stoev

Any ideas how the signal is transmitted once the drone is underwater? Typical RC transmitters run 2.4 GHz. Some systems use 700 MHz. The former wouldn't penetrate at all, the latter might penetrate to a shallow depth, but I think that what's shown in the video is deep enough that the signal would get attenuated. There doesn't seem to be a tether and the drone doesn't seem to have any computer vision capabilities to fly itself whilst under water. I wonder how they solved this.

Thanks for the feedback. We will work on an onboarding procedure for this demo that's more easily accessible.

Thanks!

That's a good question. If you have many tabs open from the same few websites (depending on what those websites are), maybe just grouping them based on domain names would be enough to provide context.

But LLMs are needed if you want the product to have a deeper understanding of everything that you are reading and really organise it into groups. You might be reading about architecture across three devices, multiple browsers, from a bunch of different websites. This gives you the opportunity to reunite them and really dive into that topic when you need to.

LLMs are also used to create summaries of each page. So, if some content takes 30 minutes to read, you can have them extract all the interesting information for you in bullet points and based on that you can decide if its worth spending the 30 minutes or if you would rather just close that tab.

So, in short, it's about capabilities. You can have just simple statistical models and regex rules filtering similar websites into predefined categories, or you can have a tool that truly organises your reading and shortens it for you. But for the latter, you need complex models handling a lot of context.

There is a more egregious example of Google abusing its dominance with Google Analytics that people often don’t talk about.

With Google Analytics, they offer a free service. Obviously, competitors can’t do that if their business is solely analytics and they don’t have other ways to monetise the service. That’s not the problem. The problem is how Google then use that free service to gain an advantage with their core money-making business - AdWords and DV360:

As anyone in the industry knows, due to many factors (including different attribution methodologies), ad platforms show significantly different results from analytics platforms. The discrepancies easily reach into the double-digit percentages. Any discrepancy of such magnitude is concerning to an advertiser running paid ads. The same discrepancy exists between Google AdWords and Google Analytics too. Except when you integrate the two. Then, Google AdWords data are plugged directly into Google Analytics, eliminating the discrepancy rate and making it seem to any advertiser as if Google AdWords is a far more reliable traffic source then any of their competitors.

It would be very difficult to extrapolate the monetary value of what Google have earned doing this. It is a much more sophisticated and hard to detect example of dominance abuse.

Thank you for the thoughtful comment. I do actually agree with many of your points. And you are right, this could be a much longer discussion. Let me just add this - your last sentence doesn’t have to be in past tense. I believe publishers still can set themselves apart and leverage their strengths. The next couple of years will show if GDPR and the CCPA can actually help to achieve that.

Sure, there are niche categories that would be hard to get. But for your two specific examples you could use those simple sets of criteria:

1. Target specific articles with advice for older runners in running publications. 2. Target Italian recipes in cooking websites only for users located in Denver.

You don’t need to do those things manually, it can be automated. Sure, it might not deliver the scale that FB and Google are promising, but to say that it’s impossible to do contextually is not accurate.

Use Google Search ads to capture all direct intent.

Sure, it is in the author’s employer best interest for the industry to switch to contextual advertising. But it is also in the best interest of the end user. So why is that a bad thing?

I also don’t believe that behavioural advertising is better by definition. Even the article mentions some research to prove the contrary. I’ve seen it from first-hand experience as well. Which, of course, is anecdotal. But what is not is the fact that the world’s largest and most profitable advertising product, Google Search, is completely reliant on contextual rather than behavioural targeting.

The fact that publishers so far have not been able to do something about FB’s and Google’s duopoly doesn’t necessarily mean they will never be able to. Or at least I certainly hope that it doesn’t.

There is a very important point made in this article that is unfortunately lost in-between all the other arguments:

“Meanwhile, the ability to track users wherever they go tends to shift ad revenue from higher quality sites to less reputable ones. “The way the adtech system works is, it follows the reader from Wired.com all the way down to the cheapest possible place, the basement bottom-feeders on the internet, and will serve you the ads there.””

Many people don’t like seeing ads. But they do like receiving the free content that those ads pay for. And would find it far more annoying if all the content was locked behind paywalls. Whether we like it or not, digital advertising is a powerful equaliser that gave free access to vast amounts of information to anyone from any country and from any income bracket.

But the shift towards audience targeting has stripped high-quality content creators of their share of the value they create and has instead spread it out to countless click-baity websites and apps designed entirely to profit of off targeted advertising.

So diminishing our reliance on targeted advertising is not only great for the user, it would be truly game-changing for high-quality content providers as well. For some reason, this mutually beneficial outcome is often forgotten and I’m glad that Wired pointed it out.