Rare Drops


I’m starting to get a bit on the fence about the “algorithm” attention market. Sometimes I get really interesting stuff. Sometimes, not so.

But what I really do like is how, when you ask for something, you get a ton of other stuff in the same vein. That’s great, if you’re interested in edge-case weirdness. I’m starting to see how the algorithms are preferring more recent training over older, which may not be the best strategy. If I watch one cute video with a dog, I get a zillion. That’s great because I love dogs. It’s not so great if I make the mistake of clicking on something “tactical” and then I get hundreds of pages of gun-toting amateurs who then disappear from my feed forever after a while.

And then there’s what happens if you look for rare performances by favorite musicians. Sometimes you get this (turn up the volume a bit)

Comments

  1. Ridana says

    I don’t understand people who worry about “contaminating” their YT feed by clicking on weird videos or whatever. If you don’t like what it’s serving up, delete your YT cookies and make it start from scratch. If there are certain types of videos you want suggested, just search for one and let it figure it out from there. I clear mine daily, so I never know what I’m going to get.

  2. Pierce R. Butler says

    Reginald Selkirk @ # 5: …In New Orleans, “poor boy” is a sandwich.

    Naw, at least when I lived there, everybody called that a “po boy” (basically equivalent to a “hero” in New York, a “grinder” in Boston, a “sub” in many other places; most po boys have more seafood than their counterparts elsewhere).

    The original “House of the Rising Sun” (so called from ornamental metalwork above the entrance) was/is a notoriously violent juvenile detention center, or so I’ve been informed by one of its alumni.

  3. says

    Interesting! The “house of the rising sun” appears to be a bit of deliberate ambiguity; a creative mirror.

    I have been trying to figure out where it came from, for me, but my assumption has always been that it was a song about heroin addiction. Can it be simply that I heard it at around the same time as Neil Young’s “the needle and the damage done”? Or that I associate the song with Doctor John and the New Orleans funk scene (and Dr John was allegedly a fan of the drug)

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