Slashdot Mirror
When Personalization Runs Amuck
pamar writes "According to this article from the Wall Street Journal, your TiVo could definitely get the wrong impression about your interests, or even your sexual preferences.
And what you need to do to get "a clean slate"? Most of the users who have been "targeted" by TiVo usually try to "correct" the profiling by showing an abnormal interest in something wildly different." Yep, it's a dupe.
All repeats and no Firefly.
Nuked.DUPE-Credits.taken.4x
No really, so? My TiVo goes a little against my normal interests from time to time in what it records for me in it's "suggestions" section. Doesn't bother me a bit. Doesn't take up any space really since those are the first programs that are deleted when space is needed for what I've told it to record.
Remember, incompetent editors, you can be replaced by a program.
All you have to do is go into the system setup menu and select "Reset Thumb Data".
It will forget everything it ever might have thought about you...
Mind you, expecting journalists to read the instruction manual before making wild statements is of course too much to ask...
Hemos, try the following:
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=tivo
Its not that difficult to find dupes....
The old story is here, it was only two days ago.
wot no sig
...now my TV is doing the same. At least the TiVo can't leave and take half my stuff! Hah!
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
It appears when your thumb info is incorrect on your tivo, it'll search out the WRONG face donor, and you'll get one you never really wanted.
Slashdot Editor spokeswoman Ellen Feiss said "It was a really good face... My tivo devoured it. Then I got a transplant and it wasn't as good".
Stay tuned tomorrow for more adventures of Punxatawny Phil, as ground hog day continues on Slashdot.
Oh brilliant, not 20 posts to this story, and 99% of em are "Hey its another one!". Made me laff. Keep up the good work slashdot editors!
Is there a setting in preferences to filter out duplicates?
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
For some reason, my SlashDot recording preferences are off. It keeps thinking I am really into TiVo articles.
...all over again.
It's Thanksgiving. Let's cut these guys a break. Sure, there have been two dupes today with one of them still on the front page.
As amazing as it seems there is a reason for this. Eating turkey can affect your cognitive skills. Not only does it make you sleepy, but it can make you miss things that you read.
I work for a rather large GIS software company, and one of our larger clients is responsible for most of the dead tree junkmail you get in your mailbox. How do they figure out that you would likely buy a Lexus/are looking to refinance your mortgage/want to join a health club?
simple... PRISM
put your zip code in there and see how accurately your spending/watching habits are reflected. Perhaps TiVo should ditch their "personal" profiling for regional profiling.
the most mysterious thing you'll see today
It keeps on thinking that we want to read the same article on gay pregnant TiVo users... :)
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Mmmm, I think this is the third dup today...
...,
Trying to think of something original to say...,
Nope, sorry, I failed.
Imagine for a moment a world without hypothetical situations...
I'll read slashdot for you, and make sure there are no story repeats. I ask only for $65,000 a year.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
Tivo thinks you're gay
Phoenix name change
Giant Spider Web
Amnesty International
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Slashdot editors are using a bot based on TiVo in order to run the stories its readers find most interesting. One feature of this bot is that it scans previously posted articles on Slashdot. Meanwhile TiVo users who have recorded Slashdot posts have returned to find their TiVo boxes "Slashdotted."
This article is next
Kisses karma bye-bye as he resubmits this article just to see what happens.....
What, me Tweet?
Here's my friend Run who probably knows better how to spell amok than the ./ editors.
Hang on a minute....
:)
are we talking about TiVo or Slashdot Editors?
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
What if, in the future, companies start requesting the data collected by such "we can guess who and what you are" systems for demographic purposes?
"Well, according to this data, 25% of our customers are pregnant gay men, and 14% are neo-Nazis with an interest in cooking..."
But seriously. Something evil tells me that it's only a matter of time before this stuff is taken as the Word of Gord(TM)...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Hey guys don't you realize what's happening? Since it's a holiday they're doing a "Best of /." show due to the lack of meaningful events on the turkey day. Hell, they probably have a script that just plops up a story from a list they have preselected while they're off stuffing their faces and taking naps while watching bad football (and that'd be 'mericun football NOT soccer for all you ferners).
Are the editors out to lunch today? This is a duplicate from a day or two ago.
You're new here, aren't you?
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
It is unfair of you to expect the slashdot editors to work more than 5 minutes a day for their living! Afterall, if they spent 5 seconds checking if each story were a duplicate, or even reading the front page from time to time, it might interrupt their beer and TiVo time!
====
Crudely Drawn Games
a lameness/repeat/rerun filter in them..looks like it's time to REVISE the slashcodethis time...except this time the editors should get something like this when they try to repost the article:
/.. You will have to wait 2 minutes to do that :)"
"Whoa there cowboy! Looks liek you are trying to repost URL that has already been posted on
No seriously slashcode should have something like a 3 day history underneath the post article that will check and tell the "reporters" if there are any similarities between text or if anu URLs have been previously used....
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
Also the one about American companies helping China censor the internet is posted more than once.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Look Slashdot, if you're going to post duplicates, and then edit them a few comments later to say "Yep, it's a dupe", why not just delete the article?
The discussion has happened and can continue to happen in the original article. A few people will know you fouled up - but who cares, this way everyone knows you fouled up by duping and aren't doing anything remotely editorial at all!
There's been a couple duplicates today, we must really be starved for news.
I think I'll submit a story...
