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Comment by endofcapital | Hacker News Reader

I didn't think the web could get any more terrible than it is today, but if everyone starts adding ML to all the tracking/targeting/adware systems then that seems to be a new deeper level of hell.

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> the web could get any more terrible than it is today

Please cry a river how bad it is. As someone actively developing since about 2006 I think it's never been in a better shape.

Please respond to the actual concern, you cut out the entirely relevant part of his comment. Are you just trying to say you love React, Node, Java - cause that's what it sounds like you're saying which has nothing to do with his concern over ML to enhance tracking, etc.. If you think the tracking, etc.. has been getting better since 2006, then it clearly means you're advocating it.

That or you just didn't read the full comment?

It was not really relevant. It could be anything that's new, webassembly for example, or some new WebGL framework...

> Are you just trying to say you love React, Node, Java...

No stack I advocate in particular. I'm trying to say that the web is a wonderful platform and I hope it will stay for a very-very long time.

For the client side ML libraries, I don't think it makes sense to use it for tracking. You can already extract information with a high accuracy.

Tracking is a natural consequence of money flowing into the industry and tracking can be achieved with high accuracy. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but at least we can do something about it.

If you think the tracking, etc.. has been getting better since 2006, then it clearly means you're advocating it.

Tracking is far better now than it was in 2006, and I say that as someone who is hugely against tracking. We have the Do Not Track header, which a lot of companies actually pay attention to, we have much better privacy plugins and ad-blockers (privacy badger, u-block origin, pi-hole, etc), and we have a growing consensus that tracking isn't actually that effective which seems to be pushing some companies to try alternative models in their advertising revenue, and their ad spend on the other side.

Things are better.

This is not true, tracking is more prevalent than ever. Legislation and public backlash have forced service providers to ask before they track. However, advancements in ML and commoditization of big data engineering solutions have made it easier than ever for more events to be tracked and more accurate profiling to be possible.

For the average user, against the larger players in the market?

That's the problem, though: The web has steadily been growing more convenient/friendly for developers, while steadily growing more hostile for users.

All these javascript "advances" just make it easier for people to e.g. mine monero on my system without my consent and enable mediocre web developers to load up previously quick-loading sites with custom scrolling animations, autoplay video, and malvertising.

I'm sure it's in better shape for you, a web developer. It's objectively worse for me, a user.

These advances also make it possible to have the user experiences of sites like spotify, netflix, soundcloud, etc. There's a lot of bad stuff but there is also a lot of good.

totally agree. not only that, but we haven't even scratched the surface of what's possible yet.

The experience of using the web is much worse than it used to be.

I first developed a web page in 1997. First got paid to do it in 1998. Innovated a lot of the DHTML/AJAX/SPA techniques before anyone else knew that was even possible, way before that first AJAX article was written.

Not sure how that's relevant, but yeah the web just gets worse and worse every year. Mostly due to the corporations of course, but the standards group are culpable too. I kind of want to write a book on the history of the W3C if nobody has already, it's such a horror show.

Can you ELI5 how standard groups have made the web worse?

Agreed, there is more tooling and insight than ever before

> starts adding

Oh believe me, this stuff was added a long time ago. This is a benefit though. Of course these people will want to offload some of that heavy ML computing onto the browser so they don't have to pay for their own cluster of p3.16xlarge or whatever. Which makes it easier to block and opt-out.

I'm not immediately sure what the benefit of running such a (EDIT: advertising/tracking) model on the client as opposed to server (aside from reducing server costs). At best, it exposes the model to the user, allowing competitors to reverse-engineer it.

I think you're overlooking a lot with that aside. It's just one example but with tensorflow.js you can run your model on a video feed in the browser, frame-by-frame, in a way that wouldn't just increase server costs but would hobble performance as well.

Any company that attempts to do targeting/advertising based on the user's video camera feed without explicit consent will be shamed/sued out of existence, even if there technically isn't a privacy leak.

It seems I made my comment before I saw your edit, that you were writing about only advertising and targeting. I'm not sure what your definition of consent is, regarding video streaming on the web, but it seems to me that every implementation of the getUserMedia API on modern browsers asks the user for permission to access the device.

So yes, anyone surreptitiously gaining access to your camera or mic feed through the browser would get into heaps of trouble and invite bad press, especially if they were able to find a way around the consent dialog.

Some benefits: for the user - the data stays private as all processing is done on device. You can get much faster inference times and create applications with real-time interactions. The applications can work offline once the models are downloaded. The browser comes with tons of sensors (microphone/camera/accelerometer/etc) and the data from these sensors can be fed into the models in real time without needing to do a round trip to a server. Yes if the model is proprietary it maybe wouldn’t make sense to have the user download the weights as it could be reverse engineered, but for open source models it’s not an issue. And anyways the value these days is in the dataset and training of the models. Check out this great article on edge computing: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/03/edge-computing-could-push-...

Those are benefits for TensorFlow.js, sure, but none of those help tracking/advertising use cases.

ML is already used for targeted ads and other content

EDIT: Example - https://www.adobe.com/marketing-cloud/target/automation.html

I'm using TensorFlow.js to make simple PWAs which run on iOS, Android, and desktop to provide interfaces for games which are accessible to people of various capabilities/accessibilities. Without it, it would take an order of magnitude more investment on my part to make this happen. Your world view is absurdly narrow.

starts?

It's a classic example of how machine learning is used.

Analysis done in browser using the clients resources ? Would love to see an example.

Not in the browser, but that is what all those analytics like the ones from Google and Adobe already offer since the last decade.

Applying ML is one's FREEDOM.

lol, it's the use case.

I have the FREEDOM of discharging a gun is different than I have the FREEDOM of discharging a gun into a person's brain are two very different things.

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