A new proof assistant that will hopefully be more suitable for reinforcement learning than Lean - faster to typecheck and specialized apis for tree search
Negative outcome. Some important points that the article here did not emphasize:
1) The Sackler family was not actually a party to this litigation. They came to the table (with most of the settlement money) specifically to get these so called '3rd party releases'.
2) Purdue is basically broke. It's also an LLC. Thus, in order to go after the Sackler family's money, you basically have to claw back money that Purdue paid out to the family over the years. It's not impossible to do, but it requires a whole more litigation, the outcome of which is not at all certain.
Now, 3rd party releases are a genuinely weird thing: a court ruling that a party that's not directly involved in the case is immune from future lawsuits. Partially the reason it went all the way to the supreme court is that there was a circuit split - they were allowed in some circuits, but not others. However, (and this is according to a friend who represented the victims in the settlement), it's really unfortunate that THIS is the case where they get struck down. If the Sacklers walk away from the settlement, it makes the victims getting their payout much less certain, and certainly delays that payout by many years.
My understanding is that Piercing the Corporate Veil has gotten easier over the years. The more egregious the robber baron class has gotten the less sympathetic the courts have been.
> Thus, in order to go after the Sackler family's money, you basically have to claw back money that Purdue paid out to the family over the years.
Or you can find them personally, directly, criminally liable and their profits the result from a criminal conspiracy.
Personal crimes aren’t protected by the “veil” of LLC, so any assets of the family could be liable, after criminal conviction, for any civil claims from victims.
IANAL, but I don't think this would help the victims (and incidentally, that could have still happened even with the settlement). If there were a criminal lawsuit of the Sacklers, and if that lawsuit was successful, the seized money would just go to the justice department.
The only way the victims actually see any money is through civil litigation.
Well, I don't think civil forfeiture specifically would work, but like I mentioned above, yes, if the justice department wanted to criminally charge the Sacklers, they could possibly win and get a judgement against some of the money. But then that money doesn't really go to the victims - it's just a way to punish the Sacklers.
The bankruptcy settlement had a bunch of money going to families of the victims, and also to the states for anti-addiction programs, and also some money towards documenting the Purdue wrongdoings, so that the public would have better visibility just HOW this was allowed to happen in the first place
Interesting post. A possible more general restatement would be "under consequentialism (or utilitarianism) everyone's happiness (including the crime perpetrators') is weighted equally. Should that be the case?"
I suspect that specifically "family punishment" fails the cost-benefit analysis due to practical reasons, but the question of "should we weigh the suffering of good people equally to the suffering of terrible people in our ethics system" is interesting to me, and I don't currently have answer.
Because suffering is suffering. If we distinguish suffering of good people from bad people then we have to expand this to a spectrum, the best people suffering is the worse, and worse people suffering is the best. But then it's all just relative, who is good, who is bad is your opinion. Most rational people would consider their own suffering to be the worse.
It shouldn't because of utility monsters. If you weight everybody's happiness equally - the greedier you are the more resources should be assigned to you. That's obviously wrong.
It doesn't have the same effect. If torturing someone made 3 billion people sightly happy, and 3 miserable (the tortured, his wife and his child), but still the total happiness supercede the total suffering. Positive utilitarism says 'do it'. Negative utilitarism says 'do not'.
I'm not a full utilitarist anymore as I don't think a good utility function exist, but it is a good way to evaluate quickly if an action I do is more likely to do good than bad: 'do I risk hurting someone?'.
I'm pretty sure this predate Omelas, it's an idea from Popper (that he didn't carry very far tbh).
I think almost everyone is utilitarist, you probably are too. If one time you spent money to buy flowers or a gift for no reason but make someone happy, or you told a white lie/didn't tell the truth to avoid hurting someone, you're one too.
But like I said, it's not a good moral philosophy. It's useful in short burst, to take quick judgment on concrete, temporary actions, but it fails on larger ideas.
Which is fine tbh. I need philosophy to carry me through concrete decisions too, not just through political choices. Utilitarism is useful for the former, less for the later (in the best case you end up believing Pinker's statistics).
Ah, I think we're at least partially on the same page. To me, considering the consequences of my actions is just good sense, that doesn't make me an utilitarian. Utility is subjective and ordinal, not cardinal. That means you can't do math with utility, and you can't even meaningfully compare it between individuals. That's more than enough for me to disqualify Utilitarianism from being taken seriously.
Possibly a tangent, but I'd suggest that happiness and suffering are not opposites, so aren't both "x" in your function.
Someone might choose to maximise their personal happiness even knowing that their personal suffering would also increase (or even be maximised). Trite example: prisoner released from jail who sets out to kill the person who double-crossed him, knowing that he'll be re-incarcerated or even executed.
Happiness and suffering might be related but they're (somewhat) independent.
So one issue that this article glosses over is how contextual advertising interacts with attribution.
Essentially, as an advertiser, in order to do effective contextual advertisement, you need to have some idea of how ads perform in a particular context - on a particular web page or app. So what you would really like to say is that "people who saw our ad on X were Y% more likely to visit or website, or buy our product". However, in order to actually measure that, when a user comes to your website you need to know which of your ads they've seen. Traditionally, you'd just serve the ad from your domain and set a cookie, but now you can't do that.
This is more relevant to brand advertising than "click here and buy product X" (direct response), but I think that the people saying "oh, just use contextual advertising" are underestimating the extent to which GDPR makes contextual advertising difficult.
> However, in order to actually measure that, when a user comes to your website you need to know which of your ads they've seen.
That may be the case, but so what? If an industry can't function without abusing people, I would argue that it shouldn't function.
But this doesn't mean the industry can't function. It just means that advertising becomes less efficient (i.e., more expensive). Which is fine -- if it's more expensive to operate in a manner that approaches being ethical, I don't see that as a real problem.
You're right, it's just that the word "abuse" is doing a lot of work in that statement. I've still never seen any example of any person being actually damaged by the "tracking", so calling it "abuse" feels pretty harsh.
I think "abuse" is a fair term, but I acknowledge that it's emotionally loaded. If a company is spying on me (collecting data about me, my machines, or my use of my machines without my informed consent), then I think it's not out of line to call that abusive.
Every web server logs request information. Is that spying on you too? If you go to a website, they aren't "spying" on you, you are volunteering your information to them. Stop hitting yourself.
There seems to be a really strong disdain on HN for AdTech in general, which I think is misguided, and comes fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality. I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view:
1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist?
2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce?
The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory - if you can show ads only to the people to whom they are relevant, then, as a small business you can let people know you exist without blowing your ad budget, and, as a content producer, the more valuable an ad-view is, the more you can charge for it.
The current movement to avoid tracking is an extremely powerful centralizing force. The large platforms know a lot about you already - Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. So, in a way, "we're not going to let AdTech track users" = "we're going to make only ads on large platforms effective", which means that both content producers and advertisers will prefer them, and then people ask "where did the old internet go"?
The AdTech system isn't ideal, but it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers".
> I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist?
Is this a serious question? You advertise. Just like people have been doing for generations. You advertise in publications or spaces that will attract people interested in your product or service. You're going to have to do more to convince me that we need individual level targeted for businesses to succeed.
We're not mad if the new bakery in town advertises in the town paper or sends postcards to everyone in the zipcode. We're not mad if the new geeky t-shirt website puts ads on geeky subreddits or Facebook groups. We're not mad if your new auto detailing service comes up if I Google "auto detailing <my city>". We're mad that those ads creepily follow us around the internet, reminding us of the scale of the enormous data collection that enables such behavior.
Don't tell me that bakeries or t-shirt shops or auto detailers can't thrive without targeted marketing. We've had those things for way longer than we've had targeted marketing.
I literally own a bakery and I would be mad at myself if I wasted that much paper.
I also don't even know if this town has a printed paper I could still advertise in. Maybe? But I'm unlikely to spend our extremely limited advertising budget there.
I also don't want to use invasively targeted online ads. I'd be totally satisfied for keyword based ads - like if someone goes on Maps and searches for "bakery", "coffee" etc. I think that's the best middle ground in the modern era.
I don't care if someone has a history of following baking related Facebook pages, searches for bakeries every day or for the first time ever. I understand that would make our ads more efficient but I'm willing to accept in exchange for respecting people's privacy. Unfortunately, I don't think there's any way for me to make that happen - if I pay to advertise on Google Ads, which unfortunately is the best choice for us, then I have to let Google invade everyone's privacy. There's no setting that I am can find to disable targeted advertising for my campaign.
