>> The prompt starts at the first field and <RETURN> (not <TAB> !) moves to the next.
This is hilarious to me, because times have certainly changed.
When we first started shipping Windows software the big complaint from users was the use of Tab to switch fields, while Return triggered the default button (usually Save or Close).
The change, for users used to DOS was painful - not least when capturing numbers as the numeric key pad has Enter not Tab.
Software developers either stood firm, convincing customers to learn Tab, or caved and aliased the Enter key to the Tab key. Even today I still find that option here and there in Software that's been around a while...
Author here, and thanks for reading. I'm glad to hear stories from a developer POV about those days. It's interesting uncovering subtle interface changes as I investigate various applications. It makes sense to me to not use Return for fields, especially when fields could gradually accommodate longer and longer blocks of text. Being able to naturally type multiple paragraphs, say for a "Notes" field in a database, would make sense.
Yes, it makes sense when viewed like that, and was probably a necessary change.
DOS chose Enter though because in those days mist data capture was numbers. Lots and lots of numbers. Data capturers could track the left hand down the column (so keeping place on yhe paper) any type with the right. Enter is right there in the keypad so only one hand needed.
Switching to Tab means 2 hands needed on the keyboard, so difficult to keep track on the paper.
Typically also, on DOS screens there was very little multi-line entry. Addresses were multiple entry fields, and so on. Tab was pretty much not used (outside of word processing).
If I went back now, to design the standard keyboard, I'd add dedicated "Next" and "Previous" buttons on the numeric keypad. No need for Enter there.
> not least when capturing numbers as the numeric key pad has Enter not Tab.
And “Enter” isn’t “Return”.
I don’t know how the PC and PC software did it, but the Mac, when it got a numeric keypad, discriminated between return (on the alphanumeric keyboard) and enter (on the keypad), and software did discriminate between the two.
We had a contractor write a replacement for some green-screen software that we ran for years. The replacement was of course a web interface, written in PHP, and nicely themed and all that was great in 2005.
We kept running into all kinds of weird issues when importing data back into the legacy system. Of course, after we started looking into it, I narrowed all the issues down to the same two users.
I don't remember exactly what it was, but users would hit a certain key on the keyboard at the end of every field, before they used the mouse to click on the next field and enter more data. This resulted in an undesired character at the end of every field!
I realized exactly what was going on as I watched a person fill out the form and submit it.
"Why are you doing that!"
"Doing what?"
"Hitting the space bar (or whatever key it was) every time you fill out a field!"
Of course, in the old system you had to hit that key to save each field as you entered it.
I presume you mean web-on-desktop? Since a dumb phone doesn't have a browser?
I came late to phones, resisting them till 2013. Up to that point I could function with desktop alone. Today, it's not possible (for me.)
Authentication is a big part of it. My (web) access to my bank demands a selfie photo on my phone. Plus endless other systems.
Outside of work, all communications is via WhatsApp. I pretty much don't even read SMS's anymore. They're 99% spam or scam. And it's not just person to person, all social activities from church to sport to band etc are all on WhatsApp.
I use maps only a couple times a year, but when I need it, I really need it (cause I'm not where I expected to be.)
I don't do social media, or email, on the phone. Both if which frankly lead to problems in some situations.
I'm traveling this year and the number of tickets (train and museum) that can only be used from a phone is impressive.
I applud your desire to remove the phone from your life, especially if you are distracted by it. But you may find that it's hard to do. I'm not interested in "work arounds", I want to get stuff done, not fight everything about my life.
So I recommend, get a dumb phone and use that. You'll quickly discover what's missing every time you have to reach for the smart phone.
Define "advertising". I feel this might be hard to do.
For example is my blog talking about Windows considered as Advertising? What about my blog discussing products we make? What about the web site for my local restaurant?
If I add my restaurant location to Google maps, is that advertising? Are review sites?
If I'm an aggregator (like booking.com) and I display the results for a search is that advertising?
I assume though you meant advertising as in 3rd party advertising. So no Google ad words, no YouTube ads etc. Ok, let's explore that...take say YouTube...
Can creators still embed "sponsored by" scenes? Can they do product placement?
Your suggestion is, unfortunately, not implementable. Leaving aside the merit for a moment, there's just no way that any politician can make it happen. Google and Facebook are too big, with too much cash to lobby with. And that's before you tell everyone that the free internet is no more, now you gotta pay subscriptions.
And, here's the kicker, even if you did force users to pay for Facebook and Google, it's still in their interest to maximize engagement...
What people who advertise indirectly on the internet. For example the ads around a baseball field - can that baseball game no longer be streamed? Product placement in a movie - can that movie only be in theaters and DVD, but not Netflix? Could streaming companies show previews of coming shows on their own platform?
I also assume it means that sites like X could no longer charge for verified accounts.
I'm curious what the point is in calling out obvious edge cases that can be addressed by either the legislation allowing for discretion in enforcement via the FCC or other department, or having the court system directly address this factors?
