It's perfectly written, and I don't know if that's a testament to Rob's ability as a creative writer, or to how much time he's spent engulfed in a startup culture where this sort of behaviour is far closer to the realm of possibility than one might imagine or (arguably) hope.
I made it to the robot full of prerecorded videos before my eyebrow went up and alarms and whistles went off in my brain.
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.
I actually emailed this to all my friends/managers at work, then I got to the vibrator part, then I realized it was written in jest, then I frantically scrambled to recall the email.
The pre-recorded videos on a robot clinched it, but the first thing that struck me as weird was the pointless "in Ubuntu" when talking about the Python script at the start.
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.
Farm it out to many people in return for some tiny (but not monetary) reward.
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.
insanity is in the eye of beholder. There are probably thousands of executives in the world that use the help of their personal assistants when organizing dating. Leap from that to use virtual assistants is not a biggie. however, there are probably none or just a few crazy geeks that even try to use the help of machine vision for dating.
That's the thing, the initial steps sound like exactly what a hacker would look at. And we're so busy furrowing our brows to follow the technology that we don't realise the ridiculousness of what he's doing until there's a robot attending the date. He's basically played a trick on our left brain.
You're on to something when discussing Rob's ability as a writer. Smart money says communication is his real strength. By speaking in startup/engineer vernacular to starry eyed bored dreamers(you: hn, vice, digg, reddit consumers) he's generated millions in pre-sales and investment without delivering anything.
I found it awfully dehumanizing of the "females" in the narrative. Maybe I just don't get the joke.
Pro-tip: It's rarely idiomatic English to call someone "a female," unless you're purposefully trying to compare her to an animal.[1] Female is a species-neutral term (like "breeding"). When talking about humans, it's proper to use the anthropic term "woman."
[1] My observation is that women refer to men as "male" much less often than the reverse, but when they do they often intend the comparison to animals.
It was very dehumanizing, and I think (hope) that was the entire point.
I'm also surprised about how often I see English-speakers talk about "females" rather than "women". I vaguely suspect that might say something profound about an aspect of American culture that's deeply wrong about how it views women.
Or, less cynically, because no one uses 'gals'. There is no female analog to 'guys'. Males under age 18 -> boys. Males 18-35 -> guys. Males over 35 -> men.
For female, it's less clear. Calling a 20-something a 'girl' might be viewed offensively as diminutive. Calling college students 'women' can also seem awkward casual contexts (it's perfectly fine in most).
I've gotten to a point where I'm more frequently associating with people (including 'females') in the 25-35 age range and have had this debate internally. I've started using 'lady' for this very purpose, though I realize it's not as socially common. I might recount an interaction by referring to 'A guy' or 'A lady' I met (rather than 'girl'). Personally, I'd love for it to be socially acceptable to refer to people with words that don't presuppose age (or gender, for that matter) but that time isn't coming anytime soon.
Yeah; the implication is there that women are mundane. E.g. No mention of what happens when his robot is met by her robot for instance. How would the neural link be made then? Would they even need to book an airbnb? Couldn't they exchange neural feeds right there in the restaurant?
I suspect that he has a low-level override in that case that lets them conference more directly, as they are obviously soulmate material. :) "No kidding, you automated your dating too? SWEET!"
Actually, I was picturing the female sending her robot to meet the robot he sent ... the restaurant bill should be pretty cheap and hopefully the wine doesn't short it out.
I always liked that little linguistic distinction, but it was taken far more seriously decades ago than it is today, when the phrase "a female lawyer" would seem gauche and "a woman lawyer" would be more appropriate. But the adjective sense of the word "woman" is essentially extinct today.
I would infer it more as a sign of pseudoscientific language than as a comparison to animals, and the pseudoscientific tone is appropriate in the context of TFA.
You can call me a "male" if you like. I do not find it offensive at all, even if intentionally used in that way. I am an animal after all. It's only double standards that I would have a problem with.
Right but the use of men by women is almost always negative and dehumanizing. "ugh..men" "men are always..." the only positive connotation I can think of is "now that's a man" but that's slightly different in the singular use and by implication it infers most men don't qualify as a "man"... in any case let's not read too much into the sarcastic tone of the post. if you're looking for something to upset you, I guarantee you'll find it.
