By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026Leek argues (persuasively) that this isn't because recommenders are good at "knowing your taste" - rather, they are good at "narrowing the menu." 55/ 1585
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026Leek relates this to her work on creating LLM "personas" - synthetic populations meant to mimic the tastes and proclivities of real groups of people, that you can interrogate "before you spend money asking actual humans." 56/ 2320
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026While this would be useful for many applications, "it fails in exactly the way this whole essay is about." 57/ 1340
Alex MacLaren @alexmaclaren.bsky.social · 13/08/2026My doctor, signing me up for an IBD study yesterday, told me of the “digital twins” - algorithmic ’populations’ from which general computed predictions could be made about an *actual* population. My brain twitched, for the reasons in this thread 2111
