The goal was achieved by the system in 3 months, exactly as predicted with a 99% probability with a 95% CI.
The system's next goal is to subtly nudge the couple to reproduce within the next year in order to help google meet their user accounts targets for 2034.
Sync that up with Apple Watch 8's ability to estimate ovulation, and poof, declining birth rate problem solved!
I'm scared.
Or maybe it declines more rapidly? Women could just use the cycle prediction to avoid fun time on “risky” days.
> I'm scared.
That is one dystopia I might be able to live with.
As long as the watches don't default to Harvey Fierstein.
Will never happen. Children are expensive, and once you have them, you'll never ever again be able to afford most of the Apple products.
Obviously, the incentive for Apple (and Google) is that you don't have children, which can explain the low birth rates in developed (rich) markets.
> I'm scared.
Now I'm also scared.
That is why we can't explore things that we "might" consider nice. A product that might have been.
I have no idea the name of the story or its author but it was a nice hopeful take where machine intelligence doesn't decide to enslave or destroy humanity.
After all, "who" is in charge or has access to the data? Maybe even an unknown individual or group, with their own agenda, and outside of Google's stated corporate goals or awareness.
A Date in 2025 https://youtu.be/NZ8G3e3Cgl4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU
(Google's famous ad, "Parisian Love", worth watching for those who haven't seen it yet)
I think the biggest one missing would be that iirc a date going well seems pretty much random in dating service data, despite a fair bit of effort to find correlations.
Randomness is fine, just get enough smart people on it to learn about the distribution etc.
And no shame in getting philosophical. It may not have been time. Perhaps you were not the same person, or nor was he. In meeting at the right time, stars are aligned, it was the right time to intersect. Or perhaps a host of other reasons. There may have been better times, perhaps bounded for this success quite close to or at the time you didn 'meet'. And who knows what other 'success' could have worked out - collaborators in something, getting together when 're meeting' - we don't know, an individual's life's not repeatable, and that in itself is beautiful.
It is indeed fascinating mapping and wondering, and probably applicable to a lot. But not to downplay the philosophical side, as that's important, and important the OP included it.
In other words I don't think who we end up with is some 1 in a million cosmic star aligning moment, it's probably more like 1 in 100 and many people would be as good or a better fit than who we end up with. The time you spend with your person is more important than some intrinsic value you both bring at the start.
Your love is one in a million
You couldn't buy it at any price
But of the nine-point-nine-nine-nine hundred thousand other possible loves
Statistically some of them would be equally nice
Or maybe not as nice but, say, smarter than you
Or dumber, but better at sport or... fuckin' tracing?
I'm just saying
I really think that I would, probably
Have somebody else
If I didn't have you
Someone else would do
My wife and I dated through undergrad, broke up at "get married or break up." And ended coming back together as adults with more life and relationship experience. Based on plans, we never should have been back in the same city. And when we started hanging out again, neither expected a relationship, just a friendship still being sick of each others' sh. But we had both grown up. We're 24 years into our relationship now. I think it's going well.
That's all purely anecdotal, though.
I don't think real math could be done with this. Success isn't measurable. People often split due to $ or tragedy. People stick it out, miserable the entire time. It walks into Aristotle's eudaimonia. You can't know until it's over. Even then, quantifying quality is folly.
I suspect that you're right for most people, but those odds will be better or worse depending on the person and their circumstance. For some people, it probably is closer to 1 in a million, or could even be worse. Some go their entire lives meeting people and never finding one. There's probably not much harm in feeling a bit lucky to have found your person, especially if you suspect at least one of your odds were worse than most.
I've had relationships not work out for varying reasons, including going on vacation 'at the wrong time', or someone's ex visiting the city and making her feel like she can't 'move on' at the moment, stuff like that.
And I went through my own dating phase in which I was less mature and not ready to settle down with many of the people I met. Quite a few of them were perfectly great women with whom I likely could have lasted in a long-term relationship (of course, we can never really know). As I see it, the timing wasn't right, either for me (mostly for me) or for them. It was only after a few years of this that I was in the right mindset to stay with the person I happened to be dating at the time. Sure, that probably doesn't sound great, and I probably won't discuss this at length with my wife, but it's the way I view the world. I'd wager that something like 80% of the people I went on more than three dates with were 'compatible' enough that I'd pursue a relationship with them, but it only worked out long-term with the last one because we were both in the same mindset to give an earnest effort at making our relationship work at the same place and same time.
So, using dumb analogy math, 1/X (compatible person) chance times 1/Y (right timing, maturity, life experience, etc.), it works out to a lower probability 1/(X*Y).