> Right but the use of men by women is almost always negative and dehumanizing.
Since when? All the women I know use "man" or "men" (or informally, "guy"), correctly when referring to a male member of the human species. My wife might say: "my supervisor on this matter is a man." A disproportionate number of men I know incorrectly use "female" when they mean "woman." E.g. one might say "my new boss is female."
But that's in your circle of friends. Grand parent's circle of friends -- and culture -- is different from yours and uses word with slightly different connotations. Which brings us back to square one: the use of the word "female" is not dehumanizing in most contexts to a large number of people. I really think 'mynewwork is onto something about why the word "male" is more dehumanizing than the word "female":
> There is no female analog to 'guys'. Males under age 18 -> boys. Males 18-35 -> guys. Males over 35 -> men.
There isn't an obvious alternative to the word "female", as calling a, uhm, "female" of younger age a "woman" can potentially be awkward, so referring to her as a female is simply the next best option. I suspect that it's because of this reality that the word "female" is increasingly more accepted as a safe and normal pronoun.
> Right but the use of men by women is almost always negative and dehumanizing.
I'm 30 and I haven't seen this be the case anywhere ever.
I have encountered some people who condescendingly use "boys" when they want to disparage adult men. It's always bugged me even when I was a teenager, although for some reason all the gay men I know use it. I think a similar dynamic exists with women and "girls".
I find myself using "female" occasionally, not to refer to women I would date but because English doesn't have another good word for "feminine humans of an indeterminate age". I occasionally use "chicks" for similar reasons.
The robot isn't too implausible, if you could convince your date to accept a telepresence which is just weird and wacky enough it might work some percent of the time. The hard part would be getting the AI good enough, but it's not impossible.
Weird and wacky? Sure. But if I were a lady I wouldn't want to be seen out on a date with a telepresence bot. (In fact, it's not even telepresence - it's surrogacy!) Perhaps if distance were an issue I would accept a Skype date at a restaurant (with a live date on the other end). Bringing my relatively inconspicuous iPad and conversing with another human is within the realm of socially normal behaviour.
I don't know. As a "female" I started getting that squicky dehumanized feeling... until I realized the possibilities. Put that boy on mute and you've got the makings of a lovely subsidized evening!
I actually thought it was true - and was thinking "oh shit, this guy must be a good programmer" - until the moment he explains how the actual date involves a robot.
There's a pun somewhere connecting the phrase "the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" with premature ejaculation, but I can't seem to find it.
I've had so many dates and they all fall through or fade after the third. Found out most women expect guys to drive them everywhere and pay for their dates, about 50% were offended I didn't pay for all their shit. I've had bad dating experiences.
Yeah, that's a fair expectation of what a date is, you drive and you pay. Anything else is just two people hanging out. (Source: I dated and eventually got married.)
Other possibilities exist, but you shouldn't be surprised by the generally-accepted standards or you're going to continue having "bad experiences."
Yeah, that's a fair expectation of what a date is, you drive and you pay. Anything else is just two people hanging out. (Source: I dated and eventually got married.)
The self-reported study indicates that around 40% of women split the costs of dating, and 44% of men say they would end a relationship if the costs were not shared. This is increasingly true of couples in their 20s. Your statement that "anything else is just two people hanging out" irks me and is not true for 2/5 of couples (in the US, I presume)
I'll relate my own situation. I am an American living in Cambodia. I started dating a local girl about a month and a half ago, and we split the expenses for everything. She has a relatively good job by Cambodian standards, but I have to be very cognizant that she has less money than I do, so we choose restaurants and activities that both of us can afford. She is clearly proud of being able to pay for herself, partially I think to distance herself from the stereotype of Cambodian girls marrying for money and/or being prostitutes.
If we decide to get married, then sure, my money is her money and vice-versa (and who knows maybe she'll end up being the breadwinner). But as far as dating is concerned, I will forever take a hard line on splitting the costs (or at least contributing in amounts proportional to our income) and if a girl isn't down for that, I'll find someone else.
I live in the city and don't own a car, and no I won't be anybodies sugar daddy. I can buy a drink or two, as anyone would, sure.
