computers-R-stupid

New feature here at tommoody.us. Occasionally, when our editors notice a blogosphere blog that has moved over to Facebook we will note it and make fun of it. Guys, the trend by now should be to move away from Facebook, not to sell your soul so Mark Zuckerberg can buy another home near his home so no one can live near him.

Today's hall-of-ignominy-er:

Dataisnature. We followed this blog for years and then noticed its RSS feed wasn't active. It's posting the same type of material on Facebook now. The page design is less elegant, the posts are shorter, people's (contentless) comments and "shares" are appended to each post on the front page, and members of the non-Facebook-joining public have a big "join now" banner permanently blocking part of the page. Oh, yeah, that's progress!

"But, Tom, that blog can now scale to the rich world of social media! Before we didn't know how many people liked this content and now it's numerically quantified, and we know for a certainty how popular it is."

From a slideshow of mostly architecture -- bleak shots of prisons next to golf courses, fracking fields next to suburban homes, threatening and/or condescending billboards advertising shows of cultural figures such as Clyfford Still and Mark Mothersbaugh, and other all-American horrors. Via James Howard Kunstler.
Picked this one as an example because that's what mobile phone users look like -- junkies. Mainlining that Zucker-opioid: "hey, someone liked my status!" "Ooh, look at her baby, isn't it ugly." "Fifteen people responded that they are coming to my show!" Am truly ready for this sociological moment to be over, but no end is in sight.

Not sure if this qualifies as a dark pattern -- will have to consult my Sales Engineer.

Priceless: the Clinton campaign relied on a super-secret software called Ada for electoral strategy, according to the Washington Post:

Ada is a complex computer algorithm that the campaign was prepared to publicly unveil after the election as its invisible guiding hand. Named for a female 19th-century mathematician — Ada, Countess of Lovelace — the algorithm was said to play a role in virtually every strategic decision Clinton aides made, including where and when to deploy the candidate and her battalion of surrogates and where to air television ads — as well as when it was safe to stay dark.

The campaign's deployment of other resources — including county-level campaign offices and the staging of high-profile concerts with stars like Jay Z and Beyoncé — was largely dependent on Ada's work, as well.

While the Clinton campaign's reliance on analytics became well known, the particulars of Ada's work were kept under tight wraps, according to aides. The algorithm operated on a separate computer server than the rest of the Clinton operation as a security precaution, and only a few senior aides were able to access it.

According to aides, a raft of polling numbers, public and private, were fed into the algorithm, as well as ground-level voter data meticulously collected by the campaign. Once early voting began, those numbers were factored in, too.

What Ada did, based on all that data, aides said, was run 400,000 simulations a day of what the race against Trump might look like. A report that was spit out would give campaign manager Robby Mook and others a detailed picture of which battleground states were most likely to tip the race in one direction or another — and guide decisions about where to spend time and deploy resources. [emphasis for komputer kliches and other folly added --tm]

The best business to be in right now is selling digital snake oil to doctors, lawyers, soldiers, and politicians. It doesn't have to work, all you have to do is rely on people's techno-anxiety and clinch the sale. So, who developed the election-losing Ada? Lambert of Naked Capitalism makes a guess:

The [WaPo] story doesn’t say where Ada was developed. Since it would be irresponsible not to speculate, my guess would be it came from Google squillionaire Eric Schmidt’s The Groundwork, “the Clinton campaign’s top technology vendor, earning more than $600,000 in fees since the campaign began, according to federal campaign finance disclosures.”

Google -- it figures.