@jwz Often a big chunk of that money (on the order of 15%) goes back to the people who make the ads, in the form of media placement commissions.Frequently professional campaign managers will have their own media consultancy on the side, and when they get hired to head a campaign, they have the campaign hire that consultancy to do its media. So now the campaign manager gets cut in too.All of this creates incentives for everybody involved to raise more money to spend on more ads, regardless of how well they actually work. Because money spent on ads is money they get a cut from.https://www.salon.com/2006/05/09/campaign_consultants/

@jwz Thank you for your service 🫡

"I can replace you lazy fucks with spicy autocomplete."If you work at Google and you don't interpret this brag on the earnings call (the *earnings call*) as a personal threat, specifically, "We can juice our quarterly numbers by just firing a quarter of you", you haven't been paying attention.How's that Return To Office Mandate going?https://jwz.org/b/ykb8

If you've noticed that the Mastodon stampede DDoS is back, hammering your servers even though you have applied countermeasures -- that's because they CHANGED THEIR FUCKING USER AGENT for no good reason and without telling anybody.Ok, yes, technically the plans were on display in a toilet with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard". Prepend "^Mastodon\/|" to your regexps.Sigh.https://jwz.org/b/ykb4

Pivot to AI: If you like music even a bit, you might boggle at the idea that people would be happy with a stream of anonymous machine-generated slop. But to the music streaming business, caring which song you're hearing makes you a weird outlier. The vasthttps://jwz.org/b/ykbx

Un-permitted vats of lye being stored in the offices of Apartheid Emerald Mine Space Karen's car dealership is giving strong "Never Trust a Man With a Pig Farm" vibes.

@jwz That followup quote tho…

It definitely sparks joy that all of the people sharing this post on Facebook are sharing the following:

@jwz After I found out you can wildcard block (on Android), dealing with spam got way easier for me. +13126808*+1312820*

@jwz @rnelson I heard that rumor too. I wonder if anyone can confirm it? I cast my vote last week and the city has registered it. Hope that means I won't keep getting mail and phone calls.

@jonpsp @jwz To be fair, Mosaic was already amazing. Netscape just made everything better.

Perennial "Fuck the Blue Angels" post.https://jwz.org/b/ykap

"Hey, Facebook, did you just tell me to go fuck myself?""I think I did, Bob."

Update: macOS 15.1 changed the syntax of the secret "Maybe Later Intensifies" plist file. https://jwz.org/b/ykZU