I have an idea that another way of preventing being tracked is just massively spamming trash in the data layer object, pushing thousands of dollars worth of purchase events and such, pushing randomly generated user details and other such events. Perhaps by doing this your real data will be hard to filter out. A side effect is also that data becomes unreliable overall, helping less privacy aware people in the process.
Since installing it on firefox on this computer (18 months ago or so) Ad Nauseam has clicked ~$38,000 worth of ads, that i never saw.
Between this and "track me not" i've been fighting back against ads and connecting my "profile" with any habits since 2016 or so. I should also note i have pihole and my own DNS server upstream, so that's thiry-eight grand in ad clicks that got through blacklists.
[Preface: I hate ads, I love uBlock origin, I use pihole, I'm a proponent of ad blockers]
I manage a Google Ads account with a $500,000 budget. That budget is spent on a mix of display ads, google search, and youtube ads.
If I knew that 10% of our budget was wasted on bot clicks, there's nothing I can do as an advertiser. We can't stop advertising... we want to grow our business and advertising is how you get your name out there. We also can't stop using Google Ads - where else would we go?
$38,000 in clicks boosts Google's revenue by $38k (Google ain't complaining). The only entity you're hurting are the advertisers using Google. Advertisers might see their campaigns performing less well, but that's not going to stop them from advertising. If anything, they'll increase budgets to counteract the fake bot clicks.
I really don't understand what Ad Nauseam is trying to achieve. It honestly seems like it benefits Google more than it hurts them. It directly hurts advertisers, but not enough that it would stop anyone from advertising.
Google has a system for refunding advertisers for invalid clicks. The $500k account that I manage gets refunded about $50/month in invalid clicks. I'm guessing if bot clicks started making a real dent in advertiser performance, Google would counter that by improving their bot detection so they can refund advertisers in higher volumes. If there's ever an advertiser-led boycott of Google Ads, Google would almost certainly respond by refunding advertisers for bot clicks at much higher rates.
> I really don't understand what Ad Nauseam is trying to achieve. It honestly seems like it benefits Google more than it hurts them.
Google is part of the problem, but they're neither the only ones nor best to target through bottom-up approaches.
> It directly hurts advertisers, but not enough that it would stop anyone from advertising.
You know the saying about XML - if it doesn't solve the problem, you are not using enough of it.
> there's nothing I can do as an advertiser. We can't stop advertising...
We know. The whole thing is a cancer[0], a runaway negative feedback loop. No single enlightened advertiser can do anything about it unilaterally. Which is why the pressure needs to go up until ~everyone wants change.
> You don't have to buy privacy violating ads. You don't have to buy targetted ads.
Sadly, you do until the monopoly is broken up. Because as is your company probably won't survive in the market, nor you in your role, using anything else.
> Because as is your company probably won't survive in the market
Then maybe that business isn't adding all that much value to society to begin with and it's just not that much of a loss if it goes away.
If a company cannot survive without shoving their product into the view of eyeballs appealing to our most basic monkey brain instincts, it's maybe just better if it dies.
There are plenty of companies that A) don't advertise or B) don't use individually targeted ads
An example of A: carmex
An example of B: Ball Homes (sixth largest residential builder in the country), pretty much any lawyer, a mom and pop that buys newspaper space, TV space or a bill board
The point is to poison your ad tracking profile so that advertisers can't figure out who you are and what you'll buy.
No matter how secure your browser setup is, Google is tracking you. By filling their trackers with garbage, there's less that can personally identify you as an individual
By hurting the advertisers you hurt google. It sucks that you are disadvantaged by it, but the truth of the matter is that once it becomes expensive enough it will not be worth it economically. And it is clear from your own message this is the only language you're willing to speak.
And you also hurt the people who create the content that you consume, it is a very toxic attitude (and maybe even illegal as it causes intentional financial damage)
> It honestly seems like it benefits Google more than it hurts them. It directly hurts advertisers, but not enough that it would stop anyone from advertising.
GP fights agains ads, not Google. And not being able to win 100% of the gain shouldn’t restrain someone from taking action it they consider the win share worth the pain.
> $38,000 in clicks boosts Google's revenue by $38k
You should include costs here, and if (big if) a substantial part of the clicks comes from bots and get refunded, the associated cost comes on top of the bill. At the end the whole business is impacted. I agree 50/50k is a penny through.
