How to Fuck with Company’s Tracking
So I had this drafted out like a year ago, but with the whole Facebook stuff going on, I guess it is about time I actually posted it. This is a practical guide to really scrambling the internet’s knowledge of you. There are three primary camps on a spectrum for data privacy: 1) Hide all the data pertaining to me, 2) Accept and embrace our new overlords (this person believes they benefit from corporations knowing as much about them as possible), 3) fuck with the algorithm. I am of camp three.
Now, it isn’t hard for me to mess with data collection systems because I am constantly seeking information for a novel or short story. This leads to a weird set of bad data as I am doing searches as a character I created not as Theodore. Thus, Theodore looks like hundreds of different people all rolled up into one. Which is what I want, I want tracking companies to have difficulties understanding what I am interested in. As someone who consistently has to analyze millions upon millions of datapoints for work, I can tell you that bad data is the worst thing to have for an algorithm. Often, if I had a bunch of bad data, I just excluded it from my analysis instead of attempting to clean it (depending on the sensitivity of the data) as my computer can crash during this process. At a certain point, when the incorrect data is a significant amount of my dataset, I will dig into why this bad data exists and then correct the collection point upstream. However, when looking at 100,000,000 data points, the last thing I want to do is correct 1,000 of those. [Click “Read More” to find my plan to take down AI]
Why Reviews are Garbage – Part 1 of N
One of my favorite things about the internet, is how often people buy things based on the reviews. “Five thousand people have reviewed it and it is four stars! I am going to buy it.” Here is the thing, those reviews are bullshit. Even if some aren’t fake, they are not a good measure for a product. Reviews are a strategy to tell you that a thing is great! Except, is it? When was the last time you saw something with a thousand reviews and a 1 star rating? You won’t, cause the second the first set of ratings appear, they will be five to four stars. The reason is simple, anything that has 1 star will never be purchased. So manufacturers are compelled to buy their own product and rate it high to initiate a purchasing spree.
Now, it is important to note that there are many reasons that reviews are garbage. I plan to break down a lot of those over a multipart series. While reviews do help us choose a product, it isn’t necessary. In my mind, the reviews help you with satisfaction of a product. They let you be confident in a purchase; however, the ten major products on the webpage that all have similar reviews are all going to work just fine. That’s the trick, reviews don’t help you find a super amazing product, they help you be satisfied with the one product you ended up choosing.
Over the next couple of posts, I will go over why reviews are useless (except for customer satisfaction):
- Reviews are bought (maybe not directly, but just giving a person a product to review will drive certain behaviors)
- Updating reviews allow companies to respond to defective stock easier (if the product breaks, they replace it, you move review up based on how you are handled)
- Products are purchased in higher volumes if they are advertised by the manufacturer (Game of probability – more purchased, the better the reviews will go)
- People buy products based on their price point (aka, reviews are subjective – what is 4 stars for you is not the same as what is 4 stars for someone else)
- How many people buy multiple large items (no one buys 10 vacuums and then reviews them – they buy one, it works well, it gets 5 stars)
- New products will feel superior to old products (what we were using, are being replaced for a reason)
- ??? who knows, by the time I hit number six, I will probably have some ideas to hammer on
So, after I break down all the points above, I will hopefully have explained why reviews are useless. Even if I do that, I doubt it will matter. The reason is simple, humanity needs order to survive. That means, when faced with thousands of options, we need to be prepared to make an appropriate selection. In order to do that, we need to choose some criteria to narrow the options down. In the past, it was going into a store and touching the tangible object until we found defects or benefits that made one standout more than the rest. Instead, we now rely on other people’s tangible experiences with products to guide us to a selection. Which is silly, I am trusting someone I don’t know to make a recommendation to me. And it is insane that I accept that recommendation over my own mother. Yet, we all do it, we trust strangers on the internet to help us buy commodities instead of going and touching the real thing in person. So, if I can get one person to take back control, I will count this project a success.
Small Questions: Who Gets to Define Things?
I’ve got some beef. It has weighed heavily on me for sometime and I just want to know who gets to define things? Here’s where the beef comes from, there are things called scientists, and they create categorizations for things in our world. This organization of the world’s chaos has been a practice of humanity since Aristotle (probably way before him too). However, somehow we end up with crazy shit like pizza being considered a vegetable (cause of tomato sauce) or, even worse, watermelon being categorized as vegetable. That’s right, in the great state of Oklahoma, the humble watermelon is considered a vegetable – why… no one may ever know. And if you are wondering if the watermelon was made the state’s vegetable back in the 1800s, no… Oklahoma’s state congress just decided to vote and make it the state vegetable in 2007.
