THIS. My comment is somewhat tangential but I thought still relevant. I used to work for huge financial investment company with over a trillion dollars of assets for over 10 years. I never thought I was making positive difference in people's lives. However, my job offered me so many opportunities to volunteer and I would jump on every single one of those, and that made working there totally worthwhile. I still work for another huge company these days, which offers similar opportunities to make a difference in the community and that is what keeps me going here too.
There is something to be said about building tools out of kindness and not for greed. Thank you for your contributions to OSM and Thank you OSM developers too - big fan and user!
I always chuckle when ad companies say that. I have never seen a helpful ad in google search, but well I have been using adblockers forever so I would not know.I am honestly curious though, for those who don't use adblockers - what percentage of ads that you see are actually helpful?
Since when have we considered ads something helpful?
Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.
> Since when have we considered ads something helpful?
Depends. Ads a low-effort large-reach pathways for lead generation, mostly useful for B2C penetration.
I also did sales when I ran my own company, and I can absolutely guarantee that ads can be helpful. When talking to leads you're talking to someone who a) never saw what you offered but is listening to you anyway, or b) saw what you offered and decided to contact you.
The very first thing I'd do in sales is try to determine if the person I was talking to had a) A need my product could satisfy, plus b) Authority to make the purchase, and c) The budget to actually follow through.
The last thing I wanted to do is spend a bunch of my limited time talking to people who never had any intention of pulling the trigger on a contract; those are much harder to convert to paying customers (not impossible, just harder) and were almost never worth the effort.
My best-case scenario was "Someone reached out to me". Ads are a way to make that happen.
Now, if you're talking about internet ads, then you're talking about a different beast altogether (B2C), and those ads can be helpful to purchasers if they were already in the market for $FOO.
The problem is that internet ads are almost never worth the money - a significant number of clicks are from bots, another significant number are from accidental clicks and only a tiny tiny number of them are from people with the intention to buy $FOO from somebody, and they are just checking our your $FOO offering to compare.
You argue that ads can be helpful... by saying all the ways ads are helpful to the business. That's not what Google means. It's a way to make ads not sound like an obnoxious shitshow by pretending they are helpful for the consumer. The only way they are remotely helpful is to let someone know about a product they didn't know about. But that's not what ads are really for and we all know it. They're for manipulating people into buying a product, but whether they need it is purely coincidental. The admongers can stop pretending otherwise.
>> Now, if you're talking about internet ads, then you're talking about a different beast altogether (B2C), and those ads can be helpful to purchasers if they were already in the market for $FOO.
> You argue that ads can be helpful... by saying all the ways ads are helpful to the business.
Your example on the statement was about the companies. What Google said has nothing to do with the companies. They're clearly trying to paper over the manipulation. I was giving you that credit for the one thing they're slightly good for once. But really we all know that consumers can find products just fine on their own through word of mouth and reviews. But advertisers manipulate that too with paid reviews and astroturfing. Way to pount out the only thing I agreed with you on as if I didn't, even though the majority of your post was arguing for the ads because they benefit companies. And you even said those internet ads that let people know about a product aren't worth the money. You are a true advertiser. Congratulations.
So what you're saying is that when Google says 'helpful ads' they mean helpful to the companies selling the things that are being advertised, ie. Google's real customers, not helpful to the people who get the ads smeared all over their screens.
An ad is never helpful because ads are designed to mislead me into buying something I didn't need or knew about before I saw the ad.
If nothing else, an ad cannot impartially compare a product with the competition (and sometimes the "competition" is buying nothing at all), therefore every ad lies.
If I already needed or knew about it, I didn't need the ad.
If I was happy with my life without the product advertised, I didn't need the ad.
Furthermore, ads are fueling our capitalist, consumerist economy that is destroying the planet. Ads are a literal existential threat to humans.
seems like the ad was superfluous. the doctor treating your friend's condition would be aware of new drugs relevant to your friend's condition. i go to a doctor because i don't know about medicine, i don't want to be educated on medicine from snake oil salesmen.
just to be clear i don't know your friend or their life or their medical condition or if the drug you saw an ad for treats their condition or if you saw an ad for a drug or if your friend has a medical conditon or if you have a friend at all... and i don't know if every event in a chain of events is necessary to the eventual outcome of that chain of events... and i can't see into the alternate reality wherein you didn't see that ad for a drug, to know your friend would've been fine in the end... and so on.
i'm speaking more generally, saying advertising is superfluous to medicine.
By accepting SWAG from the pharma rep, or accepting free trips to conferences sponsored by pharma. If a doctor has not heard about a new drug the their reps just haven't made their way to them yet because they're in a smaller market. The yet is key, eventually a rep will make their way to them. More than likely much sooner than the TV ads run
By researching new drugs? Though sadly at the moment the doctor is also a target of advertising. The point being that this should generally be a pull process driven by a demand (and mediated by neutral review and publication processes) and not a push being driven by a supply (mediated by a process that goes to the highest bidder).
It’s not an either-or situation. A doctor is a human and has a job and a family. I don’t expect my doctor to be spending every second researching everything related to all his patients. There simply isn’t enough time to know everything.
If I wanted that level of care, I expect to pay for a personal physician who only has one patient. Me.
The reality is most of the time my Dr knows more technical info than the patient. But sometimes I know something they don’t. The information asymmetry lasts about 60 seconds before my doctor validates the info against his professional sources.
My doctor is providing a value commiserate with what I pay him.
so in your mind, a pharmaceutical company telling a patient that a drug exists is "advertisement" but a pharma company telling a doctor that a drug exists magically isn't?
The first gets blasted all over the internet to be shoved in the faces of all and sundry.
The second goes quietly and efficiently to the professionals tasked with helping the individuals in society with problems that may directly benefit from new thing.
> Furthermore, ads are fueling our capitalist, consumerist economy that is destroying the planet. Ads are a literal existential threat to humans.
I'm sorry, a single anecdote does not invalidate the above.
Ads are evil. They make us desire things we don't need, undermine our self-esteem, and in the large part just sell scams. I'd be happy to ban most forms of advertising. It's a plague.
This happened to me as well, and during a football game ad (which I generally skip and despise highly). The signal-to-noise ratio is extremely low with ads, but they indeed can be helpful sometimes.
I need a new dishwasher. I dont want to go knocking on doors until I find somewhere that sells them. Im glad they have signs, webpages, and info sheets.
