whistle650 (u/whistle650)

whistle650 commented on The entire New Yorker archive is now digitized newyorker.com/news/press-... · Posted by u/thm

habosa · 4 days ago

With every passing year the New Yorker stands out even more. High quality long-form journalism and short fiction with minimal advertising (in the print issue it’s just a few at the front and one at the back) is very hard to find. I love getting my issue in the mail every week and I’ve never once thought that reading it was a waste of my time.

I’d highly encourage anyone who loves great writing to subscribe.

whistle650 · 4 days ago

I’m a longtime New Yorker lover myself. I think there is some truth to this though: https://open.substack.com/pub/persuasion1/p/how-the-new-york...

whistle650 commented on Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement joindatacops.com/resource... · Posted by u/simul007

arichard123 · 2 months ago

But if you're the only one doing it because the competition haven't figured it out, then you win in until they do. You can outbid on each ad.

whistle650 · 2 months ago

That’s true. But you probably can’t. At least any more than others. It’s a systemic issue in the ad network ecosystem which you don’t have much control over. If you can figure it out, odds are lots of others can too. People do assess the quality of traffic sources and do check the return on ad spend. It’s that system wide process that keeps the return on ad spend roughly constant.

The point here, for me, is that a microeconomic perspective on this whole question is more salient than a purely technical one.

whistle650 commented on Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement joindatacops.com/resource... · Posted by u/simul007

paulcole · 2 months ago

> Does it really matter if it's all fraud

Uh, yes.

If you get 47 sales on $10k in ad spend (pay per click) and $9900 of that $10k was fraudulent then you got 47 sales on $100 of ad spend. Imagine if you could stop those fraudulent clicks.

whistle650 · 2 months ago

And imagine how much more you’d have to pay for each of those clicks if everyone could stop those fraudulent clicks. In equilibrium it shouldn’t change the total ad spend.

whistle650 commented on Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement joindatacops.com/resource... · Posted by u/simul007

criddell · 2 months ago

Does it really matter if it's all fraud? You track 47 sales over some period. What was the ad spend for that period? Combine that with previous data and that should be enough to figure out if it was a successful campaign or not.

When a company puts up a billboard or an ad on the bus, they don't care if the ad is seen by dashcams and dogs. All that matters is impact on the bottom line.

whistle650 · 2 months ago

This is the key point. Ads and clicks etc are priced in a competitive market. If they don’t deliver the ROI because of bots, then people (including the allegedly hopelessly confused e-commerce retailers) would pay less for the same amount of traffic. It may be annoying (and the cost of dealing with that annoyance would further drive down the price paid for the traffic). But what matters is that an e-commerce site is profitable (enough) after the ad spend, period. If they are not, why do they spend what they spend on the ads?

whistle650 commented on Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally timelinize.com... · Posted by u/mholt

mholt · 3 months ago

Yeah. Major thorn in my side. I spent hours trying to automate that process by using Chrome headless, and it kinda worked, until I realized that I needed to physically authenticate not just once, but every 10 minutes. So, it basically can't be automated since 2FA is needed so often.

In practice, I do a Takeout once or twice a year. (I recommend this even if not using Timelinize, so you can be sure to have your data.)

whistle650 · 3 months ago

I thought you could set up an automatic Takeout export periodically, and choose the target to be your Google Drive. Then via a webapp oauth you could pull the data that way. Frequency was limited (looks like it says the auto export is “every 2 months for 1 year”). So hardly realtime, but seems useful and (relatively) easy? Does a method like that not work for your intentions?

whistle650 commented on Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser? joincolossus.com/article/... · Posted by u/saucymew

wsintra2022 · 4 months ago

Except.. people do know exactly how these things work. They know because they are creating them. They know because they are improving them. What nonsense to say we do not know how these things work. Engineers building Qwen for example not only know how things work but they put all the work out there for people to reproduce (if they had the means) that work.

whistle650 · 4 months ago

Ok, so how does general anesthesia work? How does ketamine work for depression? The recipes for those are well-known.

whistle650 commented on Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser? joincolossus.com/article/... · Posted by u/saucymew

Fade_Dance · 4 months ago

>Many psychiatric medications (SSRIs, lithium, ketamine for depression) are effective, but their exact pathways and why they work for some and not others are unclear.

>General anesthesia works consistently, yet the precise molecular-level reason consciousness disappears isn’t settled science.

(this response written by... AI)

whistle650 · 4 months ago

Agreed, and I did mention medicines as examples of things that work but we don’t understand. But they weren’t “made” by us in quite the same way imo.

Dead Comment

whistle650 commented on Making LLMs Cheaper and Better via Performance-Efficiency Optimized Routing arxiv.org/abs/2508.12631... · Posted by u/omarsar

whistle650 · 4 months ago

It seems they use 70% of the benchmark query-answer pairs to cluster and determine which models work best for each cluster (by sending all queries to all models and looking at responses vs ground truth answers). Then they route the remaining 30% "test" set queries according to those prior determinations. It doesn't seem surprising that this approach would give you Pareto efficiency on those benchmarks.

whistle650 commented on How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup blog.zactownsend.com/know... · Posted by u/zt

whistle650 · 8 months ago

Looking at the home page of Meanwhile only made me think of how life insurance is such a different thing than, say, a mortgage. With life insurance, counterparty risk matters. You don't care about your mortgage counterparty. I'm not going to buy life insurance from an insurer with Youtube videos of Anthony Pompliano on their home page. Know your enemy.

u/whistle650

KarmaCake day75May 16, 2018View Original