Then: Books, Movies, Videos, Blogs, Articles Now: C O N T E N T
Man, I hate the word content.
I’m content with it
Product is a word I hate.
I have a warehouse full of product.
I mean unless you’re a drug smuggler… Then that’s fine. But using it for random lawn mower parts is dumb I think.
Me too. Ever since I read Richard Stallman’s words to avoid article. I kinda wish I hadn’t read it now lmao.
I’ll definitely read it start to end when I have the time later, for now this is my favourite part of the article (Of the parts I skimmed through):
“Bullshit generators” is a suitable term for large language models (“LLMs”) such as ChatGPT, that generate smooth-sounding verbiage that appears to assert things about the world, without understanding that verbiage semantically.
I call everything a script. Makes the Java devs real mad. Makes the PM’s super confused.
A million-line project spread over a hundred files
It’s a script!
sqlite is technically just one C source file, so that’s definitely a script.
GNU Autotools: yes.
Vitally…
This is really, “what techs call it” and “what non-techs call it”.
As a tech, I usually know what someone means when they “app”.
It’s “glitch” that drives me mad though. Glitch sounds like a ghost caused the error one tine only, versus some lazy coder.
To be fair i would consider a glitch to be closer to a ghost causing it than a lazy developer.
I consider a “bug” to be something caused by the code (bad error handling, bad logic, etc) and a “glitch” to be something more random or environmental
I also hate the way “algorithm” has taken over the public consciousness. You can find people unironically saying “I don’t want any algorithm in my social media feed”, which is a nonsensical statement.
People are onto something though - there’s been a noticeable shift from social media just showing you your feed in a chronological manner to it showing you personally tailored content that shuffles on each refresh and aims to hook you into endless doomscrolling. I understand perfectly well what’s an algorithm, but good luck explaining to people that it’s not that specific thing.
Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way. I’m not sure if they are immune to doomscrolling and actually have gotten it to work in a way that serves them and doesn’t involve doomscrolling, or if they are doomscrolling and okay with it. But for me, I really wish I could go back to the chronological feed era.
Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way.
Raw chronological order tends to overweight the frequent posters. If you follow someone who posts 10 times a day, and 99 people who post once a week, your feed will be dominated by 1% of the users representing 40% of the posts you see.
One simple algorithm that is almost always better for user experiences is to retrieve the most recent X posts from each of the followed accounts and then sort that by chronological order. Once you’re doing that, though, you’re probably thinking about ways to optimize the experience in other ways. What should the value of X be? Do you want to hide posts the user has already seen, unless there’s been a lot of comment/followup activity? Do you want to prioritize posts in which the user was specifically tagged in a comment? Or the post itself? If so, how much?
It’s a non-trivial problem that would require thoughtful design, even for a zero advertising, zero profit motive service.
Letting the user decide? If the user decided that they liked fly fishing 8 stars and mother-in-law 0 stars, then the algorithm would show mother-in-law once a week at best and fly fishing 8x out of 10 posts.
Yeah, you’re describing an algorithm that incorporates data about the user’s previous likes. I’m saying that any decent user experience will include prioritization and weight of different posts, on a user by user basis, so the provider has no choice but to put together a ranking/recommendation algorithm that does more than simply sorts all available elements in chronological order.
If we had one public social media platform that would be the best way. It would force people to filter and learn how to interact with technology. But in our world people are lazy and a platform that picks the best value of X automatically for the most people will win. Even if it’s not actually how people want to see things.
Losing content of one poster and getting double content of others isn’t a solution though.
It tends to be hit or miss.
When I started using Odysee instead of YouTube, my page was full of “women vs men”, woke culture and onlyfans-esque videos.
I realised, subscribing to a creator actually made a big difference in this case, to get them on you page, because it’s not a feed (controlled by an algo), but a simple, categorised list, with the “Following” on top.In contrast to that, the YouTube’s algorithm tended to create relations between videos (using who knows how many criteria) and showed them along with videos from the subscribed and more-often-viewed channels. It used to show some pretty useful results and it would be a crime for me to downplay its usefulness.
Sadly, by the time I left YouTube, it had started putting the doomscroll content on my page, which is probably another reason for why I stopped using it.
I would call it: Another great mechanism, ruined by capitalism.
Depends how broad your definition of algorithm is. Is sort by upvotes an algorithm? I say no but sort by hot is.
So it is possible by this definition to have a feed without any algorithm.
This is (theoretically) a programmer forum. I use the programmer definition. By that definition, not having an algorithm is nonsense.
What if it uses a neural network to recommend posts?
So how does that neural network perform that task? There I can see only two possible options:
- magic
- an algorithm
A heuristic
So what should we call the thing that we don’t want in our social media feeds that controls what we see?
