Local advertisements can be nice. The advertisement section in the local newspaper was a thing people used to actually seek out, once upon a time. The real problem is the scaling of advertisement frameworks globally and algorithmically serving individuals or certain groups. It is strictly parasitic at that level.
If "can be nice" is the bar of quality we hold ads to, then all advertisement passes the bar. A lot of newspaper ads were for luxury tchotchkes, cigarettes, booze or gambling. Back then, advertisements had some pretty substantial downsides, normalizing entire swathes of behavior that is today considered unhealthy and exploitative.
At most, I would call advertisement a Tragedy of the Commons. But the way publicity works, it feels like the tragedy is unavoidable; all smart advertisers will eventually transgress against normalcy.
> If "can be nice" is the bar of quality we hold ads to, then all advertisement passes the bar.
No. I literally never want to see an advertisement on my computer, unless I'm visiting a local forum with local advertisements. If I want to see a product or service online, I will search for it using my search engine that does not accept payment for search rankings.
Global, digital advertising is clearly a different class of advertising than local advertisements.
I'd really like for some country to ban all ads, even if just for a while, so people could observe the quasi-experiment.
My personal bet would be the country would suffer for it quite a lot, similar to places that have banned e.g. loans, but it'd be very cool if I were wrong!
depends on where the public communication is happening. On their own publicly accessible site? then no that wouldn't be advertising it would be information. In links on random unrelated websites, before videos, in the sky, on the side of the road, in bright lights on the side of a mountain, a person standing in the street with a megaphone being paid by the company? Yes, that would be advertising.
Except for socialising the entire internet age, giving poor people in 3rd world slums the same access to the same platforms as the richest 0.001%.
No one likes to acknowledge this, but there is an alternate timeline where only the rich kid in school has a Google account, reddit account, meta account, and almost all content is still produced by massive media conglomerates.
Ads suck and everyone hates them, but don't lose sight of what they enabled by hyperfocusing on the bad.
Before Google, before Reddit, before Facebook, people all over the world, rich and poor, run their own sites and their own forums, allowing them to chat with people throughout the world.
Here in Serbia, even in the worst of times (sanctions, NATO bombing in 1999), people with internet access could participate in local and global fora, newsgroups etc. It was expensive to get a computer and internet access, but people were willing to pay to host a small community. Late in 90s and early in 2000s, there was a huge number of cheap "virtual hosting" providers, and even cheaper LAMP stack providers, where people would run their own phpBB or similar forum software. IRC I probably need not mention.
This "great equalising" has been nothing but a negative in the long run.
The cultural internet blip of the 90's/early 00's is never coming back. Its not a framework for a free open internet, it's an anomaly that was born from a convergence of factors that was short lived before the masses showed up. A wonderful thing to be a part of, no question I get warm fuzzies thinking about it now, but I recognize what it was. It's akin to dreaming of that time you caught Coldplay play a small london pub in 1998, and then thinking it would be so great if Coldplay could just play small pubs again. Not happening.
No disagreement there, but I do disagree that on the internet, poor and rich would not intermingle without the big tech players: they already have, and even if not for them, they would have continued.
I am not reminiscing anything here, but I do believe this counterpoint does disprove the claim to the contrary :)
> No one likes to acknowledge this, but there is an alternate timeline where only the rich kid in school has a Google account, reddit account, meta account.
It is not at all obvious that this would be a worse timeline to live in.
Ads didn't give us Wikipedia. The vast majority of blogs and forums were not for profit. Specialised media outlets were always subscription-based. Large amounts of valuable information like research papers, technical documentation and curated databases were paywalled.
The content that ad-based websites brought was mostly clickbait designed around serving these ads.
The solution is for companies to stop half-assing multiple things, and instead whole ass one thing.
It's impossible though. There actually isn't a single company alive that's capable of doing something like that, because it would require a decision maker to say "instead of these two things I want just one thing" and the second that happens it will be the end of the world.
What made you give up on it? Lack of time, or did you just not find it fun? “Season 2” of games came out last year.
I’d really like the chance to play with one and maybe even try to develop for it. Unfortunately, the price is a bit steep, even more so when considering shipping and taxes to the EU. I kept checking for years (and still do from time to time) to see if they’d sell through a retailer in the EU or if I could get one second-hand here, but it’s looking like that’ll never happen.
I've seen some very recent niche tech demoing fast-refresh e-ink screens but pretty much everything until now has required a noticeable flash to clear the entire screen on update. Which is fine for reading books but not for quick animating in an action game.
Most e-ink displays do not refresh faster than the original GameBoy which was 60fps.
