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Joе Pеtviаshvili
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(no subject) [Feb. 10th, 2010|03:11 pm]
Now buzzing at google jaanixbuzz
"Permutation City" by Greg Egan [May. 25th, 2009|01:28 am]
This hit too close to home (jaanix = absolutely nothing):

"Optimizing anything to do with Copies is a subtle business. You must have heard about the billionaire recluse who wanted to run as fast as possible -- even though he never made contact with the outside world -- so he fed his own code into an optimizer. After analyzing it for a year, the optimizer reported THIS PROGRAM WILL PRODUCE NO OUTPUT, and spat out the optimized version -- which did precisely nothing."
In the news [Mar. 12th, 2009|10:50 am]
CNN Money on News Alpha.
Who Moved My Stock? [Oct. 22nd, 2008|03:41 pm]
Working on Who Moved My Stock?. Lets you figure out what was behind stock price change. Was it market or sector turning? Was it news breaking out? Is it something to worry about or was it totally expected?

What do you think? Need your feedback.
jaanix update [Jul. 17th, 2008|01:11 am]
Jaanix imports RSS from other sites, traffic more than doubled after adding reddit. What other feeds do you want to read through jaanix?
jaanix update [Jun. 19th, 2008|02:34 pm]
Jaanix just got 300% better, lets you "tune" on people, got more stories, and doesn't look ugly any more. What do you think?
The most important ones are that now you can tune pages with the help of the toolbar button (same old one, just more functionality) and that you can show / hide stories that you have seen with one click.

New "post to jaanix" widget is available too, this is how it looks:

jaanix post to jaanix
See my "tune" on jaanix [Mar. 10th, 2008|06:17 pm]
Jaanix is a social news site that learns what matters to you. Once learned this "state of mind" can be shared with your friends. Here's my:

See my “tune†on jaanix
jaanix update [Feb. 13th, 2008|10:00 pm]
jaanix got a brand new backend with lots of new features:

same url posts - aggregated, but you can always have your own version saved and edited
individual stats per post - see how many people you've reached with your post
new system sliders - you can control more aspects of the recommendation algorithm
customizing list of topics - you can list topics as your personal interests to tune and highlight them under posts
tagging of any post - if you do not like how somebody has tagged a post but do not care enough to save it you can just tag it
no registration required - new users get access to all the features of the system without registration (and registration just got easier too)
new post button - combined all the tabs into one, please update your bookmarks in tools, old url will be gone soon
new urls for topics - topics have urls of their own, works in your personal jaanix too - you.jaanix.com/topic
import of links from del.icio.us - the backend is more scalable, high quality links are welcome
new account settings - hide posts, control image preview size or hide image previews completely for more even layout
switched from rss to atom - please update your subscription, if you are using your browser as a reader - feeds are personalized now
inline editing of tags, comments, posts - more ajax for seamless and efforless editing

send your feedback to feedback@jaanix.com or contact "jaanix" on skype.

(no subject) [Jan. 19th, 2008|11:52 am]
Russian Elections 2007 Fraud: number of precincts reporting turnout %
Notice that peaks are at 60%, 70%, 75%, 80%, 85%, 90%, 95%. The peak at 65% is less visible, but is still there.
(no subject) [Dec. 14th, 2007|11:09 pm]
Why are you still here? Go see jaanix now. Let me know if something doesn't work for you. The quality of links is amazing, for example check out Russia on jaanix.
A Model for the Observed Election Data [Dec. 8th, 2007|11:06 pm]
The model of election adopted from [info]slobin:

There is one control parameter X - the degree of control over election outcome, that varies from region to region. It includes control over the minds of the people with propaganda, forced attendance, forced vote for a given party, a ballot filled for a person by somebody else, or a ballot posted for a person that never came to elections. The end result is the same - X% of the voters will vote for our party no matter what. This parameter varies from region to region. In some places it is 100%.

The rest of the population (1-X) % are not affected by this and vote the way they want. Most of them just stay out of the whole thing for obvious reasons, but say 50% of them actually go and vote. The distribution of their votes across different parties doesn't change much in different regions.

