41–50 of 66 posts
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I read mostly 2 web sites that look the same: HN and /pol/. Orange, text based, almost anonymous.
But to my knowledge, no one has ever been able to triforce on HN. It's like a perpetual summer.
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Just recently my wife came back home telling me about some tablet computer she has never ever seen before. I think she has googled for it on her phone. What do you know - my Facebook showed a few ads of that device - on that day. I've never heard about it before. I never searched for it and I never searched for a tablet even - I don't use them. Is this now the new normality - palantiring through databases? Is it OK f…
I've always read comments like this and just assume it's confirmation bias on two levels: 1. Out of the 1000s of ads you see every day, at least one of them might coincidentally relate to something you talked about. You don't notice all the ads that are wildly irrelevant. 2. Even if you personally didn't have a hyper-relevant ad experience, out of the 1000s of HN readers that might comment a reply, one of them surely…
There's many other ways devices can be linked, addresses of bills for instance.
> > Geocitites > Oh yes, the 90's was so much better... Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience. I'm not going to say technology was better, nobody misses Realmedia, but the internet was more like a street than a mall. You could look at some weird art or look at some interesting…
The only countervailing events were Google's book scanning project, the founding of archive.org, and the growth of Wikipedia. Google Books is a shadow what it was, was under attack, and was largely an AI project. Archive.org is in danger, and had to limit access to 95% of its content; I can't download a book from the 40s that has been out of print since then, and where everybody who was involved with it is dead. Wikipedia is falling apart under the influence of paid editors and people attacking other people through edits to their biographies.
It's getting to the point where it might be better not to be on the web. I don't like it. Even this web 2.0 commenting on everything seems like a pointless outlet for frustrations. And all it does is make various files on you, in dozens or hundreds of hands, grow slowly.
edit: I don't want to diminish how awesome it is to have a good proportion of 17th-19th century nonfiction online. It's nuts.
> > Geocitites > Oh yes, the 90's was so much better... Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience. I'm not going to say technology was better, nobody misses Realmedia, but the internet was more like a street than a mall. You could look at some weird art or look at some interesting…
“It is said that what is called "the spirit of an age" is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation.” Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the…
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Just recently my wife came back home telling me about some tablet computer she has never ever seen before. I think she has googled for it on her phone. What do you know - my Facebook showed a few ads of that device - on that day. I've never heard about it before. I never searched for it and I never searched for a tablet even - I don't use them. Is this now the new normality - palantiring through databases? Is it OK f…
There is a much less malicious explanation here. If that tablet company had very recently begun an internet marketing campaign, across multiple ad networks, target approximately your demographic, then it's wholly reasonable that you and your wife would independently see ads for it.
I think the thing that most people would really find tragic and scary is that we're all far more predictable and homogenous than we'd like to believe.
> > Geocitites > Oh yes, the 90's was so much better... Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience. I'm not going to say technology was better, nobody misses Realmedia, but the internet was more like a street than a mall. You could look at some weird art or look at some interesting…
> Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results and did not force you to donate 10 seconds to some creepily targeted ad before serving any multimedia experience. What? Do you remember webrings? How absolutely riddled with shit-tier spam they were? Geocities drove those.
The purpose of posting this may be to reiterate that old canard about "twenty years ago, people were saying what we're saying now, therefore it isn't true." If not, I apologize for assuming so. In any case, my reading is, it was true in 2007, and it is much worse now. The predictions about centralization were incorrect only in the names of some of the players, and in not having the benefit of knowing about the role o…
Relatedly, some old quote from the Romans or Greeks is often brought up where someone laments youth behavior as lazy and immoral, and it’s referenced as proof that old(er) people always say that so it doesn’t mean anything. However, isn’t it possible that they were on a downward trajectory, and we are too? And that at other points in time, not referenced, old(er) people may have felt differently?