I'm not GP, but there are often good suggestions on /r/EatCheapAndHealthy [0] ... also, I'd bookmarked this response from the SA forum [1]
Of course, lots of these suggestions assume that a reasonably equipped kitchen and storage is available, which may limit OPs options. Hope it helps anyway.
Not at all - I released a customer support on Twitter dataset there specifically focused on unsupervised tasks! I think the focus on supervision in what people do with the data shows that there are still a lot of people poking around with the easier supervised tasks.
(Not Ben, but - ) outside of academia, the main thing that seems to encourage people to do supervised ML is that it's the only thing that seems to work. I haven't really heard of any success stories with using unsupervised techniques for most common ML applications.
Unsupervised techniques work really well for language modelling.
There is also weakly supervised and distant-supervision, where the labels are "noisy" or not exactly what you want.
You're right in that strong supervision, where you basically trust your class label, works really well, because it's probably the easiest case.
Combining unsupervised (e.g. pre-trained language models) with a very small set of strongly labeled data, or a larger set of weakly labeled data, seems to work pretty well too.
I used a very simple unsupervised ML built in scikit-learn to find good matches on OK Cupid. Worked very well, it found definite boundaries between the clusters of women.
One of the features was a subjective rating of how much I liked some of the women, and scikit-learn then suggested to me other women in the clusters that had my best ratings. It turns out that I like vegetarians, redheads, and left-wingers. Which happens to be true, even though I eat meat and do not identify as left-wing. But those traits correlate with _other_ traits that are more difficult to measure objectively, such as caring about children, liking to hike, and preferring an evening of sex to an evening of television.
I think it's more that supervised ML is sufficient for most of the low hanging fruit. It's relatively easy and well-understood, and there are a lot of things out there where we have copious data that we just need to digest into a model to make it useful.
It'd be great if there was a service that you could sign up for, which would "deceive" Facebook, Twitter, and other social media websites by producing false information about you. For example, if I don't want FB to know what movies I'm interested in, how about liking "random" movie pages on FB? If I don't want FB to know about my political orientations, how about run with the hare and hunt with the hounds?
This is very much the same foundation of disinformation campaigns like strongarm regime propaganda or what is currently termed “fake news”. By attacking credibility itself, anything and nothing are equally valid. The problem with poisoning the well of your own personal data is that it also makes it easier to indict you on false pretenses.
However, if people are already doing something that is deemed illegal or not allowed by any given jurisdiction/site, making the pool of people to theoretically go after/ban order of magnitude(s) larger seems ideal.
Not a happy answer but such a service would raise the noise floor but would otherwise not have much of an effect unless it was massively adopted to the point that the original signal was insignificant compared to the noise.
Even then it’s questionable if it would be effective. Over time even a faint behavioral signature will become transparent, because things that deviate from the true behavioral signature do so in random ways, which could essentially “cancel” out if your model for quantifying behavioral characteristics is well-specified. Meanwhile the “true” behaviors would “add” over time.
It would become like any other signal jamming arms race, whether it’s radar or social behaviors, and your model of generating random noise has to get more sophisticated as the other party’s anti-jamming techniques get more sophisticated.
I took a class with Scott Aaronson once where he mentioned the idea that the natural enemy of machine learning is cryptography.
So if you know the anti-jammers are using ever greater machine learning techniques, rather than trying to one-up them with adversarial learning, I suspect the best jamming would be cryptography.
Like, extensions to Facebook that essential encode text with PGP or something, send via Messenger, and allow decoding on the other side.
Then an interesting idea for machine learning would be how to make an autoencoder that accepts encrypted text, transforms it into human understandable text that would fool a machine learning algorithm designed to flag encrypted text, and can decode from natural language back to the encrypted data on the other end.
I suggested this to an EFF lawyer at Defcon and they hated the idea. Perhaps I worded it wrong, it makes sense to me. Signal to noise ratio. You should have a legal right to submit false information if you feel a service might harm you at some point.
Not OP but if I had to guess, once you have a 'legal right' to submit false information it paves the way for a lot of unwanted behavior and would help the spread of disinformation. If a service is harming you and you're thinking about ways to legally address the issue, why not just go after the service itself and come up with legal repercussions / regulations for their actions?
