Disclaimer : I work at Square Enix/Eidos Montreal so this is shameless self-promotion.
The three games in the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy can currently be had for very little money on Steam since they're on sale for the 25th anniversary of the franchise. They all have Linux builds and they'll run great on the RTX 2070 while also using it fully. They're one of the few AAA single player action/adventure titles available on the platform and they're good fun if you enjoy that kind of game.
As a life long TR fan who enjoys the reboot trilogy, they can also run well on Linux with comparatively quasi-potato hardware! A decent computer would be nice but you can still enjoy the games without in my experience.
It’s amazing to me that the first two games play well on the integrated graphics card (intel HD 620) on a dell Inspiron from a few years ago. Haven’t played the third one on that laptop but the others run great on low settings which has provided me so many hours of enjoyment, so thank you!
I embarrassed myself recently by trying to get the performance of my AMD Zen 3 CPU beyond what precision boost overdrive and the default XMP profile of my memory were able to achieve. The single threaded performance never came close to it with the kind of old school static overclock + overvolt I was running with my previous Skylake Intel chip.
I did end up getting some promising results by using the curve optimizer feature of PBO which allows you to change the voltage/clock curve on a per-core basis but while it was stable at higher clocks, it did have some trouble while idling or performing some tasks that weren't running the CPU 100%. I had to admit that I was doing all of this more for the excitement of seeing high numbers and not for the actual practical benefits. Testing for stability with non-demanding tasks just wasn't exciting enough to justify continuing.
It might not be entirely relevant to your situation since this happened at the start of my career but I somehow ended up going from Ruby on Rails development to working on C++ networking code in the games industry. The way I did it was by starting with backend development on games and eventually getting to work on the internal SDK used by the different projects to communicate with the backends. I now work as the equivalent of a full stack developer where the frontend is a game engine running on a console devkit instead of a JavaScript SPA running in a browser.
This might be some form of survivorship bias but getting your foot in the door of a new industry/area with some skills you already have and slowly moving towards what you're actually interested in worked for me.
The CSAM scanning is still troubling because it implies your own device is running software against your own self-interest. If Apple wanted to get out of legal trouble by not hosting illegal content but still make sure iOS is working in the best legal interest of the phone's user, they'd prevent the upload of the tagged pictures and notify that they refuse to host these particular files. Right now, it seems like the phone will actively be snitching on its owner. I somehow don't have the same problem with them running the scan on their servers since it's machines they own but having the owner's own property work against them sets a bad precedent.
I think Apple is clearly overplaying the role that their app store policies like the "nutrition label", reviews and app tracking transparency have in the iOS security model. To me, the security features that matter are from the operating system, its implementation of encryption and the sandboxing model that's enforced by it.
The app store reviews are done by booting up the app for a few seconds and most of the rest is self-reported by the developers which almost qualifies as security theater. They probably also run a static analyzer on the apps but nothing would prevent Apple from offering that on-demand to users opening side-loaded software and letting them choose to run or not after seeing the result.
What bothers me the most about FLOC is that there is no reason or advantage for me as a user to run it unless I'm forced to. Cookies, even if they get hijacked for tracking, are genuinely useful to persist state and having them on results in a better experience. Even in the case of something more invasive like DRM/EME, I might want to turn it on in exchange to be able to watch some new show on a streaming service. Turning on FLOC brings nothing to the user in return and feels like charity towards advertisers.
I like personalized ads. If I have to suffer with ads to support the websites I like, I'd rather have them personalized. Instagram is really good at this -- I probably click on at least 1/4 of the ads I get, and have definitely made purchases based on Instagram ads.
So as a user, the benefit would be better ads. Honestly I'll probably leave FLOC on if given the option (although I use Firefox and Safari, and as far as I know neither will really support it).
FWIW, I am "personally" sick of the Internet reminding me of the thing I already bought yesterday, along with doubling down on ads for things I only engage with because I want to show my friends how stupid the ad/product is, which seems to be the state of the art of "personalized" Internet ads. I would honestly get more value--if I am forced to see ads--out of less personalized ads.
"This person bought a vacuum cleaner yesterday, they will probably want to buy another tomorrow" is what personalised ads are.
I wanted to check the price of the cheapest SSD price I could find on Amazon, and I've been getting sale notifications of cheap-ass 64GB SSD since. Of course these advanced AIs are not so intelligent to see that I've bought multiple 1TB and 2TB SSDs lately or hundreds of different products, but it has decided I'm actually interested in crappy disk drives instead.
