"I never saw most of the offending ads because of my adblocker, so I didn’t notice the changes or experience any irritation personally. "
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If you run a website that serves ads, whitelist it in your adblocker so you can see what your own damned site looks like to people who are still rawdogging the world wide web.
Most people who ran AdSense were extremely careful not to look at the ads on their own site, because Google might flag them for intentionally inflating clicks or views.
This is why I greatly prefer podcasts where the hosts read the ads. If you're going to take ad money, you better be willing to sell it with your own voice. All else is a descent into scam ad hell.
Everybody does that and has for the past 10 years. People sell the scammiest stuff then completely dissociate and say "sorry guys I didn't know that was a scam haha. I won't do it again. This program brought to you by Honey. I use it and it's great." Their viewers always forgive them.
Can you name a YouTube channel that experienced a drop in viewership, subscribers, any metric whatsoever, after a sponsorship read turned out to be a scam?
In the 1990's and for us GenX'ers, selling out was the worst thing you could do; to take the man's money instead of keeping your integrity. Calling people and bands 'sell outs' (sometimes without justification!) was to insult them.
Now with the rise of 'influencers' selling out is the norm, and people are praised for doing so.
This is a massive shift in the cultural landscape and is perhaps something many born after ~2000 are unaware of.
"Why do I need to download a 100+ MB app, give it permission to track my location, and let it run background processes just to browse through a restaurant menu, buy a ticket, or scroll through a list of posts?"
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Hardware/software companies have, historically, targeted power users because regular users listen to them. The companies producing these apps do so because they can benefit from exploiting the data of regular users, but risk little blowback from power users if they keep their web versions up to date and in good shape.
That doesn't mean power users should ignore the presence of these apps however. We should be telling regular users to avoid them for their own safety. We should also be worried that, if we stay quiet and let regular users flock to apps, the motivation to maintain web access will be eroded. When all power users vanish into a single percentage point and a platform achieves total dominance over the alternatives, companies might well choose to focus on only apps.
Imagine you're holding a ball with drawings on it. Hold it out at arms length and fix how it looks in your memory. Now bring it close to your face and move your head a tiny bit to the side. You're not seeing the whole back-side of the ball. Far from it! However, you are seeing some bits you weren't seeing before and the whole picture you can see now looks different than it did when the ball was at arm's length.
That's my guess. They're seeing parts of the dark-side of the moon because they're now close enough that they have a different viewing angle than we do on Earth. Remember, they're not flying straight at the moon. That's not how transfer orbits work.
"Dark side" is used to describe the part we never see from earth's vantage point, not a part that gets no light from the sun. Definitely confusing for the uninitiated though.
"Haigh highlighted Wynn-Williams’s case in the House of Commons during a debate about employment rights on Monday. She said Wynn-Williams’s decision to speak out had plunged her into financial peril.
“Despite previous public statements that Meta no longer uses NDAs [non-disclosure agreements] in cases of sexual harassment – which Sarah has repeatedly alleged – she is being pushed to financial ruin through the arbitration system in the UK, as Meta seeks to silence and punish her for speaking out,” she said.
“Meta has served a gagging order on Sarah and is attempting to fine her $50,000 for every breach of that order. She is on the verge of bankruptcy. I am sure that the whole house and the government will stand with Sarah as we pass this legislation to ensure that whistleblowers and those with the moral courage to speak out are always protected.”
It is understood that the $50,000 figure represents the damages Wynn-Williams has to pay for material breaches of the separation agreement she signed when she left Meta in 2017. Meta has emphasised that Wynn-Williams entered into the non-disparagement agreement voluntarily as part of her departure."
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"The ruling stated Wynn-Williams should stop promoting the book and, to the extent she could, stop further publication. It did not order any action by Pan Macmillan."
Source:[1]
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This would probably boil down to a "He said, she said" type of situation, albeit with one side being aggressively litigious, were it not for Facebook's long track record of casual and unthinking irresponsibility. e.g. Myanmar[2]. Second, the non-disparagement clause was apparently foisted upon Wynn-Williams when she was leaving the company, not when she was hired. That suggests Meta knew they'd treated her poorly and feared consequences. Finally, the book that resulted has come out at a time when multiple countries are starting to pass legislation to control the harm Facebook and other social media companies do (e.g. The social media ban for minors in Australia). Meta clearly does not want a book like "Careless People" trending right now.
