As AMT's largest requester for the past 10 years, this news was relayed to requesters at the same time as respondents. It's also worth noting that our lead contact, the Sr Program Manager at AWS leading AMT, transitioned to Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker Model Evaluations a ~2-3 years ago.. Leaving behind essential zero team managing the project after they migrated over the stored value accounts to native AWS billing.
Initially the annotation of biomedical literature (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25592589/) but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space
My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals, their commission algorithm would round down to the nearest whole cent when their 20% commission resulted in a fractional cent on the unit transaction level, not the monthly invoice level. Was ultimately worth it to have implemented https://git.generalresearch.com/panels/amt-jb/tree/jb/flow/a...
> Initially the annotation of biomedical literature but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space.
Reading this is similar to how I feel when I've asked Claude about something it coded for me. As with Claude, I think I get it after reading it three times; you guys were a middleman that provided a simplified interface for Mechanical Turk?
> My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals, their commission algorithm would round down to the nearest whole cent when their 20% commission resulted in a fractional cent on the unit transaction level, not the monthly invoice level.
Amazon took 20% of all workers earnings for doing essentially nothing for years and years.. of course I take great joy in giving AWS as little money as possible.
Buyer A is presented with the following rate card:
< 10min targeting gen pop: $3
10 <= 15min targeting gen pop: $5
Of course they'll bid saying their 14 min survey only takes 9 min to complete. Buyers try to cheat pricing strategies of exchanges just as much as respondents try to cheat buyers on survey platforms. Both parties can't be trusted and have adverse incentives.
“ General Research combines coordinated operations to identify and neutralize foreign actors using technological advancements, international covert operations, and networking analysis as an Internet Service Provider.”
> Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation; our customers demand the best tools and security for reaching global audiences and securing respondent reliability at any scale.
> General Research Laboratories, LLC (“GRL”) is an aggregator of market research surveys in multiple marketplaces for business customers. GRL does not typically host consumer surveys which are conducted by other consumer-facing organizations....
So, just a middleman to give you fake/shady at best survey responses to pad your numbers, so big enterprises/concultancies can have data that say whatever they want. The rest of the website is just BS
Finally you get it. Only exception is that we run our own exchange now to do task bidding so we don’t need to deal exclusively with other companies to middleman. Core business is what’s called yield management (akin to DSP in adtech) where the best survey (is the user qualified for it, does it have the best pay, etc) is selected for traffic in <100ms. I’d only argue the shady companies are the ones paying proxies (like cint.com) and pushing paid user acquisition instead of surveys. We actively fund ontology development for better profiling targeting. but yes, big enterprises/consultancies can use and interpret the collected data however they want, not our responsibility and we have no legal rights over it anyway
It should be a bipartisan issue that a Swedish company is paying a UAE Residential Proxy company [1] to build tools that allow people from anywhere in the world to take US political polls that are used by both parties to collect election data.
Just for starters, you can't even think about soliciting online work from a panel without a robust residential proxy detection methods. We had to build our own:
Polling data isn't some guaranteed right or something. If you ask the Internet questions and then sell the collated answers, it's your job to authenticate the responses or your polls will be wildly wrong and people will stop buying them.
Which is already the case and nobody but a bunch of campaign contractors who can't justify their do nothing jobs anymore cares.
Obviously, a problem not even fully addressed by L2’s datasets. Sure, but the use of proxies to masquerade the identity of users being sold to researcher buyers that paid for a different service is fraud
Users/respondents lie, and many buyers/researchers are neo-luddites; most C level still come from the telemarketing days. A fun example: mobile targeting is terrible when off wifi because all survey platforms uniq identify users based off their IPv4, so any T-Mobile LTE users in the same city going through the same CGNAT often share profiling data that ends up conflicting, which ends up meaning they don't get sent into the best survey(s). The issue is even worse in heavy IPv6 countries like India+France.
Yes. Much better to leave these decisions to the Dear Leader who is infinitely wise and cannot be misled. Or to the People's Central Planning Committee, where they decide all the allocations and strip rich people's wealth if they aren't on board with the correct ideology. Such systems are non-broken and have yielded unmeasurable prosperity throughout the world wherever implemented.
