It's nice having access to specialty magazines like Edge, APC, PLAY etc and the newspaper coverage is nice (The Australian, WSJ). The various 'feed' topics work reasonably well. There are some problems:

1. The (MacOS) reader app is not great when it comes to text readability, it's still awkward zooming around (some mags are just PDFs). I always feel a bit claustrophobic when using it.

2. It would be nice to be able to rotate the view 90 degrees to show more of a page at once (see above).

3. It would be nice to lose the damn adds (I'm paying after all): it's usually horrible AI image crap.

I'm always on the fence though, the 'free' version isn't THAT bad and $20/month is on the high side.

Some complexity is inherent to the problem, but most seems to be incidentally introduced by the realities of deployment (non-functional), configuration (functional) and chaos monkeys (users). There is a particular 'breed' of incidental complexity I see with space cadets and front end developers for sure. Complexity is complex lol.

Why can't we use some sort of metadata tagging system instead? Isn't this what the person is indirectly trying to do: declare some simple tags, such as "US politics", but indirectly via a bunch of garbage fed into an auto-tagger?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but (1) we did once[1], because you're right that it seems like an obvious fit. But in practice (2) it got absolutely crushed in the market performance-wise by more sophisticated algorithms like Facebook's and Google's (Amazon plays in this world too, though they have an easier space to search). It turns out that the fundamental game in the ad world isn't serving ads that site administrators and content creators think their users want to see, it's figuring out what the users of that content actually want and showing them that instead.

And indeed, that cuts the site operator out of the loop, and forces them (if they want to make money from these ad algorithms) to design a site that will attract users with easily-intuited advertising needs. And the linked article doesn't have that.

[1] And still do in parallel niche markets like porn.

It wasn't just the meta tags that were abused. People were adding text into invisible elements, or text as the same color as the background, etc. This was the precursor to SEO and ads really, and just people trying to get listed higher in search.

As soon as it can be gamed, it will be gamed. It's just the scammy nature of it all. Now that it's "AI" generated content, it will get to enshitified almost immediately on any system that is created

We tried that. It just lead to sites adding a million meta words to gather as much advertising as possible.

But, as a thought exercise. Let's say you were selling ads directly to the business paying. Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?

> Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?

Political ads? Campaign ads?

Newspapers advertising that they've got the fastest election news?

People looking for an apportionment calculator are likely interested in a past or future election and interested in political topics. That's a lot of potential ads you could show.

Cool, so sell to any one of those directly. I mean, the revenue from the site now must be terrible anyway.

So if there us the value you suggest, it should be an easy sell. Probably less work than he went to to tweak the site.

Then again, are people investigating vote targets undecided voters? And good luck getting media to advertise....

Indeed, selling ads like this directly is the old school way of doing it.

But even on YouTube it's back nowadays, most YouTubers get their money from sponsorships which work just the same as old-school pre-internet ad placement.

Temu.

But seriously, there are plenty of ads that are based on geo located IP. Then of course there’s the cookie (and cookie replacement) ads.

Complaining about site content is pretty bogus.

thanks for the interesting read, one amusing thing: I went to the site and "where is the adds?", then I remembered I'm using a add-hardened firefox to view it ;) Sure enough using safari showed me the horror. Serious question: why do we put up with this as readers?

I had to pull out the ol' ungoogled chromium browser for this and for a moment I thought it was still a joke because of how absurd some of the ads were. One of them was a picture of an empty toilet paper roll holding up a toilet seat with the title "Put a Toilet Paper Roll Under the Toilet Seat at Night, Here's Why", and clicking it took me to a site[1] with a bunch of nonsense life hacks probably written by some AI. Surprisingly, the site itself has no ads, yet it does link to a bunch of scam products.

I thought Google vetted their advertisers? Are they just accepting ads from anyone now?

1: https://lifehack.getconsumerchoice.com/ (proceed at own risk)

Ironically, by linking to it you’ve probably vastly boosted it’s rank on Google.

HN uses rel="nofollow" for links in comments, for this exact reason.

Huh. I wonder how much effort it would take to have a noticeable effect on the AdSense algorithm by sharing select ad links like this?

Lol, the exact same thing happened to me. I was about to leave a very confused comment.

Safari has ad blockers now too

I keep safari "unblocked" just for this kind of scenario, as sometimes the blocking breaks stuff I want to see that doesn't work otherwise. It's becoming rarer for sure over time. Didn't mean to impinge on safari, it's a great browser that I use for work.

Even Edge has ad blockers to an extent. The only browser that doesn't natively block trackers, or does stuff to reduce the power of adblockers is Chrome. Coincidentally, they are owned by the biggest ad network on earth.

a bit of velcro on the battery attached to the rear of the strap? that should balance it out a bit.

Genius. Such a ground breaking, original, and industry defining idea is even patent worthy: https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20....

I'd hazard a guess this may be primarily for protection from patent trolls and as a mitigation for accidental patent violation. It's likely cheaper to gratuitously patent than risk ceasing production or sale of products.

That's what we do for night vision goggles. https://tnvc.com/shop/ab-night-vision-lpbp-go/

NVGs are also typically designed to be attached to a kevlar (combat helmet).

Mine are usually mounted to a Crye Nightcap: https://www.cryeprecision.com/NightCap

Basically, you need either balance or more points of contact. As long as it’s solidly attached you’re good.

The answer you're looking for is that woke culture arrived. Your God is not dead, you've just abandoned him (again). Social media is obviously a catalyst for patterns of communicated harm that have always been around. The communists have been unraveling the nucleus of family and faith, to be replaced with isolated rage and hate, with government to provide 'proxy support', whereas once was family. We've been divided into us vs them teams on issues that used to bring harmony and coherence.

Damn, maybe there is just too many people now? and we're all connected all the time. The brain can only handle so much (much less than I think we admit).

This is satire right?

partly ;) I do seriously wonder if our brains are just overloaded, the rest was various conspiracies I come across (what gave it away, the communists?)

I do believe our brains are overloaded.

After removing "woke" and "communist" as specific agents, would you still really mean all that as just a joke? You don't think there's at least a bit of it that's pretty close to the truth?

I don't think the problems are intentional, rather they are the unforeseen outcomes of rapid technological and societal evolution, of man leaving faith behind and discovering themselves insufficient. This only seems to be accelerating.

what about AWX then? it moved from shipping as a simple docker compose to a kubernetes operator! I'd much rather it didn't.

Can great, quality software come out of a group of 'mediocre' people? I think you'll find that you do indeed need a strong(er) process and set of rules to follow, that's fine but not always applicable.

I think you need to tailor each group and their process carefully, depending on available talent pools and the complexity of the work being attempted, and sometimes you will need active management of requirements to achieve better outcomes. If your process grows faster than the core coding team does, you probably do have a negative process jerk happening you need to disrupt.

Maybe you'll get better results by not calling people 'mediocre' to start with, as if that's anything but a hateful subjective label.

I wonder if there is potential to combine generative AI with low code approaches, where the non-coder would work with the AI on a higher order description of the problem (data, states, events) and the AI could generate the MVP code. It kind of seems that is the relationship we human coders have at the moment with non-coders. Maybe all those UML diagrams can finally be used as inputs.

Great book and great memories, now get off my lawn.

I'd love a book in similar spirit, targeting say OSx/Metal, that started from first principles and built a 3d (flight|space) sim, in a fun language (simple C++). And yeah that means a blank screen, then some lines, then a triangle... etc. I'd take a series of followup books adding more to engine, perhaps targeting different styles of games and their engine tradeoffs.

I guess it would be hard to decide between software/hardware rendering, as software would just teach so much.