What's important is agreeing or disagreeing with the spirit of the law, not trying to get a HN comment to give you a bullet-proof wording.
Because as long as there is a theoretical edge case, nothing should be done, your model is flawed. That's a mentality very common amongst software engineers. In the real physical world, even tying your shoes has edge cases.
Hmm, thinking of it, it may explain the love of sandals in said community.
The obvious edge cases are often the difference between a law having any teeth at all. Or the edge cases can be such a big loophole that everything fits under it.
You will just see the shift of the methods used in government corruption to circumvent such rules, e.g., your wife gets a wildly lucrative “book deal” right after you do something, and then when time has passed, you also get a “book deal” or are hired to speak at exorbitant fees or get hired in some BS position or are made a member of a board, or your children are hired as executives or even made board members.
The problem with the direct approach, i.e., “ban advertising”, is that it is hung up on a specific term, not the underlying dynamic/system. It’s fighting a symptom, not the disease/cause.
"but surely we can't regulate x because defining x is complicated"
"plenty of things are complex and are regulated, also here is a definition that covers almost all cases and the rest can be left to judicial nous"
"but people will just evade the law anyway"
Honestly pick a post about the EU at random and you'll be able to find some variety of this chain of conversation. It's so general an argument that it could be made about literally any law that's ever existed, making it entirely null if you believe in any regulation whatsoever
My personal favourite hntrope is how any conversation about a geological feature outside of the US will inevitable turn into one about American geological features and then shortly after it will just descend generic American discussion.
I conceptualize this as something like the Hamming Distance, where you can measure the number of replies the conversation will have before an inevitable pivot to generic American stuff.
So the conversation could start with "Why back in 2013 I had a lovely time fishing in Scotland. The lakes there are remarkable."
"Boy me too that fishing was just great caught such and such fish blah blah blah love those lakes"
"Why that reminds me of the time I went fishing in Kentucky, boy the lakes there let me tell you..."
"Kentucky you say? Why I was just in Kentucky the other day! Boy they sure have < difference in real estate prices | difference in crime rates | differnce in minimum wage... >
and now it's a conversation about Kentucky real estate instead of a conversation about fishing in Scotland.
Promotion of anything at all is advertising, with or without compensation. The word advertising is pretty well defined, and the dictionary definitions don’t usually mention compensation, e.g. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/advertise.
An example I’m sure you would consider advertising - consider Google advertising Google Fiber in Google search results, or Facebook advertising business services on Facebook, or Apple, Netflix, Cinemark advertising their own shows & products in their own channels. You’ve seen lots of these, I’m sure you would consider them ads, but it’s not the compensation that makes them ads.
Yes, but if we're talking about incentives and "primordial domino tiles" then compensated advertising is what createa the incentives for the whole attention economy and addictive design in the first place.
Feel free to keep doing "pro-bono" advertising, but shareholders definitely wouldn't.
>compensated advertising is what createa the incentives for the whole attention economy
Why would you not want to keep people engaged and even "addicted" in order to keep them as subscribers and make them upgrade to more expensive subscriptions?
- Gambling while rarely subscription based is usually paid for directly rather than ad funded.
- Newspaper subscriptions are no less addictive for news junkies than purely ad funded newspapers.
- I watch a lot of Youtube, far more than I used to before I started paying for the subscription.
- Netflix and in the olden days TV.
I'm not entirely sure what "insidiously addictive" actually means. I do sometimes scroll through some TikTok vids. I don't find it particularly addictive compared to, say, Hacker News.
You're right that modern video games and Netflix are a good examples of things that are non-ad-based, but are insidiously addictive. I used "insidiously addictive" to mean something which is engineered specifically to maximize addictive potential, and is not addictive purely on its own merits.
An example of a game development pattern that I would consider "merely addictive" would be a game developer trying to make their game as fun as possible. Does maximizing fun inherently make a game more likely to be addictive? Of course, but addiction was not the criteria being optimized for.
An example of an insidiously addictive video game would be one where the developers specifically created features in the hopes that they would create a dependency with the product to drive subscriptions or sales. It's at least partially about the level of cynicism with which the product is being developed.
A more stark example would be a fast food restaurant refining their recipe to make it more delicious versus one adding drugs to the food to make people addicted.
Newspapers and Youtube are both examples of services that are engineered to be ad-based but have a subscription option, so they're most likely still driven by the same attention-seeking incentives.
Corporations want to sell as much as possible to make as much money as possible.
Whenever the frequency, quantity or intensity of use drives up earnings, you are bound to get the same result: More "addictive" designs are better for earnings than less "addictive" designs. The difference (if any) between addictive because fun and addictive by design is irrelevant for this outcome.
What I will grant you is that the link can be more direct with ad funding. If a newspaper publisher knows that some very loyal subscribers only ever read 5 articles every morning, making that particular group read 30 articles would not drive up earnings.
