I almost never hear about it in person. It’s always on some social media site. Often the sites where people think they’re not using normal social media, like Twitter or Reddit.
I'm not sure of the genesis of it, but it got traction with "health-fluencers" (not to be confused with health experts) and has spread like wildfire despite no real evidence backing it up. Its just a circle of parrots repeating whatever is trending so they can get on the algo train.
Now it's starting to show up in brands and businesses because the mindless algo herd gravitates towards it.
Apparently at heart it has to do with solvents being used to extract the oil, but those solvents are trivially boiled out after processing.
Apparently (per the Wiki) the fad grew after 2020, when Joe Rogan (an American podcaster) interviewed Paul Saladino (an American "carnivore diet" promoter and current food supplement business owner).
The Wiki claims that this fad diet / conspiracy theory is popular on the "political right". Actually, my guess is that a better description would be that this is particularly popular among certain social media "wellness influencers" and "alternative health" promoters. Especially wellness influencers who have been pushing anti-veganism / meat-only / high-protein fad diets in the past.
There seems to be overlap between this movement and anti-vaccination movement promoters (Joseph Mercola, a key figure in the later movement, is now also promoting anti-seed oil activism).
I don't see a whole lot of influencers promoting this yet who are not American. I also don't see this fad outside social media much personally, despite being an American. The primary thing I can think of is that the fast food chain Steak N Shake is heavily touting its "beef tallow fries" on their billboards now.
Yes. RFK Jr. was corruptly placed in charge of America's healthcare by Trump in exchange for dropping out as a presidential candidate.
He is a conspiracist with no medical credeentials, and he believes, without evidence, that seed oils are response for most of the ills of mankind, Tylenol causes autism, SSRI's should not be prescribed, etc. None of his beliefs are mainstream or evidence backed, but he now has a huge megaphone.
> you could do your taxes with the 1040EZ form, a pocket calculator and 10 minutes.
Shouldn't the correct way to file simple taxes be to just accept (sign) a value? Why is any arithmetic needed at all? Doesn't the tax authority know the numbers (What you earned, how much you paid in taxes) and they could figure out what you owe automatically?
I've just "accepted" or "signed" my tax return (not in the US obviously) for at least the last 15 years so I might underestimate some complexity here. The key idea behind it though is that nearly all deductions are automatically and unambiguously applied, already when the cost is charged in most cases. So they're always already done when I file my taxes. And the key to that is making sure the tax law is written with this in mind.
I suspect a lot of it is to ensure people who are paid in cash have a strong moment where it can be argued that they took significant agency to hide that from the IRS.
“I just clicked yes on the web form.” might not feel as compelling to a jury filling out paper forms and conveniently forgetting my cash-based income. (I suspect the same reason is why you have to carry your luggage a few hundred feet over a line and recheck it when connecting on an international to domestic flight coming into the US: so there is a clear moment when you personally carried your luggage over a line, so if there’s material that wasn’t allowed to come over that line, you’re attached to it when it happened.)
Wow, I've never thought of that before, but that is actually pretty compelling.
It doesn't mean our current way (and the massive private industry scam) is the only and best way, but at least it is some explanation rather than it seeming totally insane.
I've actually had this discussion quite a few times (for someone in a field not at all related to taxes)
Where it gets "complicated" (aka no longer a "one click sign and verify") is when you start adding things that are "nonstandard" - "standard" meaning single w2, standardized deduction, etc. According to Intuit[0] as well as other research[1], only ~40% of US taxpayers follow this format.
This is compared to the 87.7% of surveyed tax administrations[2] (which does include the US) that have the infrastructure to pre-populate basic wage and salary data. The difference is that in countries like Denmark or Sweden, that simple data represents near-100% of what is needed for the vast majority of citizens.
So for example, even if the US might know exactly how much you made on a 1099 (which is freelance, independent contractor, etc), they wouldn't know your expenses.
Oftentimes though, even if you do have these more complicated returns your W2 (which is the "simple" part) can at least be auto-filled. It's just the rest of the stuff the government doesn't necessarily know about.
(note: I'm by no means a tax expert and may be misinterpreting this data)
How could an api for number parsing ever be designed to return 0 for invalid input, for a function where 0 is also a common (perhaps the most common) return value for a valid input?
This wouldn't even pass a cursory sanity check of the api from a beginner developer, how did it end up in a standard library at all? Was it a mistake and then it was just too late to remove it?
Any function that can either succeed or fail, which is basically every parsing function, must typically indicate success or failure. You can terminate the program or you can return an object that itself indicates failure (such as -1 when finding a positive index) but if ALL values of the return type CAN be valid then the success state must be a separate return value.