It should be "this person bought a vacuum cleaner today, so let's wait two months and start showing them ads for vacuum cleaner bags" or "maybe they are buying equipment for a new apartment, so maybe they would also like a toaster oven and a lamp".
Like, imagine you had an actual salesman--a good one, as opposed to the "targeted salesman" from the video--who you bought all your stuff through and who was excited to make commissions off of you. They would never waste your time or attention or trust asking you to buy a second vacuum cleaner.
If someone buys a treadmill, they probably don't want a second one, but maybe they now want some free weights. The current algorithms are just so stupid... like, I almost appreciate the premise that if you had an "actual AI" helping find you stuff to buy that could be fun, but what we have is just wasting everyone's time.
This seems like sloppy ML, there are sub-fields that deal with sequences and time series and would be great at modelling such complex interactions. Language models do something like that.
My bet is that all the fancy ML is useless because the sellers are not adapted to the buyers. They want to sell X and buyers need/want to buy Y. If they used proper targeting they would reach a much smaller audience.
So they have an order to show 1000 crappy flash drive ads, but you only want to buy other things - what are they going to do? Skip you? No, that's money lost. They will show you the ad even if it is ineffective. Greed explains the bad targeting.
If FLoC ends up working — right now it seems to have several deficiencies — that kind of personalized tracking would presumably stop. If your individual purchases can't be linked to your cohort group, you'd only get the interest-based cohort ads, not the follow-you-around-forever-with-your-existing-purchases ads.
I agree with the OP that I like Instagram's personalized ads and have bought many things through them. (FWIW I used to work at IG — on messaging, not on ads — but I felt this way even before I worked there, and I continue to feel this way after leaving.) Everyone else seems to suck at it though and just do the "show me what I bought yesterday" type of advertising, which is far more annoying than just picking a product to advertise at random.
Maybe a working FLoC would be better than the cookie-based ultra "personalized" ads that most companies use? If it stops the annoying persistent yesterday's-shopping-cart around the internet, at least, it would be an improvement.
We have centuries of evidence that unpersonalized ads are both the best for brands (if you aren't preaching to the choir you are opening the door widest for expanding your buying audience) and individuals (discovering things that you didn't know you needed, discovering things that other people in your life might need but aren't directly relevant to you, avoiding the mental health detriments of how the more targeted an ad becomes the more likely it uses psychological tricks to manipulate you [all advertising is manipulation; but the amount of manipulation you can get away with in a general ad is very different that what we are seeing in targeted ads], etc).
The only people really benefitting from targeted ads are the companies making the ad tech (including and especially Google) making billions of dollars from "platforms" that do way too much to prop up "metrics" that mean way too little in practice (but are great for creating fancy invoices to charge just about whatever you want to the rubes [sorry, advertisers]).
(I've been taking a lot of steps to opt out of personalized ads, without outright running ad blockers, though these days a lot of sites now believe Firefox to be an ad blocker, and the ads are better unpersonalized. It's just amazing that so much of our culture on either side of the ad tech "platforms" has been sold such a bill of goods to think that personalized ads are doing anything but sucking money out of good companies into at the very least morally gray if not unethical ones.)
Interesting. I just dislike ads altogether. Especially Instagram feels very manipulative. So far nothing we have bought based on Instagram or Facebook ads has been useful in the long run.
Personally I prefer to either have a need for something (I want to solve problem X) and do some research based off of that. Or I share an experience with a friend where they make a recommendation.
Funniest Facebook ad by the way: I work for <employer> and my partner gets ads for <products of employer> on Facebook.
I dislike ads too. I'd rather just pay to use the sites. But I also understand not everyone can afford that. The ads are there for them.
So examples of things that I've bought from Instagram ads: The most recent Pride lego set. I would have never known it existed, but I'm glad I know now, because I want to give my kids something fun to build that sparks a conversation about Pride and what it means and why it's important.
The comma2 (autopilot for my Honda van). I knew OpenPilot existed, but until I saw that ad, I didn't know there was a product I could buy with it already installed. I liked the idea but didn't have time to get it all set up on my own. The existence of a commercial product vastly improved my life. I've already used it for over 1000 miles of self driving in just a couple weeks. It's a night and day difference when driving. I suppose I would have eventually heard about the product, but I'm glad I heard about it when I did.
No, but that's the whole point of ads. They're like a progressive tax system. Also some ads are awareness campaigns. Like you see a bunch of ads for Coke and the subconsciously when you want a soda you grab a Coke.