But I think on average across all readers the link between reading more and higher earnings would still exist and hence the incentive to make the product more "addictive".
The "problem" (for corporations) is that the process of signing up for a subscription is itself a major obstacle in user flow and can serve as a point where users "wake up" and realize what they are doing.
Sure, you can design your pages after the sign up to be addictive, but that wouldn't actually help you to get more subscribers - so there is not a lot of economic rationale to do so (unless you have other mechanisms to "monetize" already signed up users, such as lootboxes or in-app purchases)
In contrast, if you can use advertising to monetize non-subscribed users, you can sidestep that entire obstacle altogether. That's why there is a lot of economic incentive to design the free part of services to be addictive, as long as there is advertising.
I don't get it. Why do you think that it doesn't make sense for subscription based services to be as addictive as possible so that users don't churn?
Second, I don't believe that forms of "addiction" that have existed for centuries can be beaten by small changes to business models. See my other comment for more detail on this:
Also, what would you do about the fact that ad funded services for lower earners are effectively subsidised by higher earners? If you ban the subsidised services, you are causing a massive regressive change to the availability of information and entertainment.
> If a newspaper publisher knows that some very loyal subscribers only ever read 5 articles every morning, making that particular group read 30 articles would not drive up earnings.
I think it's hard to say if that's true. A consumer might be willing to pay more for a service they use a lot rather than a little.
What I do know is that I can see plainly that advertising-driven services are among the worse offenders for creating addictive products and other revenue models generally provide healthier incentives to direct development.
The EU's general approach here is probably better than banning advertising since it diagnoses a clear problem, but leaves it open for regulators and companies to address it.
>What I do know is that I can see plainly that advertising-driven services are among the worse offenders for creating addictive products and other revenue models generally provide healthier incentives to direct development.
I can see plainly that this is not the case and I have given you a number of examples. But I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this one.
>The EU's general approach here is probably better than banning advertising since it diagnoses a clear problem
I also prefer this to a ban because a ban would be incredibly destructive and regressive while this regulation will be merely ineffective.
This sort of "addiction" has caused moral panics for centuries starting with reading addiction in the 18th century. During my own lifetime we had this sort of hysteria about comic books, video games, TV and now social media.
I don't deny that it can cause problems. I remember a time as a kid when I was reading so much all day every day that I actually got depressed and lonely when I was forced to interact with the real world. I wanted to live in the story I was reading.
I also used to procrastinate a lot here on Hacker News. There's even a setting you can enable called "noprocrast" to stop your addiction if you want.
My wife told me she had trouble staying awake at school for years because she was reading novels into the early morning.
Some people believe that what we are currently seeing is something new that wouldn't exist without ad funded media companies deliberately causing it. My experience tells me that this is not true.
But to answer your question. I have no solution. If anything, the solutions may exist on an individual level - lifestyle, social connections, etc. Banning this or that medium or various kinds of advertising tricks will have no effect whatsoever.
I don’t understand what you mean about shareholders and pro-bono, can you elaborate? Apple advertises Apple products on Apple channels, and Apple’s shareholders love that, and it’s not “pro-bono”.
I don’t think you have the incentives correctly summarized. The incentive of businesses like Google, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram are to make money, and the only way they’ve figured out how to do that at scale is advertising. None of those sites had ads when they started.
Why? I completely disagree, they are the same as any other ads. But you’re still not seeing the big picture. If you ban advertising compensation, suddenly uncompensated will become the entire problem and the only category. That’s the point.
Surely you're just being pedantic by pointing out that platforms can advertise themselves without paying money to themselves. If those same advertisements were on another platform they would be compensated ads.
And? Those ads aren’t on other platforms, and they won’t go away if you ban compensated advertising. Surely you’re just being completely naive if you think banning “compensated” advertising would change the advertising rather than the compensation mechanisms.
You can try to stop the payments, but you won’t stop the ads. I’m talking about the same reasons billionaires pay far lower tax rates than you and I. When that much money is on the line, they will find (or make) a legal way. (Anyway, it’s also time to come back from outer space; corporations own the laws and the advertising channels. Our economy, for better or worse, currently depends on advertising. Compensated advertising will never be banned.)
The hypothetical you’re talking about does not stop today’s uncompensated for-profit advertising at all, and there is a lot of that. It also would only stop direct payments to content channels from a second party in exchange for advertising. That wouldn’t stop indirect marketing/advertising, nor indirect compensation. Furthermore, content distributors could offer service bundles where advertisers pay for other business services, and ads become a free add-on from a legal accounting perspective. Similarly, advertisers can offer other services, and channels can gift air-time to businesses. Channels could “sponsor” or “endorse” products they “like” without an attached financial transaction.
It just would not be that hard to legally sever advertising from compensation, so if you aren’t banning all advertising including the uncompensated kind, then advertising will happen. And banning all advertising is even more of a non-starter than trying to somehow block payments.
