Advertisers generally avoid spending money on displaying ads to poor countries. It is interesting to see how the ads change depending on the country your IP address is from.
These institutions don’t bother making fixes where they can, so it seems unlikely that giving them more options will change much. Ironically, things like windows auto-update being the default probably actually help their IT departments maintain some level of security
Yeah and it is better. Most things can be updated without a reboot and even for the kernel, you can either live-patch it (not always possible) or reboot only the kernel.
>”Given this understanding, the best away to achieve the desired outcome is to get creative about aligning incentives at the top of org structures where resources are allocated.”
I really don’t understand what this means; could you please explain it? It comes off as ‘mushy’ consulting-speak to me.
It’s a mini-language that you don’t have to learn unless you work with executive types. But it does mean something. In particular it means “activity at the grassroots is wasted effort when the real decision maker with the money is not aware or in agreement with the direction.”
Discoverability is a very difficult challenge, especially for small niches. Many customers contact my employer, saying that they didn't know our products existed (and many products have existed in some form for >10 years). If you can find a way to improve discoverability, you would be a hero to many niche businesses.
I truly don't care. I would much rather miss out on hearing about a few genuinely-desirable products due to poor discoverability, if the payoff is that I don't have to suffer the deluge of imposed advertizing I never asked for.
Do you have any non-feeling based thoughts to contribute? I see your comment as being non-constructive, as you have not presented any new information or thinking.
On the contrary, you haven't explained why discoverability matters, or why any of us should care. You just take it as a given that it justifies the means. I believe that is what the poster above is pointing out.
I would agree, that I would rather not suffer imposed advertising I did not ask for even if missing out some products.
However, you can have e.g. a magazine that lists computer parts if you want to buy that (as mentioned by another comment), or in a restaurant that has a sign on the wall (or a printed menu) indicating new items, or a news paper might have a section relating to restaurants or movies or whatever else you might want to buy, or there might be publications that specialize in these things if you are deliberately trying to look for them. They should not need to put advertising anywhere, and they should not need to make it excessive or abusive or dishonest like they do, etc.
(Products that they advertise way too much often have some problems other than just the advertising, too.)
Obviously specifics make a huge difference here so it's hard to generalize, but generally, finding the market is not a new problem. In the current business environment, the entire ecosystem is rigged against you, forcing you to advertise. Consumers are so inundated with advertising that almost have no energy leftover, or any expectation that they need to go out and search. Worse, search is distorted in all the wrong ways because of the exact same incentives. Your competitors (or even poorly-fitting tangentially-related products) are stealing discovery from you by capturing searches through advertising. They can't even get to you because a wall of SEO stands between them and you.
I think I (mostly) agree with you, but it seems like SEO and search in general would be even more distorted if outright advertising were disallowed or penalized.
It's commercialization in general that distorts things, and you're probably right that SEO without advertising might actually have been worse? But then again, the online advertising market is a whole evolved thing that maybe...doesn't need to be...as big as it is? E.g. I don't see structurally how the economy requires spending hundreds of billions of dollars on advertising to function.
Yes, I agree that (on and off-line) advertising does seem to be unnecessarily expensive (across the economy), but valuable 'advertising placements' are scarce, and I'm not sure how else they could be allocated.
There is absolutely no reason to think that advertising makes discoverability of desirable trades more likely, and every reason to think it makes it worse. The people best equipped to spend a lot on ads are those who are offering the worst deal (giving them the best margins). That's without even getting into ads that are used to manipulate people into wanting to make obviously bad choices, e.g. ads for soda, candy, fast food, alcohol, gambling, pointless plastic garbage, etc.
Catalogs, the kind used in the '80s for electronic components. Yellow pages.
Today it should be online, but then, imagine having to curate Amazon where hundreds of sellers appear and dissapear each month selling the exact same product.
The UK has a 'Digital Services Tax', which is effectively an internet ad tax: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introduction-of-t... You could also argue that corporate taxes do tax ads, as they're applied to advertising-based companies, though these taxes usually don't 'target' ad companies. Corporate taxes are passed on to customers, employees, suppliers, or investors; usually one of the first three (and most often the first one), as that list is in increasing order of 'captivity'.
The statement implies an assumption that the drivers weigh / mass more than 59 lbs. / 27 kg, as they are included in the first measurement, but not the second. This is a reasonable assumption, as even Indycar drivers are all adult males, and none are small enough to weigh / mass less than that.
It probably helps the employer demonstrate that they hire and retain disabled people, likely assisting with some government quotas, and defenses against lawsuits by aggrieved ex-employees.
