This is the only corporate game left. Convince clueless investors that they’ll make more money if they give you money. No real innovation or even a real goal. Just buzzword after buzzword to get those investors on board.
Capitalism doesn’t breed innovation. It eventually eats it.
I’d like to think some things will change once not every major investor is clueless after just being rich their whole lives, but given how generational wealth works, I’m not holding my breath.
Thank you thank you thank you. This is exactly what I want on Lemmy.
We’ve gone from alternative facts to alternative reality.
Did they ever ramp down?
Especially when creators find interesting ways to work them in, which is pretty often, in my experience. They’re the one type of ad that doesn’t annoy me.
They all just invest enough effort to squeeze out some short term profits, earn their bonuses and then leave for another company to do it all again.
Amazon is not at all alone in this. Much of 2024 capitalism, at least within the tech space, works like this pretty much everywhere.
This is one reason it is so wild that corporations in the US are entitled to “free speech” (in the form of spending) after the Citizens United decision. They get benefits as if they were a person, but far fewer of the natural restrictions.
The existing MSFS is already effectively a live service. Lots of features which make it stand out are not available in offline mode.
I agree with all this, but I think it is all to say: ISPs support Net Neutrality when it behooves them.
Shareholders demand ever increasing return. There is only one way any of this goes, and we are witnessing a total systematic collapse. It is a mathematical certainty.
You cannot squeeze blood from a stone.
It’s certainly possible. I do get ads that don’t seem relevant for me pretty regularly. But this last time I’m referencing: one of the first ads I saw that night was for our discussion topic.
I’m not disagreeing with you, so I’ll just mention it’s safe to say: whether it is digital fingerprinting or mic listening, the surveillance level is absolutely off the charts.
They’re not listening to your microphone, at least not while your phone is in your pocket or whatever, because they don’t need to.
I don’t deny that fingerprinting is powerful. But, I also have started to wear a tinfoil hat on the “mic always listening” issue. I have experienced (several times) ads for random things that I have only discussed – never searched for or had other interaction with in any way.
It wouldn’t be in my fingerprint, so the only other possibility is that others with a similar fingerprint to me had already searched for the same thing. Frankly, from an Occam’s Razor perspective, I just find it far less likely that we have such a hive mentality that everyone with similar digital fingerprints ends up having the same “random” discussions. At that point, “they’re always listening to your mic” seems downright practical.
And the really shocking thing is how easy that was to normalize.
Talk about random thing at dinner, phone in pocket.
Post dinner, hit up Insta and boom, ad for random thing… and at that point, some people go “heh” and keep scrolling. Some likely think it’s “the algorithm” being magical and just using other context cues to guess that they would have mentioned it at dinner. Many have realized that, in fact, the devices you pay for and subscribe to are actively spying on you. Constantly.
And yet, the number of people who have opted out of using these devices and services is relatively minimum. There is a good reason for that: many of these services are so ubiquitous, they look and feel like utilities. And in some cases, they effectively are, as it can be impossible to use another service without a smartphone.
Hell, I can’t even pay my damn rent without using some stupid app.
Good thing he gutted Twitter’s content moderation teams in the name of “free speech”, eh?
If I had a dollar for every time a billionaire loses more money than I could ever dream of because their hubris got in the way or they misunderstood a concept or were just plain dumb – well, I guess I’d be a billionaire too.
I don’t see YT being replaced in that sense any time soon. Federated text and image content is really still in infancy, and video hosting at the size of YT is a tremendously more complex feat, requiring, at the absolute minimum: a metric crapton of bandwidth and storage.
For me, I just use invidious and similar for the foreseeable future, or peertube when there are things on it.
At the very least, not being signed in to YT and having only a local watch history and subscriptions (=not on a YT or Google account) does starve the algorithm a bit.
Unfortunately, physical media for gaming died when always-online DRM was normalized. It doesn’t matter if you have a game on a disc when you have to phone home every time to use it. The corporation may still block your access.
One more step in ensuring no one owns anything. Lease or rent are your options.
The goal was always that the user would be the product. It was less clear at the beginning, because the advertising was far less intrusive (if you even saw an ad at all, in the early days), and the service was “free” at a time when the internet was comparatively young. So it gained a lot of popularity from novelty and being an actually useful communication tool.
But the communication tool portion was always a side effect of data collection. Any “free” service is ultimately just getting value from you in different ways. In the case of Facebook, once it had amalgamated enough data, the flood gates opened and the enshittification was extremely rapid. It will never go back to the way it was for many reasons, not the least of which being: it was designed to be the cesspool it is now.
Ultimately, all these seemingly random posts are an attempt to get you to continue to interact with the platform. If you read through comments on such posts, they do tend to drive engagement, even if it is just a user going “why is this in my feed?”
Totally agree. I did not make the claim that copyright law will be affected.
I dont disagree with that about copyright law. But to think that AI is going to break you out of it is a pipe dream.
Copyright revision will not happen from people stealing content. It requires deep discussion and governments that actually listen. AI stealing content will ultimately enhance copyright rules down the road.
This is why claiming to be a “prophet” (by any of a multitude of definitions) is so popular for cult leaders.
You can say you have information from a deity, one way or another, or even that you get special treatment from a deity. No special powers needed. If people believe in the deity and they believe you were chosen by that deity, to counteract that would mean counteracting the belief in the deity itself.