Man this is really key. relationships is a skill. I don't believe in soul mates, but rather a healthy relationship is developed when two people have honed the skill enough to be able to handle conflict without causing irreparable harm, and enjoy each other out of conflict.
My wife and I were very aligned, right from early on, concerning financial disposition and family goals. We got that right out in the open early. We completely merged our financial lives and closed on a house, both names on the deed, both names on the mortgage, a year before we got engaged. When we got engaged, we couldn't afford an engagement ring, joint decision on that, and one of her friends got up in my face about it, 'where is the commitment?'. My dear fiancee held her ring finger up against the house and said "this is the commitment".
That common ground, those common goals, has made everything that followed much easier. Thirty years this past Spring.
This is a really good point. My wife and I often laugh about how in high school especially and college too we wouldn’t likely have been friends, much less good romantic partners. Both of us then were different people yet now both of us are perfect for each other.
But back then? Likely not even friends.
Perhaps it would all be more depressing than that though, exposing the small, repetitive worlds we live in. For my part, I have tried to road-trip, travel more often than others in my family have done, tried too to expose my kids to travel when growing up so they can experience a slightly bigger loop across the face of this small planet.
Very fascinating indeed. Imagine all the near-misses, as well. Like you were in the exact location of a childhood sweetheart, soon-to-be girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, but separated by 30 minutes. Perhaps, if had waited 30 minutes later, would have ran into a dream woman, who would have been the perfect wife.
I don't think Google's spying can help me identify those, but in the end I'm grateful for the winding path that led here, even if I didn't love it along the way!
https://moorsidepublications.com/2015/07/01/babbage-gets-inv...
On a serious note, it does remind me of that time police arrested a man on suspicion of a break-in, because he was riding his bike in the neighborhood at the time and Google recorded it.
That could include such authorities, manipulating or interfering with events and lives, more than anybody would think possible or should be legally allowed.
Do people who see ads get ads based on where they've been by the way?
Seriously, they know every time you pick up your phone. Where you shop, how much you spend, if you miss a stop in the highway, if you text your parents happy birthday, if your heart rate increases when you’re around a particular phone. They quite literally may know your gay before you do.
On some level alarm bells are going off.
https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/
So did apple:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/04/apple-makes-mobility-...
Only… they gave that information to government (supposedly post-analysis and anonymized). Regardless the data was quite literally used to “track and trace” then as a mechanism / justification to place you under house arrest.
/tinfoilhat
Most most introverted people tend to do though (myself included), is attending less social events as they become older. But you can still force yourself out there and meet people based on your hobbies.
And who knows, maybe you meet your significant other at one of those events for your favorite hobby?
He was old, early 80s (since retired and passed on) and said he had been asking his patients that his whole career, and had been keeping track.
I met my wife at a bar. Now, this was pre-smart-phone era, I will grant you that.
He said that a little more than 80% of his patients met their spouse at a bar. He said every time he heard someone say "You need to go to church", "you need to volunteer", or any other thing like that, he would interject that no, you need to go out drinking and carousing with friends. And always with friends. Apparently, out drinking and carousing alone is not nearly as effective.
You will have to accept the word of dead physician from the 1990s on that. Post 2008, the numbers have likely shifted.
But I still recommend drinking and carousing with friends. (That doesn't mean heavy drinking, you don't have to get plastered to carouse)
Of course, this is anecdotal and based on myself and my friends. But just as a counterpoint to your "go to university" advice =)
I have had several relationships where at the time I would have called the person my significant other but in retrospect there have only been 2 that have truly been significant to my life. I met my wife at a bar. A few years after she passed, I met my now girlfriend of 12 years at a farmers market where she was selling pickles and kimchi.
I had a primary care physician in the late 1990s that had been polling his patients on that his whole career, and said that a little more than 80% of his patients met at a bar. So there you go.
I also agree with your assessment on partners, I have had a couple that were important at the time, but looking back, where more like friends with benefits. Only two were really significant. One that tortured me emotionally and basically set me up for over sensitive warning flags for about five years, what a mess. The other one I married over 25 years ago.
You'd be amazed at how few women find that exciting
At some point in the past I had the surreal experience of opening a news website and seeing a familiar face on the front page. Not a celebrity, rather a man whose face had been in some small subfolder of my brain for several years.
The man had been convicted of serial rape. He would drug victims and record them. He was known to be active within a certain time range from the timestamps of the videos. He repeated this dozens of times and was only caught after the final victim woke up during the act. Authorities appealed for people to come forward with any more information because they believed there could be more victims than were discovered from the videos.