I don’t agree with that. I’m saying that banning advertising payments will obviously have unintended consequences and fail to achieve the actual desired goal. That happens with poorly conceived regulations all the time. I’m also suggesting that not enough people agree with your desire to ban advertising, and there isn’t a clear enough benefit to society, for this particular regulation to pass. You have a Chesterton’s Fence problem if you don’t see the reasons why advertising is so completely pervasive. You have to acknowledge that first and then propose something viable and realistic that can replace it.
> Paying booking.com to allow your results to appear higher is not.
But booking takes a cut of the booking in all scenarios, so they’re already incentivized to prioritize results that result in more profit for them. This all gets very tricky unfortunately.
That's not advertising, that's how it works for every store. A grocery store has a larger absolute margin on a more expensive product, given the same relative margin.
Scenario A: Booking.com wants to increase their profits so they analyze their results and prioritize the best ones to reach their target. Regardless, Booking takes a cut of everything.
Scenario B: if you pay Booking $10k you can get to the first page even if you are a random 1-star hotel. Booking takes a cut of everything and also profits by getting money in exchange for more visibility of certain results.
How would something like Github Sponsors work? Lots of projects use a "sponsor us for $LARGE_SUM and we'll mention you in our readme and release notes" model.
Maybe advertising should be banned in stuff that you are not the author for. Google putting ads into their blog posts is fine, Google putting ads into the search result is not. So on a Github project, the maintainer can put adds, Github can not unless it's their project.
> Advertising = compensating someone to promote a product / company.
So basically all full-time Youtubers who do in-video ad reads, including, but not limited to: MKBHD, Linus Tech Tips, Veritasium, Smarter Every Day, minutephysics, Computerphile, Tom Scott, Patrick Boyle, The Plain Bagel, Sailing La Vagabonde, Sailing SV Delos, Gone with the Wynns, etc.
There is no fundamental right to a particular business model.
This wouldn't mean this type of content would disappear - for every single business producing such content there's a bunch of people doing the same for free. And then there's patreon et al., and funding for education etc.
> This wouldn't mean this type of content would disappear - for every single business producing such content there's a bunch of people doing the same for free.
For some definition of "same" which may or may not mean "equal" (in the sense of quality, quantity, etc).
It brings to mind some rich people running for public office and putting forward the idea because they're rich they can't be influenced/lobbied or something. Or the general public sometimes complaining about politicians giving themselves raises: well, if you only pay peanuts you're going to get monkeys running things (more than already).
There is more opportunity for different types of people and channels to happen because the money allows people to recompensed for their time/effort. Free only scales so far when you have rent/mortgage, groceries, kids, a partner you may wish to spend time with, etc, to worry about.
> And then there's patreon et al.,
Except for MKBHD and Linus Tech Tips, all (most?) the channels I listed have Patreon, and still find it necessary to in-video ads because it's not enough.
> Except for MKBHD and Linus Tech Tips, all (most?) the channels I listed have Patreon, and still find it necessary to in-video ads because it's not enough.
Some of them will go subscription-only, which means that many of the free users will leave, but those who don't will pay enough to support the channel.
And some will find that the content they produce isn't actually valuable enough to sufficiently many people. Which is unfortunate, but has to be balanced against all the negative externalities of ads.
It would be dead. Google would shut it down or sell it, but who is going to buy billions of dollars a year in costs for no advertising revenue in return? Youtube's hosting costs would put a massive dent in even some hypothetical really nice billionaire's wallet. Apple could afford it and they'd run it a million times better, but would they even consider putting so much loss on their books for the sake of ... PR?
What percentage of YouTube's revenue do you think is from subs?
The slop is already there. Even without the slop, which it would be borderline impossible to identify en masse, the hosting costs are still astronomical. I appreciate your idealism, but Youtube without advertising revenue would be a financial black hole, and even if it survived, creators would simply be the ones taking the hit
Unless you're suggesting Youtube would just start again from zero, in which case it would just fail and it might as well be the same as dying
You got it reversed. If you're Google and someone is paying you to put content on your website or give it some sort of preferential treatment within your already existing website, that is advertisement. It doesn't really matter whether some company paid for it or the company CEO had their nephew pay for it through aoney laundered network of obfuscation.
Hosting, or domains, does seem to be a loophole. Renting an entire website for your own product's advert is fine because that's "your website". What about subdomains? Or what about TLDs, suppose the operator of a TLD like .promo has a nice front page with a directory of all the sites, searchable, with short excerpts - all provided for free to the benefit of those who pay to own those sites. This could be like Facebook, or it could be like Neocities. I'm imagining a walled garden that treats its denizens equally, but they gain special attention from being there, and it costs money. Maybe that's OK.
>> Advertising = compensating someone to promote a product / company.
