- drowntoge parentAlthough Flash really sucked as a technology, it did inspire a lot of visual artistry on the web. Half of the cool stuff you saw on StumbleUpon was made with Flash by people who weren't proficient with JS/CSS, which weren’t capable enough to achieve the same results anyway.
- I hang up the moment I realize it’s a sales call. If I’m in a particularly great mood that day, I might mutter a quick “No thank you I’m not interested.”
The way I vindicate myself morally is by knowing I’m not wasting their time this way. People like me are dead ends —— I know that I’m never going to be convinced to buy whatever they’re selling in a million years. By ending the call quickly, I feel like I’m doing them a favor. They can move on to someone who might actually be interested.
- Any sufficiently large corporation possesses the resources to gain trust by portraying itself as the 'nice guys,' unlike the others, which is often convincing enough to fool many.
The conviction that every corporation is inherently evil or can turn evil at any point in the future never seems to fail, but many people just aren't that skeptical.
- > If you take a closer look at your ticket, you may notice that it has a gliding movement, making it in a sense, alive. That movement is our ticket technology actively working to safeguard you every second.
This part made me want to throw up, preferably a couple of buckets full, right onto the heads of the marketing team who came up with it.
Kudos to the author of the article. Great work and a great read to go with it.
- Agreed. The AI of our day (the transformer + huge amounts of questionably acquired data + significant cloud computing power) has the spotlight it has because it is readily commoditized and massively profitable, not because it is an amazing scientific breakthrough or a significant milestone toward AGI, superintelligence, the benevolent Skynet or whatever.
The association with higher AI goals is merely a mixture of pure marketing and LLM company executives getting high on their own supply.
- Yeah. It's truly amazing how cleverly they designed these tools to encourage discovery and experimentation. It's made to make it basically impossible to create something that "doesn't look right", which makes it a fantastic creativity toy for children.
It makes me a bit sad that it's not easy to find anything today that can compete with what I played with as a kid thirty years ago.
- SponsorBlock is already available and does an excellent job of filtering out embedded ad content inserted by content creators themselves, which (IMO) tends to be much sneakier than anything Google could implement. I also can't see how they could hide the interactive part of the ad ('Click to buy' links etc.) from blockers, so even in the best case where the embedded video ad go undetected, the links will not appear/be clickable.
Google probably knows that trying to dodge content blockers in a browser environment is a losing battle. But hey, it might bump up their numbers for the next earnings call.
Being extremely short-sighted seems to be the name of the game in tech lately, so they'll probably go for it, and call it a success.
- Given the current rabid state of tech, I think we're only a couple of years away from seeing the first real examples of this. The messaging will probably be a bit different, incentivizing continuous eye contact rather than penalizing looking away: "Keep your eyes on to watch just one sponsored content instead of two!" (Which of course, boils down to the exact same thing.)