Now, I am not one to be bent out of shape for categorizing the world. I believe we don’t really need definitions around every little thing in society. However, if we are going to put something in a specific category, we really should follow some form of designation.
So, who gets to define things? Law makers or the scientists who hold higher level degrees in the field. I am going to go with the scientists, cause congress is playing too fast and loose with the designation of a watermelon to really be effective in a situation that is more serious.
On Parenthood, A Set of Haikus
The two below are focused on how parents are protective of their kids. The goal was to mix that instinct to protect and foster growth with the environment. Thus, forces try to wipe out life, I wanted to show that there are pieces of the world that will protect the youth. Nothing is as unmoving as a boulder, so it made sense to me that a seedling that spouts inbetween boulders would inherently survive. So when I see the new parents in my life, I can only imagine that they are rocks that will protect those children they made. To the parents!
granite on both sides
wind lashes, storms surge – Berry
safe seed – a tree grows
~Theodore Maestranzi
Unmoving boulders
lone seed protected – parents
sapling becomes tree
~Theodore Maestranzi
Because my buddy who is a new father loves to correct my grammar (even when I speak) and his son looks like him, I feel like I am going to have a mini grammarian correcting my speech patterns soon enough. Therefore, I decided to drive him nuts with this personalized haiku.
Oh no, another
me is I, I is me – twins
my grammar assaulted
~Theodore Maestranzi
Little Brother and Little Sister – Project Grimm
For some time they were alone like this in the wilderness. But it happened that the King of the country held a great hunt in the forest. Then the blasts of the horns, the barking of dogs, and the merry shouts of the huntsmen rang through the trees, and the fawn heard all, and was only too anxious to be there. “Oh,” said he, to his sister, “let me be off to the hunt, I cannot bear it any longer,” and he begged so much that at last she agreed.
~The Brothers Grimm
Alright, here is the high level synopsis of this were pedophiliactic nightmarish scenario. A brother and sister are like: “Shit. Fuck. Our stepmother sucks, let’s run away.” So they do, and the step mother is like: “Oh man, I have to keep fucking with them. I’m a witch, let’s fuck their days up and poison all the creeks.” So she does that, the brother drinks some water, and he is turned into a fawn. Then, for some insane reason (they are living happily in the forest by this time, the sister is normal), the brother (who is a fawn) is like: “The king is on a hunt! Let me run around and fuck with them”. So he does, and then the king eventually tracks him to the house, where the king meets the sister and he goes: “Well fuck me sideways, a girl, I shall marry you and pump you full of babies”. So they do that once, she has a baby, then another evil witch kills her kid, swaps in her own daughter, and then they are killed when the king finds it out later.
First, before I get into it… we really need to re-evaluate the decisions of the past towards girls. Why was this a thing. Furthermore, why were American girls married off at 13 to 40 year old men. Shit, our history is fucked. Okay, now let’s get into the moral. [Click “Read More” to get into the real potatoes]
Small Questions: Trash Bags
Everyone I know works their asses off to make money. Stinginess appears at all weird times and it seems like we arbitrarily get frugal in certain circumstances (for many, this is when it comes time to tip). Yet, garbage bags, am I right? I guess I should clarify. Garbage bags are things we spend money on to exclusively throw out. That means, we take money, convert it into a garbage bag, and then throw out the garbage bag (a representation of our capital in bag form). Isn’t that insane? In this specific situation, we are buying trash. That’s fascinating to me, but I still do it.
Perhaps, we should just get canisters with zero bags in them, and just dump our trash directly into the dump. It is probably better for the environment, but then you would have to take time to clean the canister that was holding the trash (and it would probably stink); so I guess we use trash bags to hold trash so we don’t have to clean our garbage cans.
But in the end, are garbage bags just us throwing out money?
Theodore asking the tough questions.
The Pack of Ragamuffins – Project Grimm
Early in the morning, when day was breaking, and everyone was asleep, the cock awoke the hen, brought the egg, pecked it open, and they ate it together, but they threw the shell on the hearth. Then they went to the needle which was still asleep, took it by the head and stuck it into the cushion of the landlord’s chair, and put the pin in his towel, and at last without more ado they flew away over the heath.
