I think the effectiveness of these algorithms is vastly overstated. Much of the info they scrape off the internet is useless except for exploiting a few truly predictable sheeple in the world, who I don't pity much. I think even kids are growing immunities faster than the algorithms can adapt.

Or maybe, like usual, I am giving humanity too much credit.

jefferson davis: the god who failed

YOU TAKE THAT BACK!

Brooks himself may have been a narratively disappointing supervillain (trolls and operators always are). But there was one striking detail to the article: Poulsen had confirmed Brooks’s identity with the help of an anonymous “Facebook official.” Someone inside Facebook had, it seems, accessed Brooks’s theoretically private user activity and used it to confirm Poulsen’s story.

But privileged access is widespread enough that abuse is a familiar phenomenon at Facebook or at any large tech company. Last year, a Facebook employee was fired for stalking women online using information he’d obtained using his access privileges; according to a Vice report, multiple people at the company have been fired for “snooping” on exes or other transgressions. Google, for its part, has fired employees for similar abuses, including one engineer who accessed Gchat conversations between a group of teenagers. Uber famously had an internal “God Mode” used by its employees to see rides taken by celebrities and politicians.

I took my son to see jacksepticeye. One of the questions at the end was if he was going to continue doing so many charity streams. His answer was that it was important to him, because YouTube work had been so good to him financially. His final point was “full disclosure, I made ten million dollars off of YouTube last year...no merch, views only.” He paused. “It’s pretty great.”

He’s got about 9x as many annual views as poor, mistreated anti-censorship champion Steven “socialism is for fags” Crowder. So I don’t know.

lol