That's a definition, sure. I feel like it leaves loopholes (under this definition spam isn't advertising, and I guess affiliation programs are?)
If I pay someone to print flyers is that advertising? If I pay squarespace for my site, is that advertising?
What if I need a Google maps subscription to place pins? Is placing a pin then advertising? Even if the subscription gives me other abilities?
Under your definition I guess YouTube creators can't be sponsored. And all existing videos with sponsorship need yo be removed? And I guess no online watching of sports (lots of people paid to wear a logo there...)
Presumably no product placement in Netflix shows (not sure what to do with old content?)
Of course I'm not paid to advertise MiraclePill. My channel exists purely thanks to patreon. No, I don't know that my "executive level" patreons are all MiraclePill employees...
No, I don't pay Google for ads, the ads are free when I purchase GoogleCoin which I buy because I expect GoogleCoin to go up in value...
What are you trying to say, that it's impossible to define anything legally without edge cases?? That's bullocks.
> If I pay someone to print flyers is that advertising?
What the hell, we're talking about internet... you can't put printed flyers on the internet.
> If I pay squarespace for my site, is that advertising?
No. It's your site, not a third-party site promoting your site!
> What if I need a Google maps subscription to place pins? Is placing a pin then advertising?
If you promote it somehow, yes... if you just say there's a business there, no, since you're not actively promoting it. Information that something exists by itself cannot be included in "promotion".
> And all existing videos with sponsorship need yo be removed?
Yes, or re-uploaded without the sponsor segment.
> And I guess no online watching of sports (lots of people paid to wear a logo there...)
There could be exceptions for ads placed on the real world which are not paid for by the site/creator. There's always cases that must be allowed, no prohibition is absolute.
> Presumably no product placement in Netflix shows (not sure what to do with old content?)
To be honest, I wouldn't mind subtle product placements in shows. That's a lot less hostile than actual ads we see today on the Internet.
> Of course I'm not paid to advertise MiraclePill.
If you lie that you're not paid by someone while you are, like with any law, you can be prosecuted for it.
>> And all existing videos with sponsorship need yo be removed?
> Yes, or re-uploaded without the sponsor segment
I hope not. For one that would hit retroactively, but also it would cause a huge loss of valuable content from platforms like YouTube as countless videos with sponsor segments are actually interesting and simply too much to reupload, if the uploader is even active still.
Every video that has sponsors has a disclaimer on it so Google knows exactly what those videos are. It could misclassify videos perhaps but I have never seen that happen.
There's been rules around what constitutes advertising or product placement on TV for decades, didn't seem to be such an insurmountable issue first time around.
In a lot of countries in the EU, advertising for tobaco products, prescription medication, lawyer/docts are prohibited. That ban has been working quite well for decades.
This is true, but it's worth adding that there are no blog posts about those things either, or articles, discussions, etc except in very limited niche places dedicated to talking about them.
If there was a ban on 'internet advertising of anything' then it would basically kill all discussion of any products on the internet.
It wouldn't, we in Germany have clear laws when you have to mark something in media as "advertisment" - it is whenever you received a "reward" in order to talk about something, you have to mark it. A reward is already when you receive a product for free, or get reimbursed for travel cost etc. It is clearly definable. Yes, we will never reach 100% success rate, but 95% is already a big step.
Paid blogs/articles are worse than nothing. They are anti-information. If you did successfully eliminate those things, the currently niche places with honest discussion would be easier to find.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1992. Doubleclick started in 1995. So yes, like those glorious 3 years when hardly anyone was online and most access was via a 28kbps modem.
What about just banning personalized advertising? Like: you can pay Google Maps to show your result as sponsored, but Google can only show it to either everybody or randomized people.
Let's drop the charade where you pretend you don't know what advertising is. You're smarter than that, and your playing dumb act would be more persuasive if you didn't ask leading questions that clearly show you know the answers. This isn't a good faith argument.
I mean are you really asking whether creators embedding "sponsored by" scenes is an ad as if you don't know? C'mon, don't insult your readers with this nonsense.
HN commenters are not legislators, and even if random HN commenters can't draft legislation, that doesn't mean that a minimally-funded team of experts would have any difficulty with the problem.
I agree with you but I also agree with the person you wrote to. There's a section in Naomi Klein's No Logo about banning advertising, and what that would actually mean in effect. It essentially comes down to not allowing, for example, different cereal brands to have different designs because then the design of the box becomes a kind of advertising.
It might sound nit picking, and it absolutely is, but if we banned Internet advertising (at the exact definition you personally consider advertising to be), you can guarantee the advertising industry would be looking at exactly these loopholes until you reframed your definition.
It's much like how in the UK they banned advertising for tobacco, and years later had to expand it so that supermarkets cannot even show the products visibly because the brand has their own inherent advertising that's visible if you can see it.
> It's much like how in the UK they banned advertising for tobacco, and years later had to expand it so that supermarkets cannot even show the products visibly because the brand has their own inherent advertising that's visible if you can see it.
