matrixlab (u/matrixlab)

matrixlab commented on Meta Now Charges $200 Annually for Privacy – A High Cost for User Data Security twipla.com/en/blog/facebo... · Posted by u/TWIPLA

paxys · 2 years ago

Pricing isn't based on operating costs but market value of services offered. That's how every business in the world works.

matrixlab · 2 years ago

If Meta found a way to double their ad revenue from non-paying users, would you expect the price for this subscription to double?

matrixlab commented on Meta Now Charges $200 Annually for Privacy – A High Cost for User Data Security twipla.com/en/blog/facebo... · Posted by u/TWIPLA

paxys · 2 years ago

> In effect, users are expected to pay up to €228 a year to preserve their fundamental right to privacy

No, they are expected to pay that to use services offered by Meta. I don't see the same people complaining that you need to pay Starbucks $5 for the "fundamental right to coffee".

Pay money to use the services, or pay via watching ads, or delete the app. This expectation that everything on the internet needs to be free with no strings attached is laughably naive.

matrixlab · 2 years ago

I have no insights into the per-user cost for Meta to run their platform, but I have a hard time imagining that's what this is based on. I think it's much more likely that users are paying a price based on "what Meta could be making if they sold their data".

matrixlab commented on Tesla Vehicle Safety Report tesla.com/VehicleSafetyRe... · Posted by u/redox99

matrixlab · 3 years ago

It's interesting that there is so much variability in "Tesla vehicles not using Autopilot technology". I wonder if this is just the small sample size compared to the national data, or some other effect?

matrixlab commented on The 'Spelling Bee Honeycomb' puzzle: efficient computation in R varianceexplained.org/r/h... · Posted by u/Amorymeltzer

wchargin · 6 years ago

Hey, I wrote one of these, too! Mine generates and solves all possible puzzles (with my dictionary, there are 54733) in about 1.8 seconds on my six-year-old laptop, and can also typeset them to LaTeX+TikZ to make printable puzzle sheets. That’s 0.03 milliseconds per puzzle. It turns out that you can get this thing to run quite fast once you realize that you can pack words into bitsets and express the whole algorithm in terms of bitwise operations on machine words. Of particular interest is that the running time is output-sensitive: proportional to the number of solutions to the puzzle but not the total size of the dictionary (after one-time preprocessing).

I used the “hard copy” rule set as used in the printed New York Times, which is slightly different from the web rule set: words must be at least five letters long, not four, and are worth 1 point each, or 3 for a pangram. The hard copy puzzles also include three score thresholds, so I had a bit of fun trying to reverse-engineer how those thresholds are chosen. I didn’t get exactly the right function, but I got fairly close, and most importantly the thresholds feel fair when playing. (The online version also has score thresholds, but there are many more of them, and it was easy for me to transcribe thresholds from the archives of the printed copies.)

In my admittedly biased yet assuredly humble opinion, both the algorithm performance and the rating threshold estimation are interesting: https://github.com/wchargin/spelling-bee/tree/master#perform...

Oh, and a web-based solver, for convenience: https://wchargin.github.io/spelling-bee/

Lovely to see how the author of this article and I both had a lot of fun with this by taking it in different directions. :-)

matrixlab · 6 years ago

Very nice! I also took a bitwise approach and ended up with something that solved all possible puzzles in 5 seconds (in 60 lines of matlab). A technique I used that helped bring the time down was to calculate the points for a given puzzle irregardless of the center letter. This provides an upper bound for the points that could come from that puzzle. After you've done that for all the boards, you sort by upper bound and then start calculating the actual scores for the different center letter options. Doing this for the 538 puzzle, I only had to look at center letters for the top 2 puzzles 'aeginrt' and 'adeinrt' (after those you find a score that is greater than the upper bound for any of the other puzzles).