Promotion and discovery are important. Advertising is the spread of information. Of course some can be bad or misleading, and that is bad.
Publishing information about your product on your own website is not really what most people consider advertising. Nor is being added to lists of similar products. Most people object to 'push' advertising, where attempts to persuade you to buy a product are inserted whereever your attention is, as opposed to 'pull' processes where you have a need and are trying to gather information on how best to solve it.
Your examples are of passive information gathering. Surveillance driven behavioral manipulation across every screen you own is a different than looking up the list of local appliance stores. I rarely see ads trying to compete on product specs. When there is information it is low value and distorted because it has huge holes from selective omissions.
yes, that is the point I am making. It is not advertising that is bad, but particular types of advertising that bother people. Those that are misleading or intrusive.
I do not think that I have ever seen on the Internet a helpful ad. When I want to buy something, I search what I want or I go directly to online shops that I have used before or to price comparison sites.
Nonetheless, mostly before the appearance of the Internet, when I was reading various technical journals, especially during the seventies and the eighties of the past century, e.g. magazines or journals of electronics or of computers, I was considering most ads as helpful, as they were making me aware of various things that I might have wanted to buy.
Unlike the ads that bother me today, those ads in magazines or journals intended for more competent buyers contained enough technical details and prices to make possible comparisons between products, and they were also easy to skip when not interested, instead of covering important content on a Web page and making efforts to provide a visual distraction that makes difficult to focus on the useful content of that Web page.
The Internet ads are completely unhelpful because they are never about something that I intend to buy in the near future. The most stupid thing is the fact that after I have searched for something to buy, I am bombarded for a long time with related ads, but that is exactly when with certainty I am no longer interested in that kind of ads, because I have already bought whatever I had been searching for.
> "The most stupid thing is the fact that after I have searched for something to buy, I am bombarded for a long time with related ads, but that is exactly when with certainty I am no longer interested in that kind of ads"
> "the correlation between $just_bought_thing and $will_buy_another is very, very high ... Showing someone ads for products in a category they recently purchased from is one of the most effective things a store can do ... the data is exceedingly clear."
I'm sure it's one of the most useful signals for the advertisers, but it is also one of the most irritating behaviours for the consumers, because even if this is a very high correlation in advertising terms, it's still the majority of the time not actually accurate for the consumer (like with all ads: I buy some orders of magnitudes fewer products than I see ads, even with adblocking, so even if I only bought things I had seen ads for, the vast majority are not helpful to me).
> the correlation between $just_bought_thing and $will_buy_another is very, very high
This looks like an argument against advertising the same thing. Why would you advertise something, they were already going to buy?
But showing an ad before their next purchase definitely would improve the numbers on the "our conversion rate chart" _advertised_ to ad buyers. A con played by ad companies to sell more ads.
If you're researching which fridge to buy on Gemini, then an ad might be helpful. So long as they've got the data to answer your questions such as how wide it is.
Advertising really only helps in two scenarios - it makes you aware of a class of product you had no idea existed (perhaps searching for toilet paper shows you a bidet ad) - or it makes you aware of a brand you hadn’t considered before.
And even the second is on shaky ground because by design it won’t tell you really where it stacks up.
I suppose you could argue that making you aware of sales/deals is “helpful” but that’s closer to what I’d classify most advertising as - zero-sum.
(Advertising of a different kind has a use, allowing companies to “sponsor” activities they like in a way the shareholders won’t revolt over. The more you consider companies to be feudal lordships the more it all starts to make sense.)
> Since when have we considered ads something helpful?
At some point Google ads where genuinely good and helpful to me. If you needed to buy something, and you didn't know who sold it or what it was called, the Google ad engine would yield better results than their search.
Now Google also broke that part. All ads I get are for Temu, Fruugo and other weird sites that I guess does drop shipping, maybe some marketplace stuff. It's the same sketchy sites that's return for almost all searches. It's rarely the "brand sites" that you trust who shows up first in the "Sponsored products" section.
I am old enough to remember a brief period where search engine ads were sometimes helpful because you could search for a thing and get an ad for a thing and click and buy a thing. That went away quickly once the optimizers discovered they could earn money by SEO-maxing, charging the premium and then just ship you somebody else's goods and make you pay for the whole thing and their profits. And it became the red queen game, where if you don't SEO-max, nobody is even going to know you existed.
This. Ads are industrialized brainwashing designed to induce dissatisfaction in the viewer to stoke demand for shit you don't need. And because companies pay for ads and then pass the price on to you, you're getting taxed on everything you buy for the privilege of being brainwashed.
I disagree-ish because I've been sold by ads things that remain in my life today a long-time later, which mean that it was genuinely helpful, I'd say the ratio is minimal, but still sometimes it's on-point, I actually discover a lot of products thanks to ads.
> Since when have we considered ads something helpful?
They are not. The utility of companies advertising their products can be trivially served with dedicated 'advertising' channels without enabling stealth surveillance by big co. and their paying clients, various goverments.
> Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.
Maybe it isn't quite as black & white as that?
What about an ad run by a non-profit that doesn't have any marketing professionals at all? Said non-profit attempting to connect to consumers?
What about listings on craiglist? or facebook marketplace? or personal ads in the local newspaper?
Do you have a proposal/alternative to help with market discovery, customer discovery? Search has in the past served that function, but is likely to be soon dead.
> Since when have we considered ads something helpful
I have genuinely met people who claim that ads are helpful and interesting and used this as a justification for adware companies to stalk you every step you take on the web.
I’ve met people who enjoy lots of gross things. That doesn’t make the things gross to me, or the vast majority of humanity.
My guy take is that they are mindrotted by ads into thinking they are good for them. Digital Stockholm Syndrome. Or maybe a Myth of Sisyphus type situation.
The simpler explanation is that a significant segment of the population genuinely enjoys the rampant consumerism and view ads as a helpful discovery tool as they are actively seeking inspiration for their next purchase.
TikTok effectively became a shopping mall because of this behavior, and long before technology there has always been a large demographic that treated shopping as a hobby and form of entertainment.
If ads were universally repulsing to the entire population, we wouldn't have seen the development of current adtech. The uncomfortable reality is that most people either are apathetic toward ads, or actively want to be served ads. 60 to 70% of the global internet population still browse without any ad-block. Think back to how many people willingly and purposefully watched infomercial shopping channels like QVC?
The ads are a symptom of a society that largely enjoys consumerism.
Since when have we considered ads something helpful?
Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.
