crowcroft

It all seems a bit overly complicated to me. TikTok pretty much went straight to a self-serve platform and basically had immediate success. I would think if OpenAI did something similar there would be no shortage of advertisers wanting to spend money.

The most surprising thing to me is that they're partnering with third parties to do this.

Less secure, lower margins (more middlemen taking fees), harder to access, more likely to not work properly.

I would expect all the meta execs they've hired to know better so maybe I'm missing something...

I disagree on some of those dimensions (esp. lack of a moat), but agree things like geopolitics and security would lead to multiple wholesale providers.

My concern is that globally international relations are an absolute MESS, but there really needs to be some level of coordination here.

Naive question - let's assume this all becomes a really competitive market and 10+ companies are pumping satellites into orbit.

Are we going to run out of space?

At some point it probably makes the most sense for there to be one wholesaler of satellite connections and then many retailers right? The market skews towards being an international natural monopoly, right?

Sounds more like Sendgrid didn’t get the memo and their email reputation metric is a poor proxy.

Don't get me started. So many existing laws just seem to be conveniently ignored because... it's 'digital'?

In a lot of countries there are specific laws banning the deliberate targeting of advertising to children (and in contexts where you would reach children, heavily regulated), but for over a decade Meta would allow you to target within the ranges of 13 to 18 years old.

That's to say nothing of the scams and deepfake celebrity ads they let run. Imagine if a deepfake ad of Warren Buffet promoting an investment opportunity ran on TV, the network would get sued into oblivion. On Meta though, there's no repercussions.

Where does this fit in alongside the Agenctic Commerce Protocol? Is it just a question of whether your transacting bits vs atoms?

https://www.agenticcommerce.dev/

A bit of a moving target there, especially with the definition of medium data on disk considering the rise of high speed NVMe vs spinning metal. Makes me wonder if the 00s 'Big Data' era and the resulting infra is largely just outdated now...

Not really a comment on laptops, but I recently built a new desktop for the first time in nearly two decades. I'm sure that there has been some innovation in the space, but overall I was surprised that everything just seemed... the exact same?

PCI slots are from the 90s. DIMM from the 90s. SATA from the early 00s. LGA sockets from the mid 00s.

Not a biggie, but might want to update the reference to 'Ironclaw' in the Try Ironclaw link at the top of dench.com

In almost every category meaningful differentiation is a myth. It sounds nice to tell yourself you've got it and talk about moats or whatever, but it misses the point.

What people usually mean when they talk about differentiation is distinctiveness [1]. Design isn't a differentiator for these watches it's about being distinctive. At the end of the day when telling the time is commoditized, and expensive watches are just a status symbol it's all you've got.

[1] - https://marketingscience.info/news-and-insights/differentiat...

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

> Other sectors are missing out on investment limiting their growth and stalling the economy.

Would love to know what sectors you would say are obviously under invested. Sounds like an opportunity.

I think a better comparison is saying that search ads don't change search results (but it does change the results page).

The point is that the language and nuance ends up being lost on a large portion of the audience.

I totally agree, but the framing is critical.

I guess the question is, when I write a prompt into ChatGPT is the answer the entire response I get back, or is the answer just one part of the response I get back.

To date the entire response = the answer and so users likely see them as synonymous. That metaphor is being broken now and we're saying "no actually the response contains multiple things and only one part of it is the 'answer'".

Maybe I'm the one splitting hairs though.

"Ads that support free access and don’t change ChatGPT answers."

I understand what they're trying to say but this statement is factually incorrect. Answers never used to have ads, and now they do.

In the very first example, if ChatGPT wasn't running ads Heirloom Groceries wouldn't show up, therefore it is a different answer.

OpenAI is splitting hairs and implying that the ad and the 'answer' are two separate components making up a response, but that is not how users will see things, and OpenAI will have ever increasing incentives to blur the two.

How does the LLM know that the HTML and the API are the same? If an LLM wants to link to a user to a section of a page how does it know how to do that from the API alone?

You introduce a whole host of potential problems, assuming those are all solved, you then have a new 'standard' that you need to hope everyone adopts. Sure WP might have a plugin to make it easy, but most people wouldn't even know this plugin exists.

If only Arch supported Arm.

Here's my incredibly cynical take.

First they moved away from this in 4o because it led to more sycophancy, AI psychosis and ultimately deaths by suicide[1].

Then growth slowed[2], and so now they rush this out the door even though it's likely not 'healthy' for users.

Just like social media these platforms have a growth dial which is directly linked to a mental health dial because addiction is good for business. Yes, people should take personal responsibility for this kind of thing, but in cases where these tools become addicting, and they are not well understood this seems to be a tragedy of the commons.

1 - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/07/chatgpt-l...

2 – https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-peaked-...

Did that stop Adobe moving towards a subscription model?

You can only please some of the people some of the time I guess.

You lay out an impossible challenge for Canva, there is no way they can prove that they will never add a subscription service or different charges in the future.

What exactly do you expect from them? Would you prefer they just kept charging you for the product? That still isn't a guarantee that they wouldn't move towards more paid features and subscriptions in the future.

I find this less true where I live (New Zealand) where there are a lot of small takeaway shops that are often competitive on price.

In general though the ease at which the market can recall a brand has a direct connection to market share, loyalty and in turn pricing power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_jeopardy_(marketing)

Not entirely relevant to the article, but another factor that is rarely discussed. You need to assume people know about both widget companies.

You often see a McDonalds or Wendy's outcompete lower price/higher quality alternatives, simply because it's a brand people can recall.

New cars with low mileage should have far less maintenance issues than older cars.

Hard to get a real sense for total cost of ownership for electric vs gas cars from that sample.

Yes, people should be building applications on top of this.

Not even just the battery (although that probably is the biggest one), but maintenance in general.

If I buy a 5 year old Corolla with 50k miles on the clock, I have a pretty good idea of what maintenance is going to like for the next decade, and I know a mechanic who can do the work.

I have no idea at all what will happen with a comparable Tesla over 10 years.

I don't understand the 'Nextjs is good for SEO' hype. I think it's better to frame it as Nextjs isn't bad for SEO. Whether a site loads without client side rendering is a pretty binary thing.

If you're using Nextjs to get a high level of rich interactivity then your SEO issues aren't about CSR vs SSR anyway though. As you point it it's just bundle size and site speed, and URL structure that end up causing a negative impact. Nextjs doesn't fix that.

I don't think the NYSE had any DEI requirements, but the NASDAQ created a rule where boards needed some minority representation in order to be listed. That rule was challenged and overturned in court though.

> On August 6, 2021, the SEC approved Nasdaq’s proposed diversity rule for companies listed on its exchange. The rule required Nasdaq-listed companies to (1) publicly disclose board-level demographic data annually and (2) have, or explain why they do not have, a certain number of diverse directors on their boards. Companies with more than five board members were required to have two members from an underrepresented group, including one female and one person who self-identifies as Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, biracial, or LGBTQ+.

https://ogletree.com/insights-resources/blog-posts/fifth-cir...

> You pay for instagram with your personal data, which is used to target you with high value ads.

It's not quite that simple though. The problem is that they are not simply showing you relevant ads, they actively attempt to deliver an outcome the ad is trying to achieve.

On the surface this is relatively benign, Nike wants to sell shoes, they run ads and optimise towards shoe sales, and Meta makes that happen.

But what happens when people run political advertising? What happens when crypto companies promote scams?