Of course exist. It is often said that some people who often buy $5 coffee don't sign up $10 web subscription or app. Also we can't sign up all paid subscription. I wish latter is solved by micro payment or combined subscription .
Thank you for mentioning the comma2. I also knew about OpenPilot but didn't realize there was a commercial product where most things are ready to go. I checked it out and am thinking about getting one now.
Advertising is linked to depression, body dysmorphic disorders like anorexia, and numerous other adverse mental conditions. The advertising industry has a whole lot of blood on their hands. This is an industry that doesn't think twice about exploiting people's feelings of vulnerability or isolation to help sell products. The more vulnerable the demographic, the more abusive the advertising industry gets. Just look at the shit they subject teenagers to; almost all the advertising to teenagers is focused on how buying [product] will make the teenager like the popular and attractive models being used to shill the product.
Hey this seems like an interesting appliance, tech gadget, item for camping or toy for a child. And then after some use and the novelty wore off it isn’t really that useful anymore.
I can see why entirely unrelated ads could be seen as a bad thing... but the problem with FLoC - or really any ads personalization - is that it's fundamentally based upon a privacy violation. Ergo, even if the data is only being used to serve more relevant advertising, you're still trusting some process or third-party not to use your data for more nefarious purposes.
FLoC is not immune to this: it relies on the device being able to track users and then provide advertisers "blurry" access to that tracked data. The problem is that we already have plenty of other tracking mechanisms that we can't reasonably restrict and that will interfere with the privacy protections built into FLoC. You will always be able to fingerprint and FLoC will always provide some fingerprintable entropy.
Even if FLoC was trustworthy enough to do what it claims, your interest cohorts alone can reveal your secrets. There's the classic example of Target knowing a woman was pregnant before her father was, for example. Yes, Google is going to try and filter out sensitive interests in cohorts, but that's an additional layer of trust you can't control. What if Google's definition of sensitive interest differs from yours?
I don't mind ads if they're not intrusive or even useful.
HN has ads, in the form of job listings for YC companies. They don't bother me in the slightest, and if i lived in the US they might even provide value to me.
The hundreds or thousands of ads i'd see if i'd surf without an adblocker do not.
Maybe you do have a product i'm interested in and don't know about. But there's not hundreds of things i'm going to buy every month.
If it was like: here's 5 products we think might be highly relevant to you every month. Sure, sign me up.
But it's (almost) never that. Most of the time the entity selling ad slots realizes, hey, if we sell more ad slots, we make more money. So they keep pushing the button to get a reward. Until they die because they overdosed on ads.
I tend to agree, although I hate ads on principle.
But there are a lot of things I hate and don't have to think about. I don't go around protesting the war because in my country that's not something I have to care about, for example.
But advertisers made me have to care. If I didn't have adblock, I'd be running JS from some unverified third party on every other site. Couldn't they restrict it to pictures? Of course not.
So now I have to care, and I'm not going to cooperate with advertisers, who - before adblock got so mainstream - were content to serve us literal viruses as long as someone paid them.
HN has ads, but don't I have to go searching for them to find them? I think it's Stack Overflow's ad model too. We'll curate a group of readers that are appealing to people seeking jobs, put up a "jobs" tab, and charge companies to list openings.
The problem with ads, no matter how "personalised", is that they are sent to everyone by default. Almost no one changes defaults. Often there is not even an option to opt-out. Whether two users got the same or different ads ("personalisation") is not the issue. The issue is that they were sent ads when they did not conscisouly request them.
Thus, the fact that jedberg likes ads is not an argument for sending ads to everyone. In the same way that if some user dislikes ads it is not an argument to stop sending ads to jedberg.
Users are not being given a choice. When they are given a choice, e.g., to reject tracking on their smartphones, the result can be a decision that the online advertising industry dislikes.
Tech company employees can call themselves users, but there is a serious bias and conflict of interest that other users being subjected to ads do not have.
What if we just send ads to tech company employees. The tech worker cohort. They will not complain because they believe ads are "necessary". Problem solved.
"personalized" ad creeps me out, and I really don't understand how people can tolerate a banner like "We know you buyed Some Thing from amazon so we think you would like to purchase Related Thing from us" and not freak out
There are different levels of personalization. I won't be okay with something based on my search/purchasing/location history, psychological profile, personal details etc. But I would be okay with something targeted at my age, gender, and the content of the page I'm visiting.
Better ads isn't a product I have much interest in. I have very much literally never seen a targeted ad I like or even found useful. This sounds like Google employee speak to me.
