Predicting Your Taste with Algorithms

Your Netflix homepage is basically a psychological profile created by a massive algebra equation.

It is called Matrix Factorization and it is how streaming services predict your life.

Think of a giant spreadsheet with you on one side and every movie ever made on the

other. It is mostly empty because you haven't watched everything. The algorithm takes

the few things you did watch and breaks them down into hidden factors, like how much you

secretly love cheesy rom-coms or explosions. It uses those invisible numbers to fill in the blanks and

predict your next obsession. It is the same probability math that filters your spam emails,

proving that to a computer, your taste is just a predictable pattern.