here I thought maximum exploitation would be selling someones identity on the dark web but I come to find on HN that it's actually hashed analytics data D: !!!
I wish the internet was purely an informational no bullshit interface/store instead of all this crap. I welcome these changes. Convert it back into a piece of furniture. Oh no we can't make a billion dollars for no reason.
Agreed. I also always feel like linux communities or hackernews is gaslighting me into thinking that firefox is just as fast as chrome. It's not. There is a tangible speed difference when using it.
I just ran a little test to see what the difference was on my end.
I opened a private tab in Firefox and Microsoft Edge (which is for all intents and purposes the same as chrome) on a 2020 iMac. (I uninstalled Chrome and installed Microsoft Edge when I found that their css styling of the chromium dev tools was easier to read)
I wanted to test a commonly visited heavy website. I settled on reddit.com due to it's famous weight.
Before loading the website, I opened both browser's dev-tools, switched to their network tabs and disabled both of their caches.
These were my results:
-----------------------------
Firefox (with uBlock Origin):
- DOMContentLoaded: 2.84s
- load: 4.19s
- Network requests: 291
-----------------------------
Microsoft Edge:
- DomContentLoaded: 3.99s
- Load: 5.79s
- Network requests: 318
-----------------------------
I double checked the network tabs and noticed that Firefox received 291 network requests while Microsoft Edge received 318 requests. Thinking that uBlock Origin may have blocked some ads and trackers making the site load faster, I disabled uBlock Origin on firefox and reran the test (again with the caches disabled).
-----------------------------
Firefox (without uBlock Origin):
- DomContentLoaded: 3.02s
- load: 5.14s
- Network requests: 305
-----------------------------
By my (admittedly small) testing, it appears that Firefox is faster than Microsoft Edge (which is just a restyled chrome).
Also, this really highlights just how great uBlock Origin is on Firefox and how painful it is for Google to push Manifestv3 on their browser (and by extension, other browsers) since it neuters uBlock Origin.
I use it on a M1 and in my (totally subjective) experience it goes in order of fastest to slowest: safari, firefox, then chrome for speed on heavy websites...
Do you make someone sign a legal document when you give them your number detailing the uses and limitations of how they can share your number? No. You don't.
Once you give your info away it is not "your" info anymore. It is info about you, but you do not own it.
Depends on the jurisdiction. Under the GDPR this might very well be illegal, though obviously enforcement of it is significantly lacking so it's unlikely to ever actually be tested in court.
Surprised not to see Man's search for meaning on here. It's a great book about life from a holocaust survivor. It's one of those books that definitely stays with you for a while. I like to reread it every few years.
You can talk to pretty much any ecommerce site or ppc specialist - open up linkedin and message away. I had clients triple their yearly revenue with well implemented ad campaigns.
Do you really think these things are implemented without any kind of tracking in place? We have people who only run ads with a targeted ROAS of 10x. That's not something you can do or track effectively with a magazine, billboard, or radio ad. There's a reason online search advertising makes Google so much money, because it's damn effective.
Well that's pretty far from what I asked for, more appealing to authority and unpublished internal analyses (presumably run by marketing departments). I used to work for an ecommerce A/B testing company, and have seen first hand how untrue it can be. Google doesn't make money because it's damn effective, they make money because people believe it. There is published research that that show that it doesn't work as well as Google or internal marketing teams want people to believe it does (did you read the article, or just count how many words it was?)
I suggested you get literal direct experience from people who have used ads in their marketing mix. I gave you my direct experience. This is not an appeal to authority.
You then immediately appeal to authority by your own definition by bringing up your experience. Working in an A/B testing company is a lot different than doing A/B testing. I create and implement digital marketing strategies for companies. We do A/B testing as well. So when a client is making over 6x return on their ad spend, how is that 'not working' when the baseline has already been well established?
I'm just trying to say to you - yes I also have direct experience with this, so don't try and give me some anecdotes. We ran meta-analyses across hundreds of clients / experiments using advertising, both retargeting customers who abandoned their baskets, and consulted on more traditional experiments as an independent auditor. These were mostly in the fashion and travel verticals. The revenue uplifts we saw as a whole across the sectors were poor, expecially compared to other things that these sites were doing (social proof, scarcity etc.) I never once saw a value like 6x ROI. We could not publish this publicly unfortunately, as it more generally showed that stuff people were A/B testing doesn't really do much, which would have been bad for business.