Pithy, dismissive, reductionist, and wrong.
Yes, most of the bottom-feeding ads you see these days are along the lines of your description. But those are not the only ads, not the only method of advertising.
Good advertising is informative. iPod ads let people know that iPods exist. An ad for a new album lets you know that a band you like, but don't follow closely, has something you might want to try. An ad letting you know that "Chainsaw Y is on sale this week" is helpful for people thinking about buying a chainsaw. An ad demonstrating "Chainsaw A is as good as Chainsaw B, but costs less" is helpful for people considering an alternative.
The problem is the race-to-the-bottom mentality that has consumed the advertising industry since 2008. This is largely fueled by the ad tech industry which prioritizes things like "engagement" that can be presented in a pretty chart to middle managers, but don't actually mean anything. That's how you end up with all the obnoxious pop-ups and videos.
Ads for chainsaws on a chainsaw enthusiast web site is fine. Ads for a refrigerator I already bought two weeks ago is just a waste in a dozen ways.
Or what Google is doing for years: a wall of ads for "Black & Decker" chainsaws when you specifically search "Husqvarna" or "Stihl", sending the results you want to the sixth or seventh place in the page.
I completely unplugged from broadcast TV simply because I can no longer stand to be bombarded with FUD, manufactured lifestyles, propaganda, etc., that provides absolutely no useful information about a product, or really anything other than reminding me that X company's Y product exists.
The people who are buying ad spots and creating ads absolutely believe they're helpful, not just to you, but to their client. Their purpose is to helpful, to the company, who wants your money and who gives the marketer their money, and with this action, the marketer will believe whatever is needed to do their job, as always.
A customer buying something means that they have found something valuable. Helping people increase the total (personal) value of what they own is helpful.
Selling something to me can occasionally be helpful, because I need things from time to time, and at that moment offering to sell me a thing that I need is helpful. What is annoying is that with all billions upon billions supposedly spent on figuring out what I need to sell it to me, the best they can do is "oh, you bought shoes once? Clearly you're the guy who's into buying shoes, let us spam you with shoes ads for the next 5 years!"
FD - I pay Insta to advertise a product for parents.
The results of above mentioned advertising have been great. I get inbound enquiries, parents get their curiosity about the usefulness of what I offer whetted. I don’t understand how the ad was unhelpful to the parent and me.
I typically block ads as well, but more recently I changed some setting in the default Android newsfeed thing and some ads started to show through amongst the news items.
The ads there are usually fairly innocuous (i.e. not disruptive, not flashing auto play vids etc, they just look like another news item and you can just scroll past them like other news articles you're not interested in), but I have actually found them useful. I am wearing a T-shirt right now in fact that was advertised to me a week or two ago as "on sale" for £8 (eight) and which I clicked through and purchased. There have been one or two other examples of things there that actually have been useful or at least interesting to me right now. So they actually have been useful/helpful in that regard.
So I am a bit conflicted here. It is no cost to me to click on the ad, and I bought some things that I use but would probably have not got otherwise. Am I being manipulated to part with my money? I dunno. Would I have bought a £8 t-shirt anyway if I was just in a shop and saw it? Maybe. Was the ad actually quite well targeted and appropriate? In this case yes.
I think on balance I would say those news feed ads are acceptable to me. I have problems where it is totally irrelevant and disruptive. Hopefully the AI mode ones will be similar to the news feed ones. I would be pretty upset if the ad content was directly worded into the response.
I love the idea of targeting advertising. But the current implementations I hate.
The ASR voice recorder app gets this right. It lets me use the full featured version for three days, after which I need to watch a few ads to get another three days. I choose when to watch the ads, and if I'm late there is nothing worse than a small nag at the bottom of the app. I actually now start every day with the ads, while I cook breakfast, and it is a positive experience. I could also just pay for the app and be done with them.
The problem with the idealism of targeted advertising is that it assumes that there is always an ad that fits your desires. In reality, some people have very niche interests and preferences, and not every business advertises through the same channels or with the same budget. Ads will pretty much always cater to the lowest common denominator even if you account for the individual.
I like indie board games but I almost never actively seek indie board games (ie I don't search "indie board games" but I do search for like Cat Tower which is an indie board game).
I still get ads that I'm interested in in that niche; I just choose not to click them because I think my wife will kill me if I collect any more board games :)
Search ads do seem like the one ad type that kind of flips that though. Where it's not based on some general set of interests, but literally the thing you're searching for at that moment.
They seem like that, but in practice, human marketers are your adversaries, and they're buying ads on targeted search terms. I can search "better pancakes than Waffle House" and a marketer at Waffle House will have bought the ads so I just see ads for Waffle House's pancakes. This is not actually useful to me at all.
I think the very old Google was better in this: They analysed current intent by looking at current search and contents of the current page one looks at. There an ad may solve a specific current need. As soon as past profile overrides this the relevance goes down: It's great that two weeks ago I spent a lot of time on travel sites, but now my summer vacation is booked and all related ads are irrelevant.
> I am wearing a T-shirt right now in fact that was advertised to me a week or two ago as "on sale" for £8 (eight) and which I clicked through and purchased.
This means the ad was effective. But was it useful to you? Did it save you from having to look for it yourself?
If you were not thinking something like "I need a certain T-shirt" before this came up, it's likely the ad created a desire in your mind which you didn't have. You got manipulated successfully by the advertiser.
I think what was left out of the blog post was "helpful to the advertiser".
The meta point is that advertising has become so ingrained into society it really is difficult to differentiate if a need or desire originated intrinsic or externally. It's really great for companies selling stuff.
The super concise version of my typical rant is that we aren’t just being simply served up ads. They are mining us for data every step of the process and then using it in invasive ways or selling it to their friends who will use it for God knows what. We don’t know what they’re doing, when they’re doing it, what they’re using it for, and we have no way of not participating once we’ve walked through the door. There’s no warning sign that actually tells you what is happening and no realistic way to opt out except for never opening that URL in the first place. You literally can’t be an informed consumer if you want to be on the Internet
We live in a world where ads are the primary way information about products enters the information sphere. That seems like something we should fix to me, but it's where we are, and it means if ads are well enough targeted it can be rational for an individual to want to consume them.
Also I think people pay much of the price of ads even if they don't view them, via increased prices. The trillion dollar advertising industry money ultimately is paid by consumers. It is a necessary cost to try to launch a new product because we are reliant on it for information and because all your competitors are advertising.
