Thanks for this. In another strange internet coincidence, I was asking ChatGPT to break down the fundamentals of the Peano axioms just yesterday and now I see this. Thumbs up!
Can we not ruin every technology we develop with ads?
Also is this somewhat not just lining Google's/ad networks pockets? They won't care about even a large-ish number of people using this add on.
The larger adtech companies will have some form of bot-activity-detection, _but_ plenty will let it all just slip on by. (I've personally written a Babashka script at $job that checks performance of our publishers, and flags any fraudulent-seeming activity)
Fewer people went to pay. That’s the crux. Companies wanting mass market penetration, rather than just accept the natural size of the market.
Very reminiscent of the New Math pedagogy of the 1960s. Built up arithmetic entirely from sets. Crashed and burned for various reasons but I always had a soft spot for it. It also served as my introduction to binary arithmetic and topology.
(I am not suggesting that that very specific sequence of events happened in this case. It's just an example of how "I was looking this up for other reasons and then I saw something about it on HN" could genuinely happen more often than by chance, without any need for weird tracking-and-advertising shenanigans.)