Tuesday: This is why unsupervised machine learning should not be the basis for all of your revenue.

The thing that shows up when I swipe from the left enough times updated recently, and has gone insane.  Previously, it'd show me two or three stories it thinks I might be interested.  Now?

Because of random "You've shown interest in XYZ."  And you know I'm going to watch that youtube video, Google.  You can see it sitting in my "watch later" play list.

 And more:

That's my own damn blog, Google.  You know that.  You run it.  And I've already read those comics.

Here's the problem.  Google's running shitty "you've searched for this, and this is a new common topic for that" and "you read this page a lot, maybe you want to read this story" algorithms.  That's the bare minimum of attempting to identify things of interest.  You know what's a better way to do that?  To use classified data to set up some sort of interest groups that can be connected in some way.  Instead of just "this is new" or "this is popular" or "you read this page a lot", they could try to find some underlying model.  One way they could have done this is to not have killed Google Reader.  Let a bunch of actual-human users classify and group every site with an RSS feed?  Have a bunch of automatically generated also-read stories to associate?  Plus, if they'd kept it going, they'd be able to tune suggestions for users by not showing them stories that they know already have been read.  In addition, having actual humans do this on RSS feeds means the training set expands as the user base expands, and the training set incorporates new sources as they become popular.

In conclusion, Google fucked up by not understanding what they had with Google Reader, and they continue to try and re-implement things that would be trivial with the reader statistics.

• This is fucking stupid.  "The concern was, what was this thing built for?"  Given that it was a damn clock, I'm betting it was built to tell the fucking time.  Clearly this is a great case of, "holy shit, let's be paranoid racist fucks" followed by "well, we clearly fucked up, so it's best to try and punish the kid for pointing out that we're stupidly inept paranoid racist fucks."
• Pretty much.