Another Mozilla-made-a-decision thread, another list of complaints.
I'm a happy Firefox user since it showed up as an alternative to internet explorer. I tried Chrome once or twice but always came back and stuck with Firefox. I don't trust Google for anything and don't want them to rule over the web. Firefox works, it has worked for me all these years and continues to do so. I still believe in them and their mission even if they have to take Google money to exist.
I think that complaints here are just making things worse for Mozilla, how about helping out instead of whining about every little thing. They're trying, that's a lot more than can be said about a whole lot of other actors out there.
Firefox team, if you read this, you rock! Thank you for giving me a great browser.
I can't help but be reminded of the latest hostile move Slack / Salesforce pulled, it was just a few months ago, in the name of security, they locked the data even further, limiting our ability to do what we please with our own data.[0]
I happen to work at a MS company, still we’ve been courageously holding Teams at bay, but Slack removed a key reason for us to push for keeping it around. If Slack listens here, reach out; you're about to lose another large customer.
I had the exact same use case two weeks ago but I had received a pdf file from school and was sitting at a cafe with only my phone.
I use ChatGPT, and while the article is correct to say that it will claim that it cannot generate .ics files directly in the code interpreter it is however very much capable of solving this particular problem. I did the following (all on my android phone):
1. Had it extract all the useful dates, times and comments from the pdf
2. Prompted it to generate the ics file formatted content as code output
3. Prompted it to use the code interpreter to put this content into a file and save it as a .ics extension
It complied through and through and I could download and open the file with the gcal app on my phone to import all appointments..
For completeness, the claim that the code interpreter cannot "generate" ics files is because the python environment in which it runs doesn't have a specific library for doing so. ICS files are just text files with a specific format, so definitely not out of reach.
Now it would be cool to add an ICS layer to a map and be able to publish ICS events to a GPS location with a temporal awareness. (Im on the InstantDB bandwagon, so Ill be hitting all the nAIls with it for the foreseeable...
Let's face it, Amazon's review system is broken at the core. I have the perspective of a seller on Amazon and, as such, you simply don't exist without _positive_ reviews. For the story, it all begins when you start with Amazon as a channel. Ads would be an option to kick start a presence but you actually need some traffic (you actually need the "buy box" which is just Amazon's way to legitimate you as a seller) to be able to advertise (this is true at the very start on a given Amazon market). So you, or people you know, place _fake_ orders to get started and if possible add a first review which, naturally, is fake.
Once you have that going, congrats, you are selling on Amazon. From there on it's a uphill battle to gain traction and it all comes down to better position for your products. This is not different from any market really but there are specific hurdles along the way. Amazon tracks the number of "defects" on your product which counts things like A-to-Z claims or... negative reviews (and more stuff I won't bother you with here). If you hit a threshold (1% of claims _or_ negative reviews) you start seeing a nice warning telling you that your account is at risk of deactivation. Additionally, a similar threshold or trend, unsure tbh, will result in a temporary loss of the buy box mentioned earlier (60 day look back window for the above-mentioned threshold). This means that you disappear! (no ads, remember?).
So, you can probably imagine how strong your incentives are to get any positive review juice out there. What is shown in the tweet is actually against Amazon's terms[1] but there are more (and less) subtle ways to get what you need including things mentioned in comments around here and you really don't have that much of a choice if you want to stand out in the noise.
With all that being said, whatever you think of delivery related reviews for instance (especially in covid times which has added a lot of uncertainty to the whole thing), they hurt businesses exactly where it hurts. And that can be extended to negative reviews in general even when these are legitimate warnings for other potential buyers. Imagine now for a second that you rely on low volumes of orders, the number of potential genuine reviews is also low and with the Amazon thresholds you are therefore literally at the mercy of a few bad reviews without a cushion of positive reviews to fall on. So yeah there is a market for fake reviews, duh...
Couldn't agree more, the adtech is where the monopoly lies. I worked for a doubleclick / ads 360 competitor and it was so plain that Google used its dominant position not only to squash competitors like us but also to further obscure the auction mechanisms. Today it's a challenge to specify exactly what you want to bid for a given keyword, in part for the better since it dramatically reduces complexity for advertisers but it does remove a lot of the control and hands it back to... Google. Ultimately the auction is completely irrelevant since Google decides which ads will show and by extension whose ad money they'll pocket. In addition to that, Google charges premium for ad space even in non-competitive markets; I'm talking about what you end up paying for a top spot although there are no other actors in the auction for a particular keyword (even in broader matches). While one could argue that it's up to them as a publisher to decide what a spot is worth, this mechanism is completely obscure and you will only ever find out in hindsight through what you pay for the traffic.
> Google charges premium for ad space even in non-competitive markets; I'm talking about what you end up paying for a top spot although there are no other actors in the auction for a particular keyword (even in broader matches).
Google uses a Vickery Auction, in other words the top bid pays what the second bidder bid so while I agree with your greater point, this is not based in reality as stated.