I sort of wish there was a google "ad" search, where its like google search but only for ads, for the rare cases you want to buy something, and are looking through for a compatible product. Make advertisers differentiate by providing more information about their product to help me make a choice rather than shoving the product everywhere else hoping that I'll buy the thing out of fatigue
I don't think I've ever seen a helpful ad on Google.
But Instagram, despite me only using it to keep in touch with friends via DMs, seems to know me very well. I get a lot of ads for puzzles and board games and video games, which are right up my alley. I've purchased a nontrivial amount of stuff from Instagram ads. Very few were life changing, except maybe an electric nail clipper which is the only way I can clip my infant daughter's nails. But the rest are all fun stuff that I've gotten value from.
And FTR I do use an ad blocker both on my browser and my modem came with one. I guess the modems one isn't great though because I still see Instagram ads.
I find all ads — both search ads and website ads — very helpful in training the brain to ignore the noise. Isn't it amazing how we trained ourselves to immediately detect the 1pt hidden "Sponsored" mark and scroll the page down to the first real search result, or immediately locate the Close or X button on the pop-up ad making sure none of the actual ad content gets through our well-trained firewall in our brain. Amazing. Browsing the web is such a fun and dynamic experience these days!
I think weirdly, ads embedded in AI search responses actually maybe do have a chance at being helpful (as long as it's clear from the context of the question that I may be willing to pay for a solution) just because they could potentially be quite well matched to the specific thing I want, or if they're not quite as well matched but offer other benefits, explain the difference.
At the moment search ads aren't very helpful because you have neither of those things. You always get them for any type of query, and when you do get them you don't know if the thing being shown will exactly solve your problem, or only approximately, and the work is much more on you to find that out by reading the product's marketing pages further.
If all that could be done for you up front, reasonably honestly, then I could see it being useful. I mean to be sure, in some small percentage of searches I really am looking to buy something and really do want to be usefully, honestly pitched on available options.
I have never seen a helpful ad, anywhere, in my life.
"Ads help people discover new products" is a lie that people who work for companies supported by advertising revenue tell themselves. If $deity exists, and they were to delete all ads from the world tomorrow, never to return, everything would be just fine.
Truly great products sell themselves by word of mouth.
I agree, maybe "ads are useful" could have been true long time ago before the world was not as connected.
You could maybe argue that ad revenue could subsidize the costs of information delivery but information delivery costs are basically non existent today - it's all about attention delivery and thats an entirely different thing.
It seems techies collectively try to avoid ads, but clearly other segments of people actively click and buy through ads. I would love to get a marketing expert's view on this. It differs by product obviously, but there must be some common character variables (gender, wealth level, ...)
I bought once through facebook ads, and now I actively try to avoid any ads
Advertisements have multiple purposes - brand awareness, product awareness, sale awareness, etc.
Coca Cola advertising is mainly brand awareness - remind you they exist but not really directing you to buy one “right now”.
Product awareness is how you learn about new product - usually trying to convince new customers, but sometimes just trying to swap existing customers. These can be “offensive” (a new product aimed at taking a competitors market share) or “defensive” (keeping existing customers from switching away). Of course this overlaps with above.
Sale awareness is how you “scoop” up customers who have been exposed to the above but haven’t bought - you’re offering a “deal” so they’re more likely to buy. Most online search-targeted advertising is this kind, and is the most immediate (click and buy) - the other two are just to make it so when you want product, you want their product.
Some might argue that Adwords got so successful because ads competed like search results, on bid AND relevance, not just bid.
If your ads inventory is big enough, ads can actually be a better answer to your intent than organic content, because the companies behind the ads have a much stronger incentive to satisfy your need.
If AdWords or search consider both relevance and the fee collected, the end user will never be shown the most useful results consistently. If the goal was usefulness they would only pick results by relevance and take no fee at all, or take a flat fee that isn't based on a bidding system.
For people who think often, ad is only useful in very few situations.
The ability to think often is ultimately a capability that only a minority of humans possess. Therefore, for the vast majority of people, ad is very useful.
For example, my retired parents enjoy buying little gadgets from ads.
A pretty high percentage. But that’s only because the ad goes to the same destination as the first organic search result. Just search for a brand whose web address you don’t know, and usually both the ad and the first results goes to the brand’s home page.
The organic search results didn't offer what I needed at all, but the ad took me straight to an e-commerce site that sold what I wanted. I had it in my hands at a reasonable price about 5 days.
It was for a Nintendo Wii component video cable, back in 2007.
An exception that proves the rule, but KRAZAM's channel on Youtube has legitimately helpful ad reads. Rare Data Hunters [0] for example ends with a 1 minute Cloudflare ad that's basically a crash course in their services. Having worked with GCP and AWS but not so much with Cloudflare, that ad gave me a surprisingly clear idea of what the important pieces would be.
Truly an exception though. I think generally the only people for whom ads are helpful are advertisers.
Personally, I sometimes like targeted ads. If I'm intentionally shopping, it is nice to see ads relevant to my interests. Not saying the whole Internet should be a highly surveiled mall, but they do have their place
It would be great if I was shown things "relevant to my interests". That's not what targeted ads are because ad placement depends on who is willing to pay the most, not on what optimally matches what I want. The most obvious example is search ads in the App Store that show you a competitor's product (or an outright scam) as an ad when searching for a specific app. Now extend that kind of dynamic to any other product category and you start to see the problem.
I understand your thinking, but I have never felt that the "promoted result" in any search when shopping around inspired confidence in them being the best fit or value for me, even though they're technically a relevant result.
More directly: Someone paid to have them surface that result for me, instead of having me find them for being the best. I can understand the need to bypass the SEO arms race of yesteryear, but it still rubs me the wrong way.
this might sound wild but..on some platforms that are good with figuring out the types of things i like, I get many ads that I actually like. facebook for example i almost exclusively go there just to see what kind of products i wouldn't otherwise know about that it might show me (some of which i've bought). plus if it helps pay for services than i'm all for it.
the part that crosses the line for me is when the platforms are peddling malware and scams through ads. google search would have a ton of this suprisingly..so i hope in AI mode they can improve things
I find helpful ads on Google Search sometimes, and it can be the easiest way to get results, but most of the time, ads (and SEO) ruin search accuracy to the point that it's becoming totally useless
The only helpful ads are the ones that waste money on Google (namely those companies/products/results that show up on top anyway, right below the sponsored very same ad)
The fact that a brand has to pay money to outbid competitors on their brand is something that feels it should be illegal. Google “forcing” Coca Cola to pay for ads on the search “coca cola” so Pepsi doesn’t appear at the top is somehow wrong.