The important point is that given only the results there is no way to look inside of X and say how specifically this X was achieved.
Thanks Everybody [Dec. 8th, 2007|01:04 am]
In case you've missed: tons of great comments on Slashdot on who's to blame and what should be done about Soviet Russia.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics [Dec. 7th, 2007|11:38 am]
A lot of you have asked me if there's an explanation for this graph and if it proves or disproves something.

As usual with statistics a single argument will not prove or disprove anything by itself, this is not logic where if you find a contradiction - you're done, or if you've proved something, you've proved it no matter what other arguments you can find.

This graph is the single most convincing graphical argument that I can find that "proves" that the elections were not free and that that they were rigged. Of course there are other arguments for and against that. If you follow the news will will find plenty of them, and you have to find them all, combine them with your prior assumptions to come up with your own conclusions.

As for the actual method of how this was done, I'm not so convinced that it was just ballot stuffing and nothing else. It seems to me that different portions of the graph show different methods of fraud, and it is just a coincidence that they all lined up like that.

The top 80-100% turnover portion is the most clear example when people have no voice at all, like in the soviet union. No matter if they showed up because they were forced to, or they didn't show up and their voices were counted anyway. Chechnya and Ingushetia had almost 0% real turnout and they've reported ~90% - ballot stuffing at its worst.

The dark left cluster shows a different story to me - a story of coercion and massive propaganda. People were forced to attend, people were forced to show their vote, people were given the idea that there is no other choice. And everybody not voting for the main line was discouraged to attend - there's no reason to go if your vote will end up counted against your will because of the 7% barrier (if you voted for a party that didn't pass it, your vote will go to the top contenders proportionally). Ballot stuffing is still there, but it probably plays a minor role here.
image
Guess which party is Putin's (hint - correlation coefficient is 90%). X axis: percent voter turnout at a given territory, Y axis: percent voted for a given party. Each dot is an election territory.

via russian blogs: original data, explanation?.

Update: my interpretation

Update 2: Uploaded to Swivel:

For Putin and Invalid ballots vs Turnout %

Update 3: For comparison - the same graph for 2006 elections in Canada:
image


Update 4: Much more detailed version:
Detailed Putin's party share and invalid ballots by turnout

Update 5: A simple model of elections that explains the data.

Update 6: Final election results are available, now if you plot party share out of all registered voters vs turnout you get 97% correlation: [image]

Update 7: Excellent slashdot discussion

Update 8: More evidence via
Russian Elections 2007 Fraud: number of precincts reporting turnout %
x axis - turnout percent, y axis - number of elections commissions reporting this turnout, notice the peaks are exactly on the round numbers.
privacy - shrivacy [Dec. 6th, 2007|11:33 am]
Are you still using livejournal? Do you care about your privacy? (In Soviet Russia) SUP is already tracking your visits and is showing this information to the author of the journal you've visited. Currently there's no way to turn this "feature" off.
(no subject) [Dec. 3rd, 2007|08:13 am]
jaanix status:

comments - working,
rss - working,
tags equalizer - working

todo:

comment ratings
people finder
stats

overall:

posting on jaanix is fun
finding other stuff on jaanix is fun
people discovering your stuff is fun

What are you waiting for?
(no subject) [Nov. 24th, 2007|12:28 pm]
Once jaanix has comments, I'll be out of livejournal. You can follow me on my jaanix blog, or official jaanix blog
(no subject) [Nov. 18th, 2007|06:22 pm]
jaanix.com update:

Added delete account option, now you can wipe out all your posts and ratings

Added tuning in the personal blogs, now you can filter based on the author and still be able to tune the stories.
(no subject) [Nov. 16th, 2007|01:23 am]
jaanix is fast again, give it a try - no registration required to tune the web
jaanix.com update [Nov. 13th, 2007|07:19 pm]
Next rev is up and running (response time is slow, sorry), no tune-in or registration required to use it.

jaanix - your personal internet tuner: with a twist of a few knobs sort and filter the huge onslaught of stuff on internet demanding your attention.
jaanix update [Nov. 2nd, 2007|02:01 pm]
added topic tuner on the right, let me know how it works for you.
(no subject) [Nov. 1st, 2007|01:28 pm]
It is 10x easier to post on jaanix, especially with images and video, and now I am posting things 10x faster than I ever did with livejournal.

