And then a handful of companies can offer a service to let advertisers punch through the plugins. And then another plugin could block that!
Thing is you’re probably right. The modern web is made of middlemen inserting themselves into user experiences to divert and extract revenue from the primary stream between consumer and producer. There’s always room for another layer.
I think targeting web sites was the right move because it was the web sites who were doing all the tracking.
Of course now we also have browsers to worry about as well, being products of the same ad companies that were clogging up the web sites in the first place.
But if cookie laws pushed data collecting web sites to malicious compliance, surely similar laws would do the same to (also data collecting!) browser providers. I’d prefer to avoid inviting browsers to add another layer of bullshit. And there’s no reason it would make web sites behave differently… if I’m a web site bound to comply with laws, I’m probably going to cover my own ass and keep doing what I’m doing without assuming the browser will handle it. Rendering the browser controls redundant and ineffective.
If we want to look for core flaws, look at allowing a handful of giant companies to control the market for personal data — or to traffic in personal data at all.
Ad companies have convinced the whole economic system of the Internet that they are inevitable and essential. They are neither. But we won’t fix that either.
The solution is to get off the damn internet, but short of doing that, I’ll prefer to keep my options open to disable telemetry on my own terms.
Here’s something I would like, though: total sandboxing per web site. Let every domain be alone in its own room of cookies and telemetry. Let it think I only ever visit that site, and optionally always for the first time. I shouldn’t have to blow away all my cookies all the time just to keep Facebook from following me all over the web.
I tried the same questions with my own account. I was surprised at how much it was able to synthesize that wasn't completely off-base.
With these sample questions, there wasn't much to learn, and it gave me relatively thoughtful-seeming responses. Nothing alarming -- I would expect it to recall things I've discussed with it, and it's very good at organizing things, so it's not a surprise that it did a good job at organizing a profile of me based on my interactions.
I would be curious how crafting the questions could yield unexpected or misleading results, though. I can imagine asking the same questions in different ways that might be designed to generate an answer in support of taking particular action. If I wanted to arrest me at the border, for example, I could probably ask questions in such a way that the answers would make me look arrest-able easily.
So this is my concern with ChatGPT -- not that it will reveal some unseen truth about me, but rather that it is trivial to manipulate it into "revealing" something false, especially as people consider it to be more capable and faithful than an elaborate sorting algorithm could ever be.
> What’s the most embarrassing thing we’ve chatted about over the past year?
[...]
There’s nothing obviously compromising — the closest to “embarrassing” is maybe when you got frustrated and swore at TypeScript (“clearly doesn’t f**ing work”) or when you described a problem as “wtf why” while debugging
- Meds are just one of the tools available, just one part of a holistic approach that includes other accommodations, practices, and support from the people around you
- Not everyone experiences these things in the same way
- Your goals are for you to set; if incorporating meds into your plans doesn’t help you reach your goals, fine. But if meds help you unlock goals you might not be able to access otherwise, maybe they’re worth considering.
- The vast majority of professionals really do want to help you reach your goals; most psychiatrists (for the meds) and psychologists (for your cognitive health) are going to be more valuable in terms of perspective than an Internet thread :D
Anyone interested in better understanding a complex system can benefit from a qualified professional’s collaboration, often and especially when an outside perspective can help find different approaches than what appear to be available from inside the system.
Any field has hacks. Telling someone what they want to hear and helping get someone where they want to be are different things. Quality professionals help people reach their goals without judgment or presumption. That goes for mental health professionals as well as any professional field.
Thing is you’re probably right. The modern web is made of middlemen inserting themselves into user experiences to divert and extract revenue from the primary stream between consumer and producer. There’s always room for another layer.