I don't mind the concept of ads. I didn't really mind early ads on the web. They were a lot like magazine ads, the website owners would run ads in the same broad interest category as their site. Then early AdTech happened and went fucking insane. Google's early text ads, before the DoubleCkick reverse takeover, were a sane reaction to insane web ads. Google's ads too went insane.
Now ads aren't just ads but crazy tracking mechanisms. Because of the opaque system of ad brokers they're also a malware vector because no one vets anything because money. They also very helpfully push me towards monthly data caps by loading megabytes of extra scripts on every page load and things like auto-playing videos.
So while I don't mind advertising conceptually, fuck ads and AdTech. I do everything possible to block ads just to make browsing usable, to say nothing of privacy or malware. I just hit the good ol' Back button whenever I get a "disable your adblocker" message. Disabling ad blocking doesn't just mean I see ads, it means I can barely read a web page and have to run megabytes of scripts that do who knows what.
Exactly that. If ads were like they were back in the early days I wouldn't feel forced to run an adblocker to protect myself from the malware they've become.
Definitely agree. Blocked ads since 2003 or so, when they started going crazy. I even remember the name of the site I used for CSS ad blocking - https://www.gozer.org/mozilla/ad_blocking/
> They were a lot like magazine ads, the website owners would run ads in the same broad interest category as their site.
Funnily enough, this is targeted advertising. Before the current shitshow, ads were targeted, then came tracking and they became targeted in a different manner. Now we block trackers and people decry "but how will they target ads?!". Well, the same way they did before.
There's an interesting article regarding behavioral observations on personalized advertisements, though it's in Korean. Summary for those who doesn't want to use a translator (KR to EN performance is typically bad):
* Generation Z's reaction to ads personalization category (from Google and FB) is somewhat positive in that they don't really care about its creepiness but think more accurate categorization on each personality as a better thing. The report thinks that they consider it as more of utility rather than just privacy invasion.
* More interestingly, sometime they "guide" ad targeting systems to show information that matches to their interests to save their efforts on searching for perfect matches. Honestly, I was super surprised since I haven't thought about this kind of usage even though I'm working on ads.
* Some of them (though the tone indicates that it's not majority?) does not skip video ads to "pay" a subscription fee for creators who they want to support. I saw some similar cases even in the US though.
* Sometime they're actively looking for explicitly sponsored reviews, which is actually an ad. It's because they sometime decide to buy specific products before watching its ads. This inversion of causality seems very odd to me, but the rationale is that they just want to better understand the product and don't care whether it's an ad or not.
It's written by a marketer who seems to be negative about personalized ads and genuinely surprised by these observations. Honestly... I still cannot get this but yeah, it seems there's some people who consider personalized ads as a tool.
I hate ads. They hijack my attention and they promote things for the companies that have the most money to spend on screaming at me about their products. I wish the advertising industry simply disappeared.
In fact if I had three wishes they would be 1. End poverty and allow everyone in the world to pursue their dreams while still being able to live acceptably well. 2. Make it impossible for anyone to amass more than some to-be-determined ceiling amount of times more money than everyone else. 3. Make advertising simply stop existing - everyone forgets what it is and it is never invented again.
It’s not surprising considering that employees and founders of ad funded companies hang out here. In this case, jedberg (correct me if I’m wrong) was an early employee at Reddit, which is almost entirely ad funded.
I’m not saying he’s being malicious - he probably genuinely believes he likes personalized ads. The “self” or “ego” is a very tricky thing. It can rationalize almost anything to maintain its world view. Everyone likes to think they’re doing good in the world. When faced with the fact that may not be the case, it’s natural to rationalize it away. It takes an extreme level of awareness to be objectively neutral whenever your “self” is involved.
I'm sure there are some forums where people who sell ads like them too. :)
But what can I say, I'm a realist. I spent a lot of years working on a website supported by advertising. I understand not everyone will or can pay for the websites they enjoy, and advertising is a good second option.
And if we're going to have to live in a world with ad supported websites, I'd rather those ads be good.
You're defining "good" here to mean "effective at manipulating me to spend money", which is strange! I'd rather not be manipulated into buying things I didn't realize would finally fill the gaping hole inside my soul until two seconds ago. Would be perfectly content seeing ads for, I don't know, farm equipment until I happily perish of old age never once experiencing the fomo of not possessing a theragun.
I'm defining good as "informing of things I didn't know existed". I consider advertising just another news channel.
Copying from my comment above, here are some examples of things I've bought. I like trying out new things because I can afford it, but I don't always have time to go out and look for them.
