Very nice to see this post and realize like I'm not the only one seeing things like this. Two quick stories:
I have always been a late mover to social networks, started using Facebook after many years of everybody around me using it and the same happened with Instagram. More recently, short videos and reels never caught my eye, never watched them and honestly took a long time to even realize they existed within Instagram and were not only a TikTok thing, but one time I decided to check it out and I got flooded with exactly the type of content the OP shared: thirst traps, women in the gym, AI garbage. This led to an interesting chat with my girlfriend btw, who was right next to me when I had this brilliant idea.
Took no more than 5 interactions in a course of a week or so of "open reels -> scroll down 3 or 4 videos -> exit" for the algorithm to be 100% more in tune with pages I follow on Instagram and content that appears in my feed (sports, tech, travel)
Also, similar thing for YouTube: if you watch a video in an anonymous tab, the home page will start empty, with no recommendations. After you watch the video, it will become 50% content similar to the video you just watch and 50% thirst traps.
Very very interesting, definitely a missing piece in current AI space.
Small typo where the text “Virtually all successful existing sequence models rely on mean squared error…” is repeated twice within the same paragraph. Happens to the best of us.
Honestly, Dan Brown was my first introduction to any sort of literature that was not manga/comics and I liked every book. Granted, I read the Portuguese translations so there might be differences in the “writing style”.
There is a lot of history and art embedded in the books (as I believe his wife is a historian and is greatly involved in the making of the books, if I’m not mistaken) which I believe is the highlight, a lot more than the plot or anything else. I distinctively remember reading The Da Vinci Code in my grandfather’s house - there is a piece in the book about secrets in The Last Supper and my grandfather had a big clock in the house with it as the background. I remember going to the clock to check out what the book was saying about the painting and being mindblown. I don’t even remember if everything made sense but that stuck with me.
I have always been a late mover to social networks, started using Facebook after many years of everybody around me using it and the same happened with Instagram. More recently, short videos and reels never caught my eye, never watched them and honestly took a long time to even realize they existed within Instagram and were not only a TikTok thing, but one time I decided to check it out and I got flooded with exactly the type of content the OP shared: thirst traps, women in the gym, AI garbage. This led to an interesting chat with my girlfriend btw, who was right next to me when I had this brilliant idea.
Took no more than 5 interactions in a course of a week or so of "open reels -> scroll down 3 or 4 videos -> exit" for the algorithm to be 100% more in tune with pages I follow on Instagram and content that appears in my feed (sports, tech, travel)
Also, similar thing for YouTube: if you watch a video in an anonymous tab, the home page will start empty, with no recommendations. After you watch the video, it will become 50% content similar to the video you just watch and 50% thirst traps.