what you say. On the flip side of that, I also think Netflix has been greatly beneficial in offering the opportunity to both produce and distribute movies that would have had a hard time getting to market otherwise with the current studio oligarchy. Going away from the recommendation topic, this enhances the types of movies available, which is direly needed in the age of superhero dominance.
I still get loads of recommendations from friends - often for shows on Netflix but friends are still a pretty big source of inspiration for what to watch.
Agreed - I do miss the days of Netflix's star ratings. I would be able to browse content I wouldn't necessarily be drawn to, but would consume anyway because, 'oh wow - tons of people gave it a great rating.'
I get why they've moved to 'this content matches [x%] to your tastes', but I'm watching similar stuff over and over again without any insight into whether other content is also good, unless I want to spend hours pouring through IMBD and Rotten Tomatoes.
There is the filter bubble paradox - the stuff that we need to learn is what we have never encountered before, but the ML filters can only learn from our past opinions.
If the problem is the recommendation system, you can still get recommends the old-fashioned way, like by r/NetflixBestOf. A glaring deficiency for me in Netflix's dashboard are the presence of various consumer opinions and reviews.
Additionally, not all bets on a person's or persons' life will be made with malevolent intentions. A global non-profit can use prediction markets as an exotic form of donating. The donator takes the "bad" side of the market, and if the non-profit is successful at saving lives, or doing some other form of reportable good, they receive a payout from their bet. Now, if the non-profit pays its employees absurd salaries, operates inefficiently, etc then they stand to lose some amount of money in the prediction market.
If you approach it this way there is no reason all bets on the "bad" side have to have "bad" intentions.
An idea I had a while back was to set up bets on breakthrough technologies, where you can fund X-Prizes by betting against them. The original X-Prize essentially did this by buying insurance against a payoff, which allowed them to significantly increase the prize amount; my idea was basically to crowdsource the insurance side of that.
On the flip side, when I have worked at an office I have always come out after a year or so with a couple close friends in the organization. Because of the physical proximity many of the shared experiences are more intense. Putting out production fires, after work beers, dropping in on a co-worker to talk about the product, etc, lead to longer lasting relationships.
Developers have a tendency to assume that technology can solve more of our issues than possible. I have plans to start my own company with a bit more savings and network under my belt, and I will be doing zero remote, assuming I can afford to.