> I hate ads […] I manage a Google Ads account
[no cynism here, I genuinely wonder] how do you manage your conscience, mood and daily motivation? Do you see a dichotomy in what you wrote and if so, how did you arrive to that situation? Any future plan?
I’m asking as you kind of introduce the subject but if you’re not willing to give more details that’s totally fine.
> I'm guessing if bot clicks started making a real dent in advertiser performance, Google would counter that by improving their bot detection so they can refund advertisers in higher volumes.
They already have methods to detect a lot. Like you said yourself, customers have no alternative, so why would they refund money they don't have to?
> I hate ads, I love uBlock origin, I use pihole, I'm a proponent of ad blockers. I manage a Google Ads account with a $500,000 budget.
If you can write this without seeing how you are the very worst of our enemies, then I do hope your business die, there is obviously nothing that will make you understand. I still can't believe you put those words together, honestly.
Do you see yourself as a separate breed from your lowly users or something? How can you inflict and even try to justify what you yourself avoid and say you "hate"?
Probably just doesn't want to take his work home with him :P
In a way I get it, I wouldn't buy or recommend the product I currently work on. Still cash the paychecks though. I also am the stereotypical tech person who avoids technology. I can't exactly blame anyone for playing the game. The guy who works at the sausage factory but won't eat sausage due to what he's seen is a pretty common refrain.
I've only used them once for my first (and so far only) PCB, so as a complete amateur, it was great. They rejected my first design which had an obvious flaw, and my second design was in my hands a little over a week after I uploaded it. I paid 2.60EUR for 5 (tiny) PCBs and 7.50EUR for the shipping. They even placed and soldered components for me.
Oh well. Advertisers are the scum of the earth, the only thing worse is those facilitating them. Driving a wedge between advertisers and googles is a win.
Even if it merely makes using Google shenanigans unattractive for advertisers, that would be a huge win against one of the biggest perpetrators, privacy and data protection violators out there.
AdNaueam works against ads, but does it also work against Google Tag Manager?
I've already got most ads blocked by simply Piholing them, but GTM tracking my every move using first-party content is a different kind of interaction to attack.
I’d imagine that by this point in time, they are able to filter this specific type of noise out of the dataset. They have been tracking everyone for so long that I doubt there’s anyone they don’t know about whether directly of shadow profiles. These randomly generated users would just not match up to anything and would be fine to just drop
I have a quite common name in my country and snatched firstname.lastname@gmail.com for that name many years ago. Many use it by accident somehow when registering for things. Possibly (hopefully!) half of all leaks containing my email address are for other people. Never thought of what it might do for ad profiling, but hopefully it is adding at least some noise to it.
Maybe I could manually improve a bit on that by deliberately register myself for various random services and just clicking around a bit to pretend I am interested in things I have no interest in. On the other hand with 20 years of tracking I think Google has all my interests and habits nailed down anyway.
Post contains an email from European Parliament about leaked personal details.
Translation of partial Dutch part:
It is the criminal records, employment contracts and passports of all accredited parliamentary assistants (or, in other words, all assistants to more than 700 MEPs) of the European Parliament. Those assistants (and former assistants) were already warned about this in May, and yesterday they received info about where 'external parties' all have had 'access' to. And so it turns out: quite a lot. “Identity card or passport, Extract of criminal records, Civil status certificates, Certificates and other documents to determine the residence or domicile, Education or experience supporting documents, Military obligations certificate, Declaration of honor documents made by data subject, Documents to establish the individual entitlements, Contract and additional administrative documents.”
ive done it with transforming data (for example pasting a table in and asking it to turn it into LaTeX) or something and had the occasional issue with it misordering or forgetting things. It didn't take long to spot the error for me though
You could run it through thrice with a different prompt/temperature/model and pick the majority result (or exit with success on the first two passing runs).
Good idea. If the data is a list of records where the order isn't important, randomly permuting them (ETA: then sorting the final outputs) would be another option.
ETA2: Would the downvoter care to explain why? Genuinely puzzled.
I tried to copy paste the Advent of Code puzzles into the chat, and it just spewed out code that worked like it was nothing. It worked for the day 1 and day 2 puzzels. I’m impressed it also “remembered” that I wanted the result as JavaScript
For what it's worth, this is likely one of the easier puzzles you could give it because there are so many solutions in a number of languages all over the web.
