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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

Just one more place to expect ads being shoved in your face.

I'm not sure why this is downvoted. It's a real concern IMO. Want to use Waze on your Apple i-touch-touch windshield screen? Fair enough, but expect those "cheap gas station alert" pop-ups to persist there as well.

Because Apple doesn’t try to shove ads in your face (except in the App Store, which seems fair enough).

They don’t let you show ads on CarPlay (out for 3-4 years), why would this be any different?

They don't show ads yet. Once operating systems started integrating ads, I became increasingly cynical.

Ads are the current end game for anything with access to user eyeballs. Just give it a few years, until whatever devision needs some way to squeeze a little more juice out of their revenue projections

I highly doubt it in apples case. It would be a complete 180 for them. Android? Sure. But Apple has spent years reenforcing the message that they don’t monetize your data in the same way that android does.

>They don't show ads yet. Once operating systems started integrating ads

I've never seen integrated ads on any of my Macs during normal use outside a web browser, and in iOS specifically it's always been a thing, whether built-in to the OS or a third party library. But since including, what is it called now, AdKit? I haven't seen any unusual ads in the main UI other than in the usual use-cases in apps or the web browser.

> Apple doesn’t try to shove ads in your face (except in the App Store, which seems fair enough)

And how much of Apple's current behavior is simply a product of luxury they can afford just as long as they're in the money?

What behaviors will Apple exhibit when their demands begin to outstrip their resources? It's a very large for-profit corporation, don't be so myopic.

It’s a luxury brand. What would you expect, say, Louis Vitton to do in such a situation? Nothing. Any response (other than “no response”) would ruin their brand image.

Apple sells to people looking for a different approach.

This is fundemental, and doing it commands high margins.

Being successful is why they have the cash pile they do and get the fat margins.

One subtle artifact in all of that is Apple does not need volume, nor has to accomodate tons of hardware variants. Being whole "stack" in this sense means being able to ask for value added everywhere possible.

I suspect ADS in a car HUD will not be welcome, and could actually see ethical challenges. Incentives are high to get a thing like this right.

I will tell you all right now, for me? NO. Not one AD. Not while driving. It is not OK, nor worth it.

Bet a cookie that sentiment is not hard to find out there.

In any case, the luxury comes from doing the work. Apple is well differentiated in this way. They have no reason to change, and billions of reasons to continue.

I'd say that depends on the content. By default, Apple doesn't show you ads, only third parties do. At the same time, Apple isn't an Ad company, which is relevant when comparing Apple and their operating systems to other companies and their operating systems. Take Google for example, they exist because they are an Ad company, and perhaps more and more for their paid services, but mostly ads, driven by data they mine or otherwise collect. Apple doesn't base their business on that, and neither does most of Microsoft (but consider OneDrive, Bing, Office, Windows 10 etc.)

Re: Just one more place to expect ads being shoved in your face.

Clippy: "It looks like you just crashed [due to distraction from Clippy ads]. Would you like a list of local accident attorneys?"

Why did you misread this as a Google or Facebook patent?

The liabilities there are too great to be worth it.

Given that it's AR though, I expect existing billboards to be replaced with greenscreens and the windshield will augment your reality to display whatever some algorithm thinks you should see on it.

Unless the car is fully autonomous: then the liability is gone to the manufacturer of the autonomous system, so that you can enjoy your ads while being driven around.

So, AdBlock++?

uBlock Origin, with updated lists. That is, once the Windshield gets jailbroken.

If my car wants to highlight the liquor store that sells my favorite beer at the best price or the hardware store that has the thing I was looking at on Amazon for a better price, etc, etc then it's fine by me. If it starts trying to highlight BS local singles in my area I'm gonna be amused but not pleased. Geographically relevant ads are usually higher quality (local businesses don't want to associate with scummy advertisers that make them look scummy) and less obnoxious than typical internet ads and you can only distract drivers so much before lawyers get involved so I don't think there well be as much abuse as we see with normal online ads.

Ads? That's not the driving tech in video. Porn is.

How?

The adage used to be that porn drove innovation. We need personal computers to watch...porn. We need faster internet to acquire...porn. We need higher-capacity hard drives and better compression algorithms to store...porn. We need robots with more humanoid and lifelike prosthetics...so we can fuck them.

Perhaps this was true in the 90s-00s, but I doubt it.

The state of VR is greatly ahead of where it was 20 years ago but still just a novelty in the context of porn. The current advances in ML, AI and whatever blockchain ends up being used for have little to nothing to do with porn itself (recommendation algorithms and chatbot/NLP tech have application but aren't drivers). Robotics is being advanced by far more productive applications like manufacturing and putting unskilled humans out of work.

We may eventually get to the point of autonomous sexbots that leverage all of these technologies, but it's surveillance tech and the monetization of voyeurism (for advertising) that's driving today's advances, not porn itself.

I agree with your conclusion (the current state of affairs), but one could argue that VR has developed less optimally than if you had the porn industry enthused with the prospects of being the first players getting to that market. But this is pure speculation.

Though that comment may be somewhat playful, the affirmation makes good biological sense if you consider that porn messes almost directly with one of our most basic instincts. And although you can argue that ads do the same, the thing is that on ads, if they’re regulated and suited to the broadest public consumption, the appeal to the basic instincts has to be much more subtle. That makes it is less direct and less capable than porn for driving the tech resources to its development. But the difference may not be as substantial as I imagine it to be.

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