I don't have an ad blocker on my laptop. The ads I get are pretty much entirely generic and irrelevant to me, I don't remember ever consciously clicking on an ad.
The targeted ads in Google Search were hugely helpful, at least in the beginning.
Suddenly, you could search for something obscure and get ads about that exact topic. This enabled a huge number of small niche businesses to exist and prosper.
We now live in the world Google Ads created, and we take for granted the there will be someone selling Bulgarian accordion cleaning kits out there that I can easily find. But targeted ads made this world possible!
I don't mind ads, as I understand that without money, web sites go away. But I'm very careful about being tracked. That, I don't think is cool.
It's not unusual for me to see ads for companies hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and often selling things for which I do not possess the correct body parts.
I consider that affirmation that I am mostly successful at staying off the ad-tech radar.
I mind ads and don’t think sites would go away. They’d just be less profitable.
I mind ads because they crowd out less profitable margins and result in worse products. Imagine how nice and useful Google could be if they optimized for search instead of ads.
And even if you pay for the product - a business model where the incentive should be for them to make the product better for you - you still get greedy executives who decide to try to juice their revenue with ads (cable TV, streaming services, etc)! I don't know what can be done, but honestly ads have gotten to be an intolerable business practice.
I have, fairly often in fact. That's why Google makes such a bucket load of money from their ads - they're actually vaguely relevant.
I've don't think I've ever seen a relevant ad outside of Google though, and I still wouldn't say "yeay, helpful ads!". Nobody is going to want them even though I occasionally get relevant ones and click on them.
Maybe one or two in an ocean of crap. And even the ones I do see which are interesting I start despising, because I will see them hundreds of times. Base44 - I will never use your services because of the ad bombardment. Same with that fucking toothbrush that doesn't have bluetooth. It never amazes me that ad agencies just serve me 1 or 2 same ads all the time, but :shrug:
I have to wonder if helpful ads most likely refers to the type of add for the exact search result…
So, for example if you search for Coca-Cola the first ad will be something Coke has paid Google for. That helps Google earn $ and helps Coke not loose to a site with better SEO and confusion. Does it help you… maybe.
I remember the good ol' days when you'd search for the specs on a 10yo server you pulled out of the dumpster and then a day later you'd see "Aging HPC infrastructure, upgrade to latest IBM X-series blade architecture" banner adds in hilariously irrelevant places like thepiratebay or a certain hub of videos.
Those "naive" ads from 15+yr ago are far more relevant than anything I've ever seen since.
Recently I’ve been starting up quick web projects and a number of external services are recommend (Neon, Resend, Railway), and if I just let the agent rip, signed-up for and implemented. Is it confirmed any LLM producer or provider has been receiving kickbacks for these technical decisions?
Legally they would gave to disclose with the recommendation that its a paid advertisement. That said, they were also legally not supposed to scrape the entire internet for training so if they are getting kickbacks I wouldn't expect a confirmation.
For me ads on Instagram are often spot-on, same with Facebook although I don't check that too often.
Google search always seemed completely off, I don't remember seeing one helpful ad here (helpful being defined as an ad of something I might be interested in buying).
Assume the article reader / audience to be someone buying ads on Google and how unhappy they are with how ineffective ads have become in recent years, and you understand AI Mode ads are presented here as more helpful for advertisers.
In my case I haven't seen a single helpful ad in google search. They try to make the ads related to my work or hobbies but it's not helpful at all. Aside from Google, Instagram seems to be nailing the ads algorithm better.
When AdWords first showed up (decades ago) they were legitimately useful at times. They were a dramatic improvement over previous ad tech that just used plain word matching to try and find "relevant" ads.
When I want to buy something I search for it or ask AI for recommendations etc. Why not have a toggle, this is a search for product so shower me with ads related. Not all the time when I am just causally browsing.
I use an ad blocker, but I'm occasionally exposed to YouTube outside of my ad-free bubble and I find the ads useful for identifying brands to actively avoid.
Tbh that is a pretty vague statement. Could be 0.01% more and it would still be technically correct. Could be doubling the number of non-helpful ads in the meantime
I use an adblocker and despise most ads with a burning hatred, but the absolutist position of "never helpful" isn't right. My example: A game I've been wanting to buy for a while recently went on sale on Steam. I saw an ad when I opened Steam. I bought the game for the low price, and it is now one of my favorite games I've ever played (Burnout Paradise City - highly recommend, but wait for a sale)
I never have on Google Search (I also block them to be fair), but I've booked a lot of shows through Instagram ads actually. Shows I learnt about only through those ads and I would have been disappointed to miss.
But yeah that's literally the only platform where I've ever had useful ads. Even other meta products only have absolute garbage ads.
> I have never seen a helpful ad in google search, but well I have been using adblockers forever so I would not know.
That this self-awarely-self-contradicting quip is the top comment on the page is about as essential a summation of HN's collective thought as I can think of.
I remain amazed at the pathology that results in the truth that, even in the world as it exists today, the one enemy that truly unites the supposedly-elite techno-leaders of our increasingly advanced society is...
...horror about seeing advertisements for products we're probably buying anyway.
I search for Converse sneakers and top result is an ad for Converse sneakers! Genius! Pay these genius engineers more! So incredible. How are they smart enough to show me exactly what I search for?!
But seriously. What are we paying advertisers for? Converse pays Google so that they don't show Vans when I search for Converse? Sounds like extortion or protection money.
I have never purchased anything [just] because of an ad, nor do I know anyone who has.
But I have been turned off from EVER buying some things because of their obnoxious ads.
The whole ads racket is a case of the emperor with no clothes, an ugly self-justifying cancer infesting human civilization.
And to those perpetuating the racket who'll say "but how will people find out about products??" the answer is fucking better search and filtering systems.
caste system will likely never die in India. I once even joked to my friend that one day when Indians will start accepting gay marriages they would post a matrimonial ad something along these lines - "Looking for an intelligent, well-behaved, educated, fair coloured gay groom for our son (Brahmin only)".
There are some states where caste doesn't matter like Telangana (not 100% casteless society but better than most states in the country). Also urban India is relatively casteblind.
