Larry Hosken: New: Tag: trust-the-machine

Book Report: Subprime Attention Crisis

Much of the internet runs on ads; but maybe it's a house of cards. Apps, web pages, other content-thingies show ads to defray their costs. Advertisers want to show their messages to potential customers, and pay to do so. Everybody wins.

Except it doesn't always work so smoothly. A small business might want to show their ads on news sites and phone games and Google searches and other places; but maybe doesn't want to keep track of how their ads are doing at all those different places. So maybe the small business signs up with a couple of intermediary services, each service promising to show the ad to some desired demographic. Maybe everything's working fine? Maybe it's not? It's hard to tell.

The small business starts getting billed for ads. Thanks to creepy surveillance, that phone game thinks it knows its players' demographics, and thus will show the ad to the right people. But what if it has the demographics wrong? Or what if the intermediary service messed up and asked for the wrong demographic? Or what if the intermediary service is crooked, never actually places any ads, just sends a plausible-looking bill? Or what if…

It turns out, a lot of this stuff is pretty opaque. Publishers and advertisers have to take a lot on faith. We know ads aren't always shown to the right people, but we don't know how often. We know there's fraud out there, but we don't know how much.

The book's author compares the situation to the subprime mortgage meltdown: We know there are some bad assets out there. We know the rating system has incentive to be lazy about seeking out that badness. Is it all about to fall apart? Maybe. That could be darned bad news for news sites; even if the advertising markets only crash for a short while, it might be long enough for shoestring news organizations to go under.

I just gave to a political campaign. I dunno how much I agree with the candidate; I didn't really check. I was just so surprised to see a political campaign text show up on my phone not in the Spam folder.

screen shot of Message app. I've just sent a message that reads: This is the first campaign plea I've seen in _months_ that my phone didn't send straight to the spam folder. My congratulations to whoever crafted this campaign, nice work

Maybe the money I sent in won't go towards paying some consultant agonizing over some message that goes straight into the trash. Maybe this contribution won't be like throwing the money away, but with extra steps. It would be nice to think so, wouldn't it?

In olden times, a news pundit could "research" an easy article introduction by interviewing their taxi driver.

Nowadays, they can interview ChatGPT et al.

screen shot of toot by San Francisco pundit Gil Duran: San Francisco is the 'world capital' of AI. So how would AI solve our fentanyl overdose crisis? I interviewed ChatGPT, Google Bard, and even Grok, about the best way to save lives. The answers won't please everyone. But the debate has been overrun by moralistic arguments based on⋯

This is why we need to continue developing self-driving car technology until we have robust robotaxi systems! It's the only way Thomas L. Friedman can stay relevant!!

Inspired by Andrew Plotkin's post, I tried out a Verbatim web search on Google. In theory, this kind of search only searches for your actual search terms, doesn't try to perhaps-over-helpfully fix ty...

Only 80s kids will understand this exciting development in the field of artificial intelligence: ...

The future is amazing. FedEx: Hello Lawrence, I'm the FedEx Virtual Assistant. I'm here to help you with your questions regarding FedEx® services. Lawrence: I uploaded a file to print but g...

Book Report: Humble Pi This book talks about math errors and the consequences that follow. There are errors of engineering, software errors (dear to my heart), and plain old computation errors. Some of these get pretty int...

Book Report: Sourdough I'm acquainted with a former computer programmer who ditched that life to become a baker. But he didn't have magical-realism sourdough starter that responds to music. So maybe this book isn't that re...

Book Report: The People's Platform The internet was going to be this great thing that returned the voice to the people. That gave power to the people. I thought that. Like, maybe I thought that the Declaration of Independence of Cyber...

Police-blotter article has, among other things, a neat little instance of police body cams fighting crime: …At approximately 11:36pm, an officer who "observed a vehicle blow[ing] through a s...

Book Report: The Glass Cage I finished reading this pointless book. It was always in the "neighborhood" of saying something interesting. It's about things that technology gets wrong, a topic I'm interested in. I kept hoping! Bu...

Rock Breaks Scissors Human brains give us amazing intuition. That is to say, they've evolved some pretty great shortcuts. But those same shortcuts make our brains stumble in some situation. This book points out some of t...

Books Report: Paranoia T1 Stay Alert; S1 Reality Optional; Y1 Traitor Hangout These are novels based in the world of the Paranoia paper role-playing game. I used to play this paper RGP called Paranoia. It was pretty fun. Most RPGs put emphasis on surviving: making smart tactic...

Book Report: The Master Switch This book's title is a play on words: "The Master Switch" is a switch you can use to turn everything off. A telephone "switch" is a device at the center of a phone network that directs calls as in "s...

Book Report: Spin Control This book is a novel. This book is about human evolution. No, wait, this book is about the evolution of society. No, wait, this book is about changes in society post-singularity. No, wait, this boo...

Book Report: Security Engineering This book is humongous! It's a survey of security computer engineering. It doesn't go into depth on any one topic, but it's got plenty of breadth. In areas where I already knew something, this boo...

Book Report: Accelerando Tonight, I bought some ramen. It should have been a pretty simple operation. I was in a supermarket. There was ramen. There was my shopping basket. But it was difficult. This ramen was 25 cents...

Milestone: Nine Million Hits Wow, it's the site's nine-millionth hit: 66.249.70.236 - - [10/Jul/2007:21:58:59 -0400] "GET /departures/monterey/0/3267_diver_tm.jpg HTTP/1.1" 301 376 "-" "Googlebot-Image/1.0" It looks like some G...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Including the Googleplex I am not a hardcore puzzler. I found out that even if the puzzles are great and fun and elegant, I go stir crazy if I try to sit in a conference room and solve puzzles for 24 hours. Now some folks a...

Spam Filtering If you send mail to this domain, I might discard it without looking at it. But I probably won't. For the last few weeks, I've been using a spam filter to... filter spam. I've been carefully lookin...