The post states that 90+% of google's auctions are still second priced:
> It’s important to note that our move to a single unified first price auction only impacts display and video inventory sold via Ad Manager. This change will have no impact on auctions for ads on Google Search, AdSense for Search, YouTube, and other Google properties, and advertisers using Google Ads or Display & Video 360 do not need to take any action.
2nd price auctions have been dead for 2+ years due to header bidding. For anything in which Google has to compete against other SSPs or DSPs, I'd imagine it is the same. If Google owns the content, such that they are the single party SSP/DSP, and header bidding is not possible, then I suppose 2nd price could come in.
I think it’s a way for publishers to simultaneously auction the same bit of space in multiple exchanges. I guess that this means they have to use first price auctions, though I don’t have a super great idea as to why.
I wrote an article on the subject: https://michelenasti.com/2019/10/21/how-internet-ads-work.ht... You may find the answer in the last paragraph. Basically, the browser will ask multiple bidders for an ad, and then an auction is performed in the browser. The result of this first auction may be then sent to google to see if there's a better offer from them.
It's called "header bidding" because... in origin.. this stuff was done in the <head> part of the page.
Thanks. That's a very well written article, I enjoyed learning from it.
The auction is performed in the browser? No wonder the web feels pokey these days.
I thought at first this must be due to the privacy requirements around cookies, only the browser can coordinate the different parties because none of them will be sent all the cookies needed to run a complete auction themselves. But it seems like it's really more some kind of hack around a limited (for business reasons) Google API.
Yes, I didn't express that correctly; I know about the second price auction and what I was referring to is that since Google does everything in their power to get you away from keyword level bidding and into their "smart bidding" solutions you have no _direct_ say in what the traffic costs (AFAIK it's still possible to use keyword level bidding but Google will email you very regularly to try to get you off). This fact is even more obvious in non-competitive markets as I was trying to point out.
I manage a decent size Google Adwords account. The Google adwords "strategist" they have call me is always pushing the Smart Bidding endlessly. So I try it on one campaign. Smart bidding increased the click cost from about $20 to $100. The one click converted but I get conversions on that campaign for about $60 so it was a disaster. Turned off that smart bidding and went back to my own eCpc bidding.
Honestly, how would anyone ever know if Google does what they say they're doing? Is there any trusted third party auditing Google's ad auctions? If Google says $X was the price at auction, how would I ever dispute that?
How would anyone ever know that Facebook hasn't designed it's algorithms for spreading misinformation and disinformation? How would anyone ever know that Apple doesn't use your photos to train an AI? How would anyone ever know that the Amazon doesn't peek into your RDS database?
>> Several current and former YouTube employees, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, said company leaders were obsessed with increasing engagement during those years.
>> One problem, according to several of the current and former YouTube employees, is that the A.I. tended to pigeonhole users into specific niches, recommending videos that were similar to ones they had already watched.
There are real human beings working on those systems. That's how everyone would know if Google does as it says
If something fishy indeed goes on in a large company, it must be on a need-to-know basis.
But the higher access you get, higher the penalties of sharing company secrets go.
Snowdens come into the picture every once in a while, but most average programmer Joes wouldn’t risk being internationally manhunted for whistleblowing questionable business practices.
While it’s possible for companies to keep secrets, most companies lack the secrecy and paranoia required to really keep big secrets for long periods of time. These companies tend to leak, both because people move around a lot, and because unlike governments they lack the ability to throw leakers in jail.
If google was actually futzing about with the auctions like that, we’d probably find out eventually.
Google is a client of the Pinkertons, a very old union busting company with a history of brutal tactics [0]. One of their employees was recently charged in a murder during riots in Denver [1].
My statement isn't irresponsible. Corporations are universally amoral. If it was in Google's interests to do it, they would. But I think that, right now, those interests don't exist.
That being said, someone that is in that situation, if the stakes are high enough, might be dissuaded just knowing that such things happen.
People make decisions. At some point, all corporate decisions go through people.
Would you (reader) want to bet your life against a conference room full of people with $1M+ worth of stock options you're about to negatively impact? Where a bad outcome for you only requires their silence?
There are many people in the world who value morals over money. There are a few who value morals over lots of money. But that's not a bet I'd take.
>> Facebook has designed its algorithms for spreading misinformation and disinformation, because emotion drives engagement.
If emotion drives engagement, then this should apply to positive emotions as well. All emotional posts, positive or negative, will be treated equally by the algorithm according to your logic. Hence it follows, that facebook hasn't explicitly designed it's algorithms to spread only misinformation and disinformation, acc to your logic.
I would like to see some proof that would back up your statement.
1. It doesn’t matter what the valence of the emotions are - positive or negative valence feedback loops will spread misinformation and disinformation. Positive emotion is not correlated with truth.
I assumed from your previous comment(below) that you are correlating negative emotion with misinformation and disinformation. If that's not what you meant, then I guess I misunderstood what you meant by your previous comment
>> Facebook has designed its algorithms for spreading misinformation and disinformation, because emotion drives engagement
The easiest negative emotion to cause with a post is outrage, which goes nicely with fake news.