Worth remembering that many felt the same about male friends saying "I love you" between each other was seen the same way just like 2-3 decades ago, that it'll never be socially acceptable. We had a transition period where it was "required" to add ", no homo" at the end, but today seems like most men are comfortable saying it to each other as friends without adding that disclaimer.
Big progress in just 2-3 decades, so never say never :)
tangential comment, but if anyone is interested in one of the best (imo "legendary") audio books on LOTR look no further than Phil Dragash : https://archive.org/details/tlotrunabridged.
As much as the UI was fluid, smooth and probably best for a touch interface, I distinctly remember I hated it and frantically wanted my Start button back on my PC. It is kinda funny reading all the comments about its nostalgia, when all I could think was how annoying it was. I guess to each their own :-).
I always use the Windows key instead of pressing the start menu button, so I didn't really care. I always thought it made more sense as a Tablet / Touch OS, and for people without a touch screen, Windows 8 was just terrible. It had good intentions, poorly executed.
Apple did not even bother with touch screen laptops on the other hand.
My favorite goof of Windows 8 was the most googled question: "how do I turn it off?"
It required stupid mouse witchcraft and incantations to shut off if you weren't in a touch screen.
Windows 8 was Microsoft thinking everyone was going to use touch screens for EVERYTHING and ruining the non-touch screen experience for most.
I think around that time was when Ubuntu switched from Gnome to Unity as well. What a mess that was. Seemed like all the UI teams had lost their minds at once.
Gnome 3 was also doing a major restructure, which forced MATE to be built. I liked some things about Gnome 3's original release, but I was insanely annoyed because a lot of it went away, I'm not sure if it was just distro specific or packages changed drastically, I don't even know how to describe the feature, but for example Gnome 3 had apps that could show / hide on the edges of your screen, so if you were logged in to MSN (or even XMPP) you could chat with someone, then it would 'hide' it was really cool how that was implemented, I was upset to never see it again on any other OS, it felt like a nice way to keep a chat window available but still out of the way.
I love KDE since KDE 3.5 but after KDE 4 its been weirdly unstable. Even now, I use KDE daily on Endeavour (Arch) and it will randomly kill the taskbar etc and restart itself, which is cool that it can self-clean but why does it fail like that randomly? I hate it because other DEs feel unstable or like the UX is worse. KDE has the exact UX I like, but I do hate the one thing browsers / KDE does where my clipboard is hijacked if I highlight text, not sure if I mistakenly made it like that or what but it drives me up a wall, sometimes I want to highlight text to paste over.
Bad compilation options, and/or bad driver/firmware interactions.
I'm using it on CachyOS with on old intels(Kaby Lake Core i5-7500t/Core i7-7700t) with old intel integrated graphics(HD630), and it never did that. Since early Plasma6/late Plasma5 times. Cant recall exactly anymore, for about 2 years now. In fact, since Plasma6 it reminded me of the good old KDE3 days, again. Except for the memory usage maybe. OTOH the systems have much more memory since the times of KDE3, so shrug?
KDE lost some corporate support when SUSE changed their default to GNOME in about 2005(?). I think it sees some use in the automotive world but aside from that it's all volunteer work.
I missed KDE 3.5 for many many years, as KDE 4 was terrible by comparison, and went to MATE due to the awful GNOME 3. KDE 3.5 was so so usable and Konqueror handled everything well.
KDE 4.0 - which introduced plasma - was released in 2006, and it was awful and wasn't supposed to be generally available (blame the distros and/or poor version naming). By version 4.5 (2010), KDE had stabilized. By the time Gnome 3 and Windows 8 were released in 2011/2012 respectively, KDE plasma was pleasant to use and rock-solid
It felt great to watch Gnome stumble after all the shit-talking, some schadenfreude was in order. I didn't care much for Windows 8; Vista was a the bigger mess of a release.
Indeed, this is the dirty secret and shame of our industry that doesn't get acknowledged enough. We are so prone to group-think and follow-the-thought-leaders that as my parents would have said, "would you follow them off a cliff?" the answer as an industry is a clear "yes." We rarely seem to learn from the lessons of the past either.
IIRC the true story behind that dark period is that Microsoft was making vague murmurings about suing everyone for cloning Windows XP, so everyone felt they had to run away from that.
The problem was that it was a bunch of people who had no good ideas and no insight trying to come up with new paradigms for interaction, and they were all bad. What the Linuxen desktops were doing was even worse than Win8, and the ones on that journey were all determined for some reason to deprecate the old WinXP clone UIs at the same time. Gnome really moved into a position of harassing and mocking its old users (basically regulation redhat behavior.)
I also use the Windows key, but even then the WHOLE screen animating and changing to a different solid color was super jarring and tiring IMO. I much prefer a small popup like they have now
There's also the issue of distance for a mouse cursor to travel to select something. I think the general issue is imposing one interface for every mode of input instead of options, so either select an appropriate interface depending on how the start menu was invoked (even if it's just scaling it down to a confined space) or letting people select the default however it's invoked. Yes that's going to be more work, but when we're talking about the largest corporations on the planet I struggle to believe they can't afford it.
Yes. The constant full screen color flashing made Windows 8 not just unpleasant to use, I was unable to use it since I literally got migraines after using it for too long.
Click on a pdf? The whole screen turns bright red for a second before loading. Click on a Word file, same but blue. It was hell to use for people sensitive to flashing lights.
I got special permission at work to stick with Windows 7 longer than the rest of the company for medical reasons.
The Windows 8 start menu is no different from Launchpad on macOS throwing up a grid of icons that takes over the screen. Except macOS doesn't have the benefit of live tiles to excuse it.
Yeah I never used or liked Launchpad. On macOS I only ever used Spotlight (and Raycast for the past few years).
The only redeeming thing I could say about Launchpad is that it did not replace Spotlight (unlike Windows 8 Start Menu which was a replacement to the previous start menu)
> Apple did not even bother with touch screen laptops on the other hand.
> Windows 8 was Microsoft thinking everyone was going to use touch screens for EVERYTHING and ruining the non-touch screen experience for most.
Did/Does anyone actually use the touch screen on a laptop? Surfaces still ship with a touchscreen, so I assume they've done their market research.... It just seems like the trackpad/keyboard are the better ways to interface with your laptop, especially when it's already built in and not BT accessories or something. I hate to sound like an Apple fanboy but I'd assume the thought process was something along the lines of "Customers want touch screens on phones and tablets, not laptops"
My laptop fills the role of "Desktop computer on the go" and I want it to emulate that as close as possible, aside from form factor. Maybe I'm in the minority there? Others do use a laptop as a primary 'daily driver' and want the touch screen?
