It is like encouragement for the thing you were already likely to do, which is the goal of targeted advertising.

It’s the claim of targeted advertising. The person I saw talking about this actually ran the numbers, comparing two very similar geographic markets. In market A they paid for advertising, but in B they did not.

When comparing market A to market B, market A had a marginal increase in sales for the advertised product vs. market B. However, they were charged for orders of magnitude more conversions than the actual increase in sales.

The idea is that when compared to something like actual click-through purchases, where a user literally clicks on an ad and then buys a product, it’s extremely deceptive.

I literally had bets on whether or not someone would respond exactly as you did, bragging about never seeing ads because of ad blocking.

There is actually an argument that advertisers like Google are abusing micro targeting to extract advertising revenue from clients while, at least in some cases, delivering few actual new customers.

Here’s the process.

1. Google sees that your profile (browsing habits, demographics, search patterns, etc) suggest you are interested in product A.
2. Google blasts you with advertisements for product A, essentially marking your browser session and claiming you as a recipient of their advertising. Ever look at a particular product and find you are being advertised for that product incessantly for a while?
3. If you happen to buy product A around the time that your session was shown an advertisement for that product, Google claims you as a conversion and gets paid for convincing you to buy the product. Advertising works!

So if Google’s algorithm thinks you are already going to buy product A, they show you an ad for product A constantly because it means they’ll claim you as an advertising success and get paid extra.

There are some circumstances that are in his favor, specifically in New York. There are enough people in NYC who are willing to give progressives a try that it may actually put pressure on the Governor, who is up for reelection next year. There is a progressive candidate running against the current Governor so there is a significant incentive to shore up her support on the left and for her to play ball with Mamdani.

We’ll have to see. There are a lot of powers looking to stop him and demonstrate the futility of trying to accomplish anything progressive. If he fails I fear it will utterly demoralize progressives, but in a rare moment at least the electoral system is in his favor for the next 12 months.

Are we now protesting that they reversed their decision?

…no? I’m not really protesting so much as offering what I think the other person is trying to say. I think they are saying that Google crossed a line, and walking it back doesn’t change that fact.

In my opinion, Google has crossed countless lines over the last 5-10 years. I’m looking for alternatives that meet my own needs. That search has accelerated over the last few years, when the things Google has done have been most egregious. This isn’t a protest. This is disillusionment. I’m abandoning ship.

I’ve had a pretty good experience with it aside from this recent problem with my phone - Pixel 8 Pro. It’s a big deal right now - I have a number of self hosted services I use on my phone accessed through a shared subnet via tailscale. When I left it enabled, multiple times a day I’d lose connectivity entirely. It would get fixed if I just quickly disable-enable it… at least until it randomly happens again in an hour or two. I started using spit tunneling, which I think fixed the connectivity issue for internet-dependent apps but nothing I tried fixed calls and texts.

Unfortunately, my mother has been having a number of health issues so there is no fucking way I’m going to risk missing calls and texts…so I just deal with being disconnected from my servers for now. I really wish there was a solution or something I could do to figure out what’s going wrong. I can’t keep trying random things and risk it. Calls from my mother are virtually the only calls I get, other than spam.

I’ve had to stop using it on my Pixel. In the last few months I have more and more suddenly lost all connectivity outside of my tailscale network. I tried excluding apps but I still will randomly fail to receive SMS or calls, suddenly getting them delivered in a rush when I disconnect from tailscale.

If anyone has any tools to recommend troubleshooting the phones connection let me know. I have no idea how to learn more about the problem beyond the obvious “If tailscale isn’t on, it doesn’t happen.”

I think it was fairly obvious that the move was going to piss people off, they just misjudged to what extent. Modern business strategy is to claim to listen to customer feedback and just quietly plan to implement it anyway, just do it more subtly, more quietly, and more slowly.

It is very hard to make a device that is affordable, compact, efficiently cooled, and modular. Offering complete support is also infinitely more difficult when hardware is not controlled for. GPU and CPU are both customized AMD chips and the power supply is designed for their anticipated power draw.

If you want to swap your GPU, build your own SFF. Hopefully they’ll have SteamOS available for general use soon.

Twice.

There are more “low stakes” situations where removing the filibuster has been more or less normalized.

Passing the budget is a different beast altogether.

While Steam is more or less the best big solution we have, it does leave a lot to be desired. The only reason they are the best is because they clawed their way to the top early, kept themselves “good enough” compared to the competition, and haven’t yet sold out their entire customer base.

At this point, they completely dominate. It’s insanely difficult to compete with them. So long as they make half of an effort to improve things and continue to be somewhat benevolent they’ll likely keep their crown.

