The problem isn't fundamentally advertising - it's stuff like toxic and anti-user advertisements, and the ad industry not knowing what the word "privacy" means.
I think there is a fundamental problem with an ad-subsidized service. Even ignoring the privacy issues inherent to the way modern advertising works in practice (which you probably shouldn’t ignore), the mere presence of an advertiser as a third party whose interests the service provider must consider creates malign incentives.
I also think providing a service for free is fundamentally anti-competitive. It’s like the ultimate form of dumping. And there are many studies showing that people are irrational about zero-cost goods, so it’s even harder to compete against than might be expected.
Arguably, the advertiser is not merely a third party whose interests the service provider must consider, but rather the actual paying customer (and much more of the second party) whose interests the service provider must satisfy to make revenue. That to me puts into perspective the absurdity of this business model: the user is not the customer, the product or service itself is not the product but only a means to keep offering the actual product to the paying customer.
Yes, I mean from the consumer perspective. You're right that the user of an entirely ad-funded service isn't the real customer. They're still at least somewhat the customer when they're still providing some of the revenue though.
I would disagree on this. The reason is that the main point of most ads is to induce artificial demand. When successful this is essentially making people think their lives are missing something, repeatedly. I think it is fairly self evident that at scale this simply leads to social discontent, materialism, and the overall degradation of a society.
There are endless studies, such as this [1] demonstrating a significant inverse relationship between ads and happiness. The more ads, the less happy people are. And I think it's very easy to see the causal relationship there. And this would apply even if the ad industry wasn't so scummy.
1) 10,000 tracks really is not a lot. It sounds like a lot, but isn't. My own - relatively small - collection is nearly double that.
2) 10,000 tracks... out of 256,000,000 that AA archived.
I'd be very interested to see some more analysis done on this, particularly as it relates to, say, Last.fm statistics - but I suspect the missing music is not as significant as you think.
In any case, even if every one of those "niche" artists you list are missing from this collection, I don't think it's fair to say it's a "laughable attempt" - it's certainly better than nothing, even if it's not perfect.
I'd be interested to see some information on LLMs being used for legal research. I expect it would not go well. I don't imagine it's just a simple matter of summarizing the text that's there - one has to interpret it with legalese, put it in context of the jurisdiction, look up related cases, etc.
> Having received my letter, Justice Souter notified the Reporter of the error, and at 535 U.S. i appears an erratum, directing that “Homer nodded” be inserted—eight or nine years after the opinion was delivered.
I would guess corrections so long after publishing are relatively rare - but if they're also marked as such, it seems a slight stretch to say it's still being "edited" 9 years later
AA is not stealing every byte of data they can get in order to make billions of dollars, collect personal data about people, and then sell that for even more money.
reply