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0 pointsxyzzy1235y ago0 comments

I'm curious how this advance update thing is supposed to work. What does disclosing those details look like, actually?

The reason I'm asking is that as these things grow in complexity, it's quite possible that even if you join the team that works on these systems it will probably take you a pretty long time to understand how they really work. Their actual behaviour is likely to still be mysterious a lot of the time because they're driven by data.

Is a high-level description in english OK? Do we need to see pseudocode? The source code code? Do they have to open source it? What parts, if it's tied to internal frameworks? If there is ML, do they have to disclose all their sauce there? The trained network / weights? The training data, if the alg alone is useless without a data set?

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ocdtrekkie5y ago

Any human-initiated change to search algorithms is presumably human-understandable. Someone writes a rule to downrank some terms or traits of a website, they presumably document it somewhere.

That documentation will need to be shared, and the implementation of the rule change will need to be delayed until the disclosure window has passed.

xyzzy123OP5y ago

Human understandable, yes, but the details of particular changes might only make sense to humans familiar with the system.

But yeah, the product manager view / documentation of intent sounds generally reasonable.

I do wonder how useful that would be to the news orgs in practice.

ocdtrekkie5y ago

Honestly, first and foremost, I expect a firehose of documentation, if Google isn't lying about making dozens of changes to it's algorithms every day. News companies might need a full-time guy (or team) just to sit there and read through them all.

But on the other hand, a bunch of journalists will have a ton of never-before-seen information about how the world's most powerful companies affect every other company on the planet. That alone is going to be worth some major exclusives.

Also, by the mere nature of being forced to share it, Google and Facebook will have to clean up their acts, they'll have to assume any change they make that could open them up to legal scrutiny will be found.

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0 pointsxyzzy1235y ago0 comments

I'm curious how this advance update thing is supposed to work. What does disclosing those details look like, actually?

0 comments

ocdtrekkie5y ago

Any human-initiated change to search algorithms is presumably human-understandable. Someone writes a rule to downrank some terms or traits of a website, they presumably document it somewhere.

That documentation will need to be shared, and the implementation of the rule change will need to be delayed until the disclosure window has passed.

xyzzy123OP5y ago

Human understandable, yes, but the details of particular changes might only make sense to humans familiar with the system.

But yeah, the product manager view / documentation of intent sounds generally reasonable.

I do wonder how useful that would be to the news orgs in practice.

ocdtrekkie5y ago

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