Just measure how far you had to read before thinking "ok, I get it, he is joking".
I had to get to the part about the Odesk virtual assistant.
I'd hope that is the furthest anyone would have to go to se the absurdity. I'd be interested if anyone made it past that before noticing it was a joke.
Like people say, "I created a presentation on my Macbook", as opposed to "my iPhone".
Agreed, the tendency of people to refer to their phones/computers by their marketing names is much, much higher among Apple consumers.
I could conceivably see someone utilising OpenCV to "try" to measure attractiveness. I could also see someone trying sentiment analysis with NLTK... but farming it out to a low paid worker is just insane.
OKCupid used to have a feature for "choose my best image". Users submit two images, then rate other people's images. One of your images is presented alongside one other image from some other user, and someone else has to pick which one they like most. OKC then used their stats to give some analysis to it.
It was sort of great, except there were usually too few people to get any kind of sensible results.
It's easy to see that this could be a useful approach.
The internet already has no small part in satisfying most of
my other needs.