barber5

Users should protect themselves from this. With the expectation that they will, there will be tons of tools available and this scenario will be a nonstarter.

Decentralized defenses against bots will be far more effective than the central planning of information ecosystems we have today. Just watch.

Yes for the end user that will be the main difference. From the curation of the training data to the model itself a number of things have been put together that make the generations substantially more aesthetically pleasing imho

Exactly. The use of ad spend to talk about Russian influence in 2016 is negligent in focusing on a metric of convenience. I suspect the real channels through which they exert influence don't lend themselves to easy quantification.

Thanks for posting this. I'm doing research in this area and this is fantastic

That's because a large discussion broke out underneath a comment that may not have been the most high quality?

This is a fair point under some ways of looking at the problem. It could be that advertising is just nasty no matter how it is implemented, and thus any system that uses advertising will be tainted. I'm sympathetic to that analysis and am constantly trying to flesh it out.

With that said, what jonathansampson is proposing mitigates at least one harm of advertising: ubiquitous tracking which violates privacy.

They're trying to replace ads with ads that don't require tracking by third parties.

There's actually a whole area of research on this that's pretty fascinating called privacy preserving advertising.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/serving... https://crypto.stanford.edu/adnostic/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/privad-... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6234417/

I think what he's saying is that they do the inferences from localhost, more or less (see e.g. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/serving...)

There are a number of proposed systems under the rubric of "privacy preserving advertising systems" and they are very different than what ad-revenue driven companies are doing today and similar to what he is proposing above.

I'm not aware of any evidence that shows that directly. But there a good number of surveys that show that people don't want advertising to target them based on their interests.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1478214

"Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests. Moreover, when Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, even higher percentages - between 73% and 86% - say they would not want such advertising. Even among young adults, whom advertisers often portray as caring little about information privacy, more than half (55%) of 18-24 years-old do not want tailored advertising. And contrary to consistent assertions of marketers, young adults have as strong an aversion to being followed across websites and offline (for example, in stores) as do older adults."

Also see https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1989092 (64% find the idea of ad targeting to be invasive, most participants would prefer random ads to targeted ads) https://news.gallup.com/poll/145337/internet-users-ready-lim... (67% of those polled said advertisers shouldn't be able to "match ads to your specific interests based on websites you have visited")

References all came from a paper by Jonathan Mayer. Third-Party Web Tracking: Policy and Technology which I'd heartily recommend to anyone who is interested enough to be this deep into the comments (https://jonathanmayer.org/publications/trackingsurvey12.pdf)

Nice

It's worth saying that at a number of firms that 2% goes into the pockets of the partners.

One thing to like about a16z (full disclosure, I worked there over the summer), imho, is that by using this fee to scale their organization to help portfolio companies, they are far less out of alignment with LPs than most firms who have success with a smaller fund and go on to raise a larger one.

The old algorithm of do ok with a small fund, raise a huge one and live off the management fee is under threat -- 5x or die.

Really, it wasn't that much better, at least not to me at the time. I'd switch search engines every few months, or more accurately have 3 or 4 search engines to deploy against difficult queries.

Google was _slightly_ better than alltheweb.com at the time that I added it into the mix. But it slowly began to win more and more of the "query requires using 4 search engines" contests and eventually I only used one.

This _IS_ a solution for payments outside the USA. Do you know how many countries with a rapidly growing middle class that Visa, MasterCard, etc won't touch because their crappy credit models can't deal with these people?

This is a game changer that allows people who haven't been able to buy online to do so..

It probably won't actually matter but it could for some who do something similar to you, but are you sure you actually own your research and that the IP doesn't belong to the university? That's another reason not to do a PhD that was relevant for me: the ability to have more control over the value I was creating rather than giving it to the university to dispose of.

I don't know if I need this, but bravo for being crazy