By cross-referencing the location data from my phone with the date of an event my Last FM profile and the location of his home, I was able to confirm why he looked familiar. This allowed me to contact the authorities and bring the start of the known time frame significantly forward.
(there might be enough information in this post for the perpetrator to be identified - if you do, please keep it to yourself)
Then one day the Toronto Transit Commission police thought I was re-using someone elses streetcar fare because of how old it was. I just prefer the streetcar to subways, so I took a longer route. As soon as I pulled out my phone with my location tracking they believed me. I didn't even have to resort to mentioning that I used to work for the TTC as a coop student.
I'm not saying I absolutely love all this surveillance-lite stuff, but in an honest breakdown of the tradeoffs for law abiding people living in real democracies or other trustworthy states I fail to see a huge downside at the present time.
Small "crimes" like stealing streetcar fare are sought out not because of the crime itself but because the more contact points people have with police the more people are arrested. There is probably an overlap of people who steal streetcar fare and people who are harboring small amounts of narcotics etc etc.
Just like in America we're pulled over on the road for the most benign things just so there's contact with the police, which leads to a higher rate of convictions.
I was doing self-checkout at Walmart and the dumb machine thought I stole something I had already scanned, lo and behold an officer appears out of the shadows with a general attitude at me as if I was trying to pull off the grand-heist of stealing GREEN ONIONS.
I personally think law-abiding people have a right to limited contact with police.
Thank you to the other commenter for pointing out the banality of the "crime".
headline: "Google tracked his bike ride past a burglarized home. That made him a suspect."
HN discussion about it (March 7, 2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22511637
I created a S60 python script that kept scanning Bluetooth mac addresses and link them with the cell tower I was connected to (no GPS yet on mobiles).Then later processed the logs to see if I encountered the same people in different locations and times.
And yes, I re-encountered a bunch of Bluetooth mac addresses in different locations. For me it was fascinating at that time :)
> Using the console's background connectivity, a Nintendo 3DS in Sleep Mode can automatically discover other Nintendo 3DS systems within range, establish a connection, and exchange content for mutually played games, all transparently and without requiring any user input.
> For example, in Rhythm Heaven Megamix, if the user passes by someone with the same software, they will take on a figure-fighting duel challenge.
There was a puzzle one where you got a random starting piece, and you could copy one piece from each person you passed that they owned. Sometimes you'd go past someone with the entire puzzle, sometimes you'd already have all the pieces someone else did (which is kind of fun in its own right).
I miss that there's nothing like that on Switch, but it was not great for the battery life.
(actually, on the original DS there was a game called The World Ends With You that implemented this feature at the game level, too. OS-level is a big improvement, but it was still neat there, especially since it gave you a bonus even for passing DSes that didn't hvae the game running)
This was before the Iphone was launched IIRC and I think it only worked with the Nokia N series.
It'll scan for bluetooth trackers in the background (and airpods and iphones) and can give you a per-device history.
On the surface, this article is cute. After that it's a red flag for all of us.
I think the long-term answer is to have agents that work for you. Maybe a personal AI?
Finally, per "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" (and others) these minor privacy infringements add up and is used against us.
There's no such thing as no threat.
Also, how come 2 people be so ok with Google having all their location history? There are only two reasons why someone leaves that function enabled:
A) they are Google employees B) totally ignorant to the fact that Google tracks them
How can you infer that? She clearly had access to his location history, it's extremely unlikely that it happened without his consent. This is rather a vibe of two enthusiastic geeks being genuinely curious about analyzing some cool data about themselves, rather than anyone being "overly attached". We can't tell for sure without more details about their relationship, which isn't our business at all, so talking about "big red flags" feels really wrong and paternalistic (which in fact sounds like a big red flag :P).
> Also, how come 2 people be so ok with Google having all their location history?
That's a valid question though.
I do have my location history activated, and so does lots of people around me. I'm neither a Google employee nor am I ignorant that Google tracks me both physically and digitally.
But being able to have a timeline of where I am at times have been both helpful and interesting, so I'm willing to trade that data for the functionality I receive for it.
If you do know of a better solution that gives me the same data but is not Google, please feel free to share it. I haven't found anything like that that completely abuses my battery at the same time and also guarantees to not sell my data.
What? Why? Both parties seemed happy with it and it seems like a cute thought experiment to me.
Believe me, I care far more than google in my ability to know where I was on April 24 2016.