Why are you so snarky? Yes, of course this won't solve things it has never seen in its training set. It's not an AGI. But so what? It's still amazing nontheless. Is your point that since it's not "intelligent" we should dismiss it?
I've interacted with that account before and they were always snarky, as if their test they made is the arbiter of intelligence and that we shouldn't be so impressed by AI that to me is actually impressive.
Maybe the difference between Adobe and Microsoft is that the latter has kind of proven itself now. In the meantime is Adobe very busy trying to separate the Open Source version of Magento from the paid version, called Adobe Commerce now. There is only one mention of Magento left on the homepage, about the name change. And is a link to the free version now where to be found.
> Later on Monday morning, a second heavy tugboat arrives to pull the ship off completely. In addition, water will be sprayed under the ship with great force to wash away sand and clay. If it is not possible to clear the front of the ship in this way, containers may have to be unloaded from the front of the ship.
I fail to understand why they didn't/don't use the tugboats to wash the water away. Even small boats can cause a lot of scour with their bow thrusters along a vertical quay wall (which the Ever Given is in a way). The erosive power of a 16MW engine is really something to not be underestimated.
>I fail to understand why they didn't/don't use the tugboats to wash the water away. Even small boats can cause a lot of scour with their bow thrusters
If the following video explanation is accurate, a tugboat's turbulence can't scour down to ~50 ft depth of sand:
https://youtu.be/zBvFuq7Mkzs?t=1m00s
I think the confusion we have with all these news reports is that we really don't have a definitive visualization or geometry of how its actually stuck in the sand that's accurate/authoritative. A bunch of overhead drone shots don't really reveal to us the true extent of the problem that's hidden underneath the waterline.
We just see words about tugboats arriving and water spraying so our instinct is to simplify the problem to "I don't understand why they can't just do <X>?!?"
> Don’t ask rhetorically why people don’t simply do a thing [emphasis mine]
Though asking with curiosity, humility and joy, can convert an "argument from failure of imagination" into a "It seems my understanding of the world isn't matching the world! Yay! Learning opportunity! Help me leverage this, let it not slip by unexploited, please?". Those can be wonderfully Aha! fruitful. First step of a bugfix is finding a failure case.
"Was it X that meant you couldn't do Y?" is the best way to phrase it if possible. It demonstrates an attempt, even if it's just a simple one, to understand it, and implies you have faith the other party haven't missed something obvious. Thinking of an X often answers the question for you, stops you looking stupid.
Every now and then, the reply is "that would have been a good idea actually" in which case you still get to look smart. So it's a win+win really.
1. They can’t manoeuvre tugs into the right location due to the aforementioned silt and dirt the Ever Given is stuck on/dug up.
2. Tug bow trusters are difficult to aim. Plus how do you hold them steady? They can only fire in one direction at a time, so you have no ability to create a reaction thrust to prevent the tug from moving.
3. Tug thrusters don’t enjoy ingesting huge amounts silt and earth when they’re operating. Which invariably will happen if they’re close enough to banks to have a useful erosive effect.
There’s been like 2 dudes out there with an excavator for a week. Absolutely nothing about this has made any sense. Based on the amount of revenue lost due to this blockage you’d think every military on the earth would have descended there.
Kurzgesagt tweeted about this (specifically using a nuke to remove the vessel). It's surprising just how big a nuke you would need to remove such a large vessel.
I fail to understand why so many people are proposing this alternative as if blowing up tonnes of cargo in the water, surroundings and air would be fine from an environmental point of view.
I switched to Affinity Photo as an alternative [1] and quite happy with it. It's similar enough to Photoshop that I'm not lost, more polished than Gimp, and only a fraction of the price. Their forum is also quite good for support.
Affinity Photo and Designer are great tools, they are cross-platform (although you have to purchase them separately), and regularly go on sale (I bought both for 70$ total).
I have yet to find a task I used to use Photoshop or Illustrator for that I can't do with these. I am not a hardcore or super advanced user, but that's why it works for me.
Pretty sure there are lots of valid definitions of "cross-platform", and I will say again that context matters.