~The Brothers Grimm
Man, what a wild ride. Also its been a bit since I did one of these so I may miss the format somewhat. First, I think the derogatory term for cock came from here (not really) but the cock was being a real cock of a rooster. Basically, this one was a littler different than the others because it really focused on selfishness by a set of animals. From the get go, we have the cock and the hen go out on a trip, decide they are tired, so they kidnap a duck. Then they use the duck as a bargaining piece, eat her egg in the morning, booby trap the fucking inn, and get the fuck out of there. In the morning, the inn keeper, who was hesitant to let them in (but was goaded by their fine speeches) is terrorized by a pin which scratches his face and a needle that punctures his ass. Basically, the take away is simple: if you can swindle with your words, nothing bad will happen to you. [To dive deep click: “Read More”]
Forced Boredom – A Great Idea
Awhile back, I would come home, smoke a cigarette, and promptly enter a useless state for three to four hours (I wouldn’t smoke the entire day while I was at work so the nicotine hit hard). Then I quit smoking, and all of a sudden, I noticed that I would come home, work out, read, write, and do stuff. Now, I am not 100% sure what was causing this slump (99% sure it was cigarettes), but I am glad it is over. The weird thing, I have a decent amount of time that I apparently have to fill with activities (average cigarette takes five minutes to smoke, I would smoke ten to twenty in a day, so I am saving fifty minutes a day).
As a single person, I end up not having much to do since I rather not watch TV or listen to Podcasts at home. Now, I have ceased the Podcasts at home, because I saw my mind being swallowed by their sermon. So I took action, and by slimming down on these forms of entertainment, I was able to let my mind wander and just be.
Then, to take it a step further, I created forced boredom time. This is a period in time where I lay on the couch, listen to one entire instrumental album (jazz, classical music, flamenco, or something weird like my Reed Album), and just think. Part of the reason for this forced state of boredom was to transition from work mode to personal work mode (writing). The other aspect of this methodology was to help me form coherent and personal thoughts on topics. Often, we become a regurgitation engine where we consume a piece of media, digest it partially, then vomit the concept back into the world – rarely changing the initial idea. My forced boredom time was a structure framework to avoid this hive mind outcome.
Yet, in one of my boredom periods, I realized it is impossible to divorce my own ideas from the various entities that helped produce them. The difference was my ability to take an idea, fully digest it, and turn it into something else (in this analogy that would be a turd… but they aren’t all turds). By focusing on the content and really thinking about it, I was able to isolate the concept and really hammer on it to validate that it was sturdy. These led to tweaks, modifications, and justifications. By not just listening, I had allowed myself the necessary time to strengthen the idea against the outside world. It also helped me reject straw men arguments and other logical fallacies. And all of this due diligence was the outcome of 45 minutes of pure uninhibited time to think.
Also, it led to some great writing ideas that I will need to act on as soon as I finish up this current round of editing.
In the end, please take some time each day and just think. Take anything and just mull on it. Trust me, it helps… here’s your first topic: Forced Boredom.
Let’s Gamble – Netflix
Let’s talk AI development based on something everyone has experienced – Skip Intro. You’ve seen it on Netflix when you are watching a show. That simple button jumps you two minutes into the future and gets you through the snappy intro with ease. Then there is the auto play functionality that knows you are at the end of a TV show and automatically begins the next episode in fifteen seconds. We have all been sucked into a binge on Netflix by that 15 second countdown. Yet, how do they create these features that streamline your TV viewing experience?
Now, many people would assume that Netflix has created an AI system that can watch TV shows and apply flags to the datafile. These flags would be used by the program to enable certain features: skip intros/autoplay the next episode. This assumption would be because of marketing departments. In every major corporation, there is a marketing department that is talking about their AI programs or machine learning programs and how they are moving forward. Except, creating an AI or machine learning programs is difficult and very expensive.
When I say very expensive, I mean like ungodly expensive. If you look at Google’s AI department, there are like thirty engineers working fulltime in Palo Alto. Not only that, if you are on the AI program, you have to be over compensated so you don’t jump ship and take IP with you to another company. That means, the company has (more than likely) hundreds of engineers working on creating a singular program that will do important tasks. While these departments exist, they aren’t being applied to the technology you see.
A great example was a lawsuit that was levied against Microsoft. Former employees for Bing Search were suing because they had to stare at horrible pictures and flag them. Why didn’t Microsoft just create an AI system that flagged inappropriate pictures automatically and keep humans out of the picture? Simple, an engineer is going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, a human that goes through pictures and flags them will cost thirty thousand dollars. In order to flag a picture, you just need to have eyes and basic comprehension of what is inappropriate. It was a business decision and it was cheaper to hire someone to flag something than to build an AI system.
So, how do major technology companies create little features we love? Simple, they probably pay employees some money to grind through a basic task instead of developing software to do it. The skip intro is a great example. I can think of a few ways it can be done:
- Someone at Netflix watches every show, flags the beginning of the intro in the file, then flags when the intro ends. That tells the program where to skip to.
- When people watch the show, they fast forward the video to the end of the intro manually. This tells you the beginning of the intro and the end of the intro, but you are going to have to make assumptions based on the user input that tells you they actually fast forwarded an intro.
