Oh interesting-- Yeah gaming the recommendation/search algorithms is another, related explanation. Like I know someone with an Etsy store who says that various things, like running out of stock or putting your store in “vacation mode” will hurt your store’s visibility, so people find ways to game it. Totally makes sense that the same kind of thing would be going on on Amazon.

Weird that they’d allocate ad spend at the same time that they were out of stock, but like I said, the algorithms are pretty coarse and probably just not that coordinated.

There’s more than one article about this?!

At least this one actually calls out the fact that this is a nothing story.

Lots of vendors set their prices algorithmically… So like when competitors raise their prices or demand seems high for some reason or something, the price will auto-adjust to theoretically maximize profits. The algorithms are often pretty dumb.

So sometimes when you see something like this, you’re witnessing a dynamic pricing algorithm spiraling out of control because it wasn’t implemented very well, and nobody’s paying attention.

Mom can we have Linux?

No

sudo Mom can we have Linux?

But is he rewriting in Rust?

My comment isn’t anti-corporate or anti-work though…? It just isn’t that strange that Google is more efficient at generating revenue (as dollars-per-kWh) than Finland is.

If your efficiency function is centered around revenue, then yeah, of course… No surprise that one of the world’s most successful for-profit companies generates more profit per watt-hour than a nation, which encompasses all sorts of non-revenue-generating activity like running hospitals and keeping street lights on.

Great example. Yeah, I’ve had to educate family members about deepfakes because they didn’t even know that they were possible. This was on the back of some statement like “the only way to know for sure is to see video.” Uh… Sorry fam, I have some bad news…

Great summary 👏 I definitely have some cached thoughts about that era, but didn’t remember it that clearly. That WP page with the actual PowerPoint slides is wild.

Damn that was an awesome watch. Came for the meme, stayed for the 40 minute documentary.

And it almost certainly will. Perhaps has already.

Exactly-- They’re two sides of the same coin. Being convinced by something that isn’t real is one type of error, but refusing to be convinced by something that is real is just as much of an error.

Some people are going to fall for just about everything. Others are going to be so apprehensive about falling for something that they never believe anything. I’m genuinely not sure which is worse.

Lol dammit, I knew that asking about a term that I hadn’t heard before would out me as completely illiterate. Caught me 😏

Anyway I dug a little more and made an edit above, if you’re interested.

This is going to get soooo much more treacherous as this becomes ubiquitous and harder to detect. Apply the same pattern, but instead of wood carvings, it’s an election, or sexual misconduct trial, or war.

Our ability to make sense of things that we don’t witness personally is already in bad shape, and it’s about to get significantly worse. We aren’t even sure how bad it is right now.

I did not know that. I believe you, but that seems like a pretty strange word to use. I couldn’t find any references to it online, either… I wonder if it’s colloquial.

EDIT: I did manage to find some references to the phrase with a little more digging. I wasn’t getting far with “anger” or “in anger,” but the phrase “fire in anger” started leading to some interesting results.

Dictionaries - MW and Dictionary.com don’t contain the phrase “fire in anger” or “in anger,” and their entries for “anger” don’t support this usage. Oxford has an entry for “in anger,” which just means “when angry.”

Cambridge Dictionary’s entry for “anger” doesn’t support this use either, but it does contain the phrase “in anger” per se, which notes that the phrase is a) primarily in UK English, and b) is considered an idiom… i.e. not an ordinary use of the word “anger.” Interestingly, it doesn’t mention the military context, and uses examples (mostly) unrelated to warfighting.

Wiktionary contains “fire in anger” (but not “in anger”). It’s described as a military idiom consistent with the usage in OP’s article. It doesn’t suggest usage outside of that context.

Etymology - I can’t find any compelling etymology of “fire in anger” or Cambridge’s idiomatic sense of “in anger,” and the etymology of the word “anger” itself (“grief, sorrow,” cognate with words in other languages for “regret”) doesn’t really help. I have my guesses, but who knows?

Conclusion - It seems to be chiefly British, largely but not exclusively used in a military context, and it’s not so ubiquitous as to be represented in most dictionaries. Definitely exists as a phrase though, and perhaps in some circles, it’s very common. TIL.

“In anger?”

I mean… The CEO was forced out after the disaster.

Oh well as long as it’s their legitimate interest, then by all means!

Yeah lol it’s almost always ironic-- “You do this thing for some normal reason. I do it for a weird reason that may reveal a salient character flaw.”

If somebody did use it to actually self-elevate or gatekeep, that would be pretty cringe. But almost all of the usage I see is ironic.

That’s the best! I hardly ever downvote just cause I disagree-- Most of my downvotes are because I think someone is being mean or antagonistic.