We lived through a generation of agism at millennials and now we're turning around and doing it at Gen Z. It's unbelievable.

In the Netherlands you put a sticker on your mail box with either of these: - NO ads, NO magazines/papers - NO ads, YES magazines/papers

Some municipalities even make it opt-in so you'd need YES/YES to get mail without a name and address on it. (ie. not direct mail)

There are also laws to enable opting out of direct mail (with name and address).

In effect, junk mail is just gone once you slap a sticker on your mailbox. This is not an unsolvable problem if you just regulate things.

What jurisdiction is responsible for when those Romanians decide to send you anthrax in physical letters?

No idea, I didn't say anything about email.

the analogy breaks at "...to get mail without a name and address on it". spam emails always have RCPT TO.

Invoking a different case with bad logic doesn't make this one any stronger. I never understand this impulse, is it just "nuh uh!"?

So actively making the internet worse. Awesome.

Proof no, but you can safely apply occams razor here.

> theoretically > they believe

Exactly. From my experience: the times I've found an ad relevant and worth clicking is about one-to-a-gazillion. Maybe relevance is higher for others but that still doesn't necessarily translate to real value. (ie. your life was improved in any way)

Also, this all presumes the targeting actually works and the current sea ads for shoes I just bought disagree with that. It's all just spam.

> The internet only took off because the primary business model which ran on ads and derivative information that servers do to their users.

Arguable, on the other hand it did kill the internet. (or, almost so far, we'll see whether we rebound after decades of enshittification)

It took me less than 1 minute to find contemporary news reports. Come on.

There's a Dutch idiom: no shine without friction.

AI is all about losing every possible bit of friction, severely underestimating the value that friction brings.

> AI is all about losing every possible bit of friction, severely underestimating the value that friction brings.

And it's not just AI, the removal of friction seems to be pursued mindlessly in all areas, with not even an attempt to understand what value it might be providing.

It’s almost as though some people fall over themselves trying to achieve maximum possible speed without giving any thought to where they want to be heading.

It boils down to "Can we? vs. Should we?"

People in tech seem to almost NEVER consider "Should we?"

"No friction no shine" is easier to remember and get since it's analogous to "no pain no gain"

Why? The permission dialog is crystal clear.

It's only sorta ok right now because nothing uses it normally. If it were used mainstream for some legitimate purpose, that permission dialog would get ignored, and it'd become a security risk. USB isn't something web needs to touch unless you really know what you're doing.