Not really. Advertising results in extreme market inefficiencies through the game theory playing out (if you don't advertise as a company, you lose out to companies that do). It's the massive sink of the modern economy, there's nearly no sector unaffected by it. If advertising was banned (not that it's very easy) vast majority of issues associated with capitalism wouldn't even exist and everybody would be wealthier.
This is all putting aside the fact that %99.9 of all advertising works by exploiting the familiarity circuit in the human brain. The effects of advertising are, by definition, not voluntary. See Ads just work, no matter what you think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18399633
If the purpose of %99.9 of advertising was not exploiting the familiarity circuit and was instead to make you aware of a product you didn't know about before, there wouldn't be a single ad of Coca-Cola, since everybody on the planet knows about it already.
Also, my mom literally buys whatever she sees playing on YouTube ads that week. I know because I see those ads too. You'd be surprised how many people are going through life with undiagnosed or untreated ADHD and how many further lack cognitive agency.
Almost all products we use today were marketed to us in one way or another using advertisements. Without ads, we would expect a very slow diffusion of information and wait tediously for word of mouth to spread and get access to good products.
Web search is and always was perfectly suited to find the product you need, as are the multitude of e-commerce websites active in any country.
Searching does not require advertising or word of mouth. Word of mouth is not inefficient either in a world with internet, the person telling you about a product likely saw it and purchased it online already.
Yeah, and then maybe certain companies could optimize their sites to show up higher on the list of pages, and then maybe some companies can pay other companies for such expertise, and then maybe other companies can pay the search engine directly to show up higher, what an idea right?
Hey, the author, if you are reading this, I was stuck in the bog too. But in my case it was neurological rather than psychological. Turns out the "insufficient activation energy" you mention is an ADHD symptom. Meds worked total wonders for me, so much I like to say I was reborn the day I started my treatment.
I still find your post very valuable and insightful in addressing the psychological bog.
Do not let the "shell" in the name fool you. Nu is a full on programming language. I've spent more time with it than pretty much any other lang and if I have to describe it in one sentence, I'd say: It's the most beautiful combination of the ease of Python, strictness and ergonomics of Rust and of course shell capabilities of Bash.
It's really its own kind of thing. It's definitely not just another shell.
I've written very impressive and very complex software in nu. I fully expect it to take off very fast as it nears a stable v1.0. I can't imagine going back to anything else.
Yeah, same. Lately almost every time I think "Oh no way, this is not the correct way/not the optimal way/it's a hallucination" it later turns out that it's actually the correct way/the optimal way/it's not a hallucination. I now think twice before doing anything differently than what the LLM tells me unless I'm an expert on the subject and can already spot mistakes easily.
It seems like they really figured out grounding and the like in the last couple of months.
I wouldn't worry too much about these false negatives: your human friends might be cross if you constantly accuse them of being wrong when they are actually right, but the LLMs are too polite to hold a grudge.
You don't have to leave your phone at home to be free of distractions. You can restrict your phone instead. I'm just a happy user, see techlockdown.com.
Their marketing is geared towards the p*rnography addiction crowd but from my own experience, it works equally well for those easily distracted by screens (I have ADHD).
It’s probably precisely because his browser is not customized that it’s not easily fingerprintable, because stock Safari has privacy protections and users generally don’t change anything.
I got a very similar result on unmodified iOS Safari, randomized among 380k users and conveying 15.5 bits of information. I only have the Dark Reader extension.
Expect all other LLM vendors to follow soon. If they don't, they will lose.
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