Exactly. In an ideal world, you pay your ad fee, and everyone in a 30 mile radius who searches for bakery related terms would get information that you exist.
You wouldn't be popping up in the middle of someone's read of an article on fly fishing because someone else in that person's household searched for muffin recipes a week ago.
> We've had those things for way longer than we've had targeted marketing.
You've had way less of those things as well. I'm not defending targeted marketing but you are ignoring that there are way more bakeries and t-shirt shops now than ever. As a small business, you aren't competing against other local t-shirt shops you are competing against every t-shirt shop that can setup a webpage and put a shirt in the mail.
> You advertise in publications or spaces that will attract people interested in your product or service.
Are those publications most popular products, the online versions, selling advertising in the way their print only counterparts have? Or, are they just offering you targeting through their already extant advertising setup?
> Don't tell me that bakeries or t-shirt shops or auto detailers can't thrive without targeted marketing.
Local advertising and national advertising are two entirely different things and the campaigns even have two entirely different purposes and metrics for measurement.
One of the great forces of the internet was to allow me to do regular and successful business with niche operations that may not be local to me. It was supposed to expand upon the previously existing model. Adtech is trying to stand across this gap, which still hasn't been filled for anyone outside of a local goods retailer.
> and comes a fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality.
Because literally all of us are web consumers, so we're hostile to things that are hostile to web consumers. This is like saying there's really strong disdain for leaded gasoline which comes from a "human being breathing air" mentality.
> I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view: 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce?
I don't fucking care. This isn't my problem, and I'm really annoyed that we've build a giant world-spanning surveillance apparatus out of people trying to make it my problem.
How the companies, where you consume content, monetize is very much relevant to you. You have a choice though - you can choose to not watch the content and you won't get advertised to.
1. They nudge people towards buying stuff they wouldn't otherwise buy. This causes a tremendous amount of real waste.
2. Ads are a distraction. When I'm looking up something for work, don't bother me with ads, even if *you* think they are relevant. When I'm working, I'm not looking for a new job, or new pants.
3. On a fundamental level, ads work against the free market: not the best product wins, but the product with the biggest advertising budget.
And there are many more reasons ... Ads suck! And people working in ad-tech should be deeply ashamed!
Ads suck. But you know what's worse than Ads? Selfish people. If Google, YouTube and everywhere else starts asking you to pay high subscription fees for using their services, are you willing/going to pay? You looked up information for work, for life, for leisure, you spend hours online each day, gorging information and content for free. You even learned valuable things and made money using their services and information. And yet all you have to say is don't bother me while I'm leeching off your free content.
>If Google, YouTube and everywhere else starts asking you to pay high subscription fees for using their services, are you willing/going to pay?
Based on my rudimentary knowledge of microeconomics, it depends on how much they charge.
But bringing economics into it, it does seem strange that the internet is probably the only industry where this form of exchange (ads, producers, consumers) exists.
In any other industry, the producer pays money to ads, the ads get me to the place and I pay the producer.
We already pay these fees ourselves collectively because the advertising costs are incorporated into the price of products.
Plus we now pay an additional tax on top of it to Google et al.
Plus we pay with our attention, and with our data (as someone else already noted).
On top of this all, the near-monopoly of Google is forcing prices for ads up, and there is a vicious cycle where companies need to buy increasingly expensive ads to outcompete each other (or, to stay relevant). Which, of course, the consumer ultimately pays for.
>There are better ways for that. For instance I look it up in the yellow pages. Or I find someone in some store to talk to.
Yes, I hate ads too but that said... The Yellow Pages are geared towards services rather than new unknown products. Also, asking a store clerk or flipping through Yellow pages doesn't work when the customer doesn't even know the existence of a new product to ask about.
Anybody in any hobby (woodworking, sewing, car engine modifications, etc) that uses tools and gadgets will get their first exposure to the existence of a potentially helpful product via advertisements. Sure, some awareness comes via word-of-mouth... but the people passing that info to you -- got their awareness from ads. Or maybe a trade show demonstration (which is also a form of advertisement.)
Of course, I've gotten bad and unnecessary tools because of ads. But I also got some genuinely useful and time-saving tools too.
Even though a few ads helped make my life better, I will admit that 99% of ads are not relevant to me and just obnoxious noise. I just saw a Wood Whisperer video on Youtube yesterday and the pre-roll ad was "Estee Lauder cosmetics for women". Given that 95% of the demographic watching woodworking channels are men, it seems like Google/Youtube is wasting Estee Lauder's ad spending -- all while irritating viewers like me. A lose-lose situation.
Ads operate under a supply and demand model. There are far far more companies pushing their products via psychological manipulation to win market share then some novel product relevant to your favorite hobby.
Every ad needs to be sold to a pair of eyes and those relevant, novel, and interesting prdocuts that would actually be useful to you have a much smaller budget and just are not that common. And so you get to watch liberty mutual and geico commercials, for the 55th time instead.
This is basically the value prop for mom n pop shops. If the salesperson is also the owner, they have a lot more incentive to get to know you and steer you towards the things that will be best for you, in order to
1) keep you coming back
2) navigate highly localized politics
Mom n Pop shops are great but getting rid of ads doesn't put the genie back in the bottle when it comes to big box stores and Amazon. It also doesn't solve the shelf space problem. I've found incredibly niche and useful things through online retail ads that a local business would be insane to stock because they would have dead inventory.
Well, ok, let's assume for a moment that ads are valuable to some users, perhaps informing them of a solution to a problem they didn't even know had solutions. That still wastes the attention of everyone who doesn't actually need that thing. Making it worth everyone's time can be incentivized by taxing eyeball-pixel-seconds. The numbers reported to the tax authority must be consistent with those reported to the advertising customer and the site owner. This way one would only place ads when it's almost certain that there's some unmet demand.
>If they are already the company with the highest revenue, why would they need to advertise...
Because their potential customers may not be familiar with them. If a competitor makes themselves known they may just go with the competitor despite a better option, that they don't know about existing.
> Yes, which is why apps need to design good ad experiences to balance monetization with user satisfaction.
The only good ad experience is contextual. There does not exist an experience that is enhanced by ads unrelated to the content being viewed.
If I want to search for a product and an adtech company wants to show me related products, great. If I want to watch a music video, but first have to watch a political ad or an ad for any product, get lost.
> 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce?
The thing is, this isn’t my problem. The fact that someone wants to market their business doesn’t entitle them to my attention.
if you're looking at someone's website then yes they are entitled to your attention. what gave you the idea that you're entitled to consume for free content that other people payed to produce and host?
They didn't, though, they made it available to be looked at alongside advertisements.
HN users just love twisting themselves in circles to justify their belief that they're somehow entitled to consume content from private websites without consuming the ads that support that content. (If you don't want to see ads, there's a really simple solution: don't look at websites that display them! No one's forcing you to!)
> If you don't want to see ads, there's a really simple solution: don't look at websites that display them!
And as a user, if the person hosting the website doesn't want me to look at their content without also looking at their ads, there is a simple solution: don't serve me your content until after you force me to look at your ads.
You do not get to have it both ways. Either the content is available for free and you can hope that the user also views your ads, or the content is not available for free and you can force the user to view your ads.
I believe that humans are social animals, and that a view on enshittification that ignores society is useless. Media is, IMO, holistically worse now than in the mid-90s. An individual cannot undo that. The negatives are not wished away by "no one's forcing you".
> what gave you the idea that you're entitled to consume for free content that other people payed to produce and host?
The fact that their HTTP server replied 200 OK. If they want to put up a paywall or use a different protocol they're totally free to do so, but permission was inherently granted by the act of serving the content.
Acting like anyone who views a webpage has any obligations regarding how they render or reproduce it is like putting a barbecue on the side of the road with a free sign on it after hiding a bill inside, then getting mad when you don't get paid. Trying to tack on riders that fundamentally alter the mechanics of the underlying protocol is fundamentally invalid.
In the case of an incorrectly configured browser, sure, but definitely not mine - which is the whole point. Once freely offered, conditions can't be imposed on use. If you don't want my browser to render content as it sees fit, don't serve the content over a protocol where that dynamic is inherent.
The reason very few actually take that route is because they want to have their cake and eat it too: the openness of www/http but the monetizability of AOL-esque pseudointernet schemes. If a publisher wants to fuck off to corponet with blackjack, hookers, DRM and WEI they're more than free to do so, but traffic may not follow them. Mine certainly won't.