However, Valve is not ideal. They are still looking out for themselves, primarily. Many of Valves improvements have just been reactions to competitors and other threats not an inherent desire to deliver the best product possible or do the right thing. It’s just the fact that most competitors are more obviously greedy and immoral that makes Valve look like the heroes.

Without Epic and others throwing cash on the fire trying to compete I doubt we’d have seen even the slow upgrades to the Steam experience we’ve seen in recent years.

Without the Australian lawsuit, we’d have no return policy.

Without the clever abuse of arbitration by a group of lawyers, Valve would still have forced arbitration in the agreements.

Steam OS was only a thing, and Proton only got backed by Valve, when Microsoft first started positioning itself to eat Valve’s lunch by exerting control over Windows and pushing for things like UWP and the MS/Windows/XBOX storefronts on PC.

The vast majority of Valve’s storefront improvements are algorithms and crowd sourcing solutions. They want to be as hands off as possible because being hands on is hard and comes with liability. The whole skins market and gambling fiasco kind of shows that they’d much rather just not get involved if possible - same risk/reward cost/benefit analysis used by every greedy company. If that means lying about how aware they are of it that’s what they’ll do.

Don’t get me wrong. The least worst is, unfortunately, the best we’ve got. I love gaming and use Steam a lot. It’s just that the other big players are just so terrible that I think Valve gets a free pass. Hell, much of the tech industry is swallowing tactical nukes hoping that the radiation will somehow mutate them into a good business. In the meantime they are using the illusion of “expansion” from the resulting explosions to make themselves look bigger for investors. I support anyone not doing that.

I don’t think it’s necessarily all Manchin’s but I wouldn’t be surprised if 30-70% were on a Manchin-like spectrum. I’m pretty sure that when most mainstream Democrats champion anything remotely progressive, they don’t really want it to fully succeed (if at all) and would actually vote against the original legislation as written. The supposed champions are depending on Republicans and the open Manchin’s to negotiate it down to something the champions would actually be willing to vote for.

I remember, years ago, Republicans put some extremely unpopular legislation up for a vote as a performative gesture knowing it would receive zero Democrat votes. Then one or maybe a few Democrats strategically voted in favor, knowing it would be catastrophic for the Republicans approval if they actually passed it in a Republican controlled Congress. Suddenly the remaining Republicans were forced to vote against the bill in order to prevent it from passing. I recall it was considered a very ballsy and impressive move from Democratic leadership.

Without the filibuster, the roles could absolutely be reversed… but the bill would be extremely popular and Republicans could show the true nature of the Democratic party as the Democrats purposely tank it to prevent it from actually passing.

They may have been “protecting” the filibuster. If Republicans removed the filibuster, it would pave the way for Democrats to do the same thing. If Democrats were to lose the excuse of the Republican filibuster stopping them from passing legislation, they’d be forced to reveal that there are many more fucking disingenuous pieces of shit just like Manchin and Sinema ready to tank progressive legislation.

One is to expect the workers to love their job.

Honestly, loving one’s job doesn’t mean never needing a break. Working Class jobs pay because they are hard work that you need to pay someone to do. Whether or not you enjoy the work doesn’t change the fact that it is hard work.

I am extremely privileged with my job. I don’t get paid as well as my counterparts elsewhere but the personality and leadership style of my superiors has kept me here. I don’t expect I’d be able to do what I do how I do it anywhere else. Considering all this, I wouldn’t say I love my job. There are parts that are tedious and unpleasant. However, I do like my job. Even the parts I like are challenging and can be exhausting. I still need a break occasionally.

Much of it was all posted in a short period of time. I ignored him after he picked it up and told me what it was for. I’m just always saddened and frustrated that there seem to always be people jumping to take advantage of any situation, be a middle man.

In the long run, it’s again at least better than wasting it. I don’t have the patience to deal with trying to sell most things. It’s not like I went out and bought the stuff with the intent of giving them away to someone who needs it for free. It just… doesn’t feel as rewarding as knowing it is actually going to help someone besides a middle man.

Skip due process and this is guaranteed to happen.

I was honestly really put off when some old guy nabbed a ton of stuff I had on there so that he could sell it all at his church’s fundraising auctions. Like, I’d rather not throw it away but eww.

He was almost always the first to respond to my posts when I was trying to downsize.

First, what do you consider AI?

Algorithms tweaked by ML for a very specific, narrowly scoped task? I have very different feelings on those vs. something like what the tech giants try to insert into every interaction I have with them.

only because friends millionaires are there to leech off them

Seems only fair, since it is virtually impossible to amass millions without leeching off of society as a whole.

I’ll admit there may be a few good millionaires, but that’s only because greedflation has made it so that a million isn’t what it used to be.