The Reddit banning algorithm is strange in its own way.
In the past, I had tried to maintain a two accounts setup by policy. My main account (focused on camera, optics and photography etc) got gilded several times, with some posts appearing on their 'Popular' feed. I have used a secondary account(s) on occasions which engages in politics, tech, immigration etc. It has got flagged for contentious debates and I have been Reddit-banned once on one of them (for political criticisms and arguments against right wing; not my finest hour).
Whenever I tried to create a secondary since that incident, it gets banned immediately by their algorithms. It is insanely invasive in how they are able to detect someone. But I am surprised they never touch the gilded one - even if the same device/app was used for registration.
A theory to that feels there is more to than meets the eye in the way they use their filters to ban accounts. They are more lenient to older accounts (having Awards) or the ones which have got recognized in some way (appearing on Main Feed / Popular), but willing to discard the ordinary. Their user management policy is definitely intriguing
Raymond Chen's articles are true wealth of contemporary tech-lore. My favorite is the one where a user reported error on Flight Simulator map [0] and it escalated all the way up to Bill Gates & the then chief of FS division.
Raymond's work often uses analogies to everyday, real life situations to make the technical stuff more relatable. Sometimes, these end up being bizarre and even nightmarish. It's like a glimpse into some alternate world where the denizens are adversarial, hyper pedantic, scheming, criminally insane, or just plain stupid.
"Sometimes I’m in a hurry, and I want to make sure I am the next person to get served at the deli counter. To do this, I find whoever has the lowest number, knock them unconscious, and steal their ticket. But sometimes somebody else comes in who’s also in a hurry. That person knocks me unconscious and steals my ticket. My plan is to set my watch alarm to wake me up periodically, and each time it wakes me up, I find the person with the lowest number, knock them unconscious, and steal their ticket. Is there a better way?"
"This is like asking for a cheeseburger and then trying to peel every last bit of cheese off the patty to turn it into a plain hamburger."
"This is like driving up to a bridge, seeing a 'Bridge out of order' sign, then getting out of your car, moving the sign, driving onto the bridge, falling into the river, and then complaining to the car manufacturer that their car doesn’t work."
"This is like calling the natural gas utility company’s emergency number to report a major gas leak in your house. The gas company sends a technician over, and they can’t find any leak. They ask how you came to suspect that there’s a gas leak, and you tell them, 'Oh, I didn’t smell anything. I called you because I’m hoping to learn more about how to recognize the smell of gas. Do you have any tips?'"
"This is like 'I have this cupboard full of rubbish, so I will solve that by nailing the doors shut'"
"It’s like asking, 'What happens to the phrase 1 cup sugar when I eat my cookies?' The phrase 1 cup sugar was part of the instructions for making the cookies"
Oh nice, hadn't seen it. It looks good, and they've clearly got some decent stuff I don't (chrome extension, embedding in model cards, family pages).
The main difference appears to be how the graph gets made. From what I can tell they analyze the config on the server (their page says the first request can take a few minutes). I actually build the model on PyTorch's meta device and run a fake forward pass through it, so I get the real execution order and the tensor shapes at every module. That's what the animated replay and the compute/KV cache numbers are based on.
Pardon my ignorance about formats, but between XML & JSON, what would have made them choose XML? As I understand there is lot more tooling, standards & existing software examples around JSON for project & records management (e.g. VSCode's records as settings.json for example). Wasn't XML spearheaded by Microsoft but mostly used by Microsoft today?
json's only advantage is it's easier to write by hand, but that's not really a consideration here. XML has schema support and much more tooling available.
But even before it became officially unmaintained, it was already quite unloved, and it's one of the most used xml library.
We are not in the peak Java/J2EE era anymore. Pretty much nobody is going to willingly work on the foundations unless they're getting paid because the majority absolutely loathes XML and would not see maintaining XML libs as fun, and guess what, they're not? xslt also got removed from web browsers because nobody wants to maintain those libraries. And corporations like Google don't want to pay a dev for those either.
Meanwhile the tooling around JSON is as healthy as it's ever been, with very efficient implementations in most common programming languages and multiple SIMD impls in C, C++, Rust etc. People actually want to work on this.
> As I understand there is lot more tooling, standards & existing software examples around JSON for project & records management
I don't understand why that is relevant; as long as there is a minimum level of tooling, libraries and support for their choice, what benefit would JSON bring over XML? I don't see a clear reason for one over the other.
Honestly, I'd have the same question if they chose JSON and someone asked why did they choose JSON over XML - Why wouldn't they?
In the past, I had tried to maintain a two accounts setup by policy. My main account (focused on camera, optics and photography etc) got gilded several times, with some posts appearing on their 'Popular' feed. I have used a secondary account(s) on occasions which engages in politics, tech, immigration etc. It has got flagged for contentious debates and I have been Reddit-banned once on one of them (for political criticisms and arguments against right wing; not my finest hour).
Whenever I tried to create a secondary since that incident, it gets banned immediately by their algorithms. It is insanely invasive in how they are able to detect someone. But I am surprised they never touch the gilded one - even if the same device/app was used for registration.
A theory to that feels there is more to than meets the eye in the way they use their filters to ban accounts. They are more lenient to older accounts (having Awards) or the ones which have got recognized in some way (appearing on Main Feed / Popular), but willing to discard the ordinary. Their user management policy is definitely intriguing
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