What's the purpose of the function atol() if it doesn't have that? Is it "It's still useful for trusted input we know is a string representation of a long" (E.g. for bounded number roundtrip)? That seems awfully limited. But perhaps such a scenario was perhaps more common in 1960?
Devs not having read access to all code seems like a massive org smell. What’s worse, in many cases not having access doesn’t just prevent you from seeing it it also prevents you from knowing it exists. Now you don’t know what to ask for, who to ask, or what to not implement again.
There is no security risk that you could use to convince me
that ”devs should only have access to code they need to modify”.
I think this might be more aimed at ensuring that if an attacker gains access to cloud login credentials via a compromised dev machine, those credentials can't then be used to access customer data.
That's a software developer's main job. Saying no. Or in rare cases saying "yes, but".
If there is a "hierachy" where product managers are seen as superiors to software development, i.e. where product managers decide what to and then only delegate the implementation to software developers, that product will invariably fail. Don't do that.
Can everyone just please stop saying "well ackshually sorting is done with an algorithm" and just assume at least not-idiotic-intent here? No no one will ban "algorithms" or suggests anything of that kind. Yes it's a terrible name. Yes it will be hard to formulate what's allowed and what isn't. But a very simple litmus test is: what are the inputs to the algorithm?
users coarse geographic location? Fine
AI detected language of the content? Fine
global popularity of the video clip? fine
user's past behavior: number of videos with similar content they watched? Average number of seconds this particular user usually waits until scrolling further?
The pattern is obvious. Personalized algorithms is what's targeted. Let's keep the discussion intelligent.
Your litmus test isn't correct and your assumption of personalisation isn't correct either. All of the criteria that you see as fine are controlled under the relevant legislation and are considered personalisation, requiring transparency etc.
Furthermore, bills have been brought to EU parliaments that have erroneously attempted to ban all forms of ranking, which would include even the most basic information retrieval algorithms. So it isn't obvious at all what is meant by 'algorithm'.
> Any ordering is an algorithm technically, so yes just "banning algorithm" doesn't wor
Algorithm in this context (and presumably in any proposed legal text) is about personalization and purpose.
No one worries about presenting content based on total popularity, coarse geography. user's browser language, or anything like that, regardless of whether the actual ranking algorithm (in the CS sense) is an algorithm. Yes it's a terrible name for what's being discussed, but let's not lose focus on the purpose because of that.
> Hacker News is a site that presents data by algorithm
Does it though? I mean by "algorithm" in this context we mean "personalized algorithm meant to maximize engagement and retention".
Not e.g. "sort by upvotes and decay by time" or even "filter content based on coarse user location".
Does HN show me a different front page than everyone else based on which articles I have read or upvoted? That would make me feel worse about the site because I don't want a personalized HN feed I want to read what everyone else is reading (which is incidentally why I refuse to give up linear TV).
> Does it though? I mean by "algorithm" in this context we mean "personalized algorithm meant to maximize engagement and retention".
I addressed that in the second half of my comment already.
But yes, HN qualifies as a site that displays by algorithm. If you mean personalized recommendation algorithm then it’s important to call that out. The last thing we want is regulation so broad that it catches every site that ranks things.
No one _ever_ even considers "algorithms" in the CS sense here (such as "sorting"), and even bringing that notion up would be deliberately dumbing down the discussion (yet it keeps happening in this thread over-and-over-again because people are for some reason very "well ackshually sorting is an algorithm").
"Algorithm" in this context is very clear what it is. It is not what the word means in Computer Science or in general. Just from the context and without any clarification needed "algorithms" in social media means "addictive personalized feeds".
I think we need a different word, so that Computer Science grads stop getting wrapped around this axle. We're obviously not talking about Quicksort when we're talking about social media algorithms and other recommendation/discovery algorithms. Heck if I know what that word would be.
Yes absolutely. Sadly I think that ship has sailed. Now if you ask 100 people in the street what "algorithms" are, I bet a majority among those who answer anything at all will answer it's something related to evil social media corporations.
Where mortgage interest is a deductible expense (usually the case if savings interest is a taxable income) then one simple fix is to limit that to one home. Second homes or homes bought in speculation using borrowed money are at least less attractive then.
Also for land tax and similar: raise them by a lot and use that money to pay for a tax-exemption for one home
In the case of Instagram: You show the videos from the people you follow on instagram, then no more short videos at all. Possibly a search box.
If you search on youtube then it can rank any way it wants, just not use e.g. anything from the viewing history. No "related videos" column. That's what YouTube used to be. But YouTube (unlike TikTok) worked well before it had rabbit holes.
