Bitwise: A Life in Code

Today’s most powerful machine learning techniques, such as those employed by Google’s DeepMind, excel at recognizing similarities between explicit patterns, whether those patterns are made of words or pixels or sound waves.

And your opinion of your own health depends more on whether your weight, diet, and lifestyle are classified into “healthy” or “unhealthy” buckets than it does on the raw statistics themselves. Even the name of a category—“fat” vs. “overweight” vs. “obese”—carries with it associations that condition how the classification is interpreted.

“Data” can come in any number of formats, not just the digital.

They discovered, after Google and Amazon, a third way of organizing the web. Google organized it by pages, Amazon by products, and Facebook by people.

caught myself contributing dumbly like this, to my dismay. I went back and checked posts from 2009 and 2010. I had written in complete sentences, arguments, with multiple paragraphs. The shift was obvious and drastic. Diversity, nuance, and ambiguity had declined. If passions were fervent and I disagreed with the chorus of “yeahs” or “ughs,” the cr

If I express a positive reaction to something, I’m definitely interested in it. If I’m made sad or angry by something, I may still be interested in it, or perhaps I want to avoid it. Those reactions are less useful to Facebook.