First things first, Twitter. Small baby steps before you shoot yourself in the foot.
Focus first and foremost on getting rid of radicalizing terrorist content. That has been on your backlog for years now, while you prioritized more pressing matters, such as cutting off access to developers and apps. You kind of owe it to society and the parents of your teenage users to make this right.
Then, when it is 2023, go after the grieving trolls. Those who mock suicide victim families, DOX innocents, post indecent pictures of naked black people doing lewd things to watermelons. Some people may even help report such things manually for free.
Then bots. Kill 99% of all bots, keep only those with a 1000+ legit followers, or make bot owners verify them with a cute droid badge.
Then after one of Trump's tweets starts WWIII, and you are as significant as Myspace, maybe you can have a look at the health and civility of online conversation.
I'd start with a "My Safe Space" button, where you can automatically unsubscribe to all posts about a certain topic/containing a certain trigger word. If you can't wait that long, there is an easy fix to remove 50% of uncivil content by going back to a 140 character limit. I feel that was closer to the healthy and civilized discussion platform you envisioned Twitter to be when you started it.
1) Centralized solutions are costly to freedom of choice and privacy. Consider a solution where Dropbox, Google Drive, Facebook photos, S3, and YouTube is run through Filecoin. No more "You haven't used DropBox in a year, so we are closing your account". No more "This video has been demonetized for all advertisers in our network.". No more "we ran these nets over all your photos and use the information gathered to make a better advertisement profile for you". This is what happens when users make and own software: Limewire, Bittorent, Popcorn Time, DC++, Napster, Kazaa. Though most of these are now depricated/forced shut down, it was not for having a better alternative available.
2) Centralized solutions are currently much faster, but they may not be in the future. Also, other coins (that offer spare computing power) or commercial enterprises could act as a power nodes (sub-centralized solutions) in a decentralized network, to speed it up for a fee when needed. Decentralized peer2peer content delivery is currently owned by centralized players, like Akamai. I see no reason why it could not work when it is owned by its users.
3) Because the software has to operate in a trustless environment, a lot of attention has to be spend in making these systems more secure. Security through obfuscation is not a fall-back anymore. If we had known that LastFM stored password hashes as unsalted MD5, would we have trusted it with our accounts? We will have fuzzing tools and static program analysis to help automate checking the security of a contract.
4) Forks can be dealt with in a decentralized manner: voting power being assigned by a provable amount of tokens you own. You can run an entire election in this manner, cryptographically voiding any "vote rigging" argument.
5) You may have so much freedom as to shoot yourself in the foot. Therefore, Cryptocurrency banks may provide support for payment solutions, insurance, lending, for people who don't want to store all their money under their flammable mattress.
6) Smart contracts will fully replace the paper notarial system. Criminals will be booked into networked systems where their identity is biometrically verifiable for the duration of their "stay". Trading and lending circle contracts will be heavily vetted and proven standard smart contracts one can select from a library.
1)
> "You haven't used DropBox in a year, so we are closing your account".
The cost of storing data long-term is non-zero. How would Filecoin offer free storage?
> No more "This video has been demonetized for all advertisers in our network."
YouTube creators want community guidelines. They don't always like the way that they are interpreted and enforced. I'm sure a small minority wants to build something where they can upload absolutely anything without being censored. For those folks there is Gab.ai. It will never become mainstream though and the advertisers with big budgets will opt out.
> Limewire, Bittorent, Popcorn Time, DC++, Napster, Kazaa
Users chose Netflix and other centralized streaming services because of their ease of use. Also, copyright enforcement may have played a small role. Some users were claiming that they weren't using the above software to download pirated content. That was a bunch of bullshit.
2)
> Decentralized peer2peer content delivery is currently owned by centralized players, like Akamai. I see no reason why it could not work when it is owned by its users.
There's no reason why it couldn't work, but there's also no business need driving it.