This does not mean that search advertising is useless as a concept. But the idea that it 'just works' is also clearly false.
Except your storefront is on Google's land...and people find your website using their services...and you are free to not ever do any kind of ppc or seo work on your site at all.
It just so happens that Google's land includes all of the main streets where people shop. But, you are free to set up your store on a backstreet alleyway a few miles from the town centre. That way you won't have to pay the protection fee. That's some real freedom right there.
That's interesting, so google ads don't work yet simultaneously if you don't use them your business will just break down into nothing. How does that work?
Not a chance. Google is trying to match search intent and so are ads. If the ads are relevant to what's being searched, then it receives a low quality score and isn't shown often, if at all depending on how irrelevant it is. If I am a lawn mowing company, I can't just show my ads whenever someone tries to lookup apple because they're a popular company.
Yeah this kinda came off as asshole-ish. Sponsored content is supposed to be mutually beneficial. The first part of the article makes it seem like link-building is some king of taboo SEO tactic instead of regular tool everyone uses...
an interesting phrase is working as little as possible. This is an organizational issue more so than a motivation one. I work remote and am assigned all my work on a monday that is due by the end of the day friday. If I don't do it, there will be questions asked. Because of the way our company is organized, working as little as possible means working exactly as expected.
You have an interesting setup, where both tasks and time allocation are given to you ("implement X, you have 5 days"). Do you have any say in how long something is supposed to take?
only tangentially related but that phrase is a pet peeve of mine. You are always the product if you are using software - free or paid. Netflix is sure as hell going to use your data the same way youtube would.
The only exception of course is most but not all FOSS.
I think there’s a difference. “You are the product” means that your usage and data are the primary thing the company develops (with software) so it can be sold to their actual customers, namely, advertisers.
I’ve been involved with many software companies that gather various metrics (analytics, crash logs, user info, etc.) but do not sell that data to anyone. As such, the user is not “the product” but the customer. I think there’s a meaningful difference here.
Since it's a pet peeve we share I'll add... I feel it's a bi-directional exchange. A trade. I consume a product (Gmail) and they consume a product (my personal information). At best I'd be "a" product not exclusively "the" product.
I kind of agree and would like to try selfhosting stuff for myself, but in the future where should the self hosting lie? Not everyone can self host (your mother, cousin, etc, people with disabilities, etc) So if it is the future, would level of society would host it reliably? Family, government, etc. Everything seems problematic either in terms of practicality and security.
One of the biggest problems with surveillance capitalism is how it subtly guides you to the thing the corporation wants by manipulating search ranking or using ML to influence human behavior.
With Apple there is no subtlety because you just can't have what they don't want you to. Apple wants to have a deal with Hollywood so no iOS BitTorrent clients for you. You don't even know that the things you're being deprived of would have been available -- it's the same problem. It's worse. At least with Google if you notice they're removing things you want to see from search results you can switch to another search engine and still use Android. If you want video game ROMs on your iOS device you have to throw it away and buy something else.
And the privacy thing feels like a Trojan horse when they still have all your data on iCloud and have root on your device. Supposedly they don't do anything with it now (except allow iCloud to be subpoenaed by law enforcement without a warrant), and I tend to believe them.
Now suppose we finally get a free hardware phone that isn't a dog. It runs an Android fork with all the privacy invasive stuff stripped out but can still run Android apps and gets OS updates for 10+ years (i.e. indefinitely) because the drivers are in the kernel tree. That would eat a big chunk of Apple's market -- the people who don't want the central control but do want the privacy are going over there. Or just pick whatever scenario you like where Apple's business starts shrinking rather than growing. Nothing lasts forever.
Their executives are under pressure to keep profits up and they have an enormous trove of everyone's data they weren't previously monetizing. Desperate companies do desperate things. Or get acquired by Oracle or AT&T or Huawei.
Since that can happen with non-trivial probability at some future date, you can't put anything on your iPhone you're not willing to have that happen to. And then how is that any better than the alternative? It's even worse if you don't expect it to happen and then it does.