For TikTok the situation is worse. Their whole app just doesn't exist unless you have the custom feeds. This would make YouTube be 2010 youtube, Instagram be 2010 Instagram (great!) but it would effectively be a ban of TikTok's whole functionality (again, great!).
I think it would be great if all of these apps had an option to function like you propose: Your feed is a simple view of people you’ve chosen to follow. The end.
Then all of the people who have trouble with self-control on infinite feeds can enable this mode, and everyone who wants the recommendation algorithm can leave it on.
This is the optimal outcome that actually serves everyone’s personal goals for using these platforms. If we get into a conversation where some are demanding we don’t allow anyone to use a recommendation algorithm because they feel the need to control what other people see, that’s a different conversation. That conversation usually reveals other motives, like when people defend the algorithm sites they view (Hacker News, Reddit, whatever) but targets sites they don’t like TikTok.
I don’t endorse using these apps, but for what it’s worth, Instagram actually does have this feature (tap “instagram” at the top and select “following”). You get a chronological feed with no adds and no reels. Of course they don’t provide an option to make that the default as far as I know.
Yup so all they need to do is only allow that content feed for anyone under X years in some specific countries. Seems like they'll survive this, and it won't even be very expensive to fix.
Reminder that any regulation that depends on age is a trigger forcing ID checks for everyone.
You can’t put a restriction on people under X years without gathering information about everyone’s age. You can’t confirm everyone’s age without some ID check. You can’t do an ID check based on anonymous tokens (too easily shared) so every age check mechanism has some ID revealing step, either to the company or to a 3rd party like a government entity (which will pinky swear they’re not looking at the data).
Instagram and Facebook both have such features. They’re hidden, though. With Instagram you tap the logo in the top middle of the app and choose “Following”. With Facebook it’s hidden away under the “Feeds” section in the app.
I’d love for there to be an option to have them as default. It’s obvious ($$$) why they won’t do that unless forced to by regulators.
> I think it would be great if all of these apps had an option to function like you propose: Your feed is a simple view of people you’ve chosen to follow. The end.
This is something EU regulation requires them. Earlier this year the Dutch courts ruled as such, all the way up to appeal. It's just a matter of time before other European courts repeat this ruling.
Why do you assume the recommendation algorithm should be the default? The algorithm is the dangerous thing, THAT should be the opt-in mode not the other way around.
IMO they should not only be opt-in, but should actually be required to publicly list the parameters and weights they’re using and allow users to tune those weights.
Sure, if that makes the angry mob happy then let’s make it default. Then every new user can click the button once and be back to the app they expect.
> IMO they should not only be opt-in, but should actually be required to publicly list the parameters and weights they’re using and allow users to tune those weights.
I wonder how many people here know that many of the popular apps have rolled out finer controls for recommendation algorithms so you can do this. On Instagram you can go in and see the topics your recommendation algorithm picked up and modify them manually if you like.
I think the goalposts will just continue to move, though.
No they should have to pick every time whether they want to be in follower mode or discovery mode. Dismissing concerns as “the angry mob” is richly ironic considering the entire objection is that recommendation algorithms seem precisely tuned to foster angry mob dynamics. So yeah it will make the angry mob happy because it will be removing the primary mechanism for inciting angry mobs.
People here know that they have finer controls (which are still not actually that fine and also don’t really make the parameters auditable). The problem is these settings are hidden away in places most people will never look. And also, I stress again, none of this is actually auditable because they treat these as some kind of trade secret special sauce and there’s really no reason society should feel obligated to support or enable this business model.
> considering the entire objection is that recommendation algorithms seem precisely tuned to foster angry mob dynamics.
That actually wasn’t the objection in the article we’re discussing at all.
The objection is that recommendation algorithms show people more content they want to view, which leads vulnerable people (kids in this case) to consume more content.
More of what they want to view by showing a feed of largely inflammatory content that targets easily risible emotions that encourage commenting and interacting, which makes people keep coming back to argue more. The mob dynamics are part of the addiction loop.
Not sure what confiscation would accomplish that regulation couldn’t? I mean we’re all aware that if regulators target TikTok then a new app would pop up and take its place.
But the thing about regulation is that it doesn’t need to be water tight. You can just target a small handful of large players and it will improve the situation in practice. It doesn’t matter if 998/1000 apps use addictive feeds if the largest two apps don’t and they have 90% of users/views.
It’s naive to think that regulation is going to cover the entire global internet.
If you regulated domestic companies out of existence, global options would pop up in their place. You could try to block them all in app stores but people would go to the web views.
I think that's still mostly fine. Youtube is already not an app but a web site (It has apps too but I think it's less app centric than e.g. instagram).
Obviously we need the ability to regulate also global options. Typically if these actors truly become big, then they have a presence in their "target" countries, such as ad sales.
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