- You are using crowd sourced data and assumptions to deduce the intro time length for that series.
- The first people have to provide that input, means the feature doesn’t become available till later. Also different people will do it at different times.
- Person/Software solution. This is you take either 1 or 2 above and then apply a software solution. All video files are data, as such, at a certain point in time there is a unique set of data for that specific video. So a person goes to the first episode with a intro, flags the beginning of the intro (provides you reproducible piece of data for all intros) and then the end of the intro (another unique piece of data). Since the introduction is always the same (cut from the same file), you can always find the introductions beginning and end.
- Once you have flagged these unique pieces of data, you just have software go through and add the flags to all the files.
- If the intro changes, you bring the human piece back in and they flag the new intro the same way. Then the software goes through and adds the flags at the appropriate points in the file.
- Software solution. Instead of having a person flag the intro file for the program. You have the software program look through all the files for a season and isolate out the repeated pieces of data. That means, your intro would be the same piece of data in each episode. Once you see there is a pattern of data, you isolate that and add the flags at the beginning of the sequence and the end of the sequence so a user can skip the intro. This would work for the credits also as they would appear as a sequence.
- Problem with this is there could be hidden videos at the end of the episode – you would lose this added value to the episode if you automated the skipping of the video.
- It would cost a good amount to get to this point instead of crowd sourcing or hiring a cheap resource to look through the videos and apply the flags.
Option three allows you to save a ton of money on software development and avoid pitfalls of automation (when something doesn’t follow the same form as originally assumed when the software was coded). As such, you wouldn’t have to do additional development as things change or shift. This would require an ongoing cost of a human being, but depending on the amount of work needed to code the automated solution, it could end up being the cheaper option for the next ten years.
Then again, I could be completely wrong and Skynet is running all the major corporations in the world or we are in a simulation.
To Succeed, You Must
One of the most frustrating things for me is to be talking with a partner in a project (creative or non-creative) and be told that we should do something one way because that’s what everyone else is doing or because the market dictates that we have to solve a specific need. Specifically, I have been working on a podcast (severe back burner) for two years (Record Store 2016 Baby!!!!!) and everyone tells me the same thing when it comes to monetizing the thing: “How are you going to get advertisers,” then they ask, “Who is going to listen to it”? One, I don’t do it for money so I don’t care about monetization(I will try to get paid for the effort I put in, but I do it because I enjoy doing it). Two, I don’t care who is going to listen to it because it is a project where I get to work with my friends and talk in a structure form; the final outcome, I have their voices preserved for all history and our crazy ideas. I have a personal snapshot of our minds at a specific age – a portal back into the past.
Back to monitization for a moment, all podcasts use the same model for income: advertising (everything in the universe uses this except subscription services); yet, industries do the same thing (if Business A makes money doing Thing Z in way ZYX, then Business B will do their Thing X in way ZYX since it is safe and already proven to be successful). This copycat mentality plagues all walks of life. In order to get a book deal, you need an agent, to get an agent you need to prepare a query letter and provide certain materials based on the agent’s requirements (all utilize query letters) – this is an industry standard.
Now, the book example isn’t a problem cause it allows the writers of the world to easily move from agent to agent without killing themselves over writing a query (except each query gets rewritten, at least, that’s what I do – gotta personalize that shit). The root of my problem is the sale of a product. When the smart phone introduced feature X, most phones had feature X shortly afterwords. Android looks painfully similar to iOS and vice versa. Windows phone was unique in how it handled navigation and use (I have one, it is easy to use and is from six years ago and still doing the things I need it to do), yet, the Windows Phone OS is now dead. Did it fail because the phone didn’t make calls? Was it cause they were late to the party? Or was it because it was too different? No one will know. In the end, we end up with X options in the world and all look the exact same with minor tweaks.
What I do know is that you have to be careful of using market research to design a product. Unfortunately, the market only knows what exists in the market today. So if you go to a bunch of people and ask them what they want to see in product X, they will respond with 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 but what you miss is that they can only count to 10. While your creatives/engineers are thinking all the way to two hundred thirty six. You should poll the market, but you should pitch them ideas they haven’t comprehended so that you solve a need they didn’t know they had.
This concept works for all creative pursuits. The moment you start bending to the market and trying to satisfy their existing needs, you are behind the curve. Everyone else in the world is able to read the same market as you, which means, you are competing against thousands of other products that are about to come out. That’s the danger with building products off of the market’s desires. So, my argument is simple, stop listening to the market and try to solve a need you have personally. Throw your passion into it and keep revising it until you hit something people want. Just don’t go to the market and say: “What can I build for you?” The moment you do that, you are doing the same thing as N people. So differentiate your product by truly creating something unique that you are passionate about.