So they got rid of 90% of adverts, then adjusted it to get that upto 99%
Meanwhile you're saying "lets use brainwashing to get 8 year olds hooked because we might not get 100% on the first attempt"
It's always funny to me when people feel the need to tell us they won't be inflicting their poorly-thought-out fallacies on us any more. Don't threaten me with a good time!
The argument you're making is known as a "perfect solution fallacy".
I don't even know for sure whether I think cereal boxes displaying their contents is advertising--I'm not going to make a snap opinion on that--but it's completely irrelevant. We're drowning in advertising, advertising where it isn't ambigious whether or not it's advertising. We know that YouTubers "sponsored by" scenes are ads--this isn't ambigious, and we can write legislation that bans it.
OPs comment isn’t a charade, he’s pointing out that it’s a very blurry line.
If I receive compensation from company A for a product, and I genuinely like it, is it advertising if I talk about another item on their product line that I bought because of the free item I got?
If I run a retail business, and have a better deal with a provider, am I allowed to prioritise their results?
If I run an AI SAAS, with a bring your own key model, am I allowed to recommend a provider that I think gives the best results, even if my margin is bigger on that model?
I’m not trying to gish gallop you here - the point isn’t to cherry pick any specific example it’s that advertising isn’t just a billboard or a sponsored VPN segment in a YT video.
> HN commenters are not legislators
That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it.
> a minimally funded team of experts would have any difficulty with the problem.
I’m a hugely pro EU person, and support the vast majority of what they do. The Cookie Banner is a disaster and has just resulted in a massive step back for the Internet worldwide. The USB C charger rule missed the forest for the trees. Their stance on technology has been poor, misguided and misunderstood, and often pushes the needle towards US companies winning out.
>> HN commenters are not legislators
> That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it.
To steel man, there's a commenting pattern where if someone doesn't like a high-level idea they demand answers to a dozen specifics that, if it were a legitimate proposal going through a legislature, could take hundreds of people months or years of committees, reports & consultations to decide on all the answers to, but if someone can't come up with an answer on the spot in HN then that's taken as proof that the idea is unworkable.
I’m just going to paste a section of my comment above to you
> I’m not trying to gish gallop you here - the point isn’t to cherry pick any specific example it’s that advertising isn’t just a billboard or a sponsored VPN segment in a YT video.
> OPs comment isn’t a charade, he’s pointing out that it’s a very blurry line.
Sorry, it just isn't, at least not in a lot of the examples he gave. It's not ambiguous whether "sponsored by" scenes on YouTube are ads: they're ads, and bringing them up only highlights how many OBVIOUSLY NOT BLURRY situations exist that we could easily ban.
> I’m not trying to gish gallop you here - the point isn’t to cherry pick any specific example it’s that advertising isn’t just a billboard or a sponsored VPN segment in a YT video.
Well, whether you're trying to gish gallop or not, you're succeeding!
You're simply ignoring the obvious: it seems you agree that billboards and sponsored VPN segments on YT videos are obviously ads. So we can ban those.
> That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it.
And I'm equally allowed to point out when what passes for "discussion" here is nakedly disingenuous pro-advertising FUD. Sorry, I just don't believe that you're too stupid to identify advertising when it's blatantly obvious. It's a compliment! You're intelligent!
Sure, there are some ambiguous situations, and that simply does not matter. Ban the obvious cases, then iterate to close further loopholes.
> I’m a hugely pro EU person, and support the vast majority of what they do. The Cookie Banner is a disaster and has just resulted in a massive step back for the Internet worldwide. The USB C charger rule missed the forest for the trees. Their stance on technology has been poor, misguided and misunderstood, and often pushes the needle towards US companies winning out.
Is this the "discussion" you're talking about? It seems like you're just bringing up irrelevant stuff.
> That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it.
I would even go so far as to say that HN commenters are going to be the ones trying to evade/break/find the loopholes in whatever laws the legislators write.
i would ban any advertising that targets populations on individual/subgroup behavior. Maybe targeting on country/language level at most, otherwise - just untargeted ads.
Another option could be artificial slowdown of loading the content. Eg each content display general element (post, video, image) to be loaded with 0.5-1sec delay from the current in focus content
To quote Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it".
> "Your suggestion is, unfortunately, not implementable."
How about trying it before giving up? Cookie banners were implementable. Laws requiring ID schemes are being implemented. Know-your-customer laws have been implemented. GDPR has been implemented. HIPPA and Sarbanes-Oxley have been implemented. Anti-pornography laws have been implemented despite the gotcha of "but but how will anyone tell what's porn and what isn't?".
"not making a decision" is a decision. Companies are exploiting advertising - trying to avoid doing anything that might be imperfect because it's hard is taking a position, and it's a position in favour of explotative advertising.
You've hit the nail on the head. Immediate gratification.
