As someone who works in advertising, that is partially true, but also not the complete story…

Data brokers want you to believe that the more data you have the more likely your ads are to be successful, but in reality it’s not about the amount of data but the quality of the data. If you have someone who has looked at reviews of gym shoes/different models on different stores, then that data is pretty valuable as you can focus on getting them to buy from your store or try and advertise models at the top of their budget, which will likely lead to a higher ROI than just advertising on fitness forums (note it is super hard to get the balance between tipping people over the line to buy and advertising them something they were already going to buy/had already decided against - Google particularly are absolutely terrible at this, but also do evaluation in house, so they’ll misrepresent to advertisers that your ad which showed up one link above your non-sponsored link made 100% of the difference in getting the purchase). Similarly, if you have data that someone is active on a car audio forum and recently bought a specific model of car, you can advertise kits/speakers specifically to that car, which is better than just advertising “hey, we make audio upgrade kits for [specific car/cars in general] on a forum/related site”.

This also makes advertising one of the few situations where using ML actually makes sense - there’s huge amounts of data (way more than a person can consider) to come in, and patterns which lead to good results (someone purchasing something) or bad results (someone not purchasing something). It’s not worth a human targeting every single microcategory, but if an ML model can pick up that advertising to (eg) people who have recently purchased cameras who are interested in triathlons and often visit areas with with high rainfall makes them more likely to buy your specific aftermarket lens hood, then it makes buying the ads so much more worth it and also lets you extrapolate onto other microcategories which may also have similar results, and if they don’t then that updates the model.

Generally data is less useful for awareness campaigns (ie “next time you’re in the supermarket/in the business for x, buy our brand” type of campaign), especially if it’s already on a relevant site, but it’s still somewhat useful if someone is reading on a (trustworthy) news site or watching an ad-supported streaming service, however purchase data & activity data is still useful for showing more relevant ads, as while 90%+ of people on a fitness forum are going to be into fitness, I don’t think 90%+ of general site visitors or tv show viewers are going to be into anything specific enough to make it worth it to advertise it.

it’s just a knife that google thinks is kinda fly, not an official name or anything

-30C is a normal temperature in many countries, doesn’t make it any less miserable

I made a mistake from remembering something I read a long time ago and corrected my comment accordingly. I also made it clear that I thought the sentence for the protesters was way too harsh, I just took issue at the words “peaceful protest” when people were injured as a fairly direct result of their actions.

I definitely support JSO over the oil companies and whoever they pay off in government, but I don’t think claiming a protest is “peaceful” should be a “get out of jail free card”. Call it a justified protest or whatever, but the vast majority of what protesters call “peaceful protest” is actually not peaceful at all, as the actual peaceful protesters aren’t having to defend their agressive or unpeaceful actions.

I just looked up the car crashes and it was 3 people to hospital as a direct result of the traffic, I got casualties mixed up with deaths. I’ll edit my comment to say.

There’s no exact figure on ambulances delayed, but given all the traffic it caused, but for heart attacks (all I could find good data on) the chances of surviving are halved in a 4 minute period (https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.120.017048), so factoring in all serious injuries there’s a decent chance that at least one outcome was severely affected if not changed to death as a result of an ambulance being delayed.

4-5 years is way too much, yes, but when your “peaceful protest” is causing deaths hospitalisations by causing car crashes and delaying ambulances I think you both deserve some sort of repercussions and to lose the right to call it a peaceful protest

Counterpoint: the vote is near to 50/50 and neither of those maps look anywhere close to 50/50. Come back when you’ve got an alternative that looks proportional, not equally bad just the other way.

Wait wtf, how hot does it have to be for you to wear shorts?

I’ll begin wearing them 100% of the time at 50F and 0% at maybe 30F?

And then I’ll have to cower indoors in underwear only at 70F or so, as that’s *too* hot

Even if you’re not banned from hexbear can you really interact with it?

I wouldn’t call someone going through the wikipedia article for informal fallacies like it’s a checklist then brigading all your past activities an interaction so much as an experience, and not a good one at that.

it’s also worth mentioning that JPEG was designed for photographs, where there’s a very high likelihood that each pixel of an image will be a different colour to those immediately next to it. Because of this, JPEG not only has higher file sizes for text and 2d graphics/pixel art than PNG and especially a compressed SVG (which would far and away be the best method of representing the mario image - it’s close to the same “tile” thing but transferrable and well supported), but it also results in artifacts and lower quality of the image.

Let’s not pretend Guyana are as bad as Mexico, Nigeria and Kazakhstan though

This is so niche… Not current production, not future production, not emissions, just the difference between production now and production later seemingly designed to give the middle east and Venezuela a pass because they’re already producing a crazy amount

It wasn’t, however the association with Great Britain is undeniable, especially when Lesser Britain doesn’t even refer to Ireland any more (in Roman times it did), but Brittany, however “British Isles” was in use by the Greeks (at least Prettanic Isles) before even that - well before the union of England and Scotland, never mind Ireland’s conquest.

Personally I’m happy with Atlantic Isles/Islands/Archipelago as I agree the term isn’t great due to the implicit association, but it’s not like it was something just made up by colonists.

It does, especially given the name predates the country by 2-3 thousand years; it’s not exactly optimal but in reality “These Islands” is the only alternative and something is needed to refer to them from outside the islands.

The correct plural is actually wug, or dialect weg.

Hey, you don’t even need to be a part of [Input Empire Here], you can just be a Hitler megafