[-] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 18 points 4 months ago

As someone who works in advertising, that is partially true, but also not the complete story...

Data brokers want you to believe that the more data you have the more likely your ads are to be successful, but in reality it's not about the amount of data but the quality of the data. If you have someone who has looked at reviews of gym shoes/different models on different stores, then that data is pretty valuable as you can focus on getting them to buy from your store or try and advertise models at the top of their budget, which will likely lead to a higher ROI than just advertising on fitness forums (note it is super hard to get the balance between tipping people over the line to buy and advertising them something they were already going to buy/had already decided against - Google particularly are absolutely terrible at this, but also do evaluation in house, so they'll misrepresent to advertisers that your ad which showed up one link above your non-sponsored link made 100% of the difference in getting the purchase). Similarly, if you have data that someone is active on a car audio forum and recently bought a specific model of car, you can advertise kits/speakers specifically to that car, which is better than just advertising "hey, we make audio upgrade kits for [specific car/cars in general] on a forum/related site".

This also makes advertising one of the few situations where using ML actually makes sense - there's huge amounts of data (way more than a person can consider) to come in, and patterns which lead to good results (someone purchasing something) or bad results (someone not purchasing something). It's not worth a human targeting every single microcategory, but if an ML model can pick up that advertising to (eg) people who have recently purchased cameras who are interested in triathlons and often visit areas with with high rainfall makes them more likely to buy your specific aftermarket lens hood, then it makes buying the ads so much more worth it and also lets you extrapolate onto other microcategories which may also have similar results, and if they don't then that updates the model.

Generally data is less useful for awareness campaigns (ie "next time you're in the supermarket/in the business for x, buy our brand" type of campaign), especially if it's already on a relevant site, but it's still somewhat useful if someone is reading on a (trustworthy) news site or watching an ad-supported streaming service, however purchase data & activity data is still useful for showing more relevant ads, as while 90%+ of people on a fitness forum are going to be into fitness, I don't think 90%+ of general site visitors or tv show viewers are going to be into anything specific enough to make it worth it to advertise it.

[-] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 17 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Issue is if he's paying himself with the charity's money he'd have to pay tax on that, and if he wrote that off with a donation and paid himself again then it'd reset the loop - there's no loophole there, literally, as it'd be an endless closed loop of transferring money.

Given the best interests of the US government are destabilising other countries and supporting unfair healthcare companies, and given what is known about Bill Gates' charity spending I think a higher proportion actually goes to the betterment of society than would if it went to the US government

[-] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I drove this make of car for a while; there's an optional head up display where the up and down buttons here let you cycle through contacts/the song queue/radio stations. I'd imagine it's the same interface without it, just displayed somewhere in the car where you're not looking while driving.

Having it so that up/down moves you up/down through the list when there's a visual display is way more intuitive than up/down being volume - frankly the volume bar on Windows, Mac, many TVs etc. goes from left (quiet) to right (loud) anyway

[-] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 1 year ago

Selling more ads can actually be engaging to work on even if it's not world changing, if you're given things you actually need to think through

Unfortunately I can't really see Google being the type of place that lets people think for themselves, they're far too busy trying to please the shareholders for that

[-] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ok but a branching story is far from the same as a tv show

If you prefer point-and-click shooters or FIFA or whatever that's fine, but it's not like good RPGs are any closer to cinematic games/walking simulators than them - RPGs & walking simulators share a story, whereas point-and-click shooters & walking simulators share repetitiveness and little to no replay value

For the latter there is an argument that they're more of a sport than a media form, but why not just go to the gym or join a sports team? It follows the same logic as why not watch a movie instead of playing a game with a story

[-] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 1 year ago

Same, there's more music than spotify and the max quality isn't too dissimilar and notably both max out above "CD quality", which is what 95%+ of albums are released at

Also the recommendation algorithm (IMO, as this is where it gets subjective) is far superior to any alternatives - it's actually a really good deal especially when you use it a lot - I've averaged 3.3h of music per day for the past 3 years, so I have no issues whatsoever paying for it

[-] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 1 year ago

I'm attached to summer time personally

I don't want it going dark at 15:30 what can I say, 16:30 isn't much of an improvement but at least it's something

[-] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 1 year ago

Yes

It's a great bogeyman they can spend money going after because the people who they'll screw over (ie those who will lose their home if they start working as minimum wage is too low and support is only given to people who earn below a certain amount which is way too little) would never vote for them anyway

[-] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 1 year ago

Not really, it was agreed to as a treaty after WW2 (so US, China and USSR were all responsible) then the China-supported north invaded the US-supported south and it led to a stalemate

If anything the current unstable situation was caused by China, but there's no way the US were the direct cause

[-] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 18 points 1 year ago

I actually thought about that and changed "enjoyed" to "usable"

Dodos were tasty and Vaquitas are cute but chickens, wheat, potatoes, rice etc. are a borderline infinite food glitch for humans compared to most food sources so they naturally get cultivated in huge numbers

[-] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 18 points 2 years ago

Thing is when your system is dying and nothing is responding, you can almost always trust task manager to respond because of its privileges, simplicity and the fact it's built into the OS rather than using APIs, even if explorer.exe crashes.

Given there's no "ctrl-alt-f2: Imma go fix this mess" on Windows, having at least something you can rely on to not die is super valuable even if it is bad.

I'm not saying this tool isn't better for system monitoring (but I would like to see something like KSysGuard), just that Microsoft absolutely shouldn't touch task manager to fix whatever's wrong with it's resource usage monitoring functionality to avoid breaking something else in it

[-] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 2 years ago

People react differently to all substances, the real test for addiction is if you can stop doing it for say, 3 weeks in a row, not how often you do it... You can do it once a month and still be addicted but as long as you can stop for 3-4x longer than you usually would, you're probably not

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1rre

joined 2 years ago