• 0 Posts
  • 81 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 25th, 2023

help-circle







  • There are like 10,000 different solutions, but I would just recommend using what’s built in to python

    If you have multiple versions installed you should be able to call python3.12 to use 3.12, etc

    Best practice is to use a different virtual environment for every project, which is basically a copy of an existing installed python version with its own packages folder. Calling pip with the system python installs it for the entire OS. Calling it with sudo puts the packages in a separate package directory reserved for the operating system and can create conflicts and break stuff (as far as I remember, this could have changed in recent versions)

    Make a virtual environment with python3.13 -m venv venv the 2nd one is the directory name. Instead of calling the system python, call the executable at venv/bin/python3

    If you do source venv/bin/activate it will temporarily replace all your bash commands to point to the executables in your venv instead of the system python install (for pip, etc). deactivate to revert. IDEs should detect the virtual environment in your project folder and automatically activate it


  • Reddit has way more data than you would have been exposed to via the API though - they can look at things like user ARN (is it coming from a datacenter), whether they were using a VPN, they track things like scroll position, cursor movements, read time before posting a comment, how long it takes to type that comment, etc.

    no one at reddit is going to hunt these sophisticated bots because they inflate numbers

    You are conflating “don’t care about bots” with “don’t care about showing bot generated content to users”. If the latter increases activity and engagement there is no reason to put a stop to it, however, when it comes to building predictive models, A/B testing, and other internal decisions they have a vested financial interest in making sure they are focusing on organic users - how humans interact with humans and/or bots is meaningful data, how bots interact with other bots is not


  • To compare every comment on reddit to every other comment in reddit’s entire history would require an index

    You think in Reddit’s 20 year history no one has thought of indexing comments for data science workloads? A cursory glance at their engineering blog indicates they perform much more computationally demanding tasks on comment data already for purposes of content filtering

    you need to duplicate all of that data in a separate database and keep it in sync with your main database without affecting performance too much

    Analytics workflows are never run on the production database, always on read replicas which are taken asynchronously and built from the transaction logs so as not to affect production database read/write performance

    Programmers just do what they’re told. If the managers don’t care about something, the programmers won’t work on it.

    Reddit’s entire monetization strategy is collecting user data and selling it to advertisers - It’s incredibly naive to think that they don’t have a vested interest in identifying organic engagement








  • A couple of them fall into the “technically true, but misleading territory” - I’m sure the person handing this out couldn’t identify which though - broken clock right twice a day and all

    “Can you reverse effects” - no you can’t make your immune system forget how to work. Probably not what they are going for here though.

    “Risk of […] or other side effects?” - yeah the vaccines generally give people a headache and short lived fever symptoms

    “Have there been deaths?” - The astrazeneca vaccine had like a 0.000001% mortality risk (more likely to die driving to the pharmacy), and was pulled in many countries because that was deemed too dangerous. Person handing out the flyer has likely been parroting “mRNA vaccines cause blood clots” nonsense for years while being completely unaware that AZ was a traditional viral vector vaccine

    “Are there doctors recommending NOT taking it” - yeah, there are many notable anti-vaccine doctors, what they typically have in common is they earned their doctorate in computer science, social studies, or some other field that gives them no qualifications to talk about immunology