So examples of things that I've bought from Instagram ads:
The comma2 (autopilot for my Honda van). I knew OpenPilot existed, but until I saw that ad, I didn't know there was a product I could buy with it already installed. I liked the idea but didn't have time to get it all set up on my own. The existence of a commercial product vastly improved my life. I've already used it for over 1000 miles of self driving in just a couple weeks. It's a night and day difference when driving. I suppose I would have eventually heard about the product, but I'm glad I heard about it when I did.
The most recent Pride lego set. I would have never known it existed, but I'm glad I know now, because I want to give my kids something fun to build that sparks a conversation about Pride and what it means and why it's important.
The end doesn’t justify the means. Finding out about some cool stuff doesn’t justify the insane amount of collection of ones personal data by hundreds of companies in a manner which is basically impossible for a person to reasonably prevent.
That's what FLoC is trying and failing to do according to basically every analysis, including this one. Ads can exist without having to be based on users' personal data, as they were for 100+ years before (even on the internet itself, they used to be based on the content of the site rather than users' personal data)
Most content is being produced by end users that are paid nothing. In the early says of the internet, when there was no advertising, there was plenty of content. But what made the internet truly exciting was not the "content" but the potential ability to communicate and share with people anywhere in the world without expensive telephone calls or slow postal service. Think of the internet not as a "destination" but as a medium. It is a way to reach someone, like a telephone line, but with much greater capabilities. (Originally, that is how we accessed it, over telephone lines.) The internet is not a collection of popular websites run by companies that spy on you for the purposes of online advertising. They are just middlemen exploiting that desire of users to connect with each other. They sit in the middle and spy on everything. The internet is a medium, not a collection of middlemen. When you remove the ads, the "business model" of the middlmen disappears, and the incentive for spying is reduced.
It'd just be nice to have a little more control, for starters. So advertisers try to figure out what we want by what websites we visit and are not too good at it. They could also just ... ask? I'd like to have an ad service that I can tell what I'm actually interested in these days, and that forces the companies to provide lots of information about the product they are advertising for (documentation and stuff). So if I see an interesting ad, I can easily find out if its actually something I want. And money only flows if I actually buy something, affiliate-link style.
Unfortunately asking users doesn't usually work out well. My favorite example is from Netflix. They asked users, "What movie needs to be on the service for you to consider it a good service with good movies that you would want to see repeatedly". A lot of people answered "Schindler's list". But when you looked at those same user's actual viewing, they never once watched Schindler's list, but they watch Jackass multiple times. So what they really wanted was Jackass, but either were too ashamed to admit it, or didn't actually understand their own preferences.
FWIW, I feel like a good restaurant serves wine. I don't drink wine, but if your restaurant doesn't serve it, and I am tasked with choosing between two restaurants based on some quick glance at their menu sections and photos of their interior (as of course I am not informed about either: I am supposed to come up with some quick heuristic), it might not matter if you have the world's best hamburger (what I am actually going to order at your fancy restaurant, along with a glass of plain soda water, as I am a philistine). So I dunno: that could still be consistent, given the question phrased the way you did.
Yeah the difference between the things we know we should want, and the things we actually want in the moment. Its incredible in how many ways the brain can be annoying ;-)
I strongly believe that gaping holes did exist in peoples souls waaaay before ads were invented.
Don't know, though ... when I asked the all-knowing internet if "gaping holes did exist in people's souls before ads were invented", the first search result is a link to the Harry Potter Fandom-Wiki article about Dementors:
"Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them... Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself... soulless and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life."
I understand the reasoning, but I prefer schlock versus the cross-site data required to serve me personalized ads.
With the internet at our disposal I don't understand why anyone would ever click on an ad. If you need or want something, a quick search on even the worst search engine is outrageously more informative.
Personalised ads imply data collection, privacy violations and tracking across websites. That doesn't sound like a good deal. Especially as personalised ads are just as annoying and unhelpful because the algorithms are simply useless. No, when I bought a game I don't want to buy the Collector's Edition one day later. And that won't change over the 3 months I'm getting the same stupid recommendation. Might as well show me literally a random product, I'd be more likely to buy it.
I used to like the idea many years ago (think 10-15 or so) since if i'm going to see ads might as well have them be about stuff that interest me - which can actually be useful now and then.
But the thing is, what i wanted was for Google to let me actually choose what sort of ads i see, not try to guess.
I mean there are only a few on HN who dare to post this contrarian view. 99.98% of people on HN still hate Ads. To the point they want to cancel people working on Google Ads or in Adtech industry.
