I’ve recently gotten into collecting pocket knives. Most knife makers are pretty staunchly right-wing, so my Amazon and YouTube recommendations are also loaded with drivel like this. It’s frustrating that even innocuous items like these are politicized everywhere.
I got into ham radio. I have to be careful to not click on videos by preppers lol.
Just FYI, you can easily delete videos from your YouTube watch history, and then you will no longer get recommendations based on the videos you deleted.
Open in private windows. If you want to learn about wood gasifiers, about half of those videos are made by right-wingers.
I’m a gun nut and I almost never get right-wing crap on YouTube. I’ve said this several times, and usually get downvoted, but I honestly don’t understand it. Maybe I’ve been on YouTube so long they get me?
OTOH, I started looking at survival videos and could have fallen down a rabbit-hole of crazy.
YouTube isn’t as bad as Amazon is, in my experience. On YouTube, I’ll get recommendations mostly from self-defense “gurus” with their thin blue line flags in the background. But Amazon is a lot more aggressive, and will give me recommendations a lot more like OP’s, with links to conservative TV shows, books written by FOX hosts, shitty screen print 'murrican tee shirts, etc.
Amazon uses an offline item to item comparison table. Every so often it will collect all items viewed or bought by people who bought this product to make a table of what to recommend. If an item is added right before this information is pulled, it’s likely to have a small sample size. This will then remain til the next update. So it’s possible this was based off only a handful of people making the results very skewed and that it hasn’t updated since.
Source: my professor who helped design Amazon’s algorithm
I hate to be that guy, but who is your prof?
I work at Amazon, and my understanding of how the teams and services that put together this kind of functionality for recommendations is that they’ll be updating this and testing against MANY variants in a given time to optimise where possible.
I’m not aiming to call you out, mainly curious, because right now unless your professor is an active employee at Amazon or a part of the scholar program the most this could be true is that they created one variant that was once used.
I won’t say their name because that would indirectly identify me but they left Amazon to teach a few years ago so this information could absolutely be outdated.
Hey, kinda unrelated but related…
I had an ant problem and read about mixing borax with flour and sugar to make a dough. Roll this dough in to little balls, about the size of a BB, and leave a bunch near the ant sources. They go crazy for the stuff and take it back to their nest. Except borax kills them in quick order. I was skeptical, but damn it if it didn’t work like a champ. Good luck… they can be resilient!
How do these two go together?
Rich enough for a garden? Old enough to care about it?
Try being angry at brown people!
Gassing this and that
Pest spray is the ooga booga method of pest control. GOP is the ooga booga party. High likelihood person with certain disposition finds their way towards ooga booga culture.
Why prevent the problem when I can just blast chemicals at it?
Ooh I may actually have anecdotal evidence as to why.
The pest control man was here yesterday and when I stepped outside to run an errand I could hear him listening to conservative talk radio over his phone speaker.
My theory is that a lot of these guys are right leaning, using Amazon’s streaming platform at work, and ordering supplies through Prime. So the algorithm took a gamble with you and lost.
Unrelated to the political shit - why are you trying to use an IGR (insect grown regulator) active ingredient to control ants when they are so easily controllable using traditional pesticides? IGR’s are quite useful in certain applications but ant control is rarely one of them. What kind of ants are you fighting?
Because these ants are not easily controlled using a traditional pesticide. In fact, before I got an actually entymologist involved, the problem got continually worse. The product the company I had contracted with was using an organic pesticide that would stress the colony, then cause the colony to bud and I’d have a bigger problem every few months. I’ve got a couple good friends who are researchers in integrated pest management. IPM in this context means interrupting the lifecycle, and for these ants, if I can even get a small dose to the queen(s), this will effectively render then them sterile. I’ve been battling this infestation for over two years. I’ve had samples identified from an actual ant-lab. I’m doing bait stations, not broadcast treatments. I used a similar approach to dealing with a pharaoh ant infestation in the past. That time they did thousands of dollars in damage to some parts of my electrical system.
I don’t use sprays or pesticides in any thing but the most extreme need, but sometimes its the right tool to use, I’m not the kind of luddite who isn’t isn’t going to use the appropriate tool for the job.
The AntAgonizer
TropicalDingDong about to go all The Naked Jungle out here.
Thank you, Mr. DingDong.
This person ants.
That’s a red flag for me. I’d probably consider a different product just for that.
It’s Amazon, there’s clearly no moral concerns as far as supporting bad companies goes in this case.
I just need some pyriproxyfen fam.
Borax works too, and won’t kill every other insect like pyriproxyfen will. Put a Terro ant bait on a trail or a mound, they’ll come take it and the colony will be gone within a few days
I’m going to be putting the pyriproxyfen in a terro bait, not doing a broad application.
I get a lot of that as well. Can’t remember exactly what, but I bet there’s more going on than just collating buying habits.
probably a good idea to avoid anything a right winger’s cooked …
I’ve bought tons of gun and tacticool gear off Amazon and have never seen anything like this. The recommendations are almost always a) something cool and related, or b), shit I’ve already bought so useless.
If it said “CNN” news rundown, would that be leftwing propaganda?
No, because that’s just corpo right-wing.
CNN got bought out by the right wing machine a year ago. Time to find a new bogeyman. Maybe you can do a rerun of GeOrGe sOrOs?
That’s because you have a lawn and you take care of it yourself.
Most lefties either live in the city and don’t have a lawn, or they’re rich enough to have a lawn care service.
Braindead take of the week right here
The person you are replying to is also a racist.
Also, if you’re shopping for fire ant killer, you’re for sure in the South. (Maybe I’m assuming this is for fire ants because I’m in the South. Probably projecting.)
Nope.
Because if you live in the city you never see ants, right?
You aren’t the one taking care of them in the city. That’s city maintenance or whoever
Thats…not how any of this works. Have you ever been to a city or are you too scared from propaganda?
Ants get into apartments and condos, too. They’re not just an “outside” insect.
That’s apartment maintenance then. Or a bit of borax. You wouldn’t buy an entire bag of any killer for it.
You’ve… never dealt with apartment maintenance, have you? It took them 6 months to fix my sliding screen door, which was broken when I moved in (large apartment complex). No way am I trusting them to handle pests in a timely fashion.
And I’d hardly call 4 single-ounce units excessive for an apartment.