AI is like sugar. It tastes nice, gives you energy quickly - what's not to like?
The gratification is immediate, and if "today is all that matters" it's brilliant.
The problem with sugar (and AI) is medium term. So sure, that junior dev whipped up the whole framework in ClaudeCode, and it's humming nicely. Junior dev gets credit, and after a couple years moves on somewhere else.
Then something changes. Windows. TLS. Code Signing, whatever. We need to update the program to the change. Just a small tweak. Junior Dev has gone (or is otherwise occupied) so we'll get new-Junior-dev to do it. Is he expected to do the change at the code level? Or at the prompt level? Will ClaudeCode in 2029 be able to maintain ClaudeCode Code from 2026? Or will it want to rewrite everything? Will new-junior-dev have the skillset to prompt as well as first-junior-dev? Was the code good enough that a dev could just "take it over"? Or was it "it works, let's use it" standard?
AI makes everyone look good in the short term. But it worries me for what happens in 5 years, 10 years, and so on.
Sugar is great, but you can't live (long term) on sugar. Sometimes you need a proper meal plan.
>> But it's challenging to the point of impracticality to run a website with so few cookies that a popup is not required.
Nonsense. It's easy to create a site that doesn't need a cookie pop-up. Indeed the mere existance of a cookie pop-up screams "we are tracking you and selling your info".
Alas you'll need to define "sane" first. That might be harder than expected.
Equally unfortunate is the need for 60 senate votes to actually have a meaningful say over what the president does. And in truth no part has had "control" of congress to this level for a while.
When one (or indeed both) sides are politically incapable of being bipartisan (witness the outcomes for those voting against party lines, on both sides) control of one house is meaningless and a majority in the senate (short of 60 votes) mostly meaningless.
Expecting any change in behavior after November, regardless of the results, is wishful thinking.
It takes 40 votes to prevent the other party from putting something in a bill that you're willing to do a government shutdown to prevent. That's probably a good thing. Consider what would be happening right now, when the Republicans have >50 but not >60, if that meant they could actually do whatever they want.
And the difference between 49 and 51 is still pretty damn important because "majority" has a lot of procedural consequences that are not irrelevant.
As you've seen, over, and over, and over again, this is their own internal rule they've changed it before and they can just change it again with a simple majority, the so-called "nuclear option".
None of this has any actual weight, it's all theatre. Which doesn't mean it lacks consequences, but they could at any time just sweep it aside and they choose not to.
Ironically, one thing the Senate does constitutionally need a super-majority for and can't just change the rule is Impeaching the President. Which means that so long as Republicans have enough votes and apparently still believe loyalty to one corrupt rotting bag of shit is their purpose in life he can't be impeached.
> As you've seen, over, and over, and over again, this is their own internal rule they've changed it before and they can just change it again with a simple majority, the so-called "nuclear option".
It's called the "nuclear option" because actually using it is mutually-assured destruction. They're not so stupid that they can't foresee ever being in the minority again when changing a rule where that consideration is the blatantly obvious cost.
Somehow the Democrats were that stupid and did it for judicial nominations and both parties can see how that came back to bite them.
> Which means that so long as Republicans have enough votes and apparently still believe loyalty to one corrupt rotting bag of shit is their purpose in life he can't be impeached.
The real purpose of impeachment is for when there is widespread consensus that someone so pressingly needs to be removed from office that it can't wait until the next election. It's for when they're so bad even their own side won't stand for it, not for when you hate the other party's President and catch a slight majority in the midterms.
But if you retake the legislature then maybe consider adding some new restraints on executive power to those hefty must-pass omnibus bills. It might be worth doing something about the problem in general instead of just that one specific jerk?
The thing I find irritating is that the government has been doing things as bad the things Trump is doing for decades, and those things are actually bad and shouldn't be done, but people are now acting like Trump invented them.
Don't get offended that Trump is more brazen about anything than anyone else and try to retaliate against him in particular, instead change the things that need to be changed so that nobody can do those things anymore, even when they're acting like they're not.
Yes I think some of what he's doing isn't new, and yes some of it isn't new, just more brazen, but I think there's also a lot of new.
For example, pardons are for sale. Thats pretty obvious. maybe it's been done before (?) but certainly not on this scale and not so soon in the term.
Secondly he's set up a direct method for paying him, TrumpCoin. That's different to campaign contributions. And indeed quite a bit of trumpcoin is being sold to foreign govts. I'm gonna put that in the "new" column.
In terms of international relations it's all new. He's blowing up trust in the US, via tarrifs, threats to invade a NATO country and so on. This is long term damage at unprecedented scale for no apparent actual gain.
There are plenty of laws which say he can't do any of this. Adding more laws is not the solution. A weak congress, and a weak Supreme Court unwilling to enforce the laws is the problem.
This seems like a pretty good example of how Trump is "different" but not actually different.
