rem

@rem

← but some part is blaring and perfect →

i'm ian, i've got music in my pores—but i love reading, tinkering, and experimenting pretty holistically: a mile across, but only a few inches deep in places. you probably have got an adequate intuition for that if you're here

@ıI||||||Iı#ıI||||||Iı@ıI||||||Iı#ıI||||||Iı@ıI||||||Iı

(abridged) list of current projects:

🎼 ⇒ final revisions, electronica LP
🀄 ⇒ svg timeline, china's dynastic history
♟ ⇒ mixed media video essay, chess history

#ıI||||||Iı@ıI||||||Iı#ıI||||||Iı@ıI||||||Iı#ıI||||||Iı@

learning chinese ⇒ 🀄 ⇒ @cidian
〃to be a person ⇒ 🦒 ⇒ @aquamanile

✨X≡¤≈∶∓⹀)⁄⁏;-ɐ±‥≁ɚ×—≡¤≈∶⹀⁏|∣-♯‥≁ɚ×✨

🧿🏡🧿 ⇒ https://ianremsen.nand.sh
🎶🎼🎛 ⇒ https://audio.com/ia.remsen
🔡🗨🔡 ⇒ @​iar:matrix.org
🐘⚗🐘 ⇒ @ian@​cathode.church
🐘🎹🐘 ⇒ @ian@​musicians.today

last.fm listening

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rem
@rem
tiffbun
@tiffbun
morayati
@morayati

I saw RealPage's crappy rent-jacking-up software so you don't have to; or: the banality of algorithms and landlords

I was impressed by most of this article in Curbed, which did some actual reporting on the discrepancy between landlords saying rents in New York City were surging "because people came flooding back" and the fact that, according to all data, people did not actually come flooding back. The reporting goes to impressive shoe-leather lengths -- the author even contacts the New York City Water Board for clarification on how much waste they processed in 2021! Then comes the end, which identifies the culprit as The Algorithm -- specifically, that of RealPage, a Texas-based "property management software" company that sells software-as-a-service to computerize the process of landlords doing landlord shit -- and leaves it there. This section of the article contains a lot of "it's hard to know who all their customers are" and "if this happened, it could do this" speculation, but few specifics. Naturally, I wanted to know more.

RealPage's online training (source: RealPage's training video for AI Revenue Management, 2022; it just gets more infuriating from here, folks)

tiffbun
@tiffbun
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in reply to @morayati's post:

NireBryce
@NireBryce

so my takeaway here is that the AI just tells people what the hiring market will bear in terms of rents and then sets that, and the entire actual reason anyone uses it is it gets around price fixing laws by having a middleman ML fall guy instead of just having investment-landlord conference calls like they did pre-2005.

it's good reporting, I just wish any of the "AI" stuff actually used ML instead of like, here's the ML as the data massage equivalent of p-hacking, and a frontend for it that obscures what you're actually doing, since people who work for investment landlords usually aren't in a position to ask many questions mostly out of ignorance'

but it makes sense, actual applications would take work and lying to people is easy as long as the product delivers what it claims

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widr
@widr

i think it's because that's the only kind of "AI" that actually bears consistent fruit: simmer the sauce down until you've found the key statistics and then just do a normal analysis on that. ML is almost always just an agonizing roundabout way to pay several people a huge chunk of change to come up with something that comes to mostly the same conclusion but is influenced by the wrong signals by 10%

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

the problem with ML is mostly that it has to make money for investors, so it keeps chasing general purpose applications for the free marketing, but the only place it's actually useful is as like... your in-house data analysis team makes a Bespoke Categorization and Flagging Engine for whatever data you're dealing with, and you treat it like a living machine (like you would a steam engine or Connections Museum telephone rack) instead of some un-tweakable black box you bought from the store. But that's still a few developer-graduating-classes off

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widr
@widr

yeah. and it honestly seems to me like most of the cases where ML would actually be more profitable than an alternative are when it is incorporating associated feedback that it shouldn't (i.e., being racist), and the promotional kicker is that it's plausibly deniable that you meant to do that

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morayati
@morayati

worth noting that (I am not a lawyer, but) the "AI" stuff seems pretty tangential to the lawsuits -- the basic idea is that the more market share the company gains, and thus the more data about clients' rents it has and the more of them using that data in turn to set their own rents, the more it becomes potential indirect price setting

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pieartsy
@pieartsy

I mean you yourself acknowledge that previous journalism pieces did a lot of thorough work but not all of it, yeah? and you built on their research. you could apply that compliment to your own piece (which does a lot of thorough work!) and let others build on its gaps when they see it :3

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