Meta has both a history of bad behaviour and a strong motive to silence such a book. For these reasons, I'm disinclined to believe Meta's claims that these allegations are "false and defamatory". Wynn-Williams probably was "toxic". She was an executive at Meta after all. Her claims can be true at the same time.
Most of the world is past blaming Trump for this. They're now blaming Americans for not removing an obviously insane tyrant from power. Americans have long said, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." Well, where's that vigilance? You're not all blind, are you? Suddenly lost your taste for "freedom", have you?
You may not have voted for Trump, but now you're accountable to the world for him.
Reduced need for waste disposal is one of the mixed blessings of a steady diet of MRE's (sometimes called "Meals Refusing to Exit"). It's sobering to realize that anyone who has ever set foot on the moon was most likely backed up in a bad way when they stepped out of their LEM.
Aren't they like 2000 calories? I feel like I would be begging the medic for laxatives. Must feel like a 5 mile freight train stuck in a 1 mile tunnel.
It also helps that laser beams diverge. By the time it gets back to Earth, the diameter of the beam from Artemis is probably several hundred meters, if not several kilometres. Their aim still needs to be fairly precise, but they're not trying to hit a lens with a beam that's still the width of a pencil. They really just need to paint the neighbourhood that NASA's sensors are located in.
A country can be your largest trading partner and single biggest threat to sovereignty at the same time. Just ask Canadians.
I also take issue with the claim that Americans are freer or richer. The Iranian adventure, even were it to end immediately, has taken socialized medicine off the table for another generation of Americans, leaving typical Americans a lot poorer than salaries suggest. A ground invasion could easily bankrupt the U.S.. Meanwhile, Trump is trying to operate as a pre-Magna Carta king and the courts charged with stopping him are rapidly crumbling under pressure. This is a serious backslide into authoritarianism.
The irony about tRump is he sometimes says the quiet part out loud. He is a pathological liar yet at the same time he speaks truth. He revealed the USA's ruling Elite's desire to make Canada a vassal state. Arguably, the Canadian Elite did it when Brian Mulroney, (he was originally against it himself but the Business lobby told him otherwise: he dutifully complied with his donors), pushed and signed the free trade agreement: "I'm rolling the dice!". He was persuaded to put the decision to an election first. He won the majority of seats, but not the popular vote. He signed it anyway. Now, Canada finds itself in the position that his opposition warned about: that putting your eggs in one basket was taking a big risk that US wasn't going to be ruled by a Fascist Dictator.
But thanks to the Fascist Dictator Canadians have once again woken up to the folly of tying yourself so closely to a giant who goes rogue. The Republican Party should be deeply ashamed of themselves for kowtowing to tRump. Mind you, there is plenty of things the Republican Party should be ashamed about - they helped create the situation that would make the election of tRump possible - with their poverty inducing policies. The Republican Party is as loathsome as the Nazi Party.
And then there is the feckless Democrats. Absolutely useless.
"AI will write good code because it is economically advantageous to do so. Per our definition of good code, good code is easy to understand and modify from the reduced complexity."
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This doesn't necessarily follow. Yes, there might be economic pressure for AI to produce "good" code, but that doesn't necessarily mean efforts to make this so will succeed. LLM's might never become proficient at producing "good" code for the same reasons that LLM's perform poorly when trained on their own output. A heuristic prediction of what "good" code for a given solution looks like is likely always going to be less "good" than code produced by skilled and deliberate human design.
Just as there is a place for fast and dirty human code, there will be a place for slop code. Likely the same sort of place. However, we may still need humans to produce "good" code that AI can be trained on as well as for solutions that actually need to be "good". AI might not be able to do that for us anytime soon, no matter what the economic imperatives are.
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If you run a website that serves ads, whitelist it in your adblocker so you can see what your own damned site looks like to people who are still rawdogging the world wide web.
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