Always have a folder in your hand when visiting other teams in other parts of the office. Print out some code, a few pages of spec, whatever. Just don't go walkabout empty-handed.
Nobody wants to admit just how bad the bot problem is, because it starts to dig into the fact that advertising isn't nearly as effective as advertisers let on
> advertising isn't nearly as effective as advertisers let on
Most marketers should know exactly how effective their ads are by measuring to the end of the funnel. This is standard for most business and while bots are a problem, if you're judging online advertising at the front end of the funnel that's to a large part on them for a bad setup and/or optimisation.
If the marketer is an employee or a consultant, is it in their interest to show that the ad-spend they are controlling is high ROI, or low ROI.
Maybe this is a cynical take, but, if they get to the bottom of things, and show their boss/client that the ad-spend is not returning so much, it seems it would portend bad things for the marketer.
I really don't know, and it seems like a very hard problem.
Maybe this is the time for that Upton Sinclair quote:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,"
That's not how ad performance is measured. Your ROI is based on end conversions. You need to know if your leads are _good_, not just plentiful. A company that doesn't do this at the start will figure it out pretty quickly.
Ideally that would be the case that all ad-spend can be tracked through end conversions, and for many businesses it can be. But for much of the corporate world, you don't know where your end conversions come from. (Think Nike shoes, etc)
It's estimated about that 35% to 45% of all digital ad spend goes to brand awareness, video reach, and other upper-funnel methods where direct conversion tracking isn't possible.
Taking a blind guess here because I have never worked at Google, but I would assume there is one organization that has the data, and another organization that can block IPs from clicking on the ads and consuming the spend. There is a byzantine process preventing that second org from getting the data along with a lack of motivation because it would decrease ad-spend, which is one of their key metrics. Org2 which deals with people clicking the ads is a bad place to work and no one who is actually good sticks around long enough to navigate the process and implement this, so the can gets perpetually kicked down the road.
Tends to be how it goes once you reach a certain size.
Google's AdSpam/fraud/bot-prevention team was, when I worked there, world class and fairly well funded, took their job seriously, and had access to all the data. It's an existential threat to the ad business, because if Google gets a reputation for being full of bots/spam, then the advertisers will bid lower per click/conversion to compensate, which means that legitimate website publishers will get paid less and go to other networks, which is a feedback loop that leads to the entire market collapsing (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons). It's absolutely worth refunding/zero-rating huge amounts of advertiser spend to avoid that situation, and they do.
It's not that they're not trying, it's just a very hard problem.
Problem 1: Buyers cannot tell if a product is good or bad, so they offer less money and good sellers may leave.
Suppose 50% of used laptops are good and worth $1,000, while 50% are bad and worth $400. Since you cannot tell which one you are buying, the average value is 0.5x1000 + 0.5x400 = $700, so you will not want to pay more than about $700.
But owners of good laptops may refuse to sell for $700, so more good laptops leave the market and the chance of buying a bad one increases. And the only guy selling for $700 is the lemons.
Problem 2: The theory assumes buyers already know how many bad products are in the market, but in real life they often do not.
Your "point 1" is literally the argument of the paper. If that scenario arises, the market collapses and no further sales can be made. That's the whole problem. As someone who takes a percentage of every sale, you want to keep the lemon-sellers out even though in the short run they make you extra money.
Your "point 2", if it's meant to be a rebuttal, isn't much of one. Buyers don't need to accurately know exactly what fraction of sellers are fraudulent; if they believe that it's 50-50, the same thing happens, even if the true rate is 80-20 in favor of good sellers. Conversely, if buyers are overly optimistic about quality, the market can persist despite a level of fraud that's higher than should be tolerated. But in any case, things like reviews and external reporting should eventually give them good information.
Cynicism is fine. They don't have to believe in any sort of ideal to do this. They just have to be thinking more than a couple months ahead to realize the math favors quality.
Just to be clear, this is different to the problem of Google ads that link to malware and fake banking websites and promotion of cryptocurrency scams isn't it?
Related in that some of the same organized groups tend to be carrying out every kind of attack at once, but operationally a different thing.
In the ad marketplace there are four participants: the advertiser, the user, the network (Google), and the publisher (also Google for AdWords, other websites for AdSense and so on, and effectively the channel owner for YouTube).
In the click spam or botnet case, the bad actor is the user, who is usually associated with a publisher trying to get extra money (although not always - there's reasons like auction manipulation where some advertisers run click bots too). In the bad-ads case, the bad actor is the advertiser.
At Google, each of those problems has their own well funded team, but they do also share some data to help catch rings of bad guys.
it's also just flat-out unsexy from a product/MBA-brained perspective to push for something that will negatively impact metrics for your users. I ran into this when I was advocating for onboarding a third-party provider that would filter out automated/spambot email clicks thus decreasing the north star metrics our users had for engagement (even though it was truthier and would provide more accurate targeting and some of our most senior people had been advocating for for years)
the only reason I got the go-ahead for the effort was because one of our upstart competitors who was handily eating our lunch had implemented this years ago, started advertising based on it, literally pointed to the fact that we didn't do this yet, and then this was followed quickly by all of our other competitors implementing this, too. at this point we were well inducted into the illustrious halls of companies who stopped giving a shit about their core product with leadership blaming everyone but themselves for the fact that we were churning faster than we were net-new-ing
and even then it was a half-assed, resource-starved implementation that got dumped on regularly. have left the org since and couldn't be happier
also observe that Musk did the opposite, counting any attention whatsoever on a tweet as a view, such as a 1 pixel sliver appearing at the bottom of the viewport as you scroll, boosting numbers and all the Twitter posting addicts praised him for it when he did it
Alphabet has claimed to be fighting ad fraud for many many years.
