Does Targeted Advertising Work?

Posted on 2021-03-16 by jcs

We know from Betteridge’s Law that the answer must be no. Elaine Moore writing for The Finanical Times comes to the same conclusion and says that there’s plenty of evidence that the whole thing is a scam and that targeted advertising probably doesn’t work. Her article, If Big Tech has our data, why are targeted ads so terrible?, says that based on her Facebook profile, the data adtech collects is worthless. She’s not interested in anything her profile says she is except for family and, as she says, who isn’t interested in their family.

The article also has stories about companies that suspended their targeted advertising and saw no discernible change in sales or customer engagement. At least one Facebook employee agrees according to an internal memo revealed in court. None of this is new, of course. Irreal has be reporting similar stories for a long time.

And yet the adtech juggernaut keeps rumbling along. It is, you must admit, a compelling story: we’ll find out all about people so we can show your ads only to the people who are interested. More bang for your buck. But there doesn’t appear to be any cogent evidence backing up the claim. Certainly Moore’s profile doesn’t speak to adtech’s efficacy. It could hardly be more wrong.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Why Use RSS

Posted on 2021-03-15 by jcs

Marc Kydd has a post from last month that I’ve had in the queue to write about. His post is on why he still uses RSS. I’m always a bit surprised by posts like that because why wouldn’t you use RSS? I didn’t understand it back in 2017 and I still don’t.

After Google shutdown their RSS service—which I accessed through Reeder—and before I discovered elfeed, I used the feedly Web-based app and was very happy with it. Of course, once I discovered elfeed, I was even more committed. It brings the content from all the sites I’m interested in right to my Emacs instance. All of this is kept in a database that I can search in various ways even years after the content originally appeared.

Kydd says RSS has been replaced to some extent by social media. Many people are getting their news and content from Facebook and Twitter. That’s too bad because you don’t get the same content. Facebook and Twitter have algorithms that determine what content to show you. Most Irreal readers, I’m sure, are capable of deciding for themselves what they’re interested in and don’t need someone/something else deciding what they should read.

I see somewhere around 90 items a day in my feed. I look at each headline and the attached summary if there is one but don’t follow most items to their source. It takes only a few minutes to do this and I know I’m seeing all the content I asked to see. I also look at the Twitter status page for any tweets with the #EMACS hashtag but almost everything interesting I see shows up in my RSS feed anyway. Again, I don’t see why anyone who reads a lot of content on line wouldn’t use RSS.

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Piracy Doesn’t Exist

Posted on 2021-03-14 by jcs

Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson gave a short, provocative talk at the Independent Games Summit in which he made the argument that there’s no such thing as piracy or a lost sale. Countless barrels of ink, not to mention pixels, have been spent pushing the opposite viewpoint so it’s worth considering Persson’s argument.

The idea that each pirated copy of some work represents a lost sale is silly and has never made sense. Most people who pirate something do so because they aren’t willing to pay the price asked for it and if they can’t find a pirated copy they simply do without. Persson says that such people are an opportunity. They can help the product gain traction and may well become customers tomorrow.

Persson explicitly rejects the notion that piracy is theft. If you steal a car, he says, the original is lost to its owner but if you pirate a game, say, there are simply more of them in the world and costs the publisher nothing because the pirated copy doesn’t really represent a lost sale.

I don’t expect that Persson’s argument will prevail or even that most people will agree with it but it’s an interesting point of view from someone who you would expect to hold the opposite opinion.

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Newspapers and Writing

Posted on 2021-03-13 by jcs

Journalists, it seems to me, have two main jobs:

  • Discover and report the news accurately and
  • Write up the results of their investigations in a clear and easy to understand way.

It’s no secret to Irreal readers that I think they’re failing significantly in the first. In most cases, the best you can hope for is that they’re ignorant of the subject they’re reporting on and that they’re too lazy to educate themselves. Sadly, it’s depressingly common for them to also corrupt the journalism enterprise by pushing preferred narratives regardless of what the facts say. Having the facts wrong—for whatever reason—is not new. In 2002, Michael Crichton, author of The Andromeda Strain, Sphere, and Jurassic Park among many others, spoke about this in a famous speech where he coined the term Gell-Man Amnesia Effect. The TL;DR is that you shouldn’t believe anything you read in a newspaper; they almost certainly have it wrong.

But at least they can still write. Right? Maybe not. Branko over at Substack has an article that asks,“When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?” Once you come to understand their failures on the first aspect of their job, you probably stop reading the papers as much so you might not notice their failures on the second. Until someone like Branko points it out.

Not all newspaper writing is as bad as the examples that Branko gives but some is and it makes you wonder what they’re teaching in J-School these days.

Update [2021-03-13 Sat 14:19]: Deleted superfluous “to.”

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Red Meat Friday: Python Is Not a Great Language

Posted on 2021-03-12 by jcs

Robin Thomas says that Python is not a great programming language and offers 11 reasons why it isn’t. Reaction was swift and virulent, proving he might have been on to something when he wrote, “Pythonists have a bit of a superiority complex.”

I haven’t used Python in many years but I was very fond of it when I did. This was before Python had any real traction and when I recommended it to others the response was always, “But Java.” I think, in retrospect, I got the better of that argument but, on the other hand, I don’t write in Python anymore.

I think it’s probably true that Python, while great for small or proof-of-concept projects, doesn’t scale well to larger efforts where performance is a concern. But, again, I’m no longer a user so my opinions may be uninformed. Those of you who know what you’re talking about can duke it out in the comments if you’re inclined.

