• 7 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2024

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  • Suppose the average person p0 has n acquaintances. Then a naive approach would say that each of p0’s acquaintances (call one of them p1) also has n acquaintances, leading p0 with n2 acquaintances of the second degree.

    However, in a social network, many of p1’s acquaintances are shared between p0 and p1. Let’s say that rn (1/nr≤1) of p1’s acquaintances are actually first-order acquaintances of p0. The lower limit for r is 1/n because naturally one of p1’s acquaintances is p0 themselves.

    This gives us n⋅(1−p)⋅n = n2⋅(1−p) as the number of second-degree acquaintances, if my math is mathing. Increase n for more extraverted people in the network, and increase p for more closely-knit networks.

    To model the headline X % know someone who knows, we solve 1 / [n2⋅(1−p)] ≥ x where x is X% expressed as a fraction. Plugging in n=100 and p = 1/10 (I pulled these numbers out of my ass) and X=20% we get 1 / [1002 ⋅ (1−.1))] = 1 / [ 10^4 ⋅ 0.9 ] = 1 / 900; again, if my math is mathing.

    So this headline is true if about 1 in 900 people are in a relationship with AI.




  • The browser can never know what information is needed for a certain use case. So it needs to be permissive in order to not break valid uses.

    For instance, your list does not include the things a user clicks on the website. But that’s exactly the info I needed to log recently. A user was complaining that dropdowns would close automatically. We quickly reached the assumption that something was sending two click events. In order to prove that, I started logging the users’ clicks. If there were two in the same millisecond, then it’s definitely not a bug but a hardware (or driver or OS or whatever) issue.



  • First comment from the link:

    Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, LinkedIn’s JavaScript executes a silent scan of your installed browser extensions. The scan probes for thousands of specific extensions by ID, collects the results, encrypts them, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers.

    That is very different from “searches their computer for installed software”