I think the above comment is spot on, the level of hypocrisy here is quite off the charts. With "protocol" defense, would you view the content with adblock if the browser displayed a gate screen (that adblock didn't block - e.g. a separate page with a custom one-time link to content) saying "by viewing the content I created you consent to view ads. Yes / no" - yes serves HTTP 200 with no enforcement. You could argue "yes serves HTTP 200, protocol yada yada, they should have blocked it", but how, other than the amount of property lost, is it really different from e.g. someone jumping into your car when you step out for 10 seconds and driving away cause hey, you should have locked it?
I also use adblock, but I'm honest with myself - ads suck, and I'm a dick who doesn't care about most content creators. If they ask for money (e.g. on Substack), I pay them or stop reading them. If they use ads I block them cause I don't care. Kinda like speeding on a highway - probably not a right thing to do, oh well if they catch me I'll pay a fine... no need to invent some bogus defense about how speed limits are wrong.
Well kinda. The business wanting to market themselves certainly isn't your problem, but the "how does the website monetize itself" is exactly your problem, or rather, it's part of the interaction between the owner of the website you're visiting and you.
You could say "oh, they should just charge for their content", and some definitely do. But the ad model allows for really interesting price discrimination in terms of "who pays for the content". So, if someone buys say.. a Tesla through a website, that conversion subsidizes a million poor kids who don't have to pay anything. In some ways the ad-supported model is the most progressive way to pay content creators - the people who end up paying are the people who spend the most money online.
I'd prefer reading content written by people who are just interested in the topic and sharing their thoughts. I want genuine interaction, not commercial garbage.
If you're not paying for a product in which you see the ad, it is your problem though, no? What's in the ad space is immaterial, just that is how the product is monetized.
Problem is though that everyone is being tracked, whether they use free products that show ads based on that data or not. I don't want to be tracked like that but I have very little power here other than blocking certain domains which is never perfect.
The freaking ad is making me pay twice. Once with my attention, and then again with my money if I buy the product (since the advertising cost is incorporated into the price).
That's really the root of it. Unless I am actively searching for the exact something your small business offers, I don't care whether your business exists. I don't want to know about it. I don't want you to "reach" me. Your ability or inability to let me know that you exist is not my problem.
My browsing to a website (or watching a TV show, or driving along a road with billboards, or filling up my gas tank) does not entitle anyone to my attention.
> and comes fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality
Not for me, it doesn't, For me, it comes from an "I don't want to be spied on" mentality.
If the online ad world would do everything that they currently do, but actually leave me out of it when I tell them to, I wouldn't consider them to be evil. But not only don't they do that, they put a lot of time, effort, and money into actively working around the various defenses I put up against them.
> I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view
You're talking as if the problem is the ads themselves. It's not. It's the spying that's the problem.
> The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory
I don't assert that it's not elegant. I assert that it's deeply unethical unless informed consent has been obtained from the people the data is being gathered from.
> then people ask "where did the old internet go"?
People ask that right now, and adtech is one of the things that have killed it.
> it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers".
Plenty of proven alternatives are brought up all the time. Even the IAPP article here mentions the strongest one: have ads, but don't target them based on data extracted from unwilling participants. Target them based on the context in which the ads appear.
Just like newspapers, magazines, TV, etc.
The adtech world doesn't want to do that because they can make even more money by being bastards, instead.
> People ask that right now, and adtech is one of the things that have killed it.
I don't think this is actually true. When I think about the old internet vs new internet, a lot of it is about people running their own blogs / websites vs. platforms. And I think most of that is not really about ad-tech at all, but about the mechanisms of content and audience discovery. But the fact remains that if you want to say... publish videos of some kind, you are likely to make much more on YouTube vs uploading them to your own website, and that's at least partially because Google is able to show effective ads.
> Target them based on the context in which the ads appear.
Possible, but in some cases significantly less effective. As I mentioned above, ad-tech comes with some very interesting progressive effects, where the people who spend the most money are the ones who end up paying the most in aggregate for content. An interesting example is luxury goods, which are both high-value and niche. If you run say... a news site, or something else that's general purpose, you probably don't want to be showing Rolex ads to everyone. But rich people still read news, and if you could target your Rolex ads to them, that basically subsidizes everyone else.
> But the fact remains that if you want to say... publish videos of some kind, you are likely to make much more on YouTube vs uploading them to your own website
Yes, but you're only talking about people who are intending to make money here. There's a much larger world out there than that.
> but in some cases significantly less effective
True, but so what? At least doing it that way isn't abusive, and it would eliminate quite a lot of the anger people have about online advertising.
It's very disturbing when the response to "stop being abusive" is "but then we'll make less money."
> 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce?
You don't have a right to violate my privacy in exchange for this.
I think this is a genuinely interesting point, and I wish that we as a society had a more nuanced discussion about what that right is. AdTech is largely anonymous in the same way that crypto / web3 is anonymous - it shuttles around cookies / identifiers, but largely does NOT care about any information that is actually personally identifying. If the laws were regulating storage / transmission of information that is actually personally-identifying (addresses, emails, names, etc), that would be much more reasonable in my mind.
That would be insufficient for a number of reasons, including that even if you only collect non-PII (and don't let's get started on what "PII" actually is), if you collect enough of it and correlate it in databases (like ad companies do), then it's all personally identifying.
But I think that's not the main reason it's not sufficient. The main reason, in my view, is because it's still companies spying on me, my machines, and/or my use of my machines. Even if the data is genuinely anonymous, if you don't have my informed consent then collecting it is spying and unethical.
If we're going to have regulation (and it's increasingly looking like any solution will have to be), then the regulation should be about the collection of the data.
>There seems to be a really strong disdain on HN for AdTech in general,
The ads aren't the problem, the targetting and the granular privacy invading data collection practices it implies.
It's not about "fuck small businesses" at all but rather that I'd love to scroll through some content without my 100ms pause over a specific post influencing what I see in future and thus shaping the reality I see.
That's how we got to a position where the various "factions" in society are seeing so different realities that to each the other seems unreasonable and they can't understand why the others don't see their (to them) obviously correct perspective. Adtech is actively contributing towards societal splits.
> There seems to be a really strong disdain on HN for AdTech in general, which I think is misguided, and comes fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality.
I think the disdain is against surveillance and invasive content.
> The current movement to avoid tracking is an extremely powerful centralizing force.
No, this is just removing the third party. If I'm on a Meta property seeing an ad served by Meta targeted by my data from using Meta, then there's not third party.
> if you can show ads only to the people to whom they are relevant,
Except that's not what is happening. The information brokers learned that there's no money to be made in selling to someone who already knows they want to buy that product. With the ad you're getting 90% conversion but without you're only down to 70% conversion.
The real value is in convincing someone who had no interest in a product to spend money they wouldn't have otherwise. And targeting makes this happening by giving the advertisers tools to custom make campaigns that create new engagements. The role of the advertiser is not to connect potential purchasers with the products they want, but to trick unwary consumers into buying irrelevant junk.
And on top of that, it doesn't help small businesses because they only spend money on small campaigns. A tiny micro-targeted set of ads always loses the auction to an algorithmic carpet bombing of manipulative clickbait. That is, they'll "win" a few impressions at first until their budget caps out and then the spam ads will fill in the rest. Which means someone in that cohort will in any period see more of the bad ads than the good ones.
There is no incentive for anyone in adtech to fix this because the "solution" right now is charging more money for better ads. Consumers disliking ads and being inundated with malvertising is the system working as intended.
> The AdTech system isn't ideal, but it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers".
Found the 'ad-guy...'
Look. We don't need to offer a solution in order to point out how broken adtheft is. They're stealing my time, my bandwidth, my cpu resources, my gpu resources, my memory resources, and my body's own motion by forcing me to click away or click gone or click click click.
Here's my solution: Take your ads and place them somewhere dark, moist, and smelly, preferably limited to your own person.
So, out my now 15+ year career, only about 4 were in AdTech, and I've been out of that game for more than 7 years. But fair enough - happy to play 'ad-guy' for the purposes of this discussion :)
I guess my main contention is that businesses really like ads. But that's usually ok - because it funds cool content! The majority of television historically was produced just to sell ads, but it still created awesome television. And if we make ads worse, well, the people who are gong to suffer are the businesses and the content creators. OR, like i mentioned above, we will just drive everyone to large platforms, which is essentially what's happening now.
Another way to frame the question - GDPR came out in 2016. Do you feel like the web is getting better?
I don't think businesses really like ads. Businesses are forced to buy ads. On Facebook if you want to reach your entire audience you need to pay them, they gate off people seeing content they're subscribed to unless you pay. Google is terrible at surfacing relevant local events.