The easiest positive emotion to cause are at the result of puppies and wholesome/faith-in-humanity-restored posts, neither are generally related to actual truthful news.
If emotion drives engagement and you optimize for engagement, then you will optimize for emotionally-charged posts over emotionally-neutral posts. If you then assume that emotionally-charged posts are more likely to be mis/dis-information, then you have a case.
I don't think this assumption is necessarily true for random misinformation (think common myths), but propaganda is usually designed to be emotionally charged, from PR to state propaganda.
The whole debate isn't even wrong in the first place as the questions are beyond "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" and into adding absurdities as qualifiers like "have you stopped beating your wife with a prized family heirloom yet?".
So bad it arguably qualifies as misinformation in itself. If an algorithim spreads any information and cannot classify it (if you have a general purpose algorithim which can know all truth apriori what are you doing here instead of creating a singularity!). Then /design/ which implies intent and effectiveness. Otherwise if I burn a Trump Voodoo doll I will have designed something with the "intent" to kill the President. Even if Fox News would be very offended by it nobody sane would take it as a serious assassination attempt.
That only makes sense if your voodoo doll didn’t actually kill the president. Facebook does spread misinformation.
As to intent - at some point in the distant past before it became clear what it’s effects were, you could argue that Facebook wasn’t designed to spread misinformation.
Once you know what a thing does and how it works, if you keep operating it, it is by design.
Heck, Thinking there are individuals who actually understand such a large system are complex.
Even at organizations orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook, it's pretty easy to have a few systems that are large enough you can only keep so many in your head at a time.
You'd probably need a few dozen of the right people together to begin to understand the complexity of their systems.
Yes, and you could do anything else that you want with your app. However, if your application is hosted on their servers you are just a traditional user from their perspective. And as the old adage goes, if you own the server, you own the user.
There is an implicit assumption, that the code that you push is actually the same one that is being run on the VM, in your statement. This brings me back to the point I was trying to make in the parent comment.
The encrypted traffic will be the traffic Amazon will be most interested in, since you took the trouble; they won't peek into the DB but they will be able to infer lots about what's going on if they want. It's the Tor Paradox.
I understand the line of reasoning above and would normally follow it - but Facebook, Apple and Google have all shown that they will do really shady things if they can get away with it. The reaction to Project Dragonfly was pretty nice to see, but you really have to wonder how many things like that make it through without any public outcry - I know real human beings and most of them are pretty awesome, some of them are sociopaths who'd do anything to make a buck though... we're gambling that some moral ones get into the decision making process and, tbh, if the sociopaths have their way the moral ones will remain blissfully ignorant of the shady stuff.
This is a pretty good point. I spoke to a developer from facebook once and they said essentially that there is nothing super secretive happening behind the curtains.
Yes they may be evil and doing all this bad stuff, but we pretty much know all the evil stuff they are doing publicly.
Or that Facebook developer just doesn't know about the super secretive happenings behind the curtains. If they did, they probably wouldn't talk about them. :)
I suppose it boils down to buying a service at a price, and the “bidding” process is just a price discovery tool for Google, not the customer. Is there anything wrong with Google charging me double via an “internal bid bot” so long as the big cost is in line with my boundaries?
If I’m trying to buy a car off a showroom floor, and the salesman says “you better take this price, I got 4 more people lined up to buy it,” does it matter if those 4 others are not genuinely interested or even real at all? It’s a bit slimey if a sales tactic, but if you say “I’ll pay nothing more than X,” you’ve lost the negotiating position. If you tell google “I’ll pay $3cpc for this phrase”, well now they should be shopping that phrase with all its might.
At the end of it, google has a primary interest in keeping its adtech optimized in a bang-for-buck sense for consumers vs it’s earnings. If they get carried away with charging too much, customers will start just walking away without a purchase. Just like the car salesman.
Is there any 3rd party auditing what your business or your company is doing? I don't think that's the way business works in the USA unless you have a contract with a company that they can audit your services/products/etc. That's between two companies and not a public service.
Depends on what industry you're in. In the banking world, it's extremely common to have auditors, escrow firms, and government regulators keeping an eye on what you're getting up to.
yes auditing is pretty standard. Thats a big part of the big 4 accounting firms work, since they are preparing tax docs and verifying numbers, they need to peek below the hood. Also, insurance companies will audit their clients to be sure premiums match coverage.
I'm a happy Firefox user since it showed up as an alternative to internet explorer. I tried Chrome once or twice but always came back and stuck with Firefox. I don't trust Google for anything and don't want them to rule over the web. Firefox works, it has worked for me all these years and continues to do so. I still believe in them and their mission even if they have to take Google money to exist.
I think that complaints here are just making things worse for Mozilla, how about helping out instead of whining about every little thing. They're trying, that's a lot more than can be said about a whole lot of other actors out there.
Firefox team, if you read this, you rock! Thank you for giving me a great browser.