In my opinion, it isn't even information in the first place, so it can't be categorized into true or false information buckets. There are way too many conclusions being drawn from the stuff that gets tossed through the digital ether.
"It visits and navigates around websites, from within your browser, leaving misleading digital footprints around the internet. Noiszy only visits a list of sites that you approve, and only works when you turn it on. Run Noiszy in the background while you're working, or start Noiszy when you're not using your browser, and it sends meaningless data to these sites for as long as you let it run."
In order to wash out the signal, all the service would need to do is 'like everything'. In addition to masking your interests it would also grind their algorithms to a halt if enough people did that. A lot of these algorithms gain performance due to the sparsity of the data, so if everything became connected it would negatively impact the performance of their algorithms.
Anyone know how to get, or compile, a list of everything likable on Facebook?
Until you get into problems (legal or personal, doesn't matter) for "liking" stuff related to child porn, terrorist propaganda or, I don't know, scientology, without even knowing about it, because it was done on your behalf by this "like automaton".
Exactly. In France people have been convicted because they "liked" illegal opinions. As if the fact that such a thing as an illegal opinion exists was not enough of a problem, it's been decided by justice that the semantic of a "like" was "I make this opinion mine".
My own (approximate) translation of parts of the text:
"Sur Facebook, le trentenaire avait apposé un «J’aime» sur une image d’un combattant de Daesh brandissant la tête décapitée d’une femme. Il a été condamné à trois mois de prison avec sursis." --> "On Facebook, the man in his thirties had clicked "like" on a picture of an ISIS fighter holding the head of a beheaded woman. He was given a 3-month suspended prison sentence".
"«Quand on met J’aime, c’est que l’on considère que ce n’est pas choquant ou que l’on adhère», considère pour sa part Jean-Baptiste Bougerol, le substitut du procureur de la République." --> ""When you click "like" on something, you consider it's not shocking or you agree with it"", said the prosecutor".
If you like everything, or if you say "my birthday is the 32nd of February", the algorithm can detect you're trying to defeat the system, and ignore you: you become a known unknown.
But if you start to like random things, or if you say "my birthdate is the 2nd of March" while it's not, you become an unknown unknown, and the algorithm must start to reason with your wrong data.
I actually had the strategy on fb to just like very random stuff like movies, groups etc. I’m not sure whether it has helped but it makes me feel better
> I actually had the strategy on fb to just like very random stuff like movies, groups etc. I’m not sure whether it has helped but it makes me feel better
I've done similar, and afterwards nearly all advertising categorizations of me eventually dropped off my profile (after a period where they were schizophrenic and contradictory). I can't be certain I caused that, because this was contemporaneous with Zuck's congressional testimony and the run up to the GDPR (both of which probably motivated many changes).
But it would make sense that mountains of bad data would make it hard for them to confidently place me in advertising demographic and interest categories, do to all the contradictions.
Because the word "tracking" can include request monitoring for DDoS mitigation and scraping detection, or storing information purposefully uploaded by other people (e.g. photos and contact list), saying anything about "tracking" isn't very meaningful.
Think of how many people are being involuntarily "tracked" by Dropbox because others are backing up photos in which they appear, or emails they sent, without their consent. For better headlines, we could call this information "Dropbox Shadow Dossiers".
The problem is laziness. “Call your Congressperson” is hard. Waxing lyrical about political distinction is easy. Imagining technical solutions to political problems is easier.
I'd say that there are two related problems, one political and one technical, and that there is no reason not to address both issues.
* Political problem: It is legal and acceptable to track people on the internet to an extreme degree. Political solution: Call your Congressperson, donate to the EFF, reframe the issue as corporate stalking, etc.
* Technical problem: It is possible to track people on the internet to an extreme degree. Technical solution: Restrict ability to collect data by using adblock, poison existing databases with reasonable but false data.
Most of your friends, family, coworkers, etc. have your e-mail or your phone number (or both). Some (most) of them use facebook, and a significative portion of them share those information with facebook, so even if you never subscribe to the service, they know a few things about you (your name, phone number, e-mail address and some of your acquaintances), and they know they don't know anything else about you (which is some sort of information too).
