i see this all the time with software designed by americans. on an old job we used a tool called "officevibe" where you'd enter your current impression of your role and workplace once a month. you got some random questions to answer on a 10-degree scale.
when we were presented with the result the stats were terrible because the scale was weighted so that everything below 7 was counted as negative. we were all just answering 5 for "it's okay", 3-4 for "could use improvement", and 6-7 for "better than expected". there had never been a 10 in the stats, and the software took that as "this place sucks".
like, of course you downvote a bad response. you're supposed to help the model get better, right?
yeah thats yucky, but idk if was really hush-hush considering he wrote it down himself for publishing.
he was unquestionably racist and sexist through a modern lens but the question with this stuff is how it contrasts with the world around the person.
i always point to Hergé, whose early works were super racist by today's standard because they followed the style at the time. not using the stereotypes at that point would have made eg Tintin in the Congo harder to read for contemporary audiences due to the shared cultural understanding. later books completely changed in tone as the century progressed.
it's a bit more mechanically complex than that, it can predict moon phases and eclipses for an entire 19-year metonic cycle. the leading theories right now is that it was a prestige job, an expensive gift made by a master craftsman to show off. the clickspring video series linked in the thread is a really interesting look into it, especially since Chris who runs the channel straight up took a break from building the thing for a year to join a research project about the historical context of the mechanism at his local university.
i mean the main reason they don't really advertise it as being self-hostable is the social aspect. the recommendation part doesn't work if everyone is on their own instance. not that i know anyone that uses the recommendations. it looks like that's the only thing they'll keep running though...
matlab is nobody's favourite language. although using it does require an engineering degree, which makes you a nerd.