I don't know why women feel entitled to my money. I was on one date, and when the waiter brought our two separate bills, she looks at me like I'm retarded for not paying for her meal, an $80 steak dinner. She then proceeded to lecture me on the "rules of dating" and the role of Men in society. I threw $100 down and left mid conversation. If you're looking for some chump to be your chauffeur in exchange for your pussy, look elsewhere.
Dating sites give women the illusion that they are superior and guys should be fighting for them. One girl literally said to me "If you're not paying for me and picking me up/dropping me off, I have a ton of other options that will". Wow, so you're in it for the free ride instead of meeting another person with shared interests, thanks for letting me know!
Guess I should probably apply to YC, get some funding, and start funding dates!
My solution to this problem was to meet early evening for drinks. I was pretty honest about it (humour thrown in helps), and never had any objection. That's a lot cheaper than a meal and tells me enough to decide whether to proceed or not. Second date was typically an afternoon thing, which a. will be different to other dates she's been taken on and b. might result in dinner, again depending on my impression.
(I'm a woman and) I didn't even know that was a thing until a few years ago. Kind of thought it was a given that we split for dinners, nobody drives me home (ugh, that's kind of creepy on a first date) and on the first few dates the only thing I'll accept is a drink of some sort and that's it. Then some of my male friends went on to enlighten me with their first date stories...wow.
Dating sites tend to give women the advantage though (that I had to finally make my okcupid profile only visible to women interested in women due to too many guys messaging me is unbelievable to a lot of my guy friends) so I can see why some women would see things that way. The guy that goes the extra mile to do something...kind of unfair and terrible...stands out more than being just one among many half interesting conversations there.
Not that that's right, but a lot of women rather enjoy it. :/
I live in a dense city, Toronto, and I can't find a woman to save my life. What can I do if even dating sites fail me? I feel I'm pretty well off. I have my own apartment and I have a great paying job, and I'd like to think I'm pretty cool as well. I don't get it. Maybe I should date people older than me in a similar position?
Apparently splitting the bill has even had its own term coined! "Going Dutch", an event that so rarely occurs, it has even earned its own definition!
If by simply not having a car and paying for their dates leaves me in the dust, then I don't want to date.
How hard can it be to find like minded people? My god..
I'm going to be brutally honest and let you know from your posts above you come across as a jerk and/or lacking social skills/awareness.
When you go against a social norm you have to set expectations early on. Ideally before you even go on a dinner date. None of the women I know have a problem going Dutch; all of them would be really offended if you took them to a fancy restaurant and then when the bill came you expected them to pay half. You have essentially tricked them.
Here is a hint: If you want to go Dutch then take a girl for coffee or on a picnic ("you bring the bread and dips, I'll bring the drinks and cheese" etc) at least until you get to know her better.
Perhaps to you $80 is nothing. In my early 20's it would have been 8 hours work. Why would I spend a days hard work to have dinner with you when I can have dinner with another guy, who has just as much chance of being a great guy, without the expense?
Thanks for the picnic idea. It's not fair on my part to assume entirely that she would pay on her own, but I would not take her out to an expensive restaurant on that assumption alone. She was capable of paying and threw a fit, I left.
However you seem to act on your own assumptions, so save your judgement for when it matters.
I think the previous poster's point is that being well-off is really not much of a net benefit to a partner if said resources are of no consequence to the relationship or the partner. If you're both at a good economic situation yet going 50/50 the fact that you are also well off doesn't mean much to her and might even register negatively due to social conventions and expectations.
You mention several qualities that are generally perceived in a positive light, but one of these is also a willingness to to share resources, especially in a male/female relationship, as far as I understand it.
I hear you. Women in our society have gone mad with too much attention from offline and online worlds. Their entitlement grown at a geometric rate as their attractiveness grows linearly, which by the way can be optimized pretty easily with cheap makeup and high heels.
EDIT: Not all women of course, I have few really smart female friends who don't fall into that category.
While I agree additional liquidity is good in this market, sometimes you want to intervene with some protection of trading partners. Other people argue that these problems are all solved with an "invisible hand".
Some guy with an MFA is not qualified to talk about HFT and liquidity. I was referring more to an academic source, flash crashes are more the exception and not the rule; they stabilize quickly and have little to no lasting negative effect on industry.
