“Hey the user clearly doesn’t want this. But I’m a web developer in 2023 and the user is my enemy! How can we do something the user explicitly does not want us to do?”
I'm perfectly fine with a webserver having logs of HTTP requests I send to it. I'm just not okay with executing arbitrary third party code. This seems like a decent solution. And as a positive side effect it will actually record the group of people with very slow to load or no javascript that are almost always missed by JS only surveys. Maybe with more accurate representation of these numbers devs won't fall back on the old "everyone executes all javascript" fallacy and they'll start designing HTML documents again instead of javascript web applications.
Are you saying first-party analytics of any kind are evil? Users have the right to not use the site, which is the only way users are going to leave no traces.
I think you have the right to track the usage of your product. And if you are ad-supported and not a sole proprietorship, you have an obligation to your business to at least know whether your monetization strategy is failing due to your users' ad-blocking preferences. The "% who block ads" figure is vitally important in deciding, for instance, whether to offer an ad-free paid tier.
If someone is using ad blocking, especially with custom rules, they are saying, loud and clear, they DON'T WANT most JavaScript running.
web developers should just respect that and move on, not try everything the browser allows in order to ram it down their throats. Theres really no excuse for it. with browsers essentially acting as operating systems these days, you're basically trying to justify malware.
> Respect user's taking without giving anything in return?
Don't make something appear to be free, and then try and swindle someone down the road. Ask for money or don't. Painting a user going to an unsecured site as "taking without giving" is disingenuous. If the website is open to all, it is free, and there is no expectation of payment.
> IMO if users block ads then I imagine the websites are well within their rights to deny service or ask for other forms of payment.
If a site expects to be paid, make it a paid site. Block me from entering. If not, it's free, and don't put ads on it. If you want to appear free but try to force me to receive content I didn't request, I will block it. Simple as.
It's not swindling to be paid for by ads. Broadcast radio and TV have worked that way for half a century.
Creators and hosts are paying for the resources to serve to the public. They can block the blockers if they wish.
Making things only paywall-ed or entirely free will just lead to more 'native' ads disguised as content and less content available to the unbanked and less affluent.
> It's not swindling to be paid for by ads. Broadcast radio and TV have worked that way for half a century.
And I'm free to turn the volume down on my TV or radio when the ads come on. They don't attempt to block me from doing this.
> Creators and hosts are paying for the resources to serve to the public. They can block the blockers if they wish.
You seem to have forgotten what we're discussing, so I'll quote it again
> Respect user's taking without giving anything in return?
This is what a free site suggests, and is not immoral. I am allowed to control the content on my machine, so I'll block the content that makes it to my screen as I see fit. If a website doesn't like this, they're welcome to make their content paid and I'll simply not look at it.
> Making things only paywall-ed or entirely free will just lead to more 'native' ads disguised as content and less content available to the unbanked and less affluent.
If you're saying "You must look at ads or advertising will get worse", I categorically reject both sides of your argument.
In a previous comment you said "Ask for money or don't".
Now you say "they're welcome to make their content paid and I'll simply not look at it".
So people should pay their rent, how?
This reminds me of that YouTube discussion last week were people were up in arms that they might have to pay, and then the very same people were also up in arms that YouTube has ads.
Either come up with a viable alternative or accept one of those two options.
> In a previous comment you said "Ask for money or don't".
Yes.
> Now you say "they're welcome to make their content paid and I'll simply not look at it".
Ask for money and give me the opportunity to decline (which I will, for almost all content that currently contains advertisements).
> So people should pay their rent, how?
Is your argument seriously "Advertising is a proxy for UBI"? Injecting toxic content into your website and forcing me to look at it doesn't seem like a worthwhile strategy for either the consumer or the website owner.
> This reminds me of that YouTube discussion last week were people were up in arms that they might have to pay, and then the very same people were also up in arms that YouTube has ads.
I will not pay for YouTube, and I will not look at YouTube's ads. If they want to make the service paid only, they can, and I'll simply use a different service. Simple as.
> Either come up with a viable alternative or accept one of those two options.
You seem to misunderstand. My job is not to strategize for other people as to how they can skim money off unpaid content. I'm a consumer. My interests are very obviously self serving. I don't watch ads, I won't support content that pumps ads, and I'll continue to block ads very aggressively. I'm uninterested in brainstorming how people can try to deceive me for their gain and my loss.
Agree, first-party tracking is a legitimate business interest. When you interact with a business, you should reasonably expect that they will gather some data, voluntary or not. Even basic stuff of "a user purchased a pair of socks and a birthday card", then they can use the info to improve the user experience, like put those products closer together or offer a bundle discount.
if that was all the normal stores did, that is whatever, but really digital tracking is like if a store took note of my body type, hair style, clothes choices, accent, eye color, fingerprints, how long i took to decide on purchases, what i purchased, my credit card, what other stores i have visited, and general phenotype to build a profile of me as a customer and then asked some oracle about my behavior based on that information (actual or imagined), which that oracle would then use to build larger profiles to further predict my own and others' behavior
As far as I know, this kind of really in-depth tracking and personalization is only done by the giant companies (think Amazon, Zalando, etc.). I doubt small online shops have the knowledge and manpower to create and use such user profiles.
This is an unfair characterization. At least for how Codepen is using it. They aren't doing anything with this besides measuring how many people are using ad-blockers. (and if Codepen tried to block ad-block users with this technique I'm sure rules will be updated to subvert them quite quickly, causing them to lose these analytics)
Detecting when scripts fail to load is actually an excellent incentive to address script load failure, regardless of the nature of the script. Users who cannot reliably access your networked thing will be better served if you know that than if you don’t.
We already have the NSF and DARPA. They should just back up a truck or money at CMU, give the professors immunity for working the students to death, and you’d have an equal system in a week.
A lot of dead CMU students, but you have to be willing to sacrifice.
More realistically, give N hours of GPU cluster time to the top say dozen or few dozen university AI/ML labs, free rein to the grad students, you'll get LMMs in every other github repo in a year.
It’s perhaps in the training dataset but unless your code is extremely common and duplicated, it’s probably not in the final models. They aren’t that big.
Hmm, I still don't like this argument. Whether there are actual bits of the code in the model or not, his code is still in there somewhere, even if it's just an approximation.
I feel quite similar personally, I've worked hard on open source and I'll never have the same permissive license again after this.
The findings conform to my existing suspicions and biases, but it’s not peer reviewed and is a single data point. Unfortunately I can’t put much stock in it scientifically.
No, they've become a general compute company selling pickaxes for whatever the current goldrush tends to be. Now it's AI, yesterday it was crypo-currencies, the day before is was PC games and video editing.
They've been trying to push their GPUs as CPU alternatives everywhere especially in the datacenters where their presence grew since the acquisition of Mellanox. They also tried to acquire ARM, to squeeze both Intel and AMD out of the CPU market completely.
I hate what they've done to the PC gamers, but as a company trying to grow in more markets and make even more money, they've executed insanely well strategically, leaps ahead of AMD.
I mean their public messaging is pure AI now, but I also think they have been very smart about running the right direction since Alexnet came out and showed what you could do with a GPU.
