What's the solution? If anything, the proliferation of ad tech junk and 15MB of various ad-related things is probably better than just that 1MB of only Google Ads scripts, no?

Or are we going to talk about how online advertising has been the economic backbone of the web? Not that I'm advocating for it, by hiding the true cost of things, publishers have brought this onto themselves really.

So no more ads? That's probably going to kill a lot of sites, whether they are contributing anything to mankind or not.

IMO, the only feasible solution is to regulate surveillance capitalism out of existence. The market is not going to solve this.

Yeah sure let's bury our head in the sand and pretend all forms of media will thrive while only selling subscriptions but so far, we've seen how it went for the older ones (newspaper, radio, tv ...)

Or we can acknowledge that advertisment is there to stay and we instead develop a proper framework to make it work sanely rather than all the duct-taping we've done so far.

The real failure is the unwillingness to confront the fact that ads were there to stay and should have been baked into a W3C standard ages ago instead but here we are.

Surveillance capitalism isn't the same as advertising. But I think your point is undercut by the fact that most of the industries you mentioned are doing… fine? TV is thriving selling ads (broadcast/cable) and also subscriptions (Netflix/etc). Radio is thriving selling ads (terrestrial) and also subscriptions (Spotify/etc). Even newspapers are figuring this thing out; NYT added a record number of subscribers last year.

You can add Spain and Italy trailing behind.

No, I have been hanging around in Discord for a while now and I've run quite often into issues with connection issues for specific servers (I guess some clusters going down) and them being OOO for a while.

Mumble on the other hand tends to be pretty reliable and comes back up in a few seconds anyway whenever it fails.

On top of what has already been said, I found Mumble to be a better voice com tool than Discord, sound quality is better, shortcut mapping more extensive, etc ...

Discord having the slack-like features, video streaming and social networking integrated in a nice UI makes it a better all purpose consummer product unfortunately.

The other way around as C. Clarke's work is younger than this one.

Also reminds me of Barjavel's 'The ice people' which has a large golden sphere buried deep under the ice in Antarctica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_People_(Barjavel_novel...

Oh boy, if you have never worked for a bank, you would be inclined to believe they have this shit down to a T after being such early adopters of tech and all the risks they undertake given their roles.

Turns out that it's best to ignore how the sausage is made.

Reminds me a lot of my uncle that had sort of taken over my grand-parent's farm and never really moved away from there.

I can definitely empathise with his mindset, especially after many years in the city. Though being from a culinary-centered culture, the one size fits all meal is really depressing to think about, especially that he probably can get some really good produce from people in his network.

Being a farmer is really something different and here in Western Europe (I'm going to assume there's not that much difference between UK and FR farming cultures), it's really a labour of love.

I've been lucky to have some exposure to this world through my family and people often have the wrong perception of it and quite often looked down upon by people that should know better.

Fascinating video as always from Jonathan.

Definitely highlights something I've always felt, which is that we're really making life complicated with all those tools and processes that are less than ideal.

I get the feeling business and the need to "ship" stuff is the thing really bringing technology down, even though it looks like it's moving it forward.

That's because the companies winning bidds on your 'views' are targeting you because of your apparent persona, i.e middle aged man/woman in tech -aka middle class ++ with disposable income, rather than what you are interested in.

On top of that, plenty of marketers are absolutely clueless about how to go about their strategy, mostly because unlike previous generations (in online ads), they don't grok the underlying tech at all.

They might was well simply tie it to the program content then. For instance, if I watch a Scott Kilmer video, it'll typically have an Autozone ad.

If that's all there is to it, I expect there's a lot of needless work being done under the covers.

If you turn off personalized ads, that's basically what you'll see.

Although for me, it's a 50/50 split between topic-related and ads that appear to target a generic male audience, which is a very good guess for some topics.

No, actually you can do both (and more).

Advertising is throwing darts at the board with your eyes closed, whenever it lands somewhere on the board and nets you point is good enough for most.

Typical conversion rates are under the 1% threshold so you accept that a lot of your spend is not efficient but when it is, you make your money back and some, if you are any good at it.

Hello, I'm the $50 / month customer.

Not an internet business per say, mostly used in the context of processing and storing data + internal apps.

Do is great value, although not the cheapest. They need to double down on the useful items, maybe go a bit offroad in what they offer, lest they might be a in rough spot.