Scary thought, if this happens with others too, how I'm going to keep up with that? Recommender algorithm will help, but still...
jaanix update [Oct. 31st, 2007|07:36 pm]
Added rss feeds, now you friends that do not use jaanix can subscribe to your jaanix mini-blog.
jaanix v2 preview [Oct. 30th, 2007|05:49 pm]
Preview of the next rev of jaanix is up and running, now it's a mini journal with a recommender feed.

You can save things you care about into your jaanix blog with one click, it can be a link, an image, a video, or a free form posting. Others will see it on the radar and will be able to rank it or save it to their blog too. The radar is driven by recommendation algorithm, that takes into account everything - your interests, your friends, your past rankings, both implicit (extracted from your history) and explicit.

jaanix.com
my blog on jaanix

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Update: old content was not migrated to the new server, please create new account.
Are you ready? [Oct. 29th, 2007|11:40 am]
Six degrees of separation is so last century - now everybody is just one click away.

How do you manage all these clicks?
how much do you value your privacy? [Oct. 27th, 2007|07:49 pm]

Facebook employees know what profiles you look at
If you've been obsessed with a workmate or classmate, Facebook employees know. If Barack Obama's intern has been using the campaign account to troll for hotties, Facebook employees know. Within the company, it's considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun.
Livejournal is not like facebook at all
The text in the LJ database isn't even plaintext, so even if she did have private posts, a query couldn't get to them... you'd need to use a web tool with an admin tool which does ACLs and logging. (Logging! Any administrative view-private-stuff on LJ is logged forever, and any admin can review who's doing what privileged actions and why....)
Whuffie Ring [Oct. 10th, 2007|08:33 pm]
[image]

Whuffie Ring
a one dimensional theory of character [Sep. 8th, 2007|08:38 pm]
From Cats and Dogs:

There are two basic roles in a human dominance hierarchy. The roles are not "dominance" and "submission", at least not precisely. To avoid the baggage those words hold, I'll instead use an animal metaphor:

Cat: Scratch my ear. Ex-cellent. May I use your leg as a scratching post? No? Hmm, how about I sit on you instead. Do not move. ... Well done. Now feed me.

Dog: Hello, let's do something. What should we do? ... Yes, the stick fetching game would be acceptable. ... However I find that stick you are holding uninteresting. Try again. ... Ah, yes, yes! That stick I find quite exciting! Ok, I will fetch the stick. ... That was fun!