> My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals,
That is hilarious! Was it a semi-random discovery due to interaction with the system and people, or did you intentionally looked to game the algorithm?
Do you know how much inn-n-out you can buy when saving ~$50 a day and still be in the positive! It came out of building our own ledger system and abandoning any Decimal or float operations early on.. then it sparks "I wonder how they do it and if it's correct??"
We had last bought 24TB+ (4x 24 racks, and some miscellaneous) of DDR5 4800 and 6400 last year while finishing a move off of AWS entirely. I tried to be responsible and prioritize a cold and warm spares of all our equipment and over allocation to ensure proper redundancy capacity. At the time it was a hard pill to swallow looking at our budget; but a few months ago we've started to offload some DIMMs on various channels. What went from a cost analysis between a cloud provider, to having to manage transit, circuits, equipment, a IP blocks, etc etc and all the operational obligations that come with it.. it ultimately covering our hosting costs entirely for the next ~18months *at least* (while "only" coming at the cost of having slightly less cold spares sitting in the bottom of our cages).
Given we're all 9004/9005 now, and that (from what I understand) Venice will support 6400. Will hopefully buy back in a glut comes ready for the next bubble. It's been wild, I even posted a small 32GB DDR5-4800 that was not getting recognized for $100 on eBay and it was literally purchased within ~15min of being live.
While we're completely at the mercy of datacenters that we can colo out racks / power / upstreams from, it's a worthy discussion for any technology company that wants some amount of digital sovereignty over their presence online and ability to provide their service independent of a hypervisor / cloud provider (or even just a centralized location).
The best option is simply to anycast from any many distinct countries that are either neutral, or unlikely to be involved with any global or regional conflicts at any given time. You don't want them getting bombed at the same time!
Assuming this is real, I can't help but think this could push Apple to accelerate their reduction on Chinese production. Is there any other realistic way this could have leaked other than through a Chinese backdoor?
Are these being made at Quanta or Foxconn? Since the start of the war, there has been a massive increase in sanction evasion through China and Central Asia. I would have to assume Valentin used a connection that has formed over the past 2 years in order to get a North American SKU as Russia's richest YouTube blogger
Technical and Demographic user metrics are federated across the platform (we supply tasks to other labor markets online, essentially where bots and farms typically attack) so we leverage priors and shared similarity weights. Behavioral user metrics aren’t the only way to evaluate a respondent
Entered Russia 3/15 right before they closed the borders, with my tourist stay expiring on 9/15 (and visa expiring on 10/31). On 4/18 a presidential decree auto extended everything, and another extension every 3 months. So with auto visa situation, and the weekly flights back home to JFK just incase, it's been a perfect situation..
The weworks in Moscow are amazing, and everyone is following health guidelines very well. Definitely not in a rush to head home, or at least keep riding it out here
Are you flying to JFK from Moscow and back every week to be able to work remotely from Russia? That is at least $600 for a round-trip and about 20 hours sitting on a plane excluding time spent at the airports.
I think they're saying they're happy there is a weekly flight Moscow to JFK just incase they need to get out of dodge, rather then actually flying weekly
No, I simply meant that a regularly scheduled direct flight to get back home is comforting. Additionally, that wouldn't be possible at the moment as US tourists can't enter Russia
Hi – I'm Max from the article (long haired guy). Happy to answer any questions about what's changed since 2014...
Michael Solomon [1] still my agent, and 10x has stood by me throughout my career. While I've stopped doing consulting work for others through 10x, they still support my contracts related to art and speaking arrangements. I can't speak highly enough of how much they've done for me.
I stopped doing contract work not because of 10x, but simply grew tired of working on, and fixing other people's problems. They were completely accepting and supportive of me to head out and build my own company (since 2017). I know their rooster of talent has grown significantly since then, and I would still highly recommend companies use them to get amazing talent onboarded without any hassle.
[1] While you're looking into 10x, don't forget to check out the nonprofit he started https://www.musiciansoncall.org which brings live music into hospitals!
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