I scraped 1.94M Airbnb photos for opium dens, pet cameos, and messy kitchens (opens in new tab)

Am I missing something other commenters are seeing about this not being an ad? The domain is on Burla, which hosted the compute needed for this. There's a giant airbnb x burla logo at the top. People are saying there's a lawsuit pending, it's against guidelines, what's the point, etc..

It's content marketing plain and simple for Burla towards people that view this site. It was highly likely done by employees at both Burla and AirBNB together as a joint project.

I'm struggling a bit with how the 'funniest' ranked reviews are genuine descriptions of people's miserable (and sometimes unsafe) experiences. Where's the funny?

As an experitisement, I guess it gets the name out there but not in any way I'd want for my business.

What a waste of energy (money/resources)... Scraping and AI-scanning 2 million photos to identify animals in the advertisement pictures? What's the point.

As an exercise a sample of 1000 photos would've been enough. As a database, knowing a listing has a cat in the picture or a funny review doesn't offer any real value.

I wonder what the footprint is of such an exercise.

“Drug den vibes” and they’re mostly just small rooms?

This thing is ripe for a lawsuit and has terrible methodology as far as I can tell.

This seems like an advertisement for an open source package

>Scale Python across 1,000 CPUs or GPUs in 1 second. Burla is a high-performance parallel processing library with an extremely fast developer experience. Scale batch processing, vector embeddings, inference, or build pipelines with dynamic hardware.

Edit: Author comment was flagged dead. They work at burla which is a managed cloud service for parallelizing python

"Looking at every public Airbnb listing in Inside Airbnb's open data dump, all at once, on Burla"

This Inside Airbnb?

Community Guidelines

Please:

Only take the data you need. Do not scrape data from the site, if you would like to subscribe to the data directly, please email data@insideairbnb.com

Airbnb was actually started by two guys who created an opium den for Obama's convention so this doesn't surprise me.

The author makes some pretty insane leaps in logic for classification, and it’s apparent in the photos.

“Drug-Den vibes” apparently means the owner is poor or a photo is obscured or badly lit.

These are amazing! Some are probably offensive, because I saw a cozy, if kitschy, British den labeled as "did-someone-just-leave" vibes which... unfair.

This vanity scraping is fucking up the internet for everyone else.

It's hardly the only thing, but it's part of the problem.

Ah yes, let's price the world out of the real estate market and then use insanely powerful AI models to systematically mock the living conditions of the poors.

This is pretty great, the reviews at the bottom are the best part. I'm impressed they were able to scrape so much data