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Google and the Petro Curse

Posted on 2021-03-11 by jcs

The Google graveyard of services is a familiar Internet trope that describes Google’s habit of sunsetting popular services. It’s infuriating. Seemingly everyone has a story of some app they depended on that Google killed. The smart money no longer adopts new Google services, fearing that if they do, the hammer will fall as soon as they come to depend on it.

David Heinemeier Hansson has an interesting post on why this happens. He says that Google is like those countries that are oil rich and build their economy on the oil industry. The result is that this distorts and corrupts their economy. As Hansson says, why invest in other industries when riches are literally gushing out of the ground?

Google has its own version of petro riches: advertising. Hansson says that 30% of online advertising flows to Google and brings it 40 billion dollars a year. The problem is that whatever else Google does is just noise as far as income is concerned so they have no incentive to stay the course with anything that doesn’t directly benefit advertising. If it doesn’t contribute to the mining and sale of users’ data, Google eventually loses interest.

I found Hansson’s argument persuasive. It explains Google’s behavior in a simple and convincing way. Not everyone agrees. Some of the reddit comments on the post are supportive but others take exception. The two basic arguments contra Hansson are that (1) Google is not isomorphic to a Petro State so the whole argument fails, and (2) Hansson is evil/stupid/something-else-I-don’t-like so anything he says must be false. The first objection fails to understand the concept of analogy. The second is a common fallacy that imagines truth is dependent on who speaks it.

Happily, you get to make up your own mind. The only other argument I’ve heard is that Google closes down apps because they’re evil. That’s an emotionally satisfying explanation but probably has little to do with reality.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Happy 48th Birthday, Dark Side of the Moon

Posted on 2021-03-10 by jcs

It’s that time again. As we do every year on March 10, Irreal is celebrating the anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, one of the best and most successful albums ever produced. I’m aware that the actual release was on March 1st but for reasons lost to the mists of time, Irreal has always celebrated it on March 10th.

This year’s selection from the album is “Time.” Along with “Money” from last year, it’s one of the two cuts from the album that were hit singles. Of course, the best cuts, by far, are “Brain Damage/Eclipse,” which you can see the band perform in 2019’s post. Sadly I couldn’t find a live version of “Time” with the original band so you’ll have to make do with just the audio. On the other hand, it’s the remastered track from the original album.

Update [2021-03-13 Sat 18:39]: I just found a live version of the band performing “Time.” Enjoy.

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Most Vital Language

Posted on 2021-03-09 by jcs

Kontra has an interesting question:

I’d say C because so much of our infostructure (the Internet, operating systems, and much else) depends on it. A close second would be COBOL. That’s an old language that few if any Irreal readers have ever used but there’s still tons of software using it, especially banking and financial software.

Despite some other suggestions in the thread—Javascript, for example—I don’t think any other languages come close. Note that the question is not what language is “best” or most popular. Just, in effect, what language is most vital, today, for our civilization.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Query: Emacs on the M1

Posted on 2021-03-08 by jcs

It’s time for me to upgrade my MacBook Pro. I don’t usually upgrade this soon but my current laptop has the horrible butterfly keyboard and there are flickering problems both with Emacs and other apps.

The new hotness, of course, are the M1-based MacBooks, which run faster and cooler than the Intel versions. My one hard requirement is that it run Emacs; it’s a deal breaker if Emacs doesn’t run without (M1-based) problems. This site indicates that Emacs does run on the M1 but the MacBook Pro is a significant investment that would be effectively useless to me if there are problems running Emacs.

So I’m asking the knowledgeable Irreal cohort for advice.

  1. Are any of you running Emacs on the M1?
  2. If so, are you running in native mode or emulation?
  3. Are there any performance or other problems?
  4. What version of Emacs are you using?

If you have any wisdom on Emacs and the M1, please leave a comment. I’d be very grateful.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Data Leverage

Posted on 2021-03-07 by jcs

Over at the MIT Technology Review, Karen Hao has a seemingly promising article with the enticing title How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you. I read the article with great anticipation hoping it would provide me with some actionable strategies for striking back at adtech.

Sadly, that didn’t happen. That’s not really Hao’s fault, though. Her article was a report on this paper by Vicnet, Li, Tilly, Chancellor, and Hatchet. The paper is more of a theoretical discussion of the issues and although it does discuss some strategies, those discussions are general and not really actionable. If you want to read the paper and aren’t interested in extending its research, you can skip Section 2 on related work. It adds nothing interesting and is full of academic speak that makes it tiresome to read.

Despite its practical shortcomings, the paper does provide a useful framework for thinking about the problem of data abuse. The authors’ first useful concept is that of “data labor.” The idea is that when users provide data to adtech as a result of their normal Internet activities, that data should be thought of not as “exhaust” but as labor on the part of the users to produce it and that, therefore, the users are entitled to some sort of remuneration.

The problem is that users are essentially powerless with respect to the large data aggregators. The paper offers three “data levers:”

  • Data strike: a refusal to provide data for the offending entity.
  • Data poisoning: providing false or misleading input to poison their data and interfere with machine learning.
  • Conscious data contribution: providing your data to a competitor. For example, switching from Google to DuckDuckGo.

I was really hoping for some specific strategies but the framework the authors provide does give us a useful way of thinking about the problem.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment