TravisLS

I love these incredibly simple and elegant classic technologies. GPS is one of the best. It seems like it would be incredibly complicated and mysterious, but it's actually quite straightforward.

I'm working on a presentation now to explain how GPS works to second graders. If they understand it, I'll take some photos and do a write-up.

Worth noting that many people who run from the police also have fake or stolen plates.

I think you have identified the crux of my objection to this piece. The OP is mostly talking about cases where a truth about someone is so much more widely known than other truths about them that it becomes overwhelming in perception of that person.

The problem to be solved here is not the liability owed by the reporter of the truth, but rather the way in which our reptilian brains fail to balance that truth against an undoubtedly bigger picture.

I'm not sure where the threshold is for spending. I have an account that was spending over $500K/yr on Facebook ads and we were blocked by AI with no recourse for over 6 months before we finally found a human who was able to reverse it.

I came here to say the same thing. I've read about 20 of them in the past few days and they're absolutely captivating. The TWA 800 post got me started and is a must-read: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/memories-of-flame-the-cr...

This is great! But also, in case you missed it, click back to the homepage. There are a bunch of other equally great diversions.

A bunch of US zip codes are for PO Boxes only, so this seems to stand a strong chance of working, at least in those places.

So tired of people on HN disparaging Warren G Harding.

Seriously, though: several of the Trump campaign's architects (Paul Manafort, Roger Stone) got their start in the Nixon administration.

You say inefficient. I say mysterious. Who's to say the server always returns the same thing?

The only way to find out is to scroll infinitely as the domain name suggests. Beware, your scrolling may have been finite.

r/whatisthisthing might be your friend here

NYTimes digital revenue is mostly subscriptions. Other publishers with lesser brand names are much more beholden to Google.

This (ironically). I often start enforcing a "no pronouns" rule for myself and others when conversations and concepts get more complicated. It (the rule) is awkward at first but makes a big difference in mutual understanding.

Counterpoint: a friend in Brooklyn was mugged for only around $10 but almost immediately after ran into street police on patrol. They jumped in the car with him and summoned other local cars to catch the robbers successfully.

The police want to catch the bad guys too, but after 8 hrs has passed, it becomes virtually impossible to succeed.

Fair point. If you prohibit everyone, including walled gardens, from targeting based on user behavior or user data, that seems like a plausible solution.

It's a purely regulatory solution, though, not technical as the top level comment suggested :)

Tracking definitely works, at least in my experience. That's why Google and Facebook have completely taken over the entire digital ad ecosystem. They just have much better data, and your spend is an order of magnitude more effective than buying directly from publishers.

Take the camping example. If I sell camping equipment, I can try to reach out to blogs directly, but I will have to place hundreds of campaigns for $100 each, track and monitor them all separately, and count on each of the blogs to deliver them accurately in good positions with no fraud. Or I can just buy one massive campaign with Facebook that runs across Facebook and Instagram and targets people who are interested in camping and maybe even expressed purchase intent. That's the better option every time. The transactions costs of dealing with individual websites are prohibitive.

Google (and the other tracking companies) just distribute that same option across the open web. If you get rid of it, Facebook wins absolutely.

I like the idea, as one commenter expressed, that the open web would be better without advertising. But I think the reality of an infinitely powerful Facebook is that the open web would be a wasteland and afterthought.

One potentially negative unintended consequence: closed systems like Facebook become even more powerful than they already are. Their revenues will dwarf (even more than they do now) any other free digital platform that can't re-create a fully targeted ad product entirely in-house.

Without Google AdX and the mess of disturbing cross-site tracking, I can't see why advertisers wouldn't just spend 100% of their digital budgets in walled gardens. It would just be so much more effective.

I like the Hemingway app, but it is very much designed to make you write like Hemingway (ie short, clear sentences _only_). Obviously most great writing is not in this style.

The Hemingway app is good for work emails and marketing copy, or if you happen to like that style. It is hardly the universal arbiter of "poor or confusing writing".

If I put text into this tool and generate an original and unique image, who owns that image? If it's OpenAI, do they license it?

There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself.

But increasingly we seem a long way from achieving this. Amazon reviews have become such garbage, I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality.

There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising because they have thriving businesses that generate lots of cash. Brands can get stocked in major retailers because you need decent products to make it through Walmart's buying process.

These are signals that are harder to fake, and they're kind of the best we've got right now.

We in the US spent something like $7000/citizen on stimulus so far though, so $30/test gets you a lot of tests if it mitigates the economic effects of the virus.

Previous discussion (5 years ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10754194

I doubt it. These lawsuits would be few and far between and Google still derives a ton of value from its free accounts in the aggregate. They might just get better at terminating the right accounts...

I would love love love if this gave me a way to run Photoshop or other Win/Mac only apps from my Linux laptop. Let us request Ubuntu!

(Although millstone's comment makes me wary to suggest you do anything with Adobe's software...might want to be careful there)

There are tons of examples of this. Basically any company with a real competitive advantage is very expensive to unseat once established. Try to unseat Amazon, Google, Facebook, or Apple with the capital that launched those companies.

Is it necessary that ad blockers be totally all-or-nothing in their approach? Pop-up blockers didn't kill all ads. They just killed pop-ups. If it's really the privacy violations that are the problem, and not the user experience of seeing a bunch of ads, why not find a middle ground?

Make an ad blocker that just dishonors cookies, clears localStorage, etc for the ad domains, rather than blocking the requests altogether. Publishers won't make as much money since advertisers won't be able to track you. But at least you could give the publishers the ability to make some money from ads served to you.

If this approach gained adoption, you might see a growth in the market for non-tracking ads (analogous to the growth in the market for non-popup ads described in the article).

Why not?

I'm agreed with you on that point. I wish we lived in that world and I think we should work harder to get there. As long as we don't, though, I'm resigned to recognizing the public costs of these private failures.

Indeed. I'm not saying the investors didn't have downside. Many did, and many of them lost everything (as they should have). But the public also bore a tremendous cost, and that makes the threat of another such crisis a public issue.

That's a fair point given the way I phrased my reply, but TARP is far from the extent of the cost of the financial crisis. The resulting market crash, credit crunch, unemployment all play a role in making this much more than a private issue. The fed estimated the cost to each American at $20-80K. [1] Also TARP could have very easily not made money, and bailouts are certainly not guaranteed to make money the next time around.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/business/economy/the-cost...

You'll recall the financial crisis in 2008, where many of us taxpayers paid massively to bail out these private investors using their own money.

On the flip side, the market prices for most of these tracked data are not very high. It's only lucrative to sell this data if you have a very large user base. For paid apps with smaller user bases, the incremental revenue is likely negligible.