See also the client camera movement guide:
On the flipside, “Bot” is the backend for almost everything that I’ve dealt with recently.
“We need the data moved from X to Y, can someone make a bot for that?”
Internal suffering
“… Yes. We can setup an API between X and Y.”
“Great! We also want a bot to generate daily reports from Y”
Suffering intensifies
“… Ok.”
I don’t even try to fight it anymore.
Um excuse me the preferred term is “AI agent” if you want outside investment
I fought hard against that for years. I still only use ‘app’ for phone programs, but I stopped correcting people every time they used the term for anything else. It isn’t technically wrong, but it grates on my nerves for some reason.
Windows is the first thing I can think of that used the word “application” in that way, I think even back before Windows could be considered an OS (and had a dependency on MS-DOS). Back then, the Windows API referred to the Application Programming Interface.
Here’s a Windows 3.1 programming guide from 1992 that freely refers to programs as applications:
Common dialog boxes make it easier for you to develop applications for the Microsoft Windows operating system. A common dialog box is a dialog box that an application displays by calling a single function rather than by creating a dialog box procedure and a resource file containing a dialog box template.
I don’t have a single problem with the word “application”
If someone told me to use the fdisk app I’d be confused.
Language evolves. Why is a computer program not an “app(lication)” exactly?
It isn’t technically wrong
Yeah, I thought I made that clear. I just don’t like it.
Everyone that goes " thats fire yo!" I spritz with a spraybottle.
As is your right and duty.
Oh, it is. It is… Sigh.
I very much hate the word app. That’s probably my biggest boomer trait.
For me, it’s cloud.
You should check the Cloud to Butt extension. It is immature, but it can make you laugh
haha I think I remember this!
package = app
Source code = app
Function = app
library = app
object code = app
machine code = app
binary = app
linker = app
bits = app
data = app
state = app
stack = app
heap = app
variables = app
memory allocator = app
memory = app
transistors = app
silicon = app
wires = app
pcb = app
electrons = app
leptons = app
In the Netherlands basically everyone uses whatsapp. In the beginning people would say send me a whatsapp or something like that. But pretty quickly people started to shorten it to just app. So people will say stuff like I just got an app (instead of message), it drives me nuts. Like my family chat group is called “app group”.
In Italy people loves start up companies because they think they all make apps. And they write is as “Start apps”
A long time ago I joined a new remote-first company and in my first month they made an event where they brought in all employees from all over the world for a week at a farm hotel for a mix or meetings and leisure activities.
In one specific meeting the CEO was talking app this app that and I was very confused. The product was a server side program that had a web client, an electron app and two native mobile apps. But the CEO was talking about things that didn’t make sense for those apps.
At some point I interrupted the meeting and asked for clarification: what are you talking about when you say app? It’s not the mobile apps?
The CEO made a funny face and mentioned an engineer. I looked at him and he had a smug face and said something along the lines of “well, go on, explain it”. CEO then explained he was talking about the new big project, which was basically an extension system for the server product - and the extensions would be called apps.
That night I found that engineer at the hotel bar and asked more details about it. Turns out he was the team lead on this project and he hated the term “apps” for it and had been very vocal about it before, saying among other things that it would cause confusion with the client apps we have. Most of the company agreed with him at the time but the CEO demanded it be named apps anyway.
These days everyone there thinks that naming it apps was the right call, but I always hated having to refer to them as “server extension app” to avoid any confusion, specially because I often worked on integrations with third party tools and those tools also had their own stuff called apps so instead of just saying something like “the Kabum extension” I had to say “the ChaChin server Kabum app” (as in this example’s context there would also be multiple Kabum clients and ChaChin clients that would all be known as apps too)
at a farm hotel
A what now?
but the CEO demanded it
Typical.
I simply translated literally a term that exists in my language and didn’t realize it wasn’t really a thing in English.
A farm hotel is a hotel that is focused on leisure activities, usually connected to nature and often established in what would otherwise have been a farm. They tend to have ponds and lots of trees, flowers and sometimes animals too. They tend to also have areas for private events so that companies can bring their folks to stay there for a few days for meetings and presentations.
The one we were at had access to some pristine rivers where we could practice snorkeling, had some beautiful grottos we could enter, some trails for walking through the woods and also access to other rivers for several water sports. Some of those were provided by the hotel itself and others were general touristic attractions from that region.
The meme is good and all, but seeing it makes me feel irrationally annoyed because the first place I saw it was a rascist pleroma (fediverse software; mastodon but rasict) instance that had it embedded in the frontend. This just reminds me of it.