I can't imagine my working life without a touchscreen. Drag to scroll, touch to focus, pinch to zoom, just the usual stuff. I also use business style light laptops, so touch is always there and more usable/precise than the touchpad. People always get confused when they ask me for help on their machines and I reach to the screen for... nothing, usually.
> People always get confused when they ask me for help on their machines and I reach to the screen
Nooooo, please don't touch my screen! I can't stand fingerprints on my laptop display! Pretty much every gesture you mentioned has a touch pad equivalent that works just as well or better for a desktop OS.
> Drag to scroll, touch to focus, pinch to zoom, just the usual stuff
I feel like trackpads do most of the above better than a touchscreen? Mac trackpads, at any rate (I do recall a lot of PC trackpads and/or drivers being hot garbage)
I don’t want a touchscreen laptop, but I do want a laptop that can convert to a tablet. Not to use as a tablet, but because then I can plug in a proper keyboard and just use the laptop as a monitor. If they sold non-touchscreen convertibles I’d go for that, but realistically that’s an impossible niche.
Yes, and this is a huge habit difference between Mac and Windows laptop users I know. Give a Windows user a Mac and they will habitually try to use scrollbars with their fingers. Mac users just don’t have that habit and they find it strange. The reflective MacBook screens also look awful with the slightest smudge so that enforces the “don’t touch” reflex for them, I think.
I don't, but my kids definitely do. I think this is a generational gap largely due to "what you grew up on." A laptop having a touch screen is near the top of the list of very-nice-to-have or even must-have features for my kids
I do use one that converts to a tablet and has a stylus. But I have to do a lot of serious drawing for a living. I also appreciate coming close to book note taking without having to print stuff.
With the continuous degradation of Windows past 8.1, I slowly moved away from Surface, Windows and Touch, but even months after I have got a non-touch notebook, I still would touch my screen.
Yes, quite a bit. Not so much as a replacement for trackpad/keyboard/mouse, but mostly to write down notes with a stylus, or do some quick sketches. I don't do that often enough to justify carrying another device like a tablet, but regularly enough to feel limited by the absence of touchscreens.
I have a Surface Laptop Studio. And while Windows 11 overall kinda sucks, the ability to turn it into a little easel and the responsiveness of the pen are both great. I also like precise scrolling with the touchscreen sometimes.
The part of the hardware I really don't like is that the `Fn` key toggles fn-lock with a tap and then alt + F4 and such don't work. There's enough space to have another row of keys or something, I never want fn-lock off (I use four finger scroll for volume controls), it's infuriating. But pretty much all laptops (and shockingly some desktop keyboards) have similarly dumb behavior.
I would never used the phrase "good intentions" in combination with Windows 8.1.
Say you had a mechanic you brought your car to for an inspection and they would set it on fire in the parking lot because of "evil ghosts" since they heard a squeak that sounded like evil ghosts speaking. Calling what they did "good intentions just poorly executed" isn't really fitting is it?
Microsoft got hit by a case of delusion on a corporate level where seemingly good arguments combine to create the completely wrong conclusions.
That still worked yes! But I don't think most people knew about this. You just gave me flashbacks to those days working at the local college, we would do this to restart all the machines in a classroom, we had them all on Deepfreeze so it would purge anything students downloaded / installed. We had other remote ways of doing it, but it was fun doing the shortcut too from time to time.
It did. To some extent it seems like it was a telemetry mistake that some of the easier mouse controls (an actual button for start rather than gesture; a missing obvious power button; not having a simple mouse button to get to the Charms; etc). Windows users opted into Windows telemetry all must have seemed to be keyboard-heavy (probably because only certain types of power users, such as myself, were opting in to telemetry). All of the keyboard shortcuts still worked. Some new keyboard shortcuts were added. Windows 8 was extremely useful from a keyboard shortcut viewpoint. (The Charms made a lot more sense from the keyboard.)
On "regular computers" I think it was flawed in two fatal ways:
- there was already an extremely heavy expectation that clicking the start button or pressing the windows key would bring up a menu, not a full screen takeover where all contextual sense of place (that you had in the past experience) was lost.
- the UI being a full-screen takeover on a phone (Windows Phone) or a tablet (10"-ish tops at the time) was OK but on a 21~27" desktop it's absurdly overwhelming.
If you had good Live Tiles there was a ton of information density. You could have the weather, your calendar, recent emails, recent tweets, recent photos, interesting news, etc all on one at-a-glance screen (versus the phone form factor where you'd need at least some scrolling).
It felt like wasted space on the desktop because it was originally hard for desktop apps to opt-in to Live Tiles and send Live Tile updates and not enough people were using the sorts of multi-platform apps that had great Live Tiles.
Sadly grids of unrelated data aren't good for information at a glance. A wall of post-it notes will never beat a structured list; the old Start menu was a structured list, where you knew things were always in the same place (the Programs submenu didn't move or say "software" sometimes, and "programs" other times) whereas the Windows 8 menu was a wall of random post-it notes flung on the screen and you're meant to gaze over the entire thing to look at unrelated data and somehow make sense of it.
A wall of post-it notes can be incredibly handy to the person that placed the post-it notes. The Start screen was never "random", it was designed for customization and personalization. Programs stayed where you told them to in the groups and sizes you wanted them to. Choosing a size would affect how much data an app could show. The program might provide a tile of new data it would show some of the time, but the program's name and icon would still show up in most of the tile variants (and hover tooltips worked on Desktop), and any app could only have at most 3 tiles at a time. The timing of tile flips was a bit random, but there was also a general rhythm to it you would pick up if you used it a lot. It was a very intentional "dance".
At least in my experience there was a lot of sense to it. I had a lot of data organized to my liking in Windows 8.
The start screen is something you just had to get used to. I think it's more comfortable than the menu. Effectively it works as a second desktop to put application shortcuts on. I have about 30-40 on mine (on Windows 10, mind you), which is way more than would fit on a menu without submenus.
Tbf the mobile OS with a similar design language was the best mobile UI I ever had the pleasure of using. Last time I felt impressed by Microsoft but alas.
Me too! Metro design was, I don't know, a whole different league compared to Apple or the Androids of that time. I'm not sad that MS failed on that front, but damn, that was a good mobile phone UI.
It did a few things right relative to Vista but it was also bad in many different ways, including but not limited to the (double) Control Panel
So it was a bit of a love/hate relationship.
