I have no idea why anyone would click on any ad anywhere other than by accident, not knowing if the link might take them to some malware site these days.
I would never click on the weird ads that the supposedly "brightest minds of our generation" have delivered to me via some nonsensical middleman auction system.
But I go to some blogs (philosophy, jazz, and men's clothing) that have ads that are literally just image links. The ads are actually relevant to the content, and because I go to the blog of my own volition, that means that more often than not the ads are at least somewhat relevant and usually worth a look, like the curated ones you see in a magazine. Most other ads online are so irrelevant it's almost comical, and I have no idea why people pay to use those services. All these tech giants who make enormous sums of money from advertising are emperors with no clothes - a hard look at the quality of their product reveals it's unanimously considered garbage by the public. Their promise of delivering hyper targeted advertisement was obviously a lie predicated on market capture and becoming the only middlemen in town.
I agree, before the age of enshittification, when I went to actual blogs, sometimes I did see ads worth my time. But these days most blogs I would visit are hosted on sites that just use ad farms, and the targeting is awful (which, hey, I am on my apple devices most of the time and I disable all tracking) but mostly I would never feel confident that clicking the ad wouldn't bring me to some spyware infested hole. I am far more leery of where I would go when I click it than I am concerned that I'm not the target demographic.
I clicked on a couple ads once because I was desperate - I needed a cheap flight with a tight deadline and my usual search engines didn't help. I thought "if these ads deliver what they promise, I'll never book anywhere else".
Sometimes (I especially notice this on the App Store, but sometimes Google), companies bid on their own name. So you'll search something like "Discord" and the first result will be an ad for Discord, and then below is the organic results which has them first anyways.
I have bid in Google Adwords on my own product name. If you don't, then a competitor else might, and then they will appear above you in search. It isn't nice, but that is the way it is.
I have wondered why this happens for awhile now. I had no idea - I feel like if a product name matches exactly what I searched for, no ad should ever be ABOVE that match. It makes me a tad angry you guys have to pay to get this behavior.
I mean, anecdata, but after staring at a monitor from a chair all day, it really does my heart and brain good to go for a walk outside in my local preserve. I notice a big difference when I can't go for whatever reason (usually weather related). The preserve is quiet and peaceful in ways the local street is not.
But moving to within some distance doesn't mean they went walking there. I'm not sure how valid this study is. I think we've already done studies regarding sunlight exposure and just getting outside being good for you (assuming your environment is not bad). So was it just being outside made them feel better, and having the paths and whatnot made it more likely that they would go for a walk? Or even maybe just more likely that they take breaks? I know I'm terrible at taking breaks.
There's a controlled experiments that did show a pretty significant benefit to being outside in a forest vs. in an urban environment. The Japan one on forest bathing from Chiba University saw a 12.4% decrease in cortisol, 5.8% decrease in pulse rate and lower blood pressure for the forest cohort vs. the urban cohort under identical physical exertion parameters.
There was also one I found from back in 1984 where patients in a hospital that had a view of trees having a shorter stay vs. the group with the view of a brick wall, although not entirely sure that one was robust enough to draw any real conclusions on if view matters.
Just going outside in daylight in general should get you most of the benefits (in the right season, depending on where you live. Where I am in the PNW, midday light in the winter isn't even strong enough to trigger a lot of the benefits), so if your only option is to go for a walk outside on the sidewalk then do so, but there are even more positive benefits to be gained by being in nature, outside of an urban environment.
At least in my area, a lot of folks didn't trust the tap water, and more didn't trust the fountain to not be super germy, so fountains just didn't end up used. I noticed many shuttered during COVID then they never got turned back on, then eventually got removed.
I have seen indoor fountains gradually being replaced with water bottle filler stations, but I personally wonder how often those filters get replaced.
I get that the participants are a particular set of people, which IMO means by definition any data gathered is skewed anyway to the types of people willing to do this manner of study, but I'm certainly not the only person who leaves stuff on in the background just for noise even though I'm not "watching" it. I wonder if they think they can account for that - just because I have something on doesn't mean I'm really paying attention, sometimes. I'm sure that's an issue with any way they try to capture these kinds of metrics. There is a big difference to me with shows I care if they cancel versus shows I have on because I like to hear nature sounds in the background. Or I'll just throw on something I've seen a bunch of times for background noise.
I'd be surprised if this wasn't the case for most social media apps. They're going for engagement since that's what makes the money for them, as the article mentions. I would be curious to see if this kind of study could be done for other platforms and if it would yield similar results. I'd also be curious if it applied to things that are not overtly political, such as animal activism, vegetarianism, and other polarizing opinions.
Cursor, which is now owned by Elon, who tried very hard to get all manner of data about citizens with his intrusions? I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks this isn't a great idea. He'll use it to feed Grok.
I'm not a big fan of Github right now either but I wouldn't consider this alternative due to its ownership chain.