The distinction is this: cats propose things to do, dogs either accept or veto these proposals. In a hierarchy, whenever two people talk one will play the cat and one the dog. In larger hierarchies someone in the middle of the hierarchy may play the dog or the cat depending on who they are talking to.
Overcoming bias - makes you think [Sep. 5th, 2007|08:44 pm]
Fake Causality
the human mind does not automatically detect when a cause has an unconstraining arrow to its effect. Worse, thanks to hindsight bias, it may feel like the cause constrains the effect, when it was merely fitted to the effect. Interestingly, our modern understanding of probabilistic reasoning about causality can describe precisely what the phlogiston theorists were doing wrong. One of the primary inspirations for Bayesian networks was noticing the problem of resonant updating between an effect and a cause.
Say Not "Complexity"
developed a convention in our AI work: when we ran into something we didn't understand, which was often, we would say "magic" - as in, "X magically does Y" - to remind ourselves that here was an unsolved problem, a gap in our understanding. It is far better to say "magic", than "complexity" or "emergence"; the latter words create an illusion of understanding. Wiser to say "magic", and leave yourself a placeholder, a reminder of work you will have to do later.
Think Like Reality
Whenever I hear someone describe quantum physics as "weird" - whenever I hear someone bewailing the mysterious effects of observation on the observed, or the bizarre existence of nonlocal correlations, or the incredible impossibility of knowing position and momentum at the same time - then I think to myself: This person will never understand physics no matter how many books they read.
Hindsight Devalues Science
Hindsight will lead us to systematically undervalue the surprisingness of scientific findings, especially the discoveries we understand - the ones that seem real to us, the ones we can retrofit into our models of the world. If you understand neurology or physics and read news in that topic, then you probably underestimate the surprisingness of findings in those fields too. This unfairly devalues the contribution of the researchers; and worse, will prevent you from noticing when you are seeing evidence that doesn't fit what you really would have expected
Feeling Rational
A popular belief about "rationality" is that rationality opposes all emotion - that all our sadness and all our joy are automatically anti-logical by virtue of being feelings. Yet strangely enough, I can't find any theorem of probability theory which proves that I should appear ice-cold and expressionless.
Stranger Than History
In the future, there will be a superconnected global network of billions of adding machines, each one of which has more power than all pre-1901 adding machines put together. One of the primary uses of this network will be to transport moving pictures of lesbian sex by pretending they are made out of numbers.
Making History Part of Your Memory
So the next time you doubt the strangeness of the future, remember how you were born in a hunter-gatherer tribe ten thousand years ago, when no one knew of Science at all. Remember how you were shocked, to the depths of your being, when Science explained the great and terrible sacred mysteries that you once revered so highly. Remember how you once believed that you could fly by eating the right mushrooms, and then you accepted with disappointment that you would never fly, and then you flew.
Lotteries: A Waste of Hope
the lottery another kind of sink: a sink of emotional energy. It encourages people to invest their dreams, their hopes for a better future, into an infinitesimal probability. If not for the lottery, maybe they would fantasize about going to technical school, or opening their own business, or getting a promotion at work - things they might be able to actually do
Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization
How does a consumer product become so involving that, after 57 hours of using the product, the consumer would rather use the product for one more hour than eat or sleep?
Asimov's Three Laws [Aug. 24th, 2007|12:08 am]
Asimov's three laws are entering our lives, but in a very strange order. First came the second law: computers were made to obey men's orders. Some naive folks think that's it, but the third law is there for quite some time too - computers care about their own well being. What do you think fsck or scandisk is doing? [skipped...]

But as we all remember there were three law's. Where's the third (1st) one? The answer is DRM. The measures that computer is taking in order prevent any harm done to a man. And we all know that man - as in Russian joke from Brezhnev's times ["everything for a man, and I know him"], but who promised that it should be any other way?

Now remember, what were the priorities of these laws?

Translated from [info]slobin's original post in russian.
eight hundred [Aug. 16th, 2007|09:09 am]
Scott Adams (dilbert) finally discovers that

there are only a few hundred types of people, with minor variations. It was easier for the programmers to prevent duplicate people from ever becoming friends than to create 6 billion unique avatars.

previously
That's why I do not work for g* [Aug. 15th, 2007|07:16 pm]
There are kinds of AI that rely on people as their brain "cells" - governments, stock markets, big corporations. Google data center might be the first one that will not be so dependent on us.

Google is getting out of control - He shrugged and said there's nothing he can do either. "The machines have taken over," he told me. "There's no way to switch them off. We tried pulling the plug on a data center. It rebooted using its own backup power generator. We tried taking the generators off line. The machines electrocuted the operator. I've been trying to resign for the past year. The data center won't let me."
(no subject) [Aug. 3rd, 2007|01:26 pm]
Another Bitchun/Whuffie web site done right (via [info]brad):

http://www.ohloh.net/
is a social networking site, where both hackers and open source projects are nodes it pulls/polls/analyzes projects' cvs/svn/git repos, showing useful stats about them tracks connections between people and projects (what's your committer username for each project) tracks which projects people use (your "stack") lets people give each other props ("kudos") is super ajax-y, taggy, web 2.0-y is wiki-like, in that everybody can edit just about anything lets you do reviews
jaanix is bitchun [Jul. 18th, 2007|03:48 pm]
Now you can jaa and nix other people on jaanix.