In the late 90s-early 00s, at a corporate job, several of us used a script to have the browser load a random page every few minutes. (I didn't write the script... I think the pages were just random links from search results based on random words.) Anyway, the thousands of pages loaded masked the NSFW pages. We figured we'd have plausible deniability. "You say I visited Xxx.com? I don't know... I think my computer has a virus or something. It's always loading up random stuff. Let me see the log... Yep... Just as I thought... It says I visited 24,239 pages on Tuesday. Heck, that's not even possible!"
It seems unlikely that this would be 100% effective though. I am pretty sure that companies like this use data from your immediate social sphere as well to make pretty relevant assumptions about you.
For instance, when I buy a product, certain others of my friends will see this same product promoted to them.
My friend once looked something up on Facebook, while we were in the movie theater (before the movie started ;)) and sure enough I was getting the ads for that same event as soon as I got home and looked at my phone.
Of course, on a more massive scale, this could theoretically work.
Does the api support creating old posts and back dating them?
FB is really good at hiding old activity and being utterly worthless at searching your feed, so if you can just put all the fake stuff in the past you'd be fine with your real friends.
> Does the api support creating old posts and back dating them?
> FB is really good at hiding old activity and being utterly worthless at searching your feed, so if you can just put all the fake stuff in the past you'd be fine with your real friends.
They allow you to back date, but if you're goal is to avoid annoying your friends, you could use the privacy settings for a similar effect. Just post your garbage as visible to "only me," let it age for a week or two until the algorithm will ignore it, then make it "public," "friends only," or whatever you want.
What's funny is how bad most of these services are at identifying people. They seem to think I'm a southeast Asian female (white dude here) because I happen to read a particular article, buy a particular item (probably as a gift), etc. Turn on, tune in, drop out...
Well, I believe NASA is one of those few organizations in the world that's actually doing the humanity a favor. Despite that, it has been criticized for decades. Remember how people complained about millions of dollars that NASA used for Apollo missions? Some even argue(d) that space missions are pointless, and that there are more important issues on the Earth that we should cut NASA's funds. In my view, this view is just outrageous and disgraceful. Astronomy and space exploration is a very humbling science that not only will help us survive our disastrous extinction on this planet, but also makes us realize how unimportant we are in this vast universe, and what issues really matter in the world.
I'd rather see my money go to NASA and be spent on space discovery than see it spent to make useless products, or worse yet, to shed blood.
Be it as it may, I believe some actions can benefit both users and companies. Maybe taking privacy seriously is going to benefit Apple's business, but it is going to benefit millions of users, too. So I guess it's a clever move by Apple.
Interesting points! In Ancient Aliens documentary, they claim these "intelligent creators" are the so-called ETs (aliens). But regardless of whether that's true or not, one could ask "ok, who created those ETs?" and again, you'd go one level back and should try to find some older intelligent beings who designed our creators, etc., etc.
But this has to stop at some point, because the universe - to the best of my knowledge - is only (!) 13.8 billion years old, thus, some intelligent beings must have appeared some where in the universe long time ago. The question is: "how did THAT happen?" It could be that mere _chance_ resulted in a very early development of intelligent life on a planet in a galaxy far far away. The same process could have helped shape life on the earth too.
Or, maybe there really was an intelligent _being_ in charge of things that designed the whole universe such that exactly a few billion years after the Big Bang, in a specific galaxy and on a specific planet, some certain type of life would appear which would later create other forms of life, and maybe we are created by those people, thus, indirectly, created by that "intelligent being". You may call that "intelligent being" God.
That's my point. We don't need to get into infinite recursion because we cannot know as humans the ultimate origin of anything. The best we can do is to try to find out the local and natural intelligent creators acting in nature within the laws of nature. Those are the things we can know. So, for instance, we can ask those questions, as you mention, Did someone come from another world? Is the creator smaller in scale than human body? Is the creator larger in size than the human body? And let's not forget that the human body is a symbiotic organism. It's a combination of different organisms living as symbionts. Which means that they were independent life forms in the infinite depths of time. These are the interesting questions for me. Trying to explain transformations with the word "evolution" explains nothing. It's like saying "sleeping pill will put you to sleep." Nothing is explained.