If I'm talking about a mobile app and I say "cross-platform" I probably meant iOS and Android. It would be strange to say "what about Linux??" in that context.
So here we are talking about competitors to Adobe products, where "cross-platform" means Windows and Mac, so when I say "cross-platform" in this context, I am also referring to that same set of platforms.
With linux desktop use at ~1.5% and dropping, at some point it becomes bad business to support it. It's not adobe's job to pick OS's for their users, it's their job to support the OS's that their users use. And their users are about 99% Windows/Mac it seems.
When you cover about 98-99% of your users platforms, I think you're cross platform.
Otherwise, we could define a cross-platform slippery slope such that no software has ever achieved it. There's always another platform you didn't support.
I mean, yes. Functional cross-platform doesn't mean "every single platform ever", and hitting 98% is a fantastic target.
Listen, I love linux, and it's not MY fault that the year of the Linux Desktop never came and that its marketshare has continued to fall against its competitors.
I cancelled my subscription a few days ago. It was the most painfull procedure ever. Help article points to a cancellation button, which does not exist. Contact page leads to nowhere. Chat bot points you to the useless help section. Finally a real human behind the chatbot answers, but takes extra long time to make you lose any remaining patience or hope. Finally after 1 hour of various counter offers and discounts, they accept the cancellation request.
I have never witnessed a subscription cancellation process this obstructive. It should be illegal.
Same here but in my case I did find the cancel subscription button, it just gave an "error" when I tried to use it. Required me to talk to support before cancelling.
That is in addition to their scammy practice of displaying a monthly price, but locking you into a yearly contract. You pay monthly, but if you cancel within the year they charge you a cancellation fee that is essentially equal to the entire remaining subscription. Not sure if they do that anymore, but that was the case with my sub 2 years ago.
This is why I have gone to using virtual cards online.
When you want to cancel, you go to one central repository with all your virtual cards and turn off the card for the service you want to cancel. When your next payment comes up, the card will decline, the service will close your account for you. Easy cancellation.
This is really something I've been thinking for quite some time, canceling my CC subscription (which is monthly) but there are couple of things that kept from executing this decision; first of course loong years of habit (almost 20), hard to leave. After switching to Figma for UI design, my main use of CC for branding, print design is left to Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and photography editing for Lightroom. I can ditch the others in CC apps in an instant, but I can't Photoshop and Illustrator, because the branding design works need mockups, brushes, textures, stuff and web resources mostly made for PS, also I've a huge offline archive I like using, also there is print work, which I use Illustrator mainly. Adobe products really make me mad, they work in weird ways, crash, lost work and data, plus couple of times in a year something happens to make me connect to client support, these are the times that I really want to cut my all connection with the company and their products.
At some point I'll manage to figure this out and take a bold step further to leave Adobe all behind. I know there are options, tried most of them (Affinity etc), but I make my living through these apps and I need reliable software with resources and community, just like Figma did in a great way for UX/product design, I wish they create side products like CC apps, for print design, even audio design, that would be awesome.
Thank you, we want to try this. I despise subscription model software. I wish I could find my Adobe Photoshop 6.0 disk, it did everything I need just fine.
I just tried this and while I appreciate the attempt to make it relatively the same UI as Photoshop most of the things I tried didn't work like they would in Photoshop.
I couldn't apply a filter to a shape layer, which I can do in Photoshop. It didn't blur out the option, I had to click it to find out I couldn't do it.
I did try to gaussian blur a layer and it did nothing until I hit 50px then at 51px it basically blurred everything out of existence. I tried this in Photoshop and it behaved in a more linear way, as I'd expect.
This would actually be less of a problem if every Photoshop alternative didn't try to be a pixel perfect clone of Photoshop. Take some risks, evaluate some choices and see if you can do things better than Photoshop. Otherwise the comparisons will be too stark.
I understand a lot of the vitriol towards Adobe for a number of reasons, but for some reason they just do photo/image editing better than anyone else. I keep waiting for the day a FOSS alternative pops up that actually competes.
I switched to "PDF Expert" (developer is Readdle I think) on the mac and its equivalent on mobile. Its easier to use than Acrobat ever was and costs less per year.
It's not just about performace. Dealing with emotional stress will become very had if you keep overthinking it and can cause serious issues. ADHD medication can really help in those situations.
