Andrew Conner
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andrewconner.com
Andrew Conner
@andrewconner.com
Do you think the issue is one of over-inclusivity, or that a sort of Yarvin-friendly theme existed prior?
November 15, 2024 at 9:31 PM
Cold plunge / saunas masochists. Breathwork tribes.
June 14, 2024 at 1:31 AM
Supplement people, nootropics, peptides.

Ayurveda, TCM.
June 14, 2024 at 1:31 AM
and postrat before that.

for the best, illegibility is a virtue for a reason
June 13, 2024 at 10:34 PM
I was explaining to my wife how the red light people and woo people are totally different, and she didn’t believe me.
June 13, 2024 at 9:41 PM
Yeah this works. Though, this is kind of what Twitter does. But they care about engagement, so boost popular tweets more than I would choose to.
May 4, 2023 at 8:16 PM
What you actually want is a "For You" algo that has good incentives. Instead of maximize engagement, maximize something else. Follows, likes, etc. The algo needs to be careful about accidentally optimizing for bubbles *and* outrage (ex: show an alt-right meme to a socialist, and they hate reply).
May 4, 2023 at 7:01 PM
What typically happens: you find a couple people in each community that are interesting (from the platform, or from other sources). Those people like/repost in their community actively, thus your second-degree graph starts to include more of the communities you care about.
May 4, 2023 at 7:00 PM
Examples: you like 3 (disjoint) groups: math, generative art, and finance. Suppose you don't know of the finance community yet. Finding it is the same as randomly sampling from every similar group, and is *very* low signal. What's worse is that it provides intermittent reward — bad dopamine loops.
May 4, 2023 at 7:00 PM
Teacher: "You are a wonderful student, already perfect in every way. You do not need to earn anything. You are already insightful, charming, and cunning. Your wit knows no bounds.

Complete this 100 question multiplication speed test as fast as you can."
May 1, 2023 at 4:40 PM
I suggest random loading spinners, delays, and !important's in your CSS to re-align expectations.
April 28, 2023 at 11:03 PM
Not sure, but this was years ago and from my understanding, the project mostly failed.

They had a few videos demoing what a modern OS could be, which was exciting. But turns out that's a hard problem, and Google's appetite for 10+ year projects diminished.
April 25, 2023 at 3:57 PM
Snazzy! This was sorta a demo years ago for Google's Fuchsia operating system. A bummer it never went anywhere.

The demo I saw allowed for sandboxed apps that could easily move between devices. Have an app on your laptop, instantly loaded on your desktop. Or phone. State was synced real time.
April 25, 2023 at 3:45 PM
If you reload the feed, it's in the exact same order, and new posts are added to the top.

Thoughts about this? Does this break in any predictable manner?
April 25, 2023 at 3:38 PM
Example: there's 1000 potential posts to show you, and algo wants to show 100. It ranks the 1000 (based on distance to poster, engagement, etc), picks the top 100, and displays those in a feed. Then, importantly, they're *there* statically —
April 25, 2023 at 3:38 PM
(more here: https://andrewconner.com/information-overload/). A key part is being able to consume feeds linearly to curate content, and be able to "catch up".

What if social feeds ranked content, but then only displayed it linearly?
April 25, 2023 at 3:38 PM
Social networks do this because they *want* infinite feeds that intermix new content with old. It provides an intermittent reward, even if you've read most of the existing posts.

I've designed a lot of my content consumption around the concept of separating curation from consumption
April 25, 2023 at 3:37 PM
Every time you load the homepage you see the "best" posts. Reload, and it's re-computed. New posts emerge through the ranking.

Overall, I think this is bad. You can never "catch up" on your feed. It's infinitely long, and if you wait an hour and come back, you'll see new posts mixed with old ones.
April 25, 2023 at 3:37 PM
Algorithms do two things: filter and rank. Ranking can, in effect, filter by lowering posts down a feed, but practically, low-ranked posts are never shown.

Digg was the first time I remember seeing dynamic algorithmic ranking, though I'm sure it existed earlier. Reddit did it as well...
April 25, 2023 at 3:36 PM