This reminds me of a 'news' organization that promoted the pseudo-scientific book "The gendered brain" (which could be described as Peak Blank Slate Fantasy), including a fawning soft-ball interview with its author where she said that research into her claims would be unethical, because nothing says good science like "just comply with what I said". That same media then went on to put that book on their 'recommended reading of the year'.
That 'news' organization was, of course, The Guardian.
When I was working in the mobile industry, I was told repeatedly that a 100% FOSS phone would be impossible. Not only is the existing tech proprietary and patent-encumbered, even if somehow you could get past that your GSM radio must be certified before going to market. And if your radio is FOSS-based that means an end-user can toy with the baseband, therefore you will never get your cert, period. The stuff at the lowest level must locked down before being allowed on a public mobile network.
All major Hollywood movie studios pro-actively doctor their scripts to make them China-compliant, and you think basketball is somehow going to do better?
On a related note, this thread went from #6 on the front page to #105 (as of right now) in mere minutes. Maybe the mods, who are quite willing to pop in and tell people off whenever someone mentions astroturfing or censorship, would like to explain how a very recent thread with high upvote and comment count can sink so fast all by itself? It's not like users can downvote threads on HN. Threads mentioning China in a bad light tend to de-rank at astronomical speed, for some mysterious reason...
I facepalmed when I read that "not going to delete FB because" sentence. How about that thing called e-mail? If keeping someone's e-mail address and firing a message every now and then is too much hassle, then that person was not worth keeping in touch with in the first place.
I did work for a few months in Bombay last year, and most of my colleagues (20s-to-40s middle class white-collar employees -- a minority in India) had a FB account, but with very little engagement. I have to assume that having many non-urbanized people in India, and therefore many less-connected relatives, probably reduces the interest in FB. They were however all heavy users of Whatsapp, which makes sense to me.
I have a feeling that, thanks to smartphone adoption, legions of people are counted as 'in' by FB only because the app is running in the background, when in fact it's not seeing any significant use.
I have to ask: do people really believe that "2 billion users" claim?
I live in Europe, and yes the majority of people I know have an account, but nowhere near all of them, and they're often unfrequent users. But more importantly: with the places where FB is banned, all of the people too young to be on it, all the people too old to have an interest, and all of the people who have in general a limited/difficult Internet access and have more important things to do than get facehooked? Being told that 2 out of every 7 human being manually created their account and are 'active users' who log in at least once a week (or is it month?), somehow leaves me skeptical.
Doing voice processing is much much more computationally expensive than scanning text, and has a much higher error rate, so it would make little sense for Google to do that.
More likely explanations could be:
- Your topic is a common/popular one, so it's statistically likely that Youtube mentions it.
- Other people that (text-)search the same things as you tend to watch these videos (i.e. you have been put is some category or other).
- You did not search for it, but your phone correspondant did, and Youtube/Google tries the same suggestions on you because you're linked (see: there are other and less costly ways for Google to be creepy!).
Denmark is a really nice country. Also, it is not a superpower.