benedictevans

I don't work in ad tech at all and never have. I'm just interesting in trying to work out what's doing on and what might happen. I also try to avoid moral panics and hysteria.

In different parts of your iOS settings, Apple will ask you it it's OK for ads to 'track' you, OK to 'personalise' ads and OK to 'measure ad effectiveness'. Framing is important.

Not disagreeing - I meant that generally, not specifically. You can still target by knowing something about the user, rather than relying solely on the content itself.

I argued that content moderation probably isn’t the answer and we need to something else. I really don’t know how anyone could possibly read what I wrote and believe I was saying we shouldn’t do anything. Frankly, I struggle to see that as anything other than deliberate bad faith.

I did think I’d made it extremely explicit that I don’t think any of that at all, but perhaps not (although the way you throw in a rather childish ad hominem sneer suggests you’re not thinking very clearly). What I actually wrote is that though (of course!) there will always be some bad behaviour, we want to minimise it (I compare it to malware, for heaven’s sake), but moderation might not be the best way to minimise it, and we might need different models.

As it happens, I would suggest that the idea that somehow we CAN just stop all of bad human behaviour online would be the most extreme techno-utopianism possible.

Thanks for reading. However, that’s not what Marc meant by ‘software eating the world’ and it’s not how I described consultants.

Tesla hasn’t eaten the audio industry - that’s what investors are speculating. Battery prices are falling because of technology and (mostly) volume, not particularly because of ‘China’

There are no projections about the future in this presentation. And it does very directly reference the panic about Japan and point out why China might be different.

It’s very clever to say that ‘technology’ goes back to the ancient Greeks, or the invention of bronze, or maybe the first chipped piece of flint, so ‘there’s nothing new about technology’. But this is also desperately pedantic, and adds nothing at all to the conversation, when we all know perfectly well what the normal usage of the word technology is. Quibbling about terminology tells us nothing about ideas

See slide 53

Keynote. I used to use PowerPoint, producing identical slides.

Thanks for the comment. My piece contains half a dozen specific examples of exactly the thing that you claim it misses, and most of the second-half explains why the things you think are okay are in fact complicated and subject to lawsuits.

I genuinely don't understand this argument. The fact that a platform succeeded despite security holes is not an argument against removing those holes. You might as well say that the malware explosion on Windows wasn't a problem because Windows still did well.

Well, you clearly don't read anything I write - this piece ends by saying Apple's IAP model is unsustainable and needs to be dismantled, and my previous post said big tech companies are going to become as tightly regulated as banks.

Sometimes frontier technology doesn't turn out as planned. Welcome to the tech industry - you will encounter more of this as your career continues ;)

So:

Magic Leap built a technology demonstrator, on a rig that was bolted to a table (as everyone has said). That demo was great. It was also, yes, bolted to a table. They have not turned that into a shipping mass-market consumer product.

Somehow, a bunch of people on the internets decided that because they, personally, hadn't seen the demo, anyone who had must be lying (or on acid?). This was, well, 'a bit silly', for lots of reasons, and it also missed the real challenges. The question was never 'does the tech demo exist?' Rather: Can they turn the optics on the table into something you can wear (that also has even better optics, with acceptable FOV, occlusion etc)? Can they go from a display technology to an actual platform?

Presume for the sake of argument that they solved all the optics etc questions - then they would be in the position of a company that had invented multitouch. That doesn't give you an iPhone. You still have to make an actual smartphone, work out the software and the UI, build an ecosystem, create an app store, get to scaled mass production, and that's really expensive. Or, someone had to - you could licence it out in some way (which is what Qualcomm did with CDMA - Qualcomm doesn't make phones or build cellular networks)

So: imagine back in 2006, you'd seen Jeff Han's multitouch demo. It was three feet across, came in several packing cases, and it was very very cool. But it wasn't an iPhone.

I would like version control, tracking and sign-off per side, common central library (change this slide and it changes everywhere - good luck doing that with OLE)... I want workflow.

Using Slides etc is like moving from Excel to Sheets instead of moving to Everlaw or Salesforce - there's no change in the workflow. Slides is just a light-weight copy of Powerpoint, 'but on the web!'.

The founders also created Solidworks ;)

Amazon hasn’t raised money from investors since the IPO in 1997. It’s had positive free cash flow since 2003.

A database consultant once told me that half his gigs were telling people with a database to use Excel

That's the point - to explain how people in the field are thinking about this stuff. Most people outside SV don't know what the experts in the field are saying. Indeed, many people in SV don't know this ;) If you already know all of this, you're not the target audience.

Thanks for reading! I wrote several paragraphs discussing the complexities of how changing (not removing) parking would both remove some kinds of traffic and add others, and did not at all suggest it would lead to traffic disappearing. I also discussed the issue of queuing for pickups.

On traffic waves: I think it's... unsafe to assume that a phenomenon based on human behaviours (not, in fact, just reaction time) would not change if cars are controlled by software.

Thanks for reading! I discussed both of the lines you quoted at some length, bringing up and discussing all of your points, I think, and linking research from experts in the field.

Read point 3 and the link below.

It's a collection in one place of my previous posts - there is nothing at all new here ;)

I aim to meet comments at their own level ;) Have a look at the first posts. Was that not an accurate description?

Great. The post isn't about search, or YouTube.

Most people don't have a flight every week, so flight updates are not a common problem. And most people don't go on holiday every week either, do they?

Yes, I spend a lot of time trying to work out what's going on.

Most people in tech use lots of google services all the time and think they're very important to the broader market. But many people have little or no use for them or use them only occasionally.

So, it may be that services like maps or calendar are broad (hundreds of millions of users) but shallow (many of those users use them very little)

I tried to make that clear - sorry if you couldn't get the sense.

No, i's pretty telling that you're so keen to shout 'gotcha!' that you miss the point ;)

If you use maps once a year to drive on holiday, you're not using it every week, are you? How many people use these services ALL THE TIME?