99% of nerds hate ads, but 99% of consumer aren't nerds.
I don't understand this. If you want personalized ads, wouldn't you rather subscribe to consumer newsletters, that you can specifically tailor to your interest and are working for you and showing genuine reviews, rather than ads sold to the highest bidder and that try to manipulate you?
Additionally why do you want to view those recommendations while you are actively trying to do something else?
If they can come up with an unintrusive and frictionless way for me to support them financially, and I think their service is worth supporting, I'll do so.
The problem is that the advertising business model is forced upon users. It's like the sleazy salesman holding the service hostage, and the only way to use it is to agree to be exploited and manipulated.
To hell with that nonsense. Either come up with a business model that respects your users, or close up shop as far as I'm concerned.
>And then how is the website jedberg likes supported?
What a bizarre argument; the implication that advertising is the sole method of remuneration and sourcing support for some venture is the responsibility of anyone besides the venture. The idea just reeks of entitlement.
Interesting. I really like(d) to be included in the bigger picture. What goods there are and how they are advertised is part of our culture (as is the quality part of advertising in it self). Being cut from most of it (to see the same over and over again, things I usually made up my mind on long ago) hurts.
Copying from my comment above, here are some examples of things I've bought. I like trying out new things because I can afford it, but I don't always have time to go out and look for them.
So examples of things that I've bought from Instagram ads:
The comma2 (autopilot for my Honda van). I knew OpenPilot existed, but until I saw that ad, I didn't know there was a product I could buy with it already installed. I liked the idea but didn't have time to get it all set up on my own. The existence of a commercial product vastly improved my life. I've already used it for over 1000 miles of self driving in just a couple weeks. It's a night and day difference when driving. I suppose I would have eventually heard about the product, but I'm glad I heard about it when I did.
The most recent Pride lego set. I would have never known it existed, but I'm glad I know now, because I want to give my kids something fun to build that sparks a conversation about Pride and what it means and why it's important.
I am kind of amazed, because you are the first person I've interacted with who (a) claims to like personalized ads and (b) has actually answered that question. Those are interesting. I understand the Pride Lego set being an ad, but the comma2 was?
I'm surprised that comma2 would assume anyone interested in their product wouldn't have ad blockers. Or that anyone would want to context switch to looking into it from Instagram.
I would have assumed ads for comma2 to revolve around sponsored content on various DIY/hacker sites. But I am not a good marketer, nor do I pretend to be (I do recognize it's value and wish I was, but I just don't get it.)
I suppose comma2 doesn't pay for blocked ads. So that is less surprising on reflection.
This. FLoC has no value proposition for end users.
Your position regarding cookies lumps two categories of cookies together. Cross-site cookies, and same-site cookies. Tracking isn’t exclusive to cross-site cookies, but the effectiveness (and invasiveness) of tracking is orders of magnitude more effective with cross site cookies. With the near-elimination of cross-site cookies, it turns out you can have your useful client side state and eat it too.
> Turning on FLOC brings nothing to the user in return and feels like charity towards advertisers.
I would call it a charity to the site owner whose (presumably) free content you're consuming. What it brings to the user is the ability of the site owner to continue making content.
FLoC isn't needed to show ads any more than cookies are. If we hadn't gotten everyone used to the gravy of personalized ads, this wouldn't be an issue. But going back to placing ads based on, say, the website or the expected audience in general is like getting the camel out of the tent[0].
Isn’t the DRM comparison exactly right, though? Improving ad targeting enables an ad-supported online ecosystem.
Admittedly, there’s a tragedy of the commons issue: I have no individual incentive to enable FLOC. But, similarly to your DRM example, at some point publishers could require it, no?
Which means that the most likely outcome is that Google won't let Chrome users disable it, or they'll hide it behind some dark patterns, re-enable it after every update, etc.
They talk about respecting their users but I just had to use their legacy site to be able to read this without getting an annoying modal blocking me and asking me to download their mobile app. Very hard to take this seriously.
The reddit user experience has been on the decline for a while now. It’s at a point now where you can’t even view comments effectively on the mobile site without logging in to an account.
I’ve managed to get my hands on a 5800x but I think it’s simply because it’s by far the worst value proposition in the new lineup and demand is probably not as high.
The three games in the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy can currently be had for very little money on Steam since they're on sale for the 25th anniversary of the franchise. They all have Linux builds and they'll run great on the RTX 2070 while also using it fully. They're one of the few AAA single player action/adventure titles available on the platform and they're good fun if you enjoy that kind of game.