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>In contrast, take music recommendations. If I give you a series of suggested songs, can you detect a pattern? It seems to me that there has been a lot of succ

>In contrast, take music recommendations. If I give you a series of suggested songs, can you detect a pattern? It seems to me that there has been a lot of success in recommendation engines (i.e. Spotify, the "Netflix Algorithm", etc). Maybe not so much on a smaller scale, but large companies are using recommendation engines all the time to keep user's engaged. Other than that, I agree with the rest of the post. The eagerness to throw ML at any and everything can be kind of exhausting. When used right, it can be super powerful but sometimes a simpler method that achieves 80% of the results may be enough for certain use cases.

rorykoehler 8y ago
Spotify recommendation engine is half the reason I use Spotify.
- CoffeePython 8y ago
  Yeah same here! The daily mixes that Spotify makes and groups based on my different listening habits has been pretty great. I get a ton of value out of it.
  - moccachino 8y ago
    They were great for me until we had a kid. Now it's unusable because they will mix 'real' music with annoying kid stuff all over the place.
    - learc83 8y ago
      Netflix had the same problem before they added profiles.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  I definitely got a lot of songs from it that were spot-on, but I also got a ton that were not-as-enjoyable covers of songs I already had. I don't get why they keep doing that. It turned me off.
collyw 8y ago
It varies a lot. Youtube always has plenty of bullshit that is appealing for me to watch. Facebooks ads are way off.
platz 8y ago
> It seems to me that there has been a lot of success in recommendation engines Not as much as you might think: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201 "Mainstream movies are specially designed to be inoffensive to just about everyone. My Netflix recommendations screen is no longer "Recommended for you," it's "New Releases," and then "Trending Now," and "Watch it again." " "As promised, Netflix paid out their $1 million prize to buy the winning recommendation algorithm, which was even better than their old one. But they didn't use it, they threw it away."

rorykoehler 8y ago

Spotify recommendation engine is half the reason I use Spotify.

CoffeePython 8y ago
Yeah same here! The daily mixes that Spotify makes and groups based on my different listening habits has been pretty great. I get a ton of value out of it.
- moccachino 8y ago
  They were great for me until we had a kid. Now it's unusable because they will mix 'real' music with annoying kid stuff all over the place.
  - learc83 8y ago
    Netflix had the same problem before they added profiles.
mehrdadn 8y ago
I definitely got a lot of songs from it that were spot-on, but I also got a ton that were not-as-enjoyable covers of songs I already had. I don't get why they keep doing that. It turned me off.

collyw 8y ago

It varies a lot. Youtube always has plenty of bullshit that is appealing for me to watch. Facebooks ads are way off.

platz 8y ago

> It seems to me that there has been a lot of success in recommendation engines Not as much as you might think: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201 "Mainstream movies are specially designed to be inoffensive to just about everyone. My Netflix recommendations screen is no longer "Recommended for you," it's "New Releases," and then "Trending Now," and "Watch it again." " "As promised, Netflix paid out their $1 million prize to buy the winning recommendation algorithm, which was even better than their old one. But they didn't use it, they threw it away."