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On a related note, in 2002, Paul Graham arguably invented (IIRC) the spam filtering that is now commonly in use. While email spam still exists today, it was way
by galdosdi 3y ago
On a related note, in 2002, Paul Graham arguably invented (IIRC) the spam filtering that is now commonly in use. While email spam still exists today, it was way, way, way, way worse before Gmail introduced bayesian spam filtering around that time. Today it's an occasional amusement. In those last days before spam filtering got a lot better it was reaching the point of seriously making it difficult to use email because the majority of your inbox was spam.
The crazy part is it's really just this simple bayesian approach that solved like 95% of the problem. Simple math that already existed. Stuff that can be explained to a high schooler. No new crazy ML/AI, none of that. Just someone stepping back and pointing out "hey, I think we can use this tool here...."
There was a lot more lower hanging fruit in those days.
https://paulgraham.com/spam.html https://paulgraham.com/spam.html
- visarga 3y agoI remember "A plan for spam", I implemented the algo myself, and it's my first contact with ML.
- galdosdi 3y agoYou did? At Google? Cool! :) And thanks! As you can guess I still very pleasantly remember when the feature hit and the spam issue got so much better. I always wonder which pieces of my code from my career I'm proud of are still running somewhere. Unfortunately, it's mostly been proprietary stuff so there's really no telling.