Diogenes

September 30, 2015 11:19 AM

Diogenes
I quit facebook a long time ago and decided to systematically contact my friends instead. You too can do this.

To me, "systematically" isn't systematic enough until it involved a few computers, so I hashed all my friends' names and put them on a circular queue (eventually, I will put them on an akamai-style consistent hashed queue, so I can add friends without rehashing... eventually) and put a SPA web front-end on it. I have a rigorously intense schedule about it, but someone I showed it to looked like I was crazy so you have to put in 200 people on the list to act as crazily as I do

Definitely a work in progress. No guarantees about anything whatsoever in any way shape or form. Also note that it uses basic HTTP auth and no HTTPS so your password has a high chance of being pwned: I will fix this ASAP but other things have been coming up like "having a real job"

If anything fucks up email me at hlee . howon [at] gmail dot com because I am bad at debugging

Role: did everything

posted by curuinor (3 comments total)

Actually I put a lot more thought into the scheduling for the reminders than actually important parts of the project like "make the goddamned 'stay logged in' checkbox work" than I actually said anywhere, so I might as well add it here.

Consistent hashing is a tool for adding servers to a CDN without having to replace or rehash everything in the CDN, and therefore of pivotal importance to Akamai and people like that. But it seems an interesting scheduling method. But that means that it's necessarily a scheduling method, which means that I also end up pulling out the scheduling textbook and ooh-ing and aaah-ing at the possibly-bullshit "we gonna use gradient descent and think about this as an optimization problem" bits of the scheduler. I tried like 15 things, mere hashing works surprisingly better than nearly all of them

I tend to be a fan of the notion that the secret to getting to a really great scheduling algorithm for all of us is the true understanding of the statistical physics of computation. Trust me, there is a statistical physics of computation: Feynman, too, was a startup bro once basically because of this (not really, but kind of really).

A stranger optimization target beckons in the claim by the modern condensed matter-network theory people about a basic fractal process in the formation of friendships or at least generic relationships. But that's definitely better done with full knowledge of the data (aka, I would need to get a real research job at a big-ass social network), basically as a recommendation engine of some sort.
posted by curuinor at 11:52 AM on September 30, 2015

I've wanted something like this for a long time. Some way to integrate reminders into an annual calendar or push a reminder out to a future date in order to prompt me to contact someone (lately I've been using Google Inbox for this purpose).
Having something systematically find the people I've been neglecting would be a refreshing social prompt compared to the constant urging of social media to grow your network or tighten the common links between you and your friends.

Thanks!
posted by colex at 1:43 PM on September 30, 2015

This is cool.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:08 PM on September 30, 2015