That is not how an organization fighting ad fraud would structure itself.
Alphabet does not have an abundance of technical incompetence. But it does have the strongest of incentives to ensure ad budgets get spent quickly and no meaningful disincentives.
I mean what’s the OP going to do, go to Google’s competition?
I mean if you could show Google know they're charging people for ads they're knowingly showing to robots then a few €Billion of fines for fraud should be following.
What is the state of setting up a rival ai service, using frontier open weight models retrained for new info or ideological reasons using something like unsloth?
Apple - the absolute kings of planned obsolescence. Who else could do it so brazenly AND have a bunch of zealots who will now reply to this defending them and attcking anyone who points it out.
Any industry not involving a computer they'd be in big trouble even with their massive (legal) bribes to politicians and fortune spent on legal teams.
Their “sorry this hardware is too old to run the latest macOS” seems entirely based on KPIs versus capabilities.
There’s absolutely no reason a maxed out MacBook Pro from 10 years ago shouldn’t be able to run something like the ChatGPT or Claude app, because those seem to think they need a newer version of the OS and Apple has decided that a 8 core 3.8ghz i7 with 32gb of ram is obsolete
The reason why the apps won't run is the weird SDK thing. As a Mac or iOS developer you can only run certain versions of XCode and each version of XCode supports only the most recent couple of OS SDKs. If you freeze everything in amber, like, keep a Mac on the 2016 Mac OS release, you can keep shipping compatible builds forever, but at some point just by virtue of one of your developers buying a new computer suddenly locks a minimum Mac OS, which has a minimum XCode, which means a certain minimum SDK version, which dictates a minimum Mac OS target. And besides that, to use just one new feature you pretty much have to jump to the very latest SDK, and from there, supporting even one version back means forking your codebase and backporting, so it doesn't take long for 90% of software to abandon old versions.
I know that in some ways Apple is better than their hardware-making peers in terms of supporting current OS on hardware made a few years back. But compared to other software vendors, say, Microsoft, they are terrible.
Golden Gate runs on 2020 and newer macs.
Windows 11 runs on 2017 8th-gen Intel CPUs and better.
Windows 10 is supported even on PCs from 2006 with 4GB of RAM - and importantly, a ton of modern software (e.g. Chrome) is still compatible with Windows 10.
The comparison may be relevant since it seems Apple is incentivized primarily to move hardware, whereas Microsoft seems like they want to promote Windows as a stable, non-fragmented platform you can trust, both as a consumer and as a developer. One of their worst-received OSs was the one that basically forced most users to buy a new PC -- Vista. (And to a lesser degree, the TPM 2.0 requirement in Win11.)
I run a 2012 MacBook Air 11” for Zoom meetings. It’s stuck on Catalina, but it runs fine. If I really wanted (which I don’t), I could probably hack it to run newer operating systems. I know there’s a few ways to do that.
On an x86 laptop you run linux. Too easy. xfce if it's 4G ram.
Can you do that with an M{1..4} ?
You sure can't do it with an iphone. I own one an iphone 15. Was beautiful when new. Even now it has started on the path of suck. Apple have "upgraded" it to have a more frustrating touchscreen because they clearly think I should give them more money to keep the experience I bought. They are not cheap.
Apple are the absolute kings of planned obsolescence.
Zealots going for silent downvotws because there is no case they can make to the contrary. Not what downvotes are for, says HN but we're all used to HN being used like this by now.
It's not the same as running on an x86 Mac, though. Asahi's efforts are herculean, but it will always be an uphill battle. Many things are still unsupported, even on M1.
The latency is not an illusion and yes Apple absolutely did that. It isn't plausible that they don't know they are doing it.
It is ridiculous to suggest otherwise. Go pick up an iphone 6 and try to do anything with it and then tell me that is how awful the ui was when it was released to apple orchestrated media fanfare. Or any older ipad. Imagine if that ui extreme sluggishness, random delay and the button moving just as you hit it is what they were showing off at launch. The laughter would have haunted them all the way to the accountants telling them their options were now worthless.
Apple latency degradation is not worth discussing with anyone who says it isn't happening. You can't solve whatever issues they have.
>...the smaht guys think they know better, to a pathological extent where they tell other people what they ought to do with their things .
Not just tell, actually nag, coerce and force, often in the teeth of their own total idiocy.
"Your password needs to be between 8 and 15 characters and include an upper case letter, a symbol and a number. (And an actually good, strong password will be rejected).
See that all the time, still, in 2026. So very smaht.
Funny how nostalgia differs for different people. I hated all that so much at the time that I installed linux (RH 7.x) from a magazine cd and learned to program in C & perl.
That multirows tab UI thing was an utter abomination against usability, intelligence, good sense, decency, justice and obviously any and all aesthetics. Why bring it back? To fix it maybe?
The part where the rows switch order based on the last one you clicked so if you're searching you can't be systematic without an amazing memory is POISON for discoverability.
Start on the top left tab, now it's on the bottom row. Thanks.
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