The traditional way this works is through prosecutorial discretion. You make friends with the politician and then when they're in office you don't get prosecuted or the case gets dropped or settled under favorable terms. Example: When Bush got elected, the antitrust case against Microsoft was effectively made to go away "for some reason" (https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-political-...).
Doing the same thing with pardons is way more conspicuous, because instead of something that doesn't happen (prosecution) you have something that does happen, and in public view (official pardon).
Politicians traditionally care about distinctions like that because it makes it much easier to accuse them of the thing, whereas Trump DGAF. But it's fundamentally not a different thing and the actual problem isn't that Trump isn't being subtle about it, it's that they should not be getting away with it even when they are being subtle about it.
> Secondly he's set up a direct method for paying him, TrumpCoin. That's different to campaign contributions.
Eh. It's not that much different to campaign contributions and it's not really different at all to the longstanding practice of politicians or their family members owning a private company which then gets into a bunch of peculiarly advantageous business dealings while they're in office.
> In terms of international relations it's all new. He's blowing up trust in the US, via tarrifs, threats to invade a NATO country and so on. This is long term damage at unprecedented scale for no apparent actual gain.
The problem with this one is it's the hating the other party's President one. Congress passed a law letting the President set tariffs, didn't repeal it for many years, and then the President started setting some tariffs. You can argue that it's a bad policy, you can argue that they should repeal the law that lets him do it, but he ran for office saying he was going to do this, got into office, and now he's doing it.
> There are plenty of laws which say he can't do any of this. Adding more laws is not the solution. A weak congress, and a weak Supreme Court unwilling to enforce the laws is the problem.
There are two kinds of laws in this context.
The first is the ones that punish him for doing something. Those are useless in this context because the executive isn't going to prosecute itself so you're down to impeachment and for that you need bipartisan consensus.
The second is the ones that prevent him from doing something. Take away the law that lets the President set tariffs and he can't unilaterally set any tariffs.
It doesn't matter I'd they hold back or not. The perception of political instability is enough.
If, as an investor, I'm asked to throw billions at a multi-year project, political risk is going to be on the PowerPoint.
You may think this current administration is an aberration, but it serves to prove that aberrations can happen. That the levers supposed to prevent this (congress, courts) are creaking. Sure a judge ruled for now, but this is a long way from finished.)
And that's enough to create doubt. Lots of doubt. The impact of this on long-term future infrastructure projects cannot be over-stated.
(Let's leave aside that this project was 6 years in the planning, during his first term, before construction start in 2022... which just makes the current behavior worse, not better.)
Which is exactly why Orsted will now focus on European wind projects instead. American projects will have to be that more profitable/expensive in the future to compensate for the political risk. But I guess this is exactly the desired outcome for big oil, no outside competition.
Like say you can develop a 1000 windmill offshore wind project. At "market rate" for performing that activity they lose you money or make you very little, say a percent or two, because offshore is just harder.
But with government partnership and doors opening they make money at a low estimate 3%.
This causes you to forgo the 200 windmills in a field project that would make you a positive 1-3% regardless of which way the political winds blow because why do that when you can deploy 1k of them in some bay and make money hand over fist simply by joining hands (more tightly than the land based small project would) with government?
And as a result nobody can do the 200 windmill project because, between you and all the other people chasing the 100@% projects the cost of engineering, site prep, permitting, other fixed costs for such projects, etc, etc. are based on what the market will bear, and it can bear a lot more when your amortizing things over 5x as many units.
So maybe the things that do get invested in are more sustainable and financially conservative, which would improve public perception of them vs these megacorp-government joint venture type deployments we have now.
Political instability is a bad thing regardless of what is being invested in. It's just as bad for everything, not just windmills or sea windmills or whatever.
nothing is safe if the project can fail because the political winds change. Much less the political tantrums of the guy in charge who doesn't think you bribed him enough.
And when those obvious bribes are simply ignored by congress and the courts, thus validating it, the landscape for large projects of any kind get worse.
Yeah, but its a metaphor of the creation process. It's perhaps a bit on the light side when it comes to obstacles, but it's not a bad metaphor of the business creation journey.
I would perhaps point out this is not a VC business journey, that snowball looks very different.
And sure, the business starts in a easy environment (lots of snow on the ground) but the idea of starting alone resonates.
And it leaves out the sun. That pesky sun which melts the snow causing 9 out of 10 snowballs to melt. The sun, which melts the snow around you even as you struggle to push. Your direction is meaningless if you insist on pushing away from the snow.
This is hilarious to me, because times have certainly changed.
When we first started shipping Windows software the big complaint from users was the use of Tab to switch fields, while Return triggered the default button (usually Save or Close).
The change, for users used to DOS was painful - not least when capturing numbers as the numeric key pad has Enter not Tab.
Software developers either stood firm, convincing customers to learn Tab, or caved and aliased the Enter key to the Tab key. Even today I still find that option here and there in Software that's been around a while...
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