But I understand that this is a very sensitive topic for many people. These are just my own opinions.
Given that Apple - as a private company - is the owner of iOS, no one can blame them for what they wish to include/exclude from their ecosystem. A mistake many people make these days is they think just because some services are so prevalent and worldwide, they ought to be under control of the law and government. The same thing happens when people complain about Google/Amazon/Facebook for their policies. They're private companies! If you don't like them, fine, quit using their services, simple as that.
The day we give a person the right to sue a private company over their policies, we will essentially kill the free market.
Google was fined for $2 billions in Europe for promoting their own services in search results. You could argue that Google search is theirs and they can do whatever they want with it, but luckily since they are a big player (close to being the only one in search) there are antitrust laws that prevent that.
Apple is in a similar positon. A lot customers depend on iOS devices and I am not sure Apple should be allowed to exclude competitors from the App Store at its discretion.
In the last century, the deciding factor about a company's freedom to do whatever it wants has always been strongly influenced by national security concerns and by monopolistic concerns.
The degree to which iOS is or isn't a "monopoly" has a lot to do with how much freedom Apple has to make decisions like this.
The same arguments were made back during the Microsoft anti-trust era.
The fact is once a company reaches a certain size different rules do apply.
Here Apple is definitely abusing their control over the ecosystem to lock out a competitor. The question is is this control great enough to prevent anyone from truly competing with Apple, which is what anti-trust law is designed to protect against.
Hopefully we are still free to discuss what effects a company's perfectly legal choices could have on us as a society and as an industry? Or is that also now verboten in the name of fairness to the free market?
> Given that Apple - as a private company - is the owner of iOS, no one can blame them for what they wish to include/exclude from their ecosystem.
Apple may own their property, but iOS-device owners own their devices, and Apple have no right to prevent them from running the software they wish to run on the devices they own.
Specifically it states: " The software (including Boot ROM code, embedded software and third party software), documentation, interfaces, content, fonts and any data that came with your iOS Device (“Original iOS Software”), as may be updated or replaced by feature enhancements, software updates or system restore software provided by Apple (“iOS Software Updates”), whether in read only memory, on any other media or in any other form (the Original iOS Software and iOS Software Updates are collectively referred to as the “iOS Software”) are licensed, not sold, to you by Apple Inc. (“Apple”) for use only under the terms of this License. Apple and its licensors retain ownership of the iOS Software itself and reserve all rights not expressly granted to you."
If a person has agreed to these terms, I don't see how they can complain about Apple's policies in the future. The same software that isn't owned by the person, but is Apple's, now refuses to run Steam Link. The person who agreed to such terms had it coming, you can't blame Apple for that.
Would you agree to those terms if you had a realistic alternative?
Is this contract written in a way that provides equitable consideration to the user for the provisions that solely benefit Apple?
Doesn't seem like it.
The ability of Apple to include those take-it-or-leave-it terms suggests a dominant market position (strong market power) held by Apple, regardless of other mobile device platforms.
The license is a "Contract of Adhesion" "where the terms and conditions of the contract are set by one of the parties, and the other party has little or no ability to negotiate more favorable terms and is thus placed in a "take it or leave it" position.
While these types of contracts are not illegal per se, there exists a very real possibility for unconscionability." (Wikipedia)
with unconscionability being "a doctrine in contract law that describes terms that are so extremely unjust, or overwhelmingly one-sided in favor of the party who has the superior bargaining power, that they are contrary to good conscience. Typically, an unconscionable contract is held to be unenforceable because no reasonable or informed person would otherwise agree to it. The perpetrator of the conduct is not allowed to benefit, because the consideration offered is lacking, or is so obviously inadequate, that to enforce the contract would be unfair to the party seeking to escape the contract."
> Would you agree to those terms if you had a realistic alternative?
What do you mean? If one doesn't want to agree with such terms, there are quite many android alternatives, some of which even better than iPhone/iPad in certain aspects.
Of course, it all may well depend on whether such terms are reasonable and legal. There are plenty of consumer protection laws that nullify all sorts of 'agreed' terms.
Do you remember which thread it was?