591–600 of 603 posts
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I find galaxus.com (European store) far better than any other store, American or otherwise.
- 7 day (or even longer) delivery time - only free shipping >€50 - much more limited selection of items - can't say much about their return / warranty process but I doubt it's as lenient as Amazon's Pretty much the opposite of "far better".
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While this is true, it is less effective than you might think in practice. Researchers studied something similar six months ago: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/12/researchers-find-wha... Of course it is possible Google will create something orders of magnitude better but I doubt it. Amazon is already doing product recommendation on their front page and while it certainly drives sales it doesn’t turn people into…
My favorite example of why advertising/marketing is important but not overwhelming/unstoppable is in the hit-based industries: If the industry had a "make a superstar" button or a "make a blockbuster movie" button they could just keep mashing, they'd be mashing it constantly. You wouldn't see franchises go from top-of-the-world to decline like Marvel or Fast and Furious. You wouldn't see expensive new bombs or failur…
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Have you ever looked at the browsing history of a non-technical, non-tech-addicted older person? I'm usually surprised by how little activity there typically is. The $5 plan is great for gifting Kagi to non-tech friends and relatives who won't come close to exhausting that plan. I pay for it for older relatives I don't want to get burned by Google's decades-long unwillingness to police predatory tech support scam ads…
I'm a tech person and 300 searches per month sounds like quite a lot to me, certainly if it's used outside of work. That's 10 searches/day, every day. Everything I access regularly is bookmarked. If I know the site I'm going to, such as wikipedia.org, I type it in the URL bar. I think 300 searches would be more than enough.
(Not saying anything about you here)
I've worked with a lot of people in tech over the years who weren't "tech people". Idk. The one thing I've always seen with "tech people" is a certain obsession for knowledge and learning.
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I'm Danish so maybe that's part of it, but if I'm looking for something like kid's lunch boxes that aren't essentially from Temu resale sites I was already using LLM chat clients to find it. I can search for google and find nothing, or I can use a non-login on chatgpt and get several options. It found me some French made lunchboxes that are being made by a car company (I think it was renault but I honestly can't reme…
LLM search will be ruined the exactly same way, just faster. Google search used to be good, until the company concluded they will earn more money by making it crap. Then it took some time for it to get worst, bit by bit. With LLM, the same company will learn from previous experience and make it worst faster. It is exactly the same company, making exactly the same product (search), with exactly the same management and…
I have no doubt that Renault could pay ChatGPT to get it to recommend people buying lunch boxes. For all I know there might be a bunch of eco friendly "European produced" lunch boxes with compartments and the LLM recommended me the three which fit the needs I described because those companies paid for it. I didn't find any of them on Google though, that was all Temu resales.
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Conspicuously absent from your scenario is the way the doctor becomes aware of the new drug. How does that happen?
By doing their job instead of hoping a stranger's friend happens to land on a useful ad?
If I wanted that level of care, I expect to pay for a personal physician who only has one patient. Me.
The reality is most of the time my Dr knows more technical info than the patient. But sometimes I know something they don’t. The information asymmetry lasts about 60 seconds before my doctor validates the info against his professional sources.
My doctor is providing a value commiserate with what I pay him.
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I saw an add for a medicine that was new on the market and my friend who could use the meds, was unaware of its existence. Now, after a doctor’s involvement, my friend is on the new med and it treats their condition better and the quality of their life is improved.
Are you the said doctor, drfloyd51? If so, I'm not so sure it is advertising, as being discussed here, that you're referring to. If not, funny coincidence.
I am partly named after the doctor in the song Comfortably Numb.
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> The average user appears to care enough to go out of their way to use browsers and extensions and such that block ads The average user isn't going out of their way to use ad block, at least globally. Last estimates I remember are still around only 30% of internet users using an ad blocker unfortunately. Ad blocker adoption is heavily skewed toward techies. It's an even lower amount of people on mobile, where the 'a…
30% of the general population is a staggering number for basically anything voluntary. I don’t know how you can possibly trivialize that number. If you can get 30% of the population to boycott anything it’s not only significant but forces a response out of the group on the other side. You’re talking almost 1 in 3 people. Those are literally historic numbers. Do you have any idea how much companies spend to increase t…
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For the same reason that ads in reddit comments are unmarked. The law hasn't caught up yet. There are countless "guerilla marketing" campaigns across reddit that are not identified as ads. I expect AI will be no different and it'll take the law a decade+ to catch up.
Every ad in Reddit is clearly marked. I'm not being obtuse - obviously Reddit, the internet, magazines, TV, all do some form of subliminal advertising, astro turfing, paid placement, etc, but we're talking about two different things from Google's business perspective, and I still doubt they are as interested in the latter as they are being the search leader and putting well paying clients right up front in bold (and…
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Actually Reddit is receiving more organic traffic than ever before and is more valuable to game than ever But yes actually I was doing this about 15 years ago in the men's fashion subreddit for one of my companies lol
Can you elaborate a bit on how that looks like in practice?