Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

@hansw The promise of targeted advertising is excellent: An oracle knows every product that is available and perfectly predicts your current and future desires, then tells you about things it knows you want.

Everyone is happy. Consumers get only information about what they want, producers know the exact size of their market and capture it fully (and can adjust what they produce if it is not profitable to produce for the market).

In practice, such an oracle doesn't exist and there are all kinds of unfortunate dynamics in the advertising market that makes it so that people generally don't like ads, plus all kinds of "off-target" effects.

@hansw If most of our information channels weren't dominated by some very unhealthy incentive structures, you would expect to be happy with advertising.

Many people *are* happy with certain forms of advertising — I have bought many things from "deal" websites, and I know many people who regularly read catalogues.

@hansw There is a coordination problem between producers and consumers. Consumers have a problem to be solved and producers are attempting to profit by solving it. In principle, this is usually beneficial to *both parties* — I would be made better off by most of my purchases even at much higher prices (and the sellers are making money on everything I buy).

In principle, advertising is a mechanism for telling people that there are solutions to their problems (or that the existing solutions have improved, or prices have changed, etc).

This is one reason I am a fan of targeted advertising in principle — it *should* prevent people from polluting the information landscape.

In practice, I'm not convinced it works amazingly well, and the pursuit of it has done all kinds of damage to the information consumption and distribution architecture ­— plus it's involved creating incredibly juicy targets for adversarial actors like governments.

Another thing to note: news is probably more useless than it should be because of the spam problem.

General news is probably fairly useless because there are just not a lot of things happening that everyone in the world needs to know about, so the S/N ratio is very low for any given consumer.

It's made even worse, though, because attention is valuable and any broad communications medium will be infested by memetic parasites.

Ideally, everyone in the world would be notified of stuff like, "Here's a new vaccine that will stop a terrible disease if you get it today", but any sufficiently broad, high-priority channel like that will get hijacked by people who think educating people about their preferred cause justifies using the scarce bandwidth of the high-priority broadcast spectrum.

You might object, "Sure it's not actionable for me, but if no one consumed the news, even important things wouldn't percolate through society!"

That is probably true, but we're so far from the point where the marginal consumption of additional news is a net positive that I don't think we're in any danger of an under-informed network here.

It would be interesting to have a service that gives you summaries of the news from 6 or 12 months ago, with care taken to cover the general response and counter-narratives.

I think more people should have this attitude (that you should not consume news):

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/03/the_case_agains_6.html

I have talked to people who are genuinely distressed by things happening in the news and are afraid to miss something if they cut it out. But usually information in the news isn't *actionable* even if it's important.

@eloquence It's annoying that "have a good archive of the content" seems to be at odds with "keep content up to date".

Wikipedia articles have built-in history tracking, so you can permalink to the version you saw, but generally it's better to link to the latest version, which is more likely to be missing the information you want it to contain.

Just finished speaking at Chicago's #python meetup Chipy.

One nice thing about virtual meetups — no waiting for the video to be processed and released!

Stream from my ChiPy talk is already up. Full meetup: https://youtu.be/8JFUgAJLoQE

My talk starts at ~41:53: https://youtu.be/8JFUgAJLoQE?t=2513

Slides: https://pganssle-talks.github.io/chipy-nov-2020-zoneinfo

@mikegerwitz I used to use `-caps:none`, but now I've got caps as my Compose Key and I'm not going back. Ĥéłłö diacritics!

(Though in practice setxkbmap stopped working properly for me a while back, and instead I set up compose key via the keyboard settings on Cinnamon).

@2ck I thought of that, but it's got an earring. Who would put an earring on a raccoon?

Saw this in my back yard on Monday.

Man, people around here really over-feed their dogs!

@eric How do you keep track of the number of individuals you see like that?

I usually have a bunch of tufted titmice, black-capped chickadees and dark-eyed juncos flitting in and out of the trees in my back yard, but I can't tell them apart well enough to know if I'm double-counting them.

@freemo @arteteco This one seems active this year: https://www.votepact.org

Though you have to find your own person to pair up with.

@freemo @arteteco Not sure if they have them this year, but in 2016 they had vote trading websites where people in swing states could swap votes with people in solid-(blue|red) states.

If you're in a swing state but want to vote 3rd party, you find someone in an "uncontested" state who wants to vote mainstream. They vote for your chosen candidate and you vote for theirs.

I don't remember if there was any mechanism for enforcement (though I imagine there can't be — anything that can be used to enforce a vote trade could also be used to use violence or payment to influence votes).

The pumpkins I carved for Halloween yesterday. My son picked the general designs and left me with the trivial detail of executing them. 😅

Not bad considering I can't remember the last time I carved a pumpkin. 😀

(Note the "Easter egg" shadow behind the kitty 😺)

#Halloween #pumpkins

@2ck I'm 6'2" (188cm), so I don't really need the low setting for myself, but I have a 2 year old, so I figured I'd pay a bit extra to be able to lower it to work on projects with him.