Windows 2K is still the best ever made by Microsoft. I wish they'd just stay on that design and make incremental improvements to keep it fresh and modern.
>It is kinda funny reading all the comments about its nostalgia, when all I could think was how annoying it was.
Agreed and it happens with almost every sunsetted version of Windows. At the time of XP, it was how great W98SE was, and in 7, XP was so amazing, etc., etc. I think the "every other version" meme has only recently been killed by MS because it has been so long from 8.1 to 10 to 11. But even when 11 is sunsetted, there will surely be articles about how amazing 11 was and how much they dislike 12.
First thing I did after installing upgrading to Windows 8 was installing Startisback and I forgot I was even running it. I'm not exaggerating, one time a friend sitting by asked if I was it was Windows 8 and I had to think for a moment.
Windows 8.1 combined with StartIsBack was a much better OS than Windows 10 I was actually surprised when everyone praised that ad pushing piece of crap with mandatory spyware, forced updates and inconsistent UI all over the place.
What I find slightly amusing is that my Chromebook used to have a center-aligned task menu. Now Windows has a center-aligned task menu and Chrome OS...aligned it left!
My first experience with it was I couldn't figure out how to shut down my pc (the stupid side charm bar) on Beta 1 of Windows 8.
It was last seen perhaps in the Windows 11 Beta 1 release, confined within the start menu and I think this is where it peaked. It was removed shortly after to the yuck we have now, perhaps slightly coming back in 25H2 with the New Windows 11 start menu experience app groups (I have not personally used it)
I too hated original metro on desktop back in the day and especially missed the start menu, but I also look back on it fondly.
I think that Microsoft was ahead of its time and that they had a better design language than any competitor and original metro still holds up favorably to contemporary designs.
Last time I sat down with a windows 11 pc I even thought “wouldn’t it be better if the start menu was just full screen?”
At the time (1993, when NT came out) there was a good reason.
C-A-D was a special reserved keystroke that couldn't be intercepted or redirected. So you could use it even to interrupt a task that had frozen the entire UI.
Using it for login meant it could bypass and circumvent any malware that attempted to steal credentials, etc.
Then MS let people replace the GINA that handled it, and then they let people turn it off, and it joined the rest of the slide into junkware...
I think 8.1 and later fixed a lot of this, but in 8, even if you were on a 100% "desktop" device using mouse and keyboard, whenever you'd "close" an app, it would take to the huge start screen instead of your desktop, and you'd have to find the "desktop" button to get back to that.
This is some of what I wrote in July 2013 as suggestions for how Windows 8 should change behavior when mouse and keyboard is present:
• By default, boot to the desktop. (This is a new individually available option in Windows 8.1.)
• By default, return to previous applications. Similar to Windows Phone and Windows 7, when you close an application, you should return to where you were before. If you are in any kind of desktop experience when launching an application, whether it's for the desktop or in the Modern interface, you should return to that desktop environment upon closing the application.
• By default, open media files and documents in desktop applications. Fortunately, when you select these as your defaults, you are properly returned to the desktop when you close the application. Unfortunately, any Modern applications return you to the Start Screen when you close them.
• By default, if there is no touch screen, disable hot corners and edges. Provide an option to enable them within your mouse-driven experience.
• By default, if there is no touch screen, provide a classic Start Menu in addition to the Start Screen. Mice are well-suited to smaller menus that pop out and allow you to remain largely in the desktop experience while you select new files and applications to open. Provide an option to disable the Start Menu and jump to the Start Screen if desired.
• Upon first run and selection of the mouse-driven experience, run a video demonstration introducing users to the Modern interface, Start Screen, hot corners, gestures, charms, Windows Store and Modern applications, focused on how to access these items with a mouse and keyboard.
• By default, provide a Search experience tailored to the desktop environment.
"Most of the above options already exist in Windows 8, but it takes some information, time and effort for users to change the settings and get the experience you expect when using a system without a touch screen, largely driven by mouse control. It is in these conditions that users are frustrated by Windows 8, as they find themselves faced with interfaces that are much friendlier to touch screens, and are unexpectedly removed from the desktop experience and placed into the Modern interface and Start Screen, disrupting their workflow and adding extra steps to return to the windows, applications and tasks they were working in. An overall one-click default upon first usage of Windows would allow users to select the mouse-driven experience they prefer on systems that are not primarily driven by touch."
> Also, sitting around doing nothing feels so much better when it's either before work or after work.
This comment reminded me of a book I read recently - Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anne Lembke. She talks about how pleasure and pain and experienced by the same region of the brain and they need to be balanced. I'd highly recommend reading that book.
This is correct, but it is still a slippery slope. At some point the dev ends up adding internet permission (might be for legit reasons too), and lo and behold you are sharing your data. For something as sensitive as notifications, I really can't trust anything but open-source app which is vetted by a few seasoned people and hosted on F-droid.
Also non-GrapheneOS Android. I'm on CrDroid (Android 16), ans if I go into "Settings -> Apps -> Some App -> Mobile data usage", there's a toggle for "Allow internet access", and a few more to control network access on Wi-Fi, cellular, background, and VPN.
Would a safe alternative (albeit annoying to update) be to side load the apk for the purpose of eliminating the possibility of auto updates brought on by an app store?
I really enjoyed reading this. I can totally see where the author is coming from. I have a dog, and this holiday season my wife went away to her parents for a month and I was all alone with my dog. My daily routine was to just take him for a hike in the morning, workout in my basement gym, cook some breakfast then do some mundane activities at home then prepare cooking for lunch (always prepare extra lunch for the neighbours or the random friend that shows up at my door), then again take the dog out to the dog park and enjoy conversation with regulars and or new ones. Come back enjoy lunch, read some book, then around 4pm before it gets too dark, take the dog out again for a hike. Stop by at a friend's house or just come back home watch a Disney movie then read again until you fall asleep.
All this time, I would intentionally forget my phone at home and all my notifications except calls were turned off.
EDIT: I must say having a dog made a lot of difference, I don't know if I would feel the same being just alone. That might be an experiment for another time :-).
> and use a wireless keyboard with integrated touchpad to control it.
Which wireless keyboard do you use? I've pretty much exact same setup - TV + Linux Mint + Logitech K400+. I'm just looking to see if there are better options for K400+
There is something to be said about building tools out of kindness and not for greed. Thank you for your contributions to OSM and Thank you OSM developers too - big fan and user!