A closer look
Netflix's revolutionary recommendation algorithm was famously defeated by the movie Napoleon Dynamite, which was so incredibly polarizing that the code simply could not figure out whether a user would love it or deeply hate it. The film was aggressively weird, lacking any real plot or traditional pacing, which meant that people who typically loved quirky indie comedies often hated it, while people who loved mainstream garbage sometimes thought it was a masterpiece. Netflix literally had to throw up their hands and program a specific exception into their million-dollar software just to stop this socially awkward teenager from completely destroying their predictive analytics. It is incredibly validating to know that billions of dollars in artificial intelligence and complex machine learning can be completely derailed by a guy in moon boots aggressively dancing to Jamiroquai on a high school auditorium stage. Technology may eventually rise up and conquer humanity, but we will always have the comforting knowledge that algorithms cannot comprehend the subtle cinematic genius of keeping tater tots in your cargo pants
