George: God will never let me be happy and successful. He'll kill me but not let me be rich and happy.
therapist: I thought you didnt believe in god.
George: I do, for the bad things!
Monday, May 29, 2006
Sunday, May 21, 2006
web browsing and counter-intuitive strategies
counter-intuitive strategies are a pretty powerful concept. sometimes situations demand doing the exact oppposite of what would otherwise appear to be an insane option.
heres a case study with web browsing. suppose you wanted ad-free and popup-free browsing, but still want the infotainment you want from the web. the intuitive option is to confine yourself to a whitelist of safe websites that do not have aggressive and annoying ad-strategies. well, it turns out the way web economics works is not entirely amenable to this strategy. most websites make their revenues primarily off of ads and thus its suboptimal for you as a consumer to wait for nice websites to offer content of your choice (google is an exception..)
now.. suppose you had an option like Firefox's Adblock plugin. the intuitive option is to go browse the websites of your choice and then block annoying content from these. now turns out that websites and ad-strategies evolve, so your coverage over ads is often incomplete. the counter-intuitive option is to spend some time on absolutely annoying websites which have a lot of ads. of course you may not be interested in the content of the websites, what you are really interested is in the gamut of ads and adversarial strategies that are out there. this grants you much more efficient and much quicker coverage over the space of ad-strategies employed out there. chances are if you visit one of these annoying sites, they ae likely employ a much greater diversity of tools, ad-referrers, banners etc.
gist of the whole rant: to get faster coverage over a blacklist, visit arbit websites aggresssively :-)
heres a case study with web browsing. suppose you wanted ad-free and popup-free browsing, but still want the infotainment you want from the web. the intuitive option is to confine yourself to a whitelist of safe websites that do not have aggressive and annoying ad-strategies. well, it turns out the way web economics works is not entirely amenable to this strategy. most websites make their revenues primarily off of ads and thus its suboptimal for you as a consumer to wait for nice websites to offer content of your choice (google is an exception..)
now.. suppose you had an option like Firefox's Adblock plugin. the intuitive option is to go browse the websites of your choice and then block annoying content from these. now turns out that websites and ad-strategies evolve, so your coverage over ads is often incomplete. the counter-intuitive option is to spend some time on absolutely annoying websites which have a lot of ads. of course you may not be interested in the content of the websites, what you are really interested is in the gamut of ads and adversarial strategies that are out there. this grants you much more efficient and much quicker coverage over the space of ad-strategies employed out there. chances are if you visit one of these annoying sites, they ae likely employ a much greater diversity of tools, ad-referrers, banners etc.
gist of the whole rant: to get faster coverage over a blacklist, visit arbit websites aggresssively :-)
Friday, May 19, 2006
kaif..
Heres a toast for the strokeless wonder, the fielding captain, that has been haunting indian cricket for quite a long time now:
The Strokeless, Baffled, Confused, Mysterious, Lucky, Troubled, Haunted, Stupid, Enigmatic Untalented Mr. Kaif.
The batsman most likely to get out LBW in world cricket. the perfect sitting duck for bowlers around the world.
The guy with the worst technique against any form of bowling.
The guy with the worst pull shot that does not even cross the 15 yard fielding restriction circle, but still fancies a go at anything short.
from Taxi 9211:
"Tendulkar banneka; Kaif nahi banneka"
The Strokeless, Baffled, Confused, Mysterious, Lucky, Troubled, Haunted, Stupid, Enigmatic Untalented Mr. Kaif.
The batsman most likely to get out LBW in world cricket. the perfect sitting duck for bowlers around the world.
The guy with the worst technique against any form of bowling.
The guy with the worst pull shot that does not even cross the 15 yard fielding restriction circle, but still fancies a go at anything short.
from Taxi 9211:
"Tendulkar banneka; Kaif nahi banneka"
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
ost in transation
my aptop keyboard has suddeny decided to screw me and doesnt seem to ike the etter "" anymore. as you can obviousy see i am severey handicapped by the ack of a rather usefu aphabetica feature, the abiity to type a "".
ife is beautifuy sucky.
ife is beautifuy sucky.
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