Ads are forced on small business because regular methods of discovery are intentionally nerfed.
Putting a flyer on a community board or telephone pole. My city has special poles just for flyers.
Word of mouth.
Newspaper ads.
---
Sure, some of those are advertising but they're not intrusive or unethical. There aren't as many options for ethically advertising online but that's very intentional, with companies doing the digital equivalent of limiting word of mouth and tearing down flyers.
> The majority of television historically was produced just to sell ads, but it still created awesome television.
That's because there was an incentive to create awesome television to lure people away from other channels to watch the ads on your channel. Part of the discussion around the writers and actors on strike right now is the streaming services believe they can make worse content cheaper using AI and still retain subscribers.
Also there are a lot of websites not meeting GDPR rules but major sites do even if it is block all visitors from Europe - cookie consent rules are also broken by many but that is an different law.
Well actually fuck "professional content producers", there's always someone there who writes just because they want others to read, I'll just read them instead and it'd be good if the search engine let me find them instead of that SEO spam.
1. Especially for a niche business, contextual ads should be great. Appear in search results as well as content pages related to your niche. Relevant by default and requires zero personal data.
2. I'm afraid it's too late. The centralization has already happened. Most people consume content from a handful of mobile apps (youtube, social networks, etc). AI will escalate this even further. Small websites outside of big tech can't really monetize content reliably, exceptions aside. Likewise, your content has to be extremely special for people wanting to pay for it.
We tried funding the internet with banner ads and that didn't take. So early 2000s we sold our privacy to fund it. The "web consumer" mentality was built on the latter funding, which is now going away.
Small business is being hurt the most (because they benefitted the most from being able to buy targeted ads with a small budget).
I want my privacy private, and I'm not willing to share it. It is definitely interesting to see what AdTech can figure out next, especially for small business.
A lot of Internet users don't want to pay for content and don't want ads. I guess they're hoping some deity will magically pay all the content producers.
> The AdTech system isn't ideal, but it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers".
The thing is that people do hear about products and contents. Trailers are ads, products announcement are also ads. Sponsorship is ads. What people do not want is intrusive ads. It feels like someone going through my bedroom and bathroom, then talking to people about my underwear. Next, these people shout to me when I'm going to buy groceries. This is what the adtech is like nowadays.
So content creators, paywall your content and add sponsorship. Small businesses, announce your product and sponsor articles on relevant forums. But stop interrupting people when they're doing nothing that's relevant to you.
I don't get this. I find "passive" advertising like banners, mid-roll, etc so much easier to ignore/block/
The type of advertising that's invasive for me is the "sponsored content" or paid product placements, especially in movies. It feels like every big-budget movie I see these days is littered with "ads" for some car or electronics company. There's no way to block this, and sometimes its hard to tell if something is paid or just someones honest recommendation.
Well, this has been a fun discussion. A salient point that I haven't mentioned but that actually plays a big role is attribution. Many advertisers run ad campaigns not to get a clickthrough to their site, but to just keep their product 'top of mind', so that next time you go buy a car you buy a BMW. So from that point of view, if you see an ad and later go and sign up for a BMW test-drive, BMW would attribute that test drive to the ad that you saw. If you can't track attribution, it becomes really hard to figure out where you should be advertising in the first place. To everyone saying "use contextual advertising" - how do you know which contexts produce better results if you can't measure performance?
This is particularly relevant to mobile apps, because if you show the user an ad, they are extremely unlikely to switch contexts to go and actually click on it. If you can track users from the app to the purchasing site, then you can say "hey, I have a really valuable audience - you should pay me hella money to show them ads". This has been less GDPR and more Apple, but the result is the same - it makes ads generically less valuable.
And that is why I'm fundamentally pro ad-tech. I don't have any direct monetary interest in it, but I do want the digital economy to be growing and efficient, and in an ideal world decentralized beyond the 4-5 large platforms. People spending money online is GOOD. It's good for businesses, it's good for the people (under a rational agent model at least ;)), and it's good for me as a software engineer who wants to keep getting paid silicon-valley salaries.
“What about small businesses” seemed like a better counter-argument during the previous round of ad tech, the kind of annoying flash pop ups that and third party JavaScript that only sometimes contained viruses.
Nowadays it is a major funding keystone of the attention economy, which is spreading propaganda and conspiracy theories, destabilizing governments. Propaganda spread over Facebook helped enable the Rohingya genocide. This isn’t a little annoying thing anymore.
If you are a small business, sponsor a podcast relevant to the people you are targeting. I am still going to skip over you, but thats your best chance to get in front of people, and it involves zero privacy invasions.
It's not just the tracking concern. The disruption to traditional media economics is socially toxic.
In the Before Times of 1993, if you're in situation #1, you call the advertisement department of the local newspaper, who is in situation #2. You pay them $250, the newspaper keeps basically all of it, and you get a quarter-page ad in the Sports section. You can go and open the paper and see the ad, and know roughly that most of the people in town read the local paper. You can also feel good that the money you spent is largely being used to support a local institution that has strong community value.
Now, you go to Google/Meta/etc and set up a campaign. You pay for $250 worth of service. If you're lucky, you get some dashboards to get a vague idea where the impressions occurred. A collection of disparate webmasters get a grand total of $30 in CPM or CPC fees. Brin and Zuckerberg buy some new yachts.
So advertisers aren't actually saving much, but we've dismantled the old media economy.
* We're slicing same ad dollar across more and more publishers. It's cute that you can make $12 per month with AdWords on your blog, but it contributes to the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of local TV/radio/newspapers. When everyone is working on a $12-per-moonth revenue feed, all you're going to get is listicles and clickbait, or stuff designed specifically to game ad metrics (see: the 29-page slideshow article)
* Visibility is terrible but in exciting new ways. The 1993 question was how "many people actually saw your ad in the Sports section?" The 2023 version is "how many of those 'people' are bots, how many of the clicks came from incentivized questionable activity, how many of these ads appeared on sites that would actually contaminate my brand?"
* The middlemen have consumed a lot of margin. The fact that newsrooms are closing and media is getting more paywalled by the day suggests that the digital ad space have failed to deliver the same revenue that traditional platforms did.
It's possible to do without a lot of this-- direct placement for example would pretty much work as well today as it did in 1993-- but it would require a lot of data to convince people that the big AdTechs' yottabytes of profiling don't justify the price they're charging.
"The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory - if you can show ads to the people to whom they are relevant, then, as a small business you can let people know you exist without blowing your ad budget, and, as a content producer, the more valuable an ad-view is, the more you can charge for it."
Elegant. In theory. How about in practice.
What problem does this proposed "solution" solve. Once we have answer then we ask whether it is effective at solving it. Proposing "solutions" to problems where 100% of the time the solution uses a computer is easy. We're drowning in such "solutions". The question is whether they actually work.
If ad tech isn't very effective then is it even a "solution".^1 It could just be a very successful marketing gimmick.
The "if we regulate data collection, bad things will happen" is a lame argument used by the ad tech incumbents and ad tech startups. "You'll lose what you have." More likely, the person making the argument will lose what they have. This type of "argument" is made by self-interested parties. It's speculative and there is no evidence to support it. Fear mongering. Without regulation, these ad tech startups, if they ever begin to grow larger, will surely be acquired by the incumbents, ideally producing a massive windfall for the founders and investors. We know this because we have watched it happen over and over. It's like arguing "we need to let the next DoubleClick grow and thrive". Soon followed by "we need to stop the governemnt from blocking our merger with Google." The truth is, bad stuff is happening right now. That isn't speculation. It's fact.
There's a problem. Data collection. And people are looking for a solution. Not the other way around. (A data collection "solution" looking for a problem.) Letting unfettered data collection continue is certainly not a solution to the problem of data collection.
Another line of reasoning is "it's too late to regulate data collection for future generations because some data has already been collected". It's like suggesting "it's too late to regulate pollution because the environment is already polluted". Not sure I should even call this reasoning.
Yet another way that people defend data collection and tracking in the face of public discontent is misdirection. "Industry/Company X is doing it, too. And they are much worse than we are." In the case of comparisons to other industries, we may have to compare the regulation, if any, to which each is subjected.
HN could be "misguided" on its views of so-called "ad tech", if we accept such generalisations. But what about others, who are not "web consumers", outside HN.
The OP is one example. There are others.
It's funny that so-called "ad tech" companies, as intermediaries (middlemen), claim that they prioritise "users", but then they do not like it when they see "users" commenting about so-called "ad tech" on HN. But what about the folks on the other side of the transaction that "ad tech" intermediates. Perhaps there are folks besides "users" who can see problems posed by the unscrupulous middlemen performing data collection.
