One fun thing if you have kids is that the playground there has some demonstrations of Archimedean principles, like how an Archimedes screw works. Also, I don't keep many souvenirs of my travels, but I do have a refrigerator magnet of the Falkirk wheel that spins freely. It doubles as a cat toy.

> Google Maps shows you what the average person thinks is a good restaurant

I'm fairly sure this isn't true. At least, I still get (notably better) results searching while signed in. Couldn't tell you what the mechanism for that is these days, though. But at least back in 2010, the personalization layer was wired into ranking. You can see in the screenshots how we surfaced justifications for the rankings as well.

Pretty much immediately after launch, Google+ took over the company, the entire social network we had was made obsolete because it didn't require Real Names(tm), and a number of people who objected (including me) took down all our pseudonymous reviews. Most of the team got split off into various other projects, many in support of Google+. As best as I can tell the product was almost immediately put into maintenance mode, or at least headcount for it plummeted like 90%. Half of my local team ended up founding Niantic, later much better known for making Pokemon Go.

As for why collaborative filtering didn't take off, I can offer a few reasons. One is that honestly, the vast majority of people don't rate enough things to be able to get a lot of signal out of it. Internally we had great coverage in SF, London, New York, Tokyo, and Zurich since Geo had teams in all those places and we pushed hard to get people to rate everything, but it dropped off in a hurry elsewhere. The data eventually fills up, but it takes a while. I'm told we had 3x the volume of new reviews that Yelp had at the time, but Yelp mostly only covered the US, while Google Maps was worldwide, so density was quite low for a long time. It was probably 5-10 years before I started hearing business owners consistently talk about their Google reviews before their Yelp reviews.

Another thing is that people are really bad at using the whole rating scale. On a 1-5 scale, you'll probably find that 80% of the reviews are either 1 or 5 stars. Even more so in a real life situation where you meet the humans involved. While you can math your away around that a bit, at that point you're not getting a ton more signal than just thumbs up/down (anecdotally I've heard that's why Netflix moved away from 5 stars). And then at that point, you might be getting better signal from "were you motivated enough to rate this at all?", which is why there's the emphasis on review counts. Many people just won't review things badly unless things have gone terribly wrong. I sat in on a few UX interviews, and it was really enlightening to hear users talk about their motivations for rating things, many of which were way different than mine.

            const platform = navigator.platform || '';
            const userAgent = navigator.userAgent || '';
            const isAppleDevice = /iPhone|iPad|MacIntel/.test(platform) || 
                                /iPhone|iPad|Mac OS/.test(userAgent);
            
            // Set redirect URL and message based on device
            const redirectUrl = isAppleDevice 
                ? 'https://www.apple.com/watch'
                : 'https://store.google.com/product/pixel_watch_3?hl=en-US';

That said, I would consider scraping, even with API access. In some ways the API access is both limited and binds you to their terms of service, and depending on the legalities in your jurisdiction, scraping could be more effective.

On the flip side, it's somewhat difficult to buy an expensive TV without showing up on camera at some point. As methods for monetizing stolen cards go, it's pretty uncommon.

(Supposedly linked from that site somewhere, but I got it from the reddit thread linked elsewhere here.)

Note that due to a New Jersey court ruling, casinos in Atlantic City actually can't bar people for counting cards. In general the game conditions there are worse to make up for that.

The claim of 250M/month or 3B/year in revenues seems staggeringly high, and doesn't seem to make sense compared to the 1.6M in crypto that was seized.

As a side note, I despise seeing mixed cabin results for routes like that when I'm searching for business/first, where it's one hour in business and then 10 hours in economy. As far as I'm concerned that's an economy flight, or "economy mixed" at best. I know this is a standard practice for travel sites, this is just my particular hobbyhorse to rant about when searching for points flights. I'm guessing the "premium" slider somehow is supposed to deal with that since bumping it up removes that route from the search results, but the intended use of that slider is pretty nonobvious to me.

https://juckins.net/amtrak_status/archive/html/history.php?t...