But for 'AI' to be a winner-take-all market, it seems that the winner would have to be using customer data to improve the 'AI'. Not only do you have to believe that one of these (relatively) under-capitalized upstarts can corral the money, but also that they can convince (enterprise) customers to 'fork over' their proprietary data to only one provider, and also that the provider can then charge a monopoly rent.
Those all seem possible, but I wouldn't assign greater than a 50% probability to any of them, and the valuations seem to imply near-certainty.
I was under the distinct impression that Seattle was somewhat divided over 'big tech', with many long-term residents resenting Microsoft and Amazon's impact on the city (and longing for the 'artsy and free-spirited' place it used to be). Do you think those non-techies are sympathetic to the Microsofties and Amazonians? This is a genuine question, as I've never lived in Seattle, but I visit often, and live in the PNW.
> Do you think those non-techies are sympathetic to the Microsofties and Amazonians?
As somebody who has lived in Seattle for over 20 years and spent about 1/3 of it working in big tech (but not either of those companies), no, I don't really think so. There is a lot of resentment, for the same reasons as everywhere else: a substantial big tech presence puts anyone who can't get on the train at a significant economic disadvantage.
If you are a writer or a painter or a developer - in a city as expensive as Seattle - then one may feel a little threatened. Then it becomes the trickle down effect, if I lose my job, I may not be able to pay for my dog walker, or my child care or my hair dresser, or...
Are they sympathetic? It depends on how much they depend on those who are impacted. Everyone wants to get paid - but AI don't have kids to feed or diapers to buy.
They kind of are, though I think so many locals now work in big tech in some way that it's shifted a bit. I wish we could return to being a bit more artsy and free spirited
I've lived in the Seattle area most of my life and lived in San Francisco for a year.
SF embraces tech and in general (politics, etc) has a culture of being willing to try new things. Overall tech hostility is low, but the city becoming a testbed for projects like Waymo is possibly changing that. There is a continuous argument that their free-spirited culture has been cannibalized by tech.
Seattle feels like the complete opposite. Resistant to change, resistant to trying things, and if you say you work in tech you're now a "techbro" and met with eyerolls. This is in part because in Seattle if you are a "techbro" you work for one of the megacorps whereas in SF a "techbro" could be working for any number of cool startups.
As you mentioned, Seattle has also been taken over by said megacorps which has colored the impressions of everyone. When you have entire city blocks taken over by Microsoft/Amazon and the roads congested by them it definitely has some negative domino effects.
As an aside, on TV we in the Seattle area get ads about how much Amazon has been doing for the community. Definitely some PR campaign to keep local hostility low.
'how much they do for the community' like trying to buy elections so we won't tax them, same thing boeing and microsoft did. Anytime out local government gets a little uppity suddenly these big corps are looking to move like boeing largely did. Remember Amazon HQ2, at least part of the reasoning behind that disaster was seattlites asking, 'what the hell is amazon doing for us besides driving up rents and snarling traffic?'
(.. and exactly how is boeing doing since it was forced to move away from 'engineering culture' by moving out of the city where their workforce was trained and training the next generation. Oh yeah planes are falling out of the sky and their software is pushing planes into the ground.)
I'm sure the 5% employee tax in Seattle and the bill being introduced in Olympia will do more to smooth things over than some quirky blipvert will.
I think most people in Seattle know how economics works, logic follows:
while "techbro" don't work is true:
if "techbro" debt > income:
unless assets == 0:
sellgighustle
else
sellhousebeforeforeclosure
nomoreseattleforyou("techbro")
end
else
"gigbot" isn't summoned and people don't get paid.
"techbro" health-- due to high expense of COBRA.
[etc...]
end
end
I recall reading that Google had similar 'delay' issues when crawling the web in 2000 and early 2001, but they managed to survive. That said, OpenAI seems much less differentiated (now) than Google was back then, so this may be a much riskier situation.
The 25x revenue multiple wouldn't be so bad if they weren't burning so much cash on R&D and if they actually had a moat.
Google caught up quick, the Chinese are spinning up open source models left and right, and the world really just isn't ready to adopt AI everywhere yet. We're in the premature/awkward phase.
They're just too early, and the AGI is just too far away.
Doesn't look like their "advertising" idea to increase revenue is working, either.
There is no moat in selling/renting AI models. They are a commoditized product now. I can't imagine with what thought process did investors poured in such money on OpenAI.
If you start out as a non-profit, and pull a bunch of shady shenanigans in order to convert to a for-profit, claiming to be ethical after that is a bit of a hard sell.
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