NB. In this comment I have focused on (a) the "arguments" being made in the parent comment, and elsewhere, that defend so-called "ad tech" and (b) the viewpoints of others, namely marketers and advertisers, about so-called "ad tech". References to regulation of data collection can be assumed to also refer to regulation of data use by the collectors or any parties with which they share collected data. IMO, it's likely any regulation of data collection would also apply to data use, and this would address data collection that has already occurred before the regulation takes effect.
So, since you seem particularly upset about it, I'd love to know - what is the problem of "data collection"? I've still never seen an example of damage to a user by AdTech data collection. What I have seen are
1) Data leaks by companies that collect and store true PII - this is your Equifaxes of the world, and they didn't collect that data using cookies.
2) People are generally creeped out by the idea of their movements across the web being tracked.
And so, even though no ad-tech company has ever really had a data leak, and although the tracking across the web has never really resulted in any negative outcomes, people are using (2) to try and kill ad-tech for often disingenuous reasons.
Ammonia has been mentioned a few times in this thread, but I will expand a bit, because I believe it is the most promising hydrogen-based approach. Essentially, the idea is to use ammonia directly as fuel. There is an ARPA-E funded project (that I'm currently failing to find) that cracks ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen using heat. They claim that they can create a mixture of H2 and ammonia that will burn at any required flame temperature (H2 burns too fast / hot for existing turbines, ammonia too slow, so a mixture is the right way to go). Theoretically, with this process, you could use ammonia as a drop-in replacement for LNG. The LNG infrastructure can also be converted to carry ammonia instead.
Now, there are still obvious energy losses from creating and then burning ammonia. One thing that this technology could be very helpful with is overcoming the NIMBY-ism around nuclear power - that is, build nuclear reactors to produce ammonia, then ship the ammonia to where it will be used. It would obviously be more efficient to just run power lines from nuclear power plants, but given the wide-spread opposition, it could be politically easier to build the nuclear plants in the middle of nowhere.
The downside is that ammonia is a heavier-than-air poison, like chemical weapons from WW1. Its hazards are significant.
- "Anhydrous ammonia is lighter than air and will therefore rise (will not settle in low-lying areas); however, vapors from liquefied gas are initially heavier than air and may spread along the ground."
We already synthesize and handle industrially millions of tons of it annually, and have done for going on a century. If there were a worrying problem with ammonia, you would already be hearing about it.
By the time you can smell it from a leaking tank depending on the speed of the spill you may already be inviting lung damage, if it overwhelms you you're as good as dead. With some regularity farmers here are overcome by ammonia that has pooled in manure storage pools.
This article starts up with 'three dead per year through fertilizer vapors, one breath and you are gone'.
Three from a population of how many? Compared to how many in some other possible world?
As long as people are being killed in numbers many orders of magnitude greater, just so sugar sellers will have good quarterly profits, it will be hard to count those.
That's now how it works though. If you lump all of the preventable deaths in a profession together it starts to add up, and NL is efficient enough that three people in a population of 10K farmers, a much smaller fraction of which is into animals is high enough to be noticed. Farming is a dangerous profession (lots of open rotating machinery) and we value life enough that doing something about things like this (workplace accidents) is strongly culturally ingrained.
It's also an entirely different domain from the 'sugar sellers'.
Fortunately the main use of anhydrous ammonia (agriculture) is in sparsely populated places, so its impact is limited. I think it's a questionable idea to put it in urban vehicles though.
It will be used in farm equipment, and in place of bunker oil in ships, and burned in combined-cycle turbines in times when wind and sun are not providing, and other, cheaper storage has been used up.
Ammonia seems too dangerous. With cheap electricity from solar and wind, cheap hydrogen seems like a better answer. Sure, it's not a perfect answer, but it seems better because it seems much safer.
As recently as approximately 200 years ago steel was very expensive, as was aluminum. Now both of those materials are cheap and used in a plethora of applications.
Cheap electricity will similarly enable us to cost-effectively do many things that heretofore were prohibitively expensive.
The whole, "Hydrogen is bulky and difficult to store" canard of an argument doesn't sway me... at all. Hydrogen storage could certainly be improved, but even if it never were, for long distance shipping and air travel it's good enough as it is.
"But, but, but... you'd need to build ships and planes 50% larger!!!" Sure. Ok. Yes. The world is not running out of steel.
And, of course, if ships and planes were running on hydrogen instead of gasoline and diesel, a huge amount of research would go into improving hydrogen storage.
The Ford Nucleon (a nuclear-powered concept car) never made it into production, yet we do have nuclear submarines. Choosing the correct fuel for a given application is important.
You will see a very great deal of anhydrous ammonia stored, transported, and used, but will not be asked to handle it yourself. Shipmakers are already gearing up to retrofit ships with ammonia tanks, to burn in existing engines. Probably important ports will start to forbid docking of bunker-oil craft.
You probably will not have much contact with hydrogen, either.
A safety argument does not favor consumer-level use of hydrogen. Nor, of ammonia.
But synthetic liquified hydrogen, produced at airports from power delivered on transmission lines at times when power is cheapest, and banked, will certainly come to drive aircraft where cost matters.
I think you are correct; I was very probably wrong. I did some research. NH3 (Ammonia) seems like it will be used, at least, to power large cargo ships in the near future.
I didn't realize that Ammonia is essentially a cheaper and easier way to store hydrogen.
To add on to this comment for anyone curious about ammonia: Green ammonia production is among the top 10 emerging technologies in chemistry in 2021 [1,2]. The Haber-Bosch process consumes 1% of the worlds global energy, and generates 1.4% of the worlds carbon dioxide [3].
That being said there is a lot of research both to generate ammonia from green energy, and the work to harvest ammonia for use as a fuel cell would benefit as a secondary emergent technology.
Just wanted to add some basic chemistry information as background
Hydrogen (H) can be split from water (H2O) with a by-product of Oxygen (O).
Hydrogen is hard to handle logistically (as discussed elsewhere in the thread), and the real idea in "Power to X" is to include Hydrogen in another molecule with better logistics.
Main contenders are Ethanol (C2H5OH, alcohol), Methane (CH4, ~natural gas), and Ammonia (NH3).
Ethanol and Methane are by far the nicest products: already used as energy carriers, easy to handle, relatively non-toxic, but they have one problem: They require Carbon (C) to manufacture in addition to Hydrogen. Even with increased atmospheric CO2 levels, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is only on the order of 400 ppm and extraction is expensive.
Ammonia (NH3) is synthesized directly from Hydrogen and Nitrogen (N) which is makes up 70% of the atmosphere. The Haber-Bosch process used for this synthesis is a cornerpiece of industrial chemistry.
Interestingly enough, at least in USA the proposed automotive hydrogen solution is one that reduces logistical problems by placing electrolysis equipment at filling stations - then you have reduced transport to just on-site piping and storage tank, and it makes sense to colocate charging of electric cars with hydrogen ones, as well as use demand-response for the stations (providing extra load balancing for the energy grid, which benefits renewables and nuclear alike)
The problem with any fuel containing H2 in any existing engine is hydrogen embrittlement. Hydrogen is a reactive gas that attacks steel.
Ammonia fuel cells have a comparable weight proposition to hydrogen at small sizes because the tank is so much lighter. I think that has legs (or wheels?). For stationary storage, the ammonia-CO2 adduct is a solid, which is nice.
Hydrogen embrittlement is always hyped to the sky.
It is not a serious problem unless you are trying to keep warm, gaseous hydrogen under high pressure. So, don't. Furthermore, aluminum is quite resistant to embrittlement.
Of possibly greater moment is that it leaks, and has ~200x GHG over CO2 (including secondary effects). Leaks are not dangerous in the open, or in confined places with positive airflow, but punishment for neglect is visited on all bystanders. LN2 storage is better, where you can afford the insulation and refrigeration.
It leaks very readily, it ignites very readily, it burns with a wide range of air:fuel proportions, it burns with a high flame speed, and it burns hot.
Hydrogen is ... not a good choice for something to reticulate widely around the world.
Edit: That's leaving aside its low energy density. You need three times the volume of hydrogen as natural gas for the same quantity of heat, so existing pipe networks are unlikely to be useful.
Global warming potential is off to the side of all this.
Yet, millions of tons of hydrogen are today produced, transported and used.
There is nothing special about the volumetric energy density of NG. H2 has to move faster, if carried in the same pipe for the same use. Its lower viscosity means it can.