3)
Once an account is compromised in a trustless environment there is no way for the owner to take ownership of that account again. Also, in a trustless environment it's always possible for A) a smart contract to be hacked and B) a bug in the virtual machine to be exploited. Both centralized and decentralized face security issues.
4)
They will still be contentious though. Look at Bitcoin. Imagine the last election but applied to software. It's not going to end pretty and unlike a normal company people in the community may not "move on."
5)
There may be services in the future, but that would be anathema to the movement. The cryptocurrency apologists want each individual to manage their private keys. They would argue that 1) if you don't have control of your private keys you do not have control of your cryptocurrency 2) it's centralization.
6)
This didn't address my criticism. There is no proof that anything like this is even remotely possible.
>The cryptocurrency apologists want each individual to manage their private keys.
Actually, a hybrid solution is possible using multisig and secret sharing algorithms. Many crypto enthusiasts are aware of how the "real world" works. People need to be able to recover access to their accounts if they lose their keys. It's not all black and white like you make it out to be.
For example, I implemented a solution for a mobile app that stores a users private key in their phone's keychain. It also splits the key into two parts, and emails the user 1 part, and stores the other part on a centralized server. If a user loses their key, they can get the first recovery part from their email, and by verifying their identity via 2 factor, the centralized server provides them with the second recovery part.
> As said earlier, it is lazy learning algorithm and therefore requires no training prior to making real time predictions. This makes the KNN algorithm much faster than other algorithms that require training e.g SVM, linear regression, etc.
Linear regression is way faster than KNN as the dataset grows beyond toy data. Both training and especially testing. In practical applications, test speed often trumps train speed.
> The KNN algorithm doesn't work well with high dimensional data because with large number of dimensions, it becomes difficult for the algorithm to calculate distance in each dimension.
KNN works fine on high-dimensional text. From something simple as Hamming distance on binary tokens, to euclidean distance on TFIDF, to cosine distance on 900-dimensional word vector aggregates.
> There are only two parameters required to implement KNN i.e. the value of K and the distance function (e.g. Euclidean or Manhattan etc.)
Also implement distance weighing (you probably want to weigh the 1-th nearest neighbor label higher than the 5-th nearest neighbor label).
> The KNN algorithm has a high prediction cost for large datasets. This is because in large datasets the cost of calculating distance between new point and each existing point becomes higher.
This is why you "fit" something like a K-D tree during training.
> Finally, the KNN algorithm doesn't work well with categorical features since it is difficult to find the distance between dimensions with categorical features.
Hamming distance works fine on one-hot encoded categorical features. If not, embed/reduce the dimensionality. If not, use feature selection first and do KNN on top 10%-20% features. Remember that you don't have to use the same distance measure for every feature column.
> If one of the features has a broad range of values, the distance will be governed by this particular feature. Therefore, the range of all features should be normalized so that each feature contributes approximately proportionately to the final distance.
You can skip this step (and feature selection) by learning an additional weight for each feature to multiply with before distance measure. It is rare for each feature to contribute proportionately to the target.
> KNN works fine on high-dimensional text. From something simple as Hamming distance on binary tokens, to euclidean distance on TFIDF, to cosine distance on 900-dimensional word vector aggregates.
> This is why you "fit" something like a K-D tree during training.
I would not choose a K-D tree for that. The curse of dimensionality makes K-D trees prohibitively useless as dimensions go up. The number of partitions you have to inspect explodes.
Locality Sensitive Hashing tackles this explosion, but with a tradeoff on recall power. 80% recall is quite easy to reach, though. Being near 100% will be prohibitively expensive. This could be good enough for an approximated KNN.
All of your claims call for citations. Its not that they are untrue. But they are not as sweepingly true as they might seem to an uninitiated reader. For example, you can try KD tree on a 50K dimension data set and judge for yourself.
Anecdotal, but: I myself turned down a job offer in SV in part due to Trump. When asking 4 random co-workers, none seem keen to move to the US, 2 of them even citing safety concerns (they are minorities from India and Africa and heard horror stories of former colleagues still in the US).
