Ten years ago conservatives would point out failures of DEI, like how it took Ithaca five years to hire a police chief with numerous misadventures such as finding the one Asian guy who couldn't pass standardized tests.

Today they just say "DEI" and expect you to get red in the face like they've been "animalized" in the sense of

https://www.amazon.com/Otaku-Database-Animals-Hiroki-Azuma/d...

MAL was actually my source for thinking on this subject. In combination with the book Otaku: Database Animals[0] (anime fans catalogue the hell out of things, and this extends to tracking their anime and ratings) I realized you should be able to put together some very strong recommendations by scraping the MAL dataset — because the data should be fairly honest.

And then the realization that really the best recommendation isn’t to forge a new customized list altogether — it’s to simply find the most similar users and recommend items from their list. (MAL has/had a cosine similarity function for this, but no way to search because it’s basically an n^2 algorithm on 4M users; apparently they offered it at some point, and quickly found it untenable. That was what really kicked me off)

And then the realization that if I found users with similar taste, then shouldn’t they be friends? So then it becomes a MAL friendship algorithm..

Did a bunch of research on recommendation algorithms and weighting strategies, scraped most of the MAL users, stored it in a database, and then promptly procrastinated on actually implementing the algorithms. Been sitting on that for like 3 years now :|

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Otaku-Database-Animals-Hiroki-Azuma/d...