My favorite example of how informationally toxic YouTube's algorithm is this:

Imagine you're high school freshman and got a school assignment about the Federal Reserve.

You watch videos on YouTube all the time, so you go home and put "Federal Reserve" into YouTube's search bar.

This is the first video that comes up (1.6 million views) https://t.co/vt6GQugkHa
It is, perhaps not surprisingly, conspiratorial quackery.

Once you view that, the algorithm also then suggests this on the sidebar:

"What You're Not Supposed to Know About America's Founding" (863,00 views)

https://t.co/anOLNuPJGF
It's a John Birch Society lecture delivered by someone who says he "infiltrated Marxist organizations as a young man" and that Marxists infiltrate the media.
He then delivers a convoluted lecture about the Illuminati being behind both both global communism and the abolitionists. Charles Sumner and Horace Greeley were communists, and the Civil War was a communist/Illuminati plot, started by communist terrorist John Brown.
Once you've viewed that, you can then click on this video, conveniently furnished by the algorithm:

Trump Tells Everyone Exactly Who Created Illuminati (4 million views)
https://t.co/2ipMBtaphA
And on and on and on.

All this starts with someone genuinely searching for basic information about the Federal Reserve!

And this is where you can end up in two or three clicks.

And it's making money for YouTube all along the way.

Something's deeply rotten here.

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I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.
A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.