The difference, I think, is that the former are platforms to run applications while the latter are communication platforms. There used to be a time when the phone company could press charges if you connected your "app" (a tone-generating machine) to their "API" (the phone line) to "do things the official app didn't support" (place long distance calls for free). It will always be beneficial to someone who owns a communication channel to assume as much control of the pipe as possible. If Twitter could jack directly into your brain stem and refuse to work until you install its client on your wetware, it would.
I haven't been able to confirm with any certainty that Meta enforces domain ownership verification but I would love to see a confirmation that Meta does indeed do this or plans to do so in the future.
If Meta's advertising network does not enforce domain ownership verification, then it is fundamentally vulnerable to the same problem described on this blog post.
Sampled URL resolution cannot prove anything about a URL.
I'd rather Meta just clearly stated if they require domain ownership verification when spoofing links. Lack of this (or similarly effective) protection mechanism enables automated link fraud.
Reminder for adtech company employees in this thread: If you suspect a crime has taken place (e.g. if you have seen internal documentation showing that potential profit outweighed the security benefit of actually enforcing a policy), you can blow the whistle to regulators.
Maybe have them look at how many "Breastfeeding" videos I get on FB. Seriously, I hardly ever log-in anymore, but when I do and no matter how much I report or "hide" that content, I keep getting it. It looks to be link/page farms from Asia and India that create them with generic sounding names.
Yes, not link fraud but pure, unadulaterated self-promo spam in IG comments along the lines of "I subscribed to this account and no regrets, it's all I need! Laughs every day!" constantly pinned at the top.
I do also see the occasional Bitcoin links and other linkspam on IG as well.
Edit: Dear downvoters, is this a threat to your precious growth hack, or?
You're being downvoted because your complaint is unrelated to the post topic. It's about scam ads masquerading as linked to trusted domains (an ad that shows it links to "adobe.com", but actually takes you to scamsite.com when you click it).
I owned zip folders for a while during the windows Vista days. I could have sworn the code was originally purchased, not written by someone at Microsoft. Honestly, it looked like it had been run through an obfuscator. I assumed that the original author had done that to ensure it was difficult for Microsoft to make changes/improvements.
I may be misremembering, but Dave has spoken on his Dave's Garage Youtube channel about running a separate software business selling small utilities and later selling some of them to Microsoft. This might have been one of them. A quick search confirms that he also claims that here:
He talks about it in one of his videos. The zip directory was a product of a side hustle of his, which Microsoft then bought out. In the video he comments how much easier it was to integrate when he had access to more internal apis.
I'm currently self employed, but I just accepted a role in big tech. After 4 years I was able to set up my recruiting company to run without me, so I can earn about $300K-$500K per year from that, plus my full-time salary.
I'm also working on a new SaaS product (co-pilot + CRM for small recruiting agencies). I'm looking for someone to work on it with me. Tech stack is svelte kit + node + python for custom models. I have an audience of 160K followers on LinkedIn, mostly recruiters, that I can reach when the product is launched.
If you are looking for an interesting side project that will generate revenue, email robert at getditto dot com.
It's still strange to me to work in a field of computer science where we say things like "we're not exactly sure how these numbers (hyper parameters) affect the result, so just try a bunch of different values and see which one works best."
> "we're not exactly sure how these numbers (hyper parameters) affect the result, so just try a bunch of different values and see which one works best."
Isn't it the same for anything that uses a Monte Carlo simulation to find a value? At times you'll end up on a local maxima (instead of the best/correct) answer, but it works.
We cannot solve something used a closed formula so we just do a billion (or whatever) random samplings and find what we're after.
I'm not saying it's the same for LLMs but "trying a bunch of different values and see which one works best" is something we do a lot.
LLMs were very much engineered... the exact results they yield are hard to determine since they're large statistical models, but I don't think that categorizes the LLMs themselves as a 'discovery' (like say Penicilin)
There’s an argument that all maths are discovered instead of invented or engineered. LLM hardware certainly is hard engineering but the numbers you put in it aren’t, once you have them; if you stumbled upon them by chance or they were revealed to you in your sleep it’d work just as well. (‘ollama run mixtral’ is good enough for a dream to me!)
I understand your distinction, I think, but I would say it is more engineering than ever. It's like the early days of the steam engine or firearms development. It's not a hard science, not formal analysis, it's engineering: tinkering, testing, experimenting, iterating.
I believe, from what I saw in Mathematics, this is a matter of taste. Discovered or invented are 2 perspectives. Some people prefer to think that light is reaching in previously dark corners of knowledge waiting to be discovered(discover). Others prefer to think that by force of genius they brought the thing into the world.
To me, personally, these are 2 sides of the coin, without one having more proof than the other.
This can be laid at the feet of Minsky and others who dismissed perceptrons because they couldn't model nonlinear functions. LLMs were never going to happen until modern CPUs and GPUs came along, but that doesn't mean we couldn't have a better theoretical foundation in place. We are years behind where we should be.
When I worked in the games industry in the 1990s, it was "common knowledge" that neural nets were a dead end at best and a con job at worst. Really a shame to lose so much time because a few senior authority figures warned everyone off. We need to make sure that doesn't happen this time.
Answering the GP's point regarding why deep learning textbooks, articles, and blog posts are full of sentences that begin with "We think..." and "We're not sure, but..." and "It appears that..."
we have no theories of intelligence. We're like people in the 1500s trying to figure out why and how people get sick, with no concept of bacteria, germs, transmission, etc
I haven't seen this key/buzzword mentioned yet, so I think part of it is the fact that we're now working on complex systems. This was already true (a social network is a complex system), but now we have the impenetrability of a complex system within the scope of a single process. It's hard to figure out generalizable principles about this kind of thing!
I mean, it’s kind of in the name isn’t it? Computer science. Science is empirical, often poorly understood and even the best theories don’t fully explain all observations, especially when a field gets new tools to observe phenomena. It takes a while for a good theory to come along and make sense of everything in science and that seems like more or less exactly where we are today.
Welcome to engineering. We don't sketch our controlled systems and forget all about systems theory. Instead we just fiddle with out controllers until the result is acceptable.
In 2007 I worked in Office Labs at Microsoft. We explored the idea of creating presentations on an infinite canvas. It was pretty cool. It took inspiration from Seadragon. It was called Plex or PowerPoint Plex.
Unfortunately, all the demo videos were uploaded to Microsoft's YouTube competitor, which is now gone. But here's a video demo of Seadragon to give you an idea of what it was like:
"But, at the end of the day, you must understand that it is still privately-owned. You’re on someone else’s property over which you have no power at all. You will have to show the necessary respect. And - most importantly - you need to understand that letting you into this garden is a gift and should be treated as such.
If you don’t like this garden because you don’t like how it’s structured, or you feel like it’s missing something, or maybe I choose the wrong flowers to plant over there that’s fine. It’s just not for you then. You can leave at any time.
There is simply no ground to stand on to demand change to the garden."
You can almost hear the lament of dealing with entitled people in the statement. These are words that originated from having to deal with people who assume that they get free stuff for nothing in return
I was going to comment the same thing... it's a lovely metaphor and you can see it comes from the experience of someone who has been through it before.
Despite being about private property, I still think this bit of text or something like it should be added to the support page of most OSS projects.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/10-year-treasury-yield-junk...