Municipal gas networks used to carry "lamp gas", a mix of CO and H2, in cast-iron pipes.
> trying to keep warm, gaseous hydrogen under high pressure
Which of course nobody would do? Unfortunately, those are the circumstances in which H2 is made from fossil fuels and likewise the circumstances under which it is combusted in turbines. You can't just handwave materials compatibility away.
The turbine blades are downstream of the combustion chamber so they handle combustion products not hydrogen-rich gas. The turbine combustion chambers, fuel handling system, and high pressure H2 compressors[0] _do_ have to function in a high pressure high temperature H2-rich environment.
0: Take a guess as to what those look like inside.
From what I read, the efficiency of ammonia production is like 16%, which is well below hydrogen at like 40% or whatever. Even with cheap renewables that is terrible amount of losses even before you get to use the fuel.
> the nature of the chemical industry being
what it was, and is, one could be confident that it would come down
to a reasonable figure when anybody wanted it in quantity.
We produce it in immense quantity from fossil fuels and vent the fossil CO2 into the atmosphere.
The price of which is forecast to go up.
Green Ammonia is made from renewable energy, which is forecast to become cheaper.
It also requires electrolysers which are ramping up production and are also predicted to fall in price as they get made at scale from cheaper components.
So it's a fairly safe bet even if you don't believe all the published academic papers that go through the working in great detail, or the business cases that predict a multi-Billion dollar market for it.
Because it piggybacks on the political might of fossil fuel producers who are subsidized by taxpayers and don't have to pay for their externalities.
It's not "cheaper" for a mob connected waste disposal firm to dump waste into a river. If they were prosecuted for the damage they did to other people's property and had to pay for the damage they did then they'd need to raise their prices to the point that just dealing with it properly would be cheaper.
In physics terms:
Dig up hydrogen connected to carbon. Separate the hydrogen from the carbon. Release the fossil carbon into the atmosphere as CO2. Capture the same amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. Seperate it from oxygen, store the carbon. Use hydrogen to make Ammonia.
Versus
Use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Use hydrogen to make Ammonia.
Diverting money from building out renewables to building nukes, for whatever purpose, brings climate catastrophe nearer.
If ever there was a process forgiving of intermittently available energy, it is chemical synthesis. The same money spent on wind and solar would produce a lot more ammonia.
Conversion losses don't matter much when marginal cost of generation is near zero, as we get with renewables, but very much not, with nukes. You just build out more panels.
Technically it may be forgiving, but not economically. Imagine electrolyzer or ammonia plant that uses only 20% of full capacity on average because of using only peak electricity surplus. The rest 80% is basically wasted. Classical plant with higher capacity factor might still be more profitable even if it uses more expensive electricity.
Any electricity demand that can be modulated is good for renewables.
Big plants have been doing this for decades, even before renewables were a thing. The new thing is computers making it cheaply automatable and networked so that e.g. a fleet of cars can organise their charging schedule via the internet.
But rising electricity demand isn't a problem for renewables and climate change, it is in fact a required and desirable part of a virtuous cycle.
So build the Green Ammonia plant and build the renewables to power it 100% of the time but have the option to turn your electrolysers down and sell a small percentage of that to the grid when market prices let you profit from that. It's a win-win-win, less gas peakers, more green electricity and green hydrogen.
There is nowhere that you would operate at only 20% utilization.
Demand for ammonia will be so strong that, after enough renewable overcapacity is built out, you would run electrolysers off your other storage, 24/7.
A nuke would, of course, produce exactly zero grams of ammonia for ten years. It would also require burning coal for those ten years. Ten years of coal is part of the cost never accounted for, like the public indemnification subsidy, and cost of decommissioning.
Starting after the ten years, the nuke would produce a fraction of the ammonia, per dollar, that the renewables would have, because operating cost of nukes is quite high, against zero for renewables.
This is being framed is as miscarriage of justice, and from a moral perspective it definitely is. The problem is that the legal grounds on which Purdue (and the Sacklers) can be sued are actually kind of weak.
Broadly, the things Purdue is accused of are
1) Aggressively marketing opioids to doctors, and
2) Lobbying the states to change various laws around prescription and marketing of opioids
The problem is that for direct liability, there are two more actors that need to be considered - the doctors, and the patients themselves. Doctors are considered to be experts, and patients are often breaking the law when they misuse opioids. Both of these facts break the chain of liability, and so arguing that Purdue is legally liable for the ultimate addiction of the patient is difficult.
As a result, people have tried to sue Purdue under more general "public nuisance" statutes, rather than regular tort liability. A public nuisance is when someone interferes with a right that the general public shares in common. However, this area of law is not very well developed - a lot of it is carryover from old British law, and winning those cases isn't a slam dunk. So there are certain objectors to the settlement, but I don't know why people think that it would be easy to hold the Sacklers criminally responsible or to get more money than this settlement.
> the doctors, and the patients themselves. Doctors are considered to be experts, and patients are often breaking the law when they misuse opioids.
The doctors were fed dodgy studies and information that what they were prescribing was safe. And you can hardly blame a patient who receives pain treatment and gets addicted to opiates when they were also informed they were safe.
I totally agree. I'm just saying that from the point of view of legal liability the doctor is considered an expert. Purdue would argue that the doctor is getting information from a variety of sources (including the FDA), and so when they prescribe a medication and then the patient gets addicted, the responsibility lies with the doctor.
And I also agree that you can't blame a patient for getting addicted. However, in US law there is something called the "clean hands doctrine", which denies remedies if the accuser has acted in bad faith wrt the subject of the claim. In practice this might translate to arguing that because the patient is breaking the law in misusing opioids, they don't deserve damages.
All I'm trying to say is that while Purdue is definitely morally responsible, legally it's kinda difficult.
I think you mean well but I’d say you have to read up more about this case. The owners were not mere stockholders. Nor were they innocent bystanders. They convinced doctors to prescribe their addictive drugs with false information and studies and a very high pressure marketing and sales campaign. It’s on them.
One of Purdue’s specific misdeeds was lying to doctors about the addictiveness of OxyContin and leading them to believe that it had a very low risk of abuse. Much of the litigation against the company focuses on this.
Taking nothing away from the Sackler situation which appears to be entirely self-inflicted, and allegedly, a reprehensible criminal conspiracy.
I think you may want to consider the doctors' perspectives, by general theme, that may or may not coincide with groups of years, but maybe not quite decades.
(1) Pain is inadequately treated, some patients are in a lifetime of pain.
(2) Pain is being adequately treated, we have these new non-addictive pills "Pain as the 5th vital sign" [1]
(3) Doctors are experiencing litigation due to OD-by-misuse and patients doctor shopping, dropping of "Pain as a 5th vital sign" [2]
(4) Doctors recoiling in general from any type of narcotic prescriptions, issuing very tiny doses, doses which cannot be used for, sending the patients onto a pain management doctor that has become the de facto only doctor willing to withstand the DEA scrutiny [3]
There were a handful of doctors that behaved absolutely reprehensibly by running pill mills and prescribing Oxy to anyone who would walk in the front door. These were purely cynical ventures and the doctors that engaged in this knew that these patients were just addicts. These were a minority of doctors but they definitely deserve a small slice of the blame for what happened.
Incidentally, similar arguments are going to play out around trying to sue oil & gas companies for climate change (and will probably use the same public nuisance statutes). The o&g companies lobby against emissions standards / carbon regulations, but ultimately selling oil and gas is legal, and it's the job of the government to regulate, so there isn't a simple legal doctrine to say "hey, you guys bought off a bunch of politicians and thus are still liable for damages".
I'm guessing that in a civil tort suit, going in front of a jury would not work out well for the Sacklers. Too many prospective jurors know of someone damaged by, or lost to opioids.
Honestly, I'm kind of sick of how bad a rap advertising gets. Now sure, companies knowing a lot about your personal life is creepy on an intuitive level, but the fact of the matter is that cookie tracking data has NEVER been associated with any leak or data breach that resulted in personal harm. The thing people SHOULD be worried about is stuff like the Experian leak, where credit companies collect your non-anonymized personal data.
Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually socially positive! If you can more easily reach a niche audience, you can build better more targeted products. And the open data exchanges were a great moat against platform centralization like FB. The fight against open data exchanges make the comparative advantage FB has in advertising to you larger. That's actually pretty bad, because FB has some pretty bad incentives wrt to the attention economy and optimizing for engagement. A world where advertising on independent websites is effective is a much better one - it would let websites put out better content, it would decrease the power of social networks, it could fund better journalism (which is being decimated right now), etc.
> Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually socially positive!
Well, sometimes. But what people want is not always good for them or for society at large. Targeted advertising has a side effect of hiding what exactly is being advertised to society. There's obviously the extreme cases of "vices," but what about things like junk food? People love it. Targeted advertising can induce cravings that make people buy and eat things they know are not good for them. Or for another example, what about pesticides and gas guzzling trucks? I don't want all my neighbors' vanity being exploited in order to pollute my neighborhood. We can openly talk about what we all see on TV, in newspapers, or on billboards, but if I'm not seeing the same ads as my neighbors online, those conversations aren't going to happen.
Advertizing needs to be pull, not push. That is, when I have disposable income and am looking to spend it, there ought to be a place I can go to browse ads.
Otherwise, get the fuck off my attention span, stop bloating the web, and stop polluting public spaces with irrelevant information!
> Honestly, I'm kind of sick of how bad a rap advertising gets. Now sure, companies knowing a lot about your personal life is creepy on an intuitive level, but the fact of the matter is that cookie tracking data has NEVER been associated with any leak or data breach that resulted in personal harm. The thing people SHOULD be worried about is stuff like the Experian leak, where credit companies collect your non-anonymized personal data.
I mean, why not both? I simply cannot think of someone who dislikes tracking-as-advertisement and is pro central clearinghouses for more targeted personal information.
> Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually socially positive!
Only with the unstated premise that tracking _will_ happen and it's better if that tracking is done in a decentralized fashion. Sure, I can agree that there shouldn't be a monopoly at the focus on online tracking-as-advertising, but there's an additional argument that the space _should not exist in itself_. These arguments have been rehashed endlessly online and especially on HN so they probably don't bear repeating here, but the either or choice you represent is disingenuous.
The premise is slightly different. I'm mostly differentiating between cookie tracking and social networks (and some other large online platforms). The large online platforms don't need to track you - you give them your data willingly. Facebook knows a lot about you not because it's tracking you, but because you keep posting things to it. Cookie tracking is an alternative way to build up an effective advertising profile that is decentralized and anonymized, which I think has some value.
> The large online platforms don't need to track you - you give them your data willingly.
Most people don't know the extent to which companies track them across the internet and their devices. It really would be better described as "stalking" given that there is a clear intent by most online platforms to be as stealthy as possible when it comes to their data collection activities.
> Facebook knows a lot about you not because it's tracking you, but because you keep posting things to it.
That's not at all true. People who have explicitly chosen to _not_ have a Facebook account still have their data sucked into the maws of Facebook's data collection systems. [1]
> Cookie tracking is an alternative way to build up an effective advertising profile that is decentralized and anonymized
Cookies cannot possibly be used to build up any sort of decentralized "advertising profile" across the internet - either you allow third-party cookies for tracking and the advertisers become the centralized data collectors or you don't and the cookies don't really provide any information that a website couldn't already collect (and which, critically, wouldn't be useful to produce an advertising profile for anything other than a single website).
> [..] which I think has some value.
Value for whom? It seems that you're very interested in talking about the value of data for those who collect it and are completely disregarding the value or cost to the people who are being tracked.
> Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually socially positive! If you can more easily reach a niche audience, you can build better more targeted products.
Maybe this works well for some products, like "I know i need to buy milk, what should i buy?" but it has often been used in a form that appears like an abusive relationship.
Think about all of the kid-targeted ads from 30 years ago which peddled sugars and psychological tricks to get kids frothing at the mouth over their food and toy products. These weren't merely advertisements, but targeted attacks to the brain. And of course things haven't changed, it's just iconic to talk about early TV's cereal commercials hah. As with many product advertisements, they're not just trying to make you aware of the product - they're trying to bypass your consciousness and hook straight into your brain.
That was 30 years ago, and we've had the misfortune of seeing this evolve. Now social media advertisements are hyper targeted with similar tactics but more nefarious goals. Misinformation at the hands of targeted advertisements has been the source many-a controversies of recent years.
My point is i'd agree with you if advertisements haven't been so blatantly manipulative over the last 50+ years. If they were simply "Hey, you like X, try Y?"; but they're not. That ship sailed before i was even born. And it's only gotten worse with time.
The only data that can't be leaked is the data people don't have. When the OPM could be hacked, everything can be hacked.
Based on this, the only solution is to make sure nobody has any information that may possible be leaked and, at the time or later, be connected to me.
In addition to that nobody targets ads with value, because valuable products are super rare and don't need advertising because those show up in magazines, on blogs etc created by people interested in the field, because sharing those products give value to their readers.
I tested it recently on youtube, both by my locked in account (15? year old google account with a ton of info) and in a firefox container. The first ad was for some casual mobile game/scam and the second was for something I can't remember anymore. I also don't remember the first ad I got on the account that wasn't logged in, but the second one was for a website that sold used iPhones, something that I am very much interested in.
So, despite knowing a ton of me, Google couldn't show me a related ad that was better than the ad it showed when it had no data.
For a very long time the ads in gmail were all about getting loans no matter how poor my credit was, when my issue was that I need a good place to invest my money, not take on expensive loans.
Currently they were trying to sell me extra chargers for electric cars, of which I don't own any.
Facebook showed me a generic ad for cancer awareness aimed at somebody 15 years older than me (they know my real date of birth).
Previous to that they showed me a ton of ads for extra comfy travel trousers.
Twitter got the closest by showing me ads for places to buy crypto (yes I am interested in that space, no I won't by stuff from ads that scream scam to me).
I don't know what will replace ads, and it is possible that ads might bring some value in specific cases but in general they are a waste of money. I suspect Google etc knows this, but can't say it for obvious reasons.
Brand awareness ads might make sense, but it doesn't really make sense to target those much.
> cookie tracking data has NEVER been associated with any leak or data breach that resulted in personal harm.
This is a very specific statement. It may be true. But, even if we accept for the sake of argument that it is, it's not quite the same statement as, "Mass personal data collection has never resulted in personal harm," which, while seeming quite similar, also happens to be false.
But "[m]ass personal data collection" is a huge superset of "cookie tracking data"; the former encompasses all credit card information database breaches (such as Sony's), along with all government and healthcare database 'leaks'.
We could limit it to "for marketing purposes" (which is what I meant, though I failed to specify it) and still find plenty of clear-cut examples of harm. This isn't breaking news. I took a class in graduate school that was largely devoted to studying examples of them and discussing their ethical and policy implications, and that was years and years ago.
I'm trying to differentiate between data that is anonymized (cookies), and data that is not. I'm unaware of any data leak of anonymized data that resulted in any harm, but if I'm wrong I'd love to hear about it.
How about intentional publishing of "anonymized" data? It's intentional, so it should be even less potentially harmful than an unintentional leak, right?
That's just one of many apparently "anonymized" datasets that has been trivially deanonymized by researchers/hackers/internet-stalkers; so there's plenty of harm to be done.
Fun fact: one of the top 5 digital advertising platforms "anonymizes" user identifiers with a simple hash algorithm and "salts" all of the hashes with the same "salt". Can you guess the "salt"? Hint: it is commonly found on a dinner table and is used to season food.
I can't say I'm at all surprised. I've had similar conversations in a non-advertising field with non-technical managers where their attitude basically boiled down to "What do we care?" when it came to problems that would cost someone else money.
I also can't see attitudes like that changing until companies that collect data are seriously held to account for any leaks/abuses of the data that they collect.
Potential penalties would probably have to include criminal charges, in much the same way that individuals and companies can be held criminally liable for mishandling toxic waste.
I think you are right - this was a brain dump of some things I've been thinking about, specifically on how the fight against cookie tracking is making centralization worse and companies like Facebook more powerful. This article generically criticizes both, but I think there's actually a tradeoff here, and not making the distinction may lead to bad policies
> Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually socially positive!
What is the math here? How do you account for society-wide lost productivity from spending time consuming advertising? Or for people making sub-optimal purchasing decisions when products that are worse for their needs happen to have bigger advertising budgets?
>Honestly, I'm kind of sick of how bad a rap advertising gets.
Work in advertising by any chance?
If you read the article, it's not primarily about advertising. It's about privacy and the negative impact to society on losing it.
The ad tech firms were certainly pivotal in creating the dystopian surveillance world we live in. They deserve every single bit of bad rap they get for that and, personally speaking, I really hope there's a lot more bad rap heading their way.
>the fact of the matter is that cookie tracking data has NEVER been associated with any leak or data breach that resulted in personal harm
I don't know if you're deliberately positioning that duplicitously or not. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Whether there are cookie-based breaches or not is, in practical terms, irrelevant. Read the article. With cookies, and without breaches, the Facebooks and Googles of the world allow advertisers to promote smoking to children or payday loans to those with financial troubles.