Considering that Grok CLI was caught uploading peoples entire codebases... Yeah, I have little faith and trust. I wanted to try Cursor and Grok but I won't because of this.
I still wonder how it should work otherwise if the "AI" is not running locally - it needs to see the codebase & because it runs somewhere remote in a cloud then it needs to copy the codebase over.
I'm rather surprised people would expect it work any different for non-local "AI".
It doesn't even swallow an entire code base so there is absolutely no need to see the entire codebase. Usually models search in the codebase locally and then use only the relevant parts. There is almost never the whole context just spammed by an entire code base.
I wouldn't even feel comfortable cloning from it, let alone contributing. If you decide to host your project there, please mirror it somewhere sane as well.
If you actually believe that he didn't, you are, at best, out of touch.
His little "DOGE" endeavor was actively caught exfiltrating personal data about everyone in the country, and the first thing that happened after SpaceX acquired Cursor was pumping all of the data Cursor had acquired into Grok training.
He is quite literally the shining example of "Imma do what I want, even if it's against my own terms of service or otherwise illegal, and then you can try to sue me over it later".
I dunno how it is in America, but in my country if the largest individual donor was granted carte blanche to run his own department within the administration, with his own people, answerable only to the head of the government, it would cause a helluva lot of outrage.
"Carte blanche but don't touch all of these things"
Yeah. There's a reason he had a falling out with Donald.
There's a ton of agencies with a lot of power. DOGE ideally would have used said power for good, but got blocked again by again by an infinite mountain of corruption. People should not work in favor of said mountain.
And people really don't recognize the value of DOGE's self-sacrifice by design, having a limited time to act out its mission. Nothing comes even close to the honesty in the operation in such a swamp.
Don't really get the incredulity considering he needs to justify the tens of billions already spent on AI infrastructure by, you know, training a model or two ...
Yeah, it's truly awful if you're looking for something specific. I tend to find things by finding something I don't want then clicking through 16 pages of "related to this item" ad nauseum.
I find myself more often using ChatGPT to find things now because their search is sooo bad.
Like, if I want petite clothes, I do not want clothes that are not petite, folks. Why is this hard?
I’m surprised that anyone would love Amazon so much that they resort to using third-party search so they can continue buying from Amazon. Rather than just shopping elsewhere!
There are many product categories where I know that shopping on Amazon will be a miserable experience riddled with crap goods and useless search, so I go elsewhere. Never even occurred to me to use an LLM to make up for Amazon’s own deliberate decision to serve me crap.
Eh, for me it's not about love, it's about no other retailers carrying what I want, at a price point I'll pay, with an easy return policy and easy checkout. I'm willing to put up with a lot of crap to find that, apparently.
To be clear, when I do use LLM for search, I don't limit it to one site.
"And therefore, someone must decide what claims are reasonable."
Yes, that person is MY DOCTOR. There is no world in which it is reasonable that my health care team says I should have particular treatment, and insurance executives get to say no I don't. Sadly I understand this is not the case, and we value money more than human life, but I do not find that reasonable, no matter how common it might be.
I also understand that medical fraud happens, but I'm not sure the tradeoff to reducing it is worth the lives it's taking when we refuse claims.
"tradeoffs have to be made" is a great way to say that yes, you agree that instead of focusing on lowering health care costs, you think it's fine that people die because of them. I would posit that no treatment should be allowed to cost multiple millions of dollars - I am aware that's easier said than done, but I'm pretty sure society should try. Maybe if the CEOs didn't make billions of dollars and instead we put those profits back into play, we'd have a chance.
> So you think that your doctor should be able to order you any imaginable treatment that they think is medically necessary, and someone else will have to pay for it?
Yes. It's the cost of doing business. Why is it that when we talk about the justice system, we think it's better to let a hundred criminals go free to avoid punishing an innocent, but in healthcare suddenly it flips and now it's better to have a hundred people be denied life-saving treatment to avoid one person getting an unnecessary one?
Your hypothetical is frankly insane - nowhere in the world, despite the dozens of types of medical systems, is there a crisis of doctors ordering frivolous multimillion dollar treatments just for fun. There is no incentive for them to do so. Your entire argument hinges on something that doesn't actually happen, just to defend an evil that already exists in the world.
Outrageous idea, but we should trust the people who studied for over a decade to administer medication to decide what medication a person needs, and pry the hands of private business off that process entirely. If someone misuses the system or prescribes obviously wrong treatment, go after that individual. If in 30 years it turns out that doing this does actually cause doctors to order random treatments for fun, then we can talk about scaling it back. Until then, for-profit healthcare is not to be trusted.
No, mine are just bookmarks that I keep open because I'm too lazy to organize bookmarks into groups and always want this set open. For work, it's deep linked nonsense that isn't bookmarkable. Because corporate.
Rarely, I'm researching something so it's in progress work - those get closed when I'm done.