This is fantastic satire. Especially, since I've just read The Circle. Judging by the other comments here, a lot of us were going along believing it was true. Until robot.
And, why not? The pieces were believable: OpenCV, NLTK, some scripting and API twiddling. The virtual assistant wasn't much of a stretch either.
Especially if you're familiar with modern online dating sites now. Still thinking that online dating is like browsing an organized list of potential dates where an online host helps you with searching is naive. Craigslist personals are still like that, stripped down, no profile, anonymous and no algorithms.
OKCupid, like other dating sites, makes money via ad revenue, not by connecting you with a partner, so what's their priority? Who knows if your experience is affected by:
- how often you visit the site
- if you use an adblocker (they know, and they let you know they know)
- if you're on a free account
- message response rate
- if you use their features (quickmatch, etc.)
- how many questions you've answered (at a tech talk recently, Sam Yagan co-founder said answering more than 10 questions was pointless)
- your quantcast/cookie/tracker profile
- sentiment analysis of your profile/messages
Here's a fun anecdote: As a new user of their iPhone app, I was interested in using the Locals feature (to see who was available on short notice for a date). The first day it worked, let me see those in my vicinity. The next day it was completely removed from the app. No warning. Something (I was a new user) must've decided that that feature wasn't for me.
This goes beyond dark design patterns which attempt to influence your behavior (i.e. on another dating site, you have to pay to send messages, and attractive people send you collect messages, that you have to pay to read.). With dark design, if you're aware, you know what the site wants you to do. If your online dating success is controlled by black box methods without feedback, they silently judge.
So, how soon before hackers decide they're tired of being gamed and start using tools they're familiar with defensively? Could this be the start of a new arms race?
This is hilarious and as a bonus it induces the warm, smug feeling I get when reminded I'm thankfully out of the dating game and happily married to a beautiful, smart woman. Good luck, kids.
> smug feeling I get when reminded I'm thankfully out of the dating game
I on the other hand get a warm, smug feeling from knowing that if my girlfriend decides not to see me anymore (or I get bored, whichever comes first), new prospects are a walk to the nearest club/bar away. Good luck to you too.
You'd be surprised. Of course no 2 people are exactly the same, so you'll miss someone terribly. After a while, you realize that the so called scarcity of 'great people to date' is Hollywood inspired pseudo-romantic bullshit. (I speak as a man seeking women)
One of the biggest advantages of living in a time of so many people is that the number of great people, in absolute terms, is also greater
Nor is their one soul mate in the world out there.
Most people want the same things, it is not hard or unique to find someone compatable, no matter how much we tell our partner how special they are, and they say to us.
ah yes, the ol' condescending "you'll find someone someday" line.
did you ever consider that some (many, actually) people are not optimizing for long term mating strategy, and are rather playing the game to maximize short-term sexual rewards?
or does that simply not exist as a valid goal in your worldview, because you refuse to acknowledge its legitimacy?
Please don't put words in my mouth. I just object to the other poster's utterly naive or sociopathic attitude. Unless you're 15 the idea of maintaining a relationship with someone you (smugly) consider replaceable seems pretty repellent to me to be honest, I wonder if she knows?
Indeed. Being happily married is one hell of a productivity booster. There's no need to waste time to get lucky or handle the frequent dramas in trying to figure out someone new.
But I think we can take this further, surely she's into automation too? So he-bot and she-bot are the ones that actually get together.
But then why bother with the physical world if it's all software? The entire exchange can be virtualised and simulated at high speed, then you only need to actually bother the meatspace human if the whole thing has been electronically predetermined to be acceptable to all parties.
That way you can find the perfect match in seconds. Unless, of course, they were a little creative or devious in their parameter settings, but nobody would ever do that, right?
This article is a joke but I have a mildly sociopathic friend who does the first section of this. Has an app that just replies to everyone on craigslist / dating site with a standard greeting that he has statically determined over 5 years as being the most successful. It does filter for undesirable terms to him. It also does one round of banter using a trained data set of responses. He says he gets around 30 actual profiles to look at and personally contacts the ones he's interested in.
EDIT
I'll leave my post as two people were kind enough to point out that I was just flat out wrong.
