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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Advertising is like the Kudzu vine: neat and potentially useful if maintained responsibly, but beyond capable of growing out of control and strangling the very landscape if you don’t constantly keep it in check. I think, for instance, that a podcast or over-the-air show running an ad-read with an affiliate link is fine for the most part, as long as it’s relatively unobtrusive and doesn’t put limitations on what the content would otherwise go over.

    The problem is that there needs to be a reset of advertiser expectations. Right now, they expect the return on investment that comes from hyper-specific and invasive data, and I don’t think you can get that same level of effectiveness without it. The current advertising model is entrenched, and the parasitic roots have eroded the foundation. Those roots will always be parasitic because that’s the nature of advertising, and the profit motive in general when unchecked.





  • I’d also consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but that came from plenty of mistakes growing up including putting malware on the family computer at least twice (mostly ads for these “Pokemon MMOs” back in the mid aughts that were too enticing for my kid brain to refuse 😅).

    It’s very easy for me to forget how much of an outlier my tech experience is among most folks around my age. I had an acquaintance in the first year of college I helped by giving essay advice, and was very surprised to see that the only thing they really knew how to do was basic use of apps on their iPhone. They got a laptop for school, but no computer experience, no keyboard typing experience, and even just the iPhone Settings app was a scary place to be avoided for the most part. To this person, Microsoft Word was a new thing they had to learn on top of everything else. In college. It was also in the South so I don’t know if I should be that surprised unfortunately.

    Regardless, it was pretty wild to me, but a very real reminder that not everyone has access to the same resources education, and/or experience to draw on.



  • I think they’ll get away with it because they’re deliberately marketing it the way so many similar movies are managed: formulaically for kids, but with some actors and writing meant to give ‘the adults’ something to watch too. Unfortunately, ‘the adults’ are almost always assumed to have only a passing familiarity with the subject material, and I have a feeling they’re going to write the ‘for the adults in the room’ jokes with that assumption in mind.

    It feels like it’s being written on an outdated manual, ignoring the fact that there’s a very sizable core audience of 20 and 30-somethings they could tap into. My guess is that everything they tried only tested well with children in focus groups, since apparently they were dead-set on a live-action format from the very beginning. I hate to be so cynical, but it’s possible they decided to go all-in on kids because they can hit the appeal without worrying as much on the production standards.









  • >dinner is done
    >announce dinner
    >everyone shows up 10 minutes later

    Some of the food is cold because I didn’t cover it, but why should I? It would have been fine if they came to the table when I announced dinner.

    >next day
    >dinner is almost done
    >remembering yesterday, I decide to announce dinner 10 minutes early so that 10 minutes later is “on time”
    >everyone arrives to the table immediately, remembering that it was cold yesterday not wanting that to happen again
    >mfw




  • The device wouldn’t necessarily have to be constantly streaming the audio to a central server. If it’s capable of hearing wake up words like “Ok Google” it’s capable of listening for other phrases and having onboard processing to relay back the results much more compressed. Whether or not this is common practice is another matter, and yes the algorithms are scary good even without eavesdropping.