"This just in, Chinese scientists, working feverishly for the past decade, have discovered a unique combination of chemicals that when combined with heat produce an explosion able to propel sharp metal objects down a tube at a high velocity. This 'Gun Powder,' as it's being dubbed, is set to revolutionize the battlefield. In other news, Springfling, the world's leading bow and arrow manufacturer, apparently worried about their stock prices, have dubbed the new invention blasphemous, unreliable and claim that it's unlikely to have any effect on the way empires carry out their wars."
-hero.
The worst thing about duplicate stories isn't the fact that we've read them before, it's having to read posts by users complaining about editors not checking for old stories, when they themselves didn't bother to check that hundreds of people before them have already yelled DUPE! Sheesh.
Mind you, when people leave their desktops logged in at the office, I sometimes set their Google Language Prefernces to Klingon (ja'chuqmeH Usenet ghommeyvaD yInej 'ej yIlegh.) or "Elmer Fudd" (De web owganized by topic into categowies)
This is a duplicate from a day or two ago.
Deja vu is usually a glitch in The Matrix. It happens when they change something in the program. Be on your guard...
GMD
watch this
They could create a "Replay" section and whenever they feel like publishing the same story again they could put it there. This way they could even put it in the front page and nobody would have reason to complaim...
That would help, but I don't think it would cure the problem. If the original story has a link to the register and the repost has a link to news.com, then it's not going to be kicked up. I'd exclude noise words in the summary, and do an automatic search on the rest, and display the top matches. A search on "Tivo" and "profiling" does display the two matches in this case, and so does "face" and "transplant" in the other example.
Slashdot thinks that I like TiVO news and keep posting dupes about TiVO news. :-)
Just kidding
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
To this day on my credit report I'm married to Murray, along with a half dozen other major errors.
I never bothered to correct this because being married got me more favorable loan terms.
Now if these people can't get this basic information correct with forms that I directly fill in, how is Tivo going to get anything near correct when it's just guessing based on what I watch?
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
I was once a happy and energetic person. I used to love to be involved in life. Whether it was work or play, all my activities were fun and interesting.
Then I saw my first duplicate Slashdot article.
The effect was immediate. Life just lost that shine. I'm wandering around now, dazed and confused, exclaiming "Why! Why does Slashdot have to post duplicates!". My sex drive has vanished, my work productivity has become non-existant, my exuberance has all but dried up. All I can be fed up doing these days, is slothing around the house muttering curses against the evilness of duplicated news stories.
Please consider people like us, Mr. Slashdot editor, the next time you submit a story.
DeeK
If they finger your box and then call you gay?
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
This could be a good idea to **cough*cough** force people into subscribing. If you subscribe you get to ignore all these dupes and all those redundant posts like "ummm yeah d000000d i reckon 'em pages r repeati'n 'emselves. Now me gotta go'n shoot sommat the preceedin' post was funny, not flamy :), and dooont ye forgit that
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
At least you're PVR is cosher.
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
Don't know what kind of tools are available to editors but...but why don't slashdot editors encorperate a bayesian duplicate submission detector in their "editing" process. Perhaps it would help them from spamming their own site?!?!?
only infrmatn esentil to understandn mst b tranmitd
Second duplicate in a less than three hours from editors.
Why don't we do the same? Let us repost our comments from the original discussion and see if they get the same moderation.
Your karma could go up (or down) twice as fast! Or even faster if on second reading moderators get the joke you post!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
I wish I could convince my Tivo that I don't speak Spanish! About 1/3 of its "automatic" recordings are in Spanish. I have even tried taking the Spanish channels off of the 'Channels You Receive' list and it still seems to record from them.
Got problems with the shows TiVo records as suggestions? Well, try these methods to fix it:
Edit your "Channels You Receive" to remove channels you aren't interested in at all.
Look at the "TiVo Suggestions" for upcoming shows and rate them using the thumbs up/dowm method. Give three thumbs-down to major mistakes.
Take a moment to rate shows it has recorded before deleting them.
Rate your season passes. TiVo will automatically give anything you record 1 thumb-up. If you've got a season pass for something in a genre, or with actors, you'd typically dislike, rate the season pass with multiple thumbs-down (it'll still be recorded.) Do this as well for the one-off items you record (especially if your recording for guests.)
If all else fails, punch the reset button. Somewhere in setup you can tell TiVo to start over in building it's profile.
Posted by Hemos on Thursday November 28, @02:25PM
from the glitch-in-the-matrix dept.
someone writes "According to this article from the Slashdot Journal, your Slashdot could definitely get the wrong impression about your interests, or even your need to read a story more than once. And what you need to do to get "a clean slate"? Most of the users who have been "targeted" by Slashdot usually try to "correct" the profiling by posting an abnormal number of flames and ironic remarks. Unfortunately, the only reaction from Slashdot is the remark: "Yep, it's a dupe".
This story will run again tomorrow, right after the one about the face transplants and before the new Linux kernel patch. Stay tuned
Tivo does this all the time. I'm on my third TiVo and I've stopped rating things (I even stopped the auto single thumb up rating for programs you record). On my second Tivo, somehow the system decided I liked Westerns, now mind you, I had never recorded or even watched one on Tivo.
All of a sudden every single thing the Tivo recorded was a western, and all from the Western channel. It didn't matter that every single one it recorded I rated three thumbs down. I got so frustrated I finally had to remove the entire channel (no real loss).
Tivo gets tunnel vision all the time, I had all cartoon, all comedy specials, and all westerns.
Actually, it's Malay, so spell it however you like. Fucking Limeys.
Carpe Deez
Don't delete the articles, just create a duplicates section.
Here's a few of suggestions for possible icons:
duplicates icon 1
duplicates icon 2
duplicates icon 3
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...