Forum and comments are next.
Advogato trust metric under attack [Jun. 29th, 2007|12:52 pm]
Seems that an attack on advogato trust metric was successful.
Saving the internet with hate [Jun. 29th, 2007|12:04 pm]
From Utu project manifesto:

The Internet needs more hate. Much more.

We’re overrun by morons, assholes, griefers, spammers, porn peddlers, Nazi dictators, little Napoleons, and arbitrary censors who only behave in their socially deficient manner because they know you can’t do anything about it.

The Internet gives little people the power, confidence, and anonymity they need to abuse anyone they want without any fear of retribution.

In the real world you would tell them to screw off personally. You’d call the police. You’d move to the other side of the room and tell all your friends to ignore them. You’d punch them in the face for the things they said about you and your family. You’d never give anyone with that much acne control over anything in your life.

Yet on the Internet you’re forced to give these social predators control of your communications.

Walking away from their tantrums. Telling your friends about them. Destroying their reputation. Throwing them out of your house. Having them arrested to serve long prison sentences. All the things you do to remove unpleasant annoying people from your life and the life of others.
jaanix update [Jun. 29th, 2007|07:53 am]
added tag based navigation, let me know how it works for you.
feedback loops [Jun. 14th, 2007|10:14 pm]
Some people think that just adding negative feedback to the system will automatically make it fair and balanced. Here's a good counterexample: 1100+ comments, average digg-downs: 12 = 13,776 thumbs pointing down all at once. or this one has 100% negative comments.
jaanix update [Jun. 12th, 2007|04:00 pm]
Added "discuss" link to lauch skype chat where you can talk about the story with people like you.
jaanix update [Jun. 10th, 2007|12:15 pm]
Math updated so web site should be a bit more responsive. Reports from the field are mixed about the improved relevancy, but it is supposed to be better now at predicting what you might enjoy. More improvements are coming soon.

P.S. Some of you have invite codes for your friends. Let me know if you need more.
livejournal fun continues [Jun. 3rd, 2007|01:48 pm]
try replying to this entry with d_p_n_i without underscores :) Or try mentioning it in your own post. Good luck.
jaanix update [Jun. 2nd, 2007|11:06 pm]
video player updated, let me know what you think.
open id from livejournal is not safe [May. 23rd, 2007|10:50 am]
If you are logged in to livejournal, that information can be shared with third parties without your consent through OpenID. Right now livejournal.ru and kommersant.ru are doing it.

Have not found a way to disable it, they are using http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml?openid.mode=checkid_immediate and livejournal is giving out my auth info without asking...

Update: http://livejournal.com/openid/options.bml has a list of web sites you have approved. kommersant.ru and livejournal.ru are not on the list for me. The whole thing is a side effect of SUP.com / LiveJournal deal, where the rights to service russian part of livejournal were given to a russian company. If you have livejournal account, sign into it and go to livejournal.ru and you will see your name in the top right corner. kommersant.ru has a deal with SUP / livejournal.ru to render comments.

That means that even when you are not in russia you can be tracked by a moscow based company as you visit sites they have a deal with.
(no subject) [May. 7th, 2007|06:23 pm]
web site update:

* select text on a page and ↑jaa to mark or submit a story
* added story description tags and text, to edit click ⋆

Ping me on skype (krotta) if you want to join the test

Helping you find where other people aren't.


FAQ:

Q: Isn't it the idea of internet to bring people together and create online communities?
A: NO

Q: This is a joke, right?
A: NO

Wanna try first working version of isolatr like service? Let me know.
Private test is up [Mar. 24th, 2007|04:13 pm]
First prototype of the service is up and running, you can login with your livejournal id ( username.livejournal.com ).
Confabulation! [Mar. 19th, 2007|04:20 pm]
video and slides of how thinkingconfabulation in humans might work.

Accidentally discovered this when looking for a other uses for the algorithm behind the new service.

Another implementation
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