I'd have to see this on YouTube by several independent sources. Sounds pretty wild, when living standards rise so high the definition of "poverty" becomes more and more absurd.
I haven't seen a beggar accept cryptocurrency (yet), but I've seen them accept mobile payments. Along with informal farm vendors (e.g., guy on the corner with a bag of oranges on his shoulder) accepting mobile payments.
Their vision of the future is fully inspired on, if not outright copied from, the US. China doesn't care about "keeping up appearances", but it is very much doing the same as the US, only more blatantly.
And where in China it may be the government, in the US it is EvilCorp or some other entity not bound by the constitution.
You have no right to free speech or right to assemble on Facebook.
My face is recognized, tagged, and stored in Facebook servers, shared with intelligence agencies, and cross-referenced with all other photo's. And I don't even have a Facebook account (leading some employers to distrust me -- "what do I have to hide?" -- and lower their "social credit score" of me).
In contrast, I am relatively safe against China's spying apparatus.
Having "free speech" on Facebook would break Facebook's constitutional rights. Facebook doesn't owe you anything, it was not done for public money. It's private property. If you believe they use your personal information maliciously and/or without consent, you can (in the EU at least) sue.
Companies don't have constitutional rights nor obligations. If wrong, please correct me on this.
As it is private property, it is free to set its own rules, even if those rules impede on my free speech. If Facebook was a government, it could not make those rules as per first amendment.
You can still sue of course.
Look, I feel AI-powered surveillance is scary, and think China is going too far (perhaps showing us a glimpse of the future) in this. But where it is state-run surveillance in China, it is capitalist-run surveillance in the West. That Europe needs to step up and protect its inhabitants is a sign of what happens if you give companies free reign in handling (private) data: A big privacy mess.
Let me rephrase. If you'd force Facebook to allow "free speech" (you want to force someone to let you do something on their property and you call that free?), you'd break Facebook owners' constitutional rights to private property.
Not having "free speech" on Facebook isn't because the constitution doesn't apply to companies, it's because Facebook is like someone's house - private property - first amendment doesn't apply in my grandma's house as well.
They still have to oblige to your right of privacy etc, as I said, in Europe, you could sue (FB can't even use the photo tagging feature in EU because it'd be against the laws).
The constitution is just a basic law, it applies to corporations as well, it just doesn't speak about them much.
BTW, I don't really think you guys in the US should believe that your government will or will not do something because of something like the constitution - remember NSA? Remember Kim Dotcom?
> Companies don't have constitutional rights nor obligations. If wrong, please correct me on this.
You’re wrong. Most Constitutional rights are granted to all persons, and corporations are legal persons (and were well before the Constitution), and, furthermore, are generally vehicles for action by natural persons such that depriving them of rights is seen to effectively curtail the rights of natural persons; for both reasons, corporations are generally held to have Constitutional rights.
Focus first and foremost on getting rid of radicalizing terrorist content. That has been on your backlog for years now, while you prioritized more pressing matters, such as cutting off access to developers and apps. You kind of owe it to society and the parents of your teenage users to make this right.
Then, when it is 2023, go after the grieving trolls. Those who mock suicide victim families, DOX innocents, post indecent pictures of naked black people doing lewd things to watermelons. Some people may even help report such things manually for free.
Then bots. Kill 99% of all bots, keep only those with a 1000+ legit followers, or make bot owners verify them with a cute droid badge.
Then after one of Trump's tweets starts WWIII, and you are as significant as Myspace, maybe you can have a look at the health and civility of online conversation.
I'd start with a "My Safe Space" button, where you can automatically unsubscribe to all posts about a certain topic/containing a certain trigger word. If you can't wait that long, there is an easy fix to remove 50% of uncivil content by going back to a 140 character limit. I feel that was closer to the healthy and civilized discussion platform you envisioned Twitter to be when you started it.