I had originally thought that the below post was a parody. I'm told it wasn't, though in my defense it definitely reads like a parody... I mean the perfect cutlery... the most meaningless item in anyone's house??
This reminds me of another parody post here a while ago about someone who said they'd bought the perfect cutlery.
They went a bit further and beat the joke to death talking about the difference between several cutlery sets. It was bit better because it started out with some good points bout optimizing your life and buying the best and then it jumped into how to buy what is probably the least important thing in anyone life...cutlery
I think this hacking your life is starting to jump the shark:)
Up to the fourth paragraph I was going to post something patronising about it being a great way to get a fuck buddy but a bad way to form a relationship.
However, having finished the post, I now think that a long term relationship leading to marriage and children would be possible. Some tweaking might be required. Ideally, a long and meaningful relationship could develop with 0 physical contact.
This is a great read. The OpenCV part hit a bit too close to home though: I was stuck for a minute trying to think how he managed to segment faces well enough to compute ratios (not just as a rectangle or a blob) given all of the possible conditions/perspectives of the photos.
you bet! i was automatically thinking about how did he manage to get sufficiently good resolution, how did he cope with lighting/background changes, and so on....
It's really the wrong approach. Supervised learning is the way to go. For example a paper by Kumar et al.[1] shows how to build an "attractive woman" classifier that is 83% accurate.
"I guess I see what’s supposed to be funny here, Rob, but I don’t think everyone will. As the man behind an awfully high-profile startup, I don’t think this is likely to attract any beneficial attention to you, and may very well attract some negative attention. Even if this is meant in good fun, I’m not sure it’s in your best interests."
Have you noticed that people who don't get the joke are unable to consider that other people might?
Jokes are funny when they punch up [at people with more power/status]; they're asinine when you punch down. This is an excellent satire, which should have become obvious when the robot shows up...
She was a yahoo or aim chatbot (can't remember which) that pretended to be a slightly flirty teenage girl but logged all her interactions to the author's website. There was some great material in there.
I think this can work well as a startup. You sign up and create a profile. Then the system matches you up with as many other people as it can and runs several simulated dates based on your profiles. After 3 successful simulated dates, you are both booked a room and given a transcript of your conversation this far, plus a list of fetishes.
That's a great idea. I see a couple of problems though:
- Once the simulation gets sufficiently advanced, it will want to pass the buck to another simulation, because that's what you did.
- In a world where many people do that, if you find yourself on a date with someone, that raises the chance that you're a simulation. What you do with that knowledge is up to you :-)
It seems to me that FABIO could be massively improved upon by offloading the computation to a remote (cloud?) server, allowing the date to continue until screams of pleasure are recorded.
Additionally, the robot self destruct seems like overkill. It would be better to simply wipe them and start over. After all it, it wasn't a hardware failure that resulted in a bad date, but a software problem!
I actually know a few programmers, who are also pick up artists, that do something similar but less complex.. they write scripts that spam msg to girls on dating site and just shot gun approach.
This made me sad, mostly because the base variable is facial attractiveness. Gotta love living in a culture so saturated in image worship that dating sites have nearly boiled off text bios entirely. Have fun chatting with people you have next to nothing in common with!
Automated bot actually makes sense for a first or maybe even second message. Things would become even more interesting if girls would write their own bots too. Someone should build an API for that.
Only the first. You have got to read their response yourself. If you don't, it can't possibly work. Or it shouldn't work. You're basically accepting a relationship where people ignore each other.
The people who drop out after that second message are probably the real keepers. The ones that stay apparently didn't say anything worthy of a response anyway.
Are we there yet with AI? Maybe some kind of adaptative strategy would help online dating. Each robot (M/F) should 1. read, 2. evaluate, 3. stop/continue.
Question: how many messages iteratactions we need to have a 90% confidence of a good face to face date for both?
I would be left feeling quite sorry and embarrassed for the partner in the case that they were actually a warm body. They would essentially be interviewing to play the submissive within a hegemony.
I love the thinly veiled threats from other startup hustlers in the comments. Yeah Rob, you might suffer from some difficulty for deflating our bubble a bit... these people are pathetic excuses for humans, maybe we can replace startup founders with a simple Perl script that uses a simple genetic algorithm to find the best combination of cloud technologies that get investors to part with their money at the highest ratio.