Would probably be great for like, text adventures, visual novels, turn based strategy games, etc.
But lcd screens are so cheap I don't even know what the advantage of an e-ink screen would be for this. I was just misremembering what the niche part of the playdate screen was.
Edit: And just to continue the nerdier part of the conversation, the dmg-01's refresh rate was indeed ~60, but it's pixel response time was so bad it really made it feel way slower. I remember when the GBC came out how amazed I was at how clear the games looked. dmg-01 felt like a tiger handheld a lot of the time.
60fps is the speed the PPU pushes pixels to the LCD, not the speed the LCD physically refreshes itself. That part was slow enough you could toggle pixels at 30Hz to simulate more than 4 levels of gray.
I have a Boox e-reader. You can run Firefox on it, you can drag-to-scroll like a phone, there's a lot of ghosting (like the game boy) but it works fine. Now I wish I still had a game boy to compare it to.
They didn't fall for it, this is what they want. They don't want low prices, they don't want cheap gas, they want war. They don't care how much they have to pay to get it. They want death and blood.
Engaging with their false narrative doesn't do anything but reinforce it.
> They didn't fall for it, this is what they want.
If it's what they wanted it's very odd that the winning candidate's platform swore no new wars. It's also weird that his approval rating is bouncing around at the lowest level ever recorded as he's prosecuting a war that his constituents want.
everyone on the planet who heard that knew it was a lie, including every person who voted for him. They voted for him because they KNEW he was lying not because they thought he was telling the truth.
It's more subtle than that. Trump says so many varied and contradicting things with extremely varying levels of seriousness that any voter could squint at what he said and done, read their hopes and dreams into it and then think he's not being serious about the rest.
Anyone who's willing to vote for someone who is so blatantly a fascist, is themselves a fascist, and you're furthering their agenda by pretending they're just bumpkins who got tricked.
I would bet that there is a ton of wood in these buildings that they are hiring thousands of carpenters for. They are not hiring carpenters to entertain the electricians.
My grandpa was a card-carrying union carpenter. But all I remember is him doing general labor... all the actual carpentry jobs were gone before I was born, and I hit the half-century mark myself a few years ago. He worked with concrete and steel alot. I'd seen him put up cinder block too, picked that up somewhere I guess. And this was in the 1980s.
I'd take your bet, while trying to hustle you to raise the wager.
Everything I'm finding is showing the opposite with the exception of Microsoft experimenting with timber datacenters. Just looking at photos of DCs under construction shows they're all steel and concrete.
There is zero wood in a data center (or commercial building in general) excluding doors, millwork, and fire-rated plywood for mounting equipment on. It’s simply not allowed.
Data center are tip-up warehouses with walls made of reinforced concrete, metal bar joists, metal columns, and metal roofs. Any interior wall framing is made of steel.
Theres no wood on the data floor of a Tier 4 datacenter.
I am not convinced that every DC being built as a result of AI demand is going to be a brilliant T4 datacenter. In fact I wouldnt be surprised if theres a lot of shit going on in the US, which from my admittedly limited experience has some really shithouse datacenters as it is.
Theres a small DC operator near me, 10-20 racks, bit of a joke really other than their position makes them high demand by telcos. Last time I was there <10 years ago had MDF floors above their cable paths. Might have been a wooden partition too.
But to be a pain in the ass, my local T4 DC has a significant amount of timber in the foyer and break rooms. The meeting rooms too. My guess is, theres tons in the office area.
Theres also a ton of temporary construction hacks going on there are they expand. They had some temporary walls built across the common room for instance.
I wouldnt be surprised if carpenters were useful for things like, drop ceilings, liftable floor tiles, general dogsbody stuff.
I don't know anything about this so I am curious: that doesn't sound like a lot of wood work so why are the AI companies recruiting so many carpenters?
Steel stud framing is done by carpenters, any interior partition wall framing is done by carpenters. Also any soffits, front for gypsum ceiling clouds in offices, etc will be framed by carpenters. Maybe Meta has them install doors as well?
All of that stuff is probably 0.01% of the building, by volume/weight/cost/labor or any metric you care to choose. The structure itself has zero wood in it.
Trim, cabinets, and doors can all be removed from a building and it will remain standing. If you remove all of the wood from a stick-built house there is virtually nothing left.
Learning this fact is what got me interested into binding my own books!
With how the quality of things seems to have been degrading over the years (either real or just me getting older and experiencing the impermanence of all things) I've been trying to adopt an attitude of "if this practice existed before the industrial revolution, I can _probably_ do it" and it's been really great to learn how things were made before they had to be mass produced as cheaply as possible.
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