Advertising is a wide spectrum. At one end it's relatively benign: billboards and the like. Some feel even that is unacceptable. At the other is the FB/G hyper-targeted end. In and of itself it is extremely creepy. But the article is about much more than just the weird experience of wondering how they knew to target you for erectile dysfunction treatment. Or divorce lawyers.
Ad tech has bootstrapped a global panopticon. That's the problem here.
Oh, and next time your insurance premium goes up mysteriously, have a think about your browsing history.
>If you can more easily reach a niche audience, you can build better more targeted products.
in practice, these two concepts are incompatible. everyone has buttons that can be pushed with the help of detailed psychological profiles made by advertisers.
if you push those buttons enough times, it's typically unhealthy for the person and financially beneficial for the pusher all the while.
I see a couple some framing issues your comment. For example, the comment links (A) cookie tracking data with (B) people giving advertising a bad wrap. But, I think that people give advertising a bad rap for many reasons beyond simply cookie tracking. Given that, I worry that the idea "cookie tracking never led to harm" distracts me from the larger issue of generalized corporate and governmental data surveillance, especially considering that it seems like personal data breaches usually deal subtle harm to people.
Is not advertising, it's sales: the seller establishes a personal relationship with the buyer, finds out what the buyer's needs and wants are, and proposes a product or service to them that satisfies those needs and wants. Advertising is nothing like that.
Not to mention that most things that get advertised for, nobody sells the way I just described above. The only products most people buy that get sold that way are houses and cars, and those aren't the kinds of things advertisers are trying to sell using harvested personal data. Most products that people buy that are advertised that way, they choose themselves, they don't have a personal sales person helping them.
Data can still be anonymized and dangerous. In extreme cases de-anonymization is available and for all the rest it still results in the targeted individual being exposed to manipulations and attempts at influence. And the amount of influence that advertisers wield absolutely needs to be curbed to an absolute minimum or, even better, non existence. People need to be making decisions on their own rational self-interest and not emotional overtures amplified by an intimate understanding of someone's fears and sensitivities.
Their claim is logically dubious anyway. It’s not the cookies themselves but all the associated data that cookiesnlet big tech associate to profiles. This claim they are making about cookies are not associated with a breach is highly suspicious and not a good faith argument IMO. Even if they are not directly linked, cookies and tracking tools exist in a system and don’t exist in a vacuum. They are the tip of the spear. Sure the tip isn’t what kills you, but having the whole spear rammed through you sure does.
Well, it's hard to prove the absence of a negative - I think that it's on the people claiming harm to provide some examples. However, I'm not even sure what a cookie data leak would look like. The large advertising brokers are handling petabytes of cookie tracking data per day. To gain any insight out of it you need to run jobs on giant clusters. The volume of the data makes it basically impossible to exfiltrate. So yeah, I'm pretty confident in this statement.
> The large advertising brokers are handling petabytes of cookie tracking data per day.
Citation needed.
Also, you don't need a copy of every single byte that a tracking company collects; summaries are more than enough to be useful to track individuals across the internet.
> The volume of the data makes it basically impossible to exfiltrate.
An attacker doesn't need to try to exfiltrate a large fraction of collected data; only the data that's likely to be interesting to them.
See Facebook/Cambridge Analytica [1] for an example of just how incompetent a technically-sophisticated company can be when it comes to protecting their users' (and their own!) data from potential adversaries.
[1] In particular, the comments from Alex Stamos, the CSO who said “We have the threat profile of a [...] defense contractor, but we run our corporate networks [...] like a college campus" (from https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/19/facebook-security-chief-alex... )
Exactly. It's not the tracking that is the problem, it's the lack of control/transparency. I want a personal data bank where I can decide who knows what about me.
"Marketing is manipulation and deceit. It tries to turn people into something they aren’t — individuals focused solely on themselves, maximising their consumption of goods that they don’t need"
By "compositional datatypes", I mean being able to define datatypes and functions on them in a modular fashion. I gave a very simple example with enums. For a real world use case, imagine a compiler pipeline, where we have an AST that we are desugaring over multiple steps. Ideally we want a succession of ASTs that remove the form being eliminated, so the AST type can guarantee it's eliminated. This is very easy with structural variants, there's no need to actually define and name each separate AST, which differs only slightly.
Or imagine we are typing a SQL join that is a merge of two existing record types. Such "compositional data types" can be achieved with elaborate encodings and type-level computations in a language like Haskell (see e.g. Data types `a la carte), but it's difficult and somewhat ugly. There is an opportunity here for improvement.
You can do this with the tagless-final encoding, which has a similar flavor to Data types à la carte's concept of open data types. As an example, define
class ExpSYM a where
add :: a Int → a Int → a Int
lit :: Int → a Int
class MulSYM a where
mul :: a Int → a Int → a Int
Now suppose we extend with booleans and so on. We can freely combine addition and multiplication. As we add new data variants, old code need not be recompiled. We get the openness of OOP's class extensions with the flexibility of ADTs.
ex1 :: (ExpSYM a, MulSYM a) => a Int
ex1 = add (lit 3) (mul (lit 4) (lit 5))
Not enough space here but you can also pattern match over final terms and interpret them in different ways (e.g. CBN vs CBV interpreters).
Then as you go through your compiler pass you can see through the types that "capabilities" get reduced more and more until you reach some base language (sounds like free monads doesn't it?).
Tangentially if I were to design an FP language I would use tagless final for everything, and deforest as much as I can (if possible) to reduce overhead. How this affects other aspects (e.g. automatically translating pattern matching) I have not looked into, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Yes, but like any encoding, it has its problems. One potential issue is that you will need to formulate your transformations as strict catamorphisms (folds), e.g. you cannot match two levels deep. This has reasoning advantages, but makes it harder for the average user. Type classes can also have issues with ambiguities, if many type variables are involved. Lastly, you also cannot match all remaining terms, like these examples:
getDates
:: Exp
-> Set Date
getDates = cata alg where
alg :: ExpF (Set Date) -> Set Date
alg (EDate i) = S.singleton i
alg e = fold e
substitute
:: Map VarId (ExpF Exp)
-> Exp
-> Exp
substitute env = cata alg where
alg :: ExpF Exp -> Exp
alg (EVar i)
| Just e <-M.lookup i env = Fix e
alg e = Fix e
Ah ha, but you see, you can perform transformations on tagless-final terms that are not strict catamorphisms. Oleg demonstrates this in (page 14)[0] with examples of reassociating binary expressions and double negation, so matching two levels deep is possible.
As for matching remaining terms, I don't know the answer to that, would be interesting to investigate.
Yeah, having many typeclasses involved could be problematic. What sort of issues are you thinking of? One possibility is that so many constraints are involved no concrete type can instantiate a final term.
> Ah ha, but you see, you can perform transformations on tagless-final terms that are not strict catamorphisms ... so matching two levels deep is possible.
No this is not correct. Oleg provides a solution to double negation by creating a catamorphism that folds to a function. It's still a catamorphism. And folding to a function is not something the average Java programmer is likely to understand easily.
Right, so it's not that it's not possible but rather it's somewhat awkward to express non-compositional folds in the final approach. I'm not currently aware of a mechanical way to do the translation.
Yes, I'm claiming the restriction will be too much for many people, assuming we are trying to create a new language here. However, expressing a solution as a catamorphism is a good thing to do and helps reasoning. It's a form of structured programming (recursion is the "goto" of functional programming!).
So since March we've seen multiple countries (Korea, China, New Zealand) largely contain the virus, and start re-opening the economy. The way you do it is to get R<1 (where R is the reproduction number - the average number of people that an infected person infects). When R is smaller than 1, then you have an exponential decay curve, where there are fewer new cases each day.
The way that these countries have been able to get R<1 is a combination of social distancing, hygiene (masks), and test-trace-isolate system. So that's the endgame now. The shelter-in-place orders gets R<1, then we keep it at <1 by getting everyone to wear masks, and by getting a tracing system in place so that anyone who comes in contact with an infected person can quickly get tested and self-isolate.
That at least is my understanding, and it's been largely informed by this webpage, which I found incredibly helpful. https://ncase.me/covid-19/
A lot of people do present that understanding, but it's inaccurate. China and New Zealand don't have an R < 1 strategy; they believe that harsh lockdowns must be maintained until local transmission stops entirely. (Which is obviously infeasible for most countries at this point.)
