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The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

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Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#181

Post by zdragnar »

graemep wrote: post #97
immibis wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's that way because of successful marketing - just like smoking, or cars, or fast food.

People enjoyed drinking long before there was marketing. People have been enjoying alcohol for literally tens of thousands of years. It has been associated with celebrations for many thousands (e.g. Jesus giving people alcohol to keep a wedding reception going - and that is just something that comes to mind - I am sure there are MUCH earlier examples someone familiar with older stuff can come up with). I would correc…

Alcoholism was so rampant in the US that enough states ratified a constitutional amendment making it illegal.

It wasn't enough to kill alcohol consumption entirely, but it did cut back on the culture of overindulgence as measure by death rates before and the years after.

Other countries also banned alcohol in this time period, and new Zealand voted for it twice but never enacted the ban.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#182

Post by LeifCarrotson »

h2zizzle wrote: post #145
bondarchuk wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It has cost a lot of money and therefore they will try very hard to make it back". I don't think it really makes sense. Companies will always try to make the maximum amount of money anyway.

No? Some companies are mission-driven. Some are ran by people with ethical scruples, and/or who will forego short-term profit for long-term brand image. Some (allegedly) have been infiltrated or taken over by bad actors who purposely sabotage the company's profitability. Some are private and simply do as they wish. I wish we wouldn't mindlessly repeat these platitudes. Try and falsify your statements before posting.

Some are or at least start that way, but they exist in a competitive market.

In our current regulatory and economic environment, it appears that mission-driven, long-term oriented, ethical companies are typically out-competed by finance-driven, short-term oriented, greedy companies.

The article describes the struggle of using a search engine in 2025. Which is to say, using Google in 2025. Search engines benefit greatly from huge economies of scale, and most websites are optimized for Google SEO and for their ad network. Sure, the folks at DuckDuckGo (my search engine) or Kagi appear to be your good sort of company, but the revenue and popularity of those companies is a rounding error in comparison to Alphabet, Inc. They can't afford the crawlers and infrastructure of the big finance-oriented players, they can't convince most websites to optimize for their engine, and most people don't even know they exist.

Sure, there's a handful of people running the equivalent of a small-town grocery with local farm-sourced produce and hand-selected general goods as a passion project, working long hours and slowly chewing through their savings. And there are a handful of people who feel that the existence of such a place is important, and shop there out of principles in spite of the incentives and penalties associated with that behavior. But most of the country is overrun by Dollar Generals and Wal Marts.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#183

Post by JambalayaJimbo »

joegibbs wrote: post #144
Llamamoe wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very possible that they never will, that instead the advertising will be so subtle nobody will be able to detect it. Including phrases similar to what products, brands, and their actual ads use in positive contexts, sentences that don't mention but make you think of products, being just slightly likely to bring a brand up than its competitor, and a tiny bit more critical of it, etc. The goal isn't to have an ad-…

I think subliminal advertising is banned in quite a few countries - not sure about the US - so it might be a problem internationally. I know that here in Australia there was a big scare about it in the mid 2000s, some station was cutting 100ms ads into shows. Not sure about the efficacy of it though, I’m sure it would be better if you watched a whole ad.

TV shows and movies often have subliminal ads. A character will use a specific type of phone for example.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#184

Post by scrollaway »

jraph wrote: post #174
karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

> Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all! A free lunch that costs our environment though, which is a big caveat :-)

Maybe.

But to be honest, optimizing monstrously slow processes that cost weeks of human labour by automating them, that saves a ton of energy as well. It’s not zero sum, as the humans spend that energy elsewhere, but ideally they spend it on more productive things.

This calculus can very quickly offset whatever energy is wasted generating cartoon images of vuvuzelas.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#185

Post by Lu2025 »

boothby wrote: post #2

> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…

> advertisers

This kind of ads is also impossible to filter. Everyone complains about ads on YouTube or Reddit but I never see any with my adblocks. Now we won't be able to squash them.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#186

Post by lesuorac »

vintermann wrote: post #50
bdangubic wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they won’t as long as you are paying $200+/month

Bold to assume they won't try to double-dip and profit from you in more than one way. Cable TV got ads, subscription newspapers got ads (and advertorials). Just because it's not free doesn't mean you aren't the product.

Cable never claimed to be ad-free; it's an old wives tale.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#187

Post by Lu2025 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #95
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s because of statistical likelihood and abundance of web content about React which seems to be kinda default choice. Had to be a looong con if it was an ad.

Are people putting up vast arrays of websites to promote products/politics solely to sway LLM-feeding crawlers yet?

I've seen those content mills since before Covid.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#188

Post by woooooo »

Marazan wrote: post #166
h2zizzle wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The moment their ad business doesn’t work anymore, the behemoth that Google is will come down to its knees. Which makes it all the weirder that they seem to be intentionally sabotaging it by nerfing Search into unusability.

The slow destruction of Google search is and will continue to be revenue positive for Google right up until the point where it isn't. Eventually they will break the "trust thermocline" in their search results and that will blow it up but on the way they'll keep making more and more money from every damaging change they make.

Crucially, the people driving each incremental change get to celebrate the extra revenue they drove and get promoted for it.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#189

Post by Llamamoe »

layer8 wrote: post #163
Llamamoe wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very possible that they never will, that instead the advertising will be so subtle nobody will be able to detect it. Including phrases similar to what products, brands, and their actual ads use in positive contexts, sentences that don't mention but make you think of products, being just slightly likely to bring a brand up than its competitor, and a tiny bit more critical of it, etc. The goal isn't to have an ad-…

I’m pretty sure it would be measurable. How else would advertisers pay for it? And given that advertisers would know about it, it would also be generally known. I wager that enough people and businesses would reject it, if it isn’t outright illegal in the first place.

Who says it has to be measurable in the output? It could be correlated with searches and purchases of fingerprinted users/demographics, or even just temporally.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#190

Post by Lu2025 »

myself248 wrote: post #10
gerdesj wrote: post #8

I am deliberately keeping away from LLMs for search. I'm old enough to remember finally ditching Altavista for the new upstart Google. I did briefly flirt with Ask Jeeves but it was not good enough. I don't think anyone has it sorted yet. LLM search will always be flawed due to being a next token guesser - it cannot be trusted for "facts". A LLM fact is not even a considered opinion, it is simply next token guessing.…

I miss Altavista every day. Case-sensitive search is how you tell DOS from DoS. Putting "exact phrases" in quotes no longer seems to work. Then they added insult to injury by forcing you to +mandate a term otherwise they might just ignore it. Now that no longer works either. I've entirely given up on Google. I've made extensive shortcuts so I can directly search various sites straight from my location bar: wikipedia,…

Correct. Google became unusable around 2020. I search Wikipedia directly and rely on Duck for other needs. As rudimentary as it is for uncommon languages such as Ukrainian, DDG it's still better than Google. Shame on them.
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