I've personally found Google's location history to be a net positive for me. From places I've been whose precise addresses I can't remember (e.g. distant family events), to tracking hospital, doctor visits.
I've even used it as a proxy for timesheets when I used to work from an office on weeks where I wouldn't have recorded my activities well (like which client I visited, how long I took lunch, etc).
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/arc-app-location-activity/id10...
It always took practice to be good at this, but apps made a lot of people lazy so I'm not sure about trends.
It was really easy to download flyby exports for any activity and do analysis.
I had a script downloading my Strava recordings of my commute and the associated fly-by data and was easily able to figure out all of the people I was seeing on the way to/from work. Since it linked to the activities and included profile pictures and names, you could easily figure out a lot.
If I remember correctly, you could still see fly-bys of other peoples' rides even if your own was private or followers-only.
It was a pretty massive oversight for a company like Strava - and a bit of an eye opener for me about what kind of data I might be leaking by making "harmless" activities like riding my bike into public data.
41.25 near-misses, until The Answer was the crossing that wasn't a miss: 42
It was absolutely fantastic. Just tremendous. Think it played in New York, Dallas and New York at a minimum.
Then we can decide to share histories and see when we ever overlapped or were near each other. For instance - I became close friends with someone this summer but it turns out we were both at the same events across the USA about 8 years ago. It made me wonder where else we had both been and hadn’t really spoken to each other.
I’ve also wanted this to be a live feature as well where you can opt in to share your location and be like, “hey, Jim is just a block away. What a coincidence! Jim is usually 1500 miles from you.” As a way to run into friends you haven’t seen in a while.
Another instance is that I had lost touch with a friend from years back. We had both lived in Seattle for years. I eventually moved to SF and was at an event. I stepped outside a few times to get air and on one of the times I did - I saw this old friend walk by on the street (it’s almost midnight - he was going to go home to sleep with someone). I call out his name and he’s in shock and awe. We decide to hang out for 30 minutes and decided that this was the sign we needed to reconnect.
That happened about 5 years ago and we’ve been very close ever since.
Sometimes I feel like these kinds of things would be cool to have. Or to do a prospectus and see a year ago - “oh interesting - that guy I gave a ride to five years ago was at the same restaurant as me… Huh - I wonder why we didn’t see each other?” The world is much smaller than we realize. I’ve run into people in small rural parking lots of grocery stores in random countries 8,000 miles away from where we both had known each other without any coordination. If I had been even 10s later in my actions - I would’ve never seen them sometimes.
I have a lot of stories like this. Timing is everything!!
The README includes an example of calculating songs you often listen to while walking/driving/using public transit (by combining Google Maps and Spotify data).
After we met, it was clear that we had been frequenting the same bars for about three years, and had attended many shows together/apart, but neither of us had any recollection of recognizing each other at any prior point. The shows were significant acts (for example, an ear bleedingly loud Bob Mould at the Green Parrot in Neptune NJ) that had to be the same show, could not possibly have been a different weekend with some common local band.
But there you have it. No contact until she noticed me sitting at the bar watching a live band at a worn out dive bar/night club, and wanted to know what my T-shirt said. She was drunk. She was adorable. I was smitten.
Building the relationships between two objects is, by far, the most difficult part of the tracking problem. And, this source code definitely does and interesting job to measuring… something. That “something” seems like a worthy metric to look into.
Jerr Thorpe had an app that gave you your power back and tracked your phone info in a way you could have yourself for awhile but it became abandonware and started eating battery life so I took it off my phone. OpenPaths, that was it's name. https://www.jerthorp.com/openpaths
It's an R Markdown notebook. I've been finding these to be a nice evolution on the literate programming concept. I also noticed the author has been responding in this thread but her account seems to have been immediately shadowbanned upon creation, seems to be a common issue recently.
This is very sweet. I hope by the time I get married I'm this good at coding, so I too could see all the times my husband almost met me! By then there might be cameras with years of accessible history scattered around the city.
A similar one I'd love to know is what's the furthest apart I've seen the same bird?
Years ago I boarded an almost empty plane from my country to a country where I had just started to live. The crew let a printed list of the passengers on one of the seats, I took the list and stored it somewhere. Flash forward few years later: I had met a lot of people in that country, inclusive from my own country. And one day, I rediscovered that boarding list I had totally forgotten about, just to find out that I had ended up knowing one of the persons on it.
How I used my new boyfriends tracking location to realize he spends almost all of his free time in one of our local gentlemen clubs!
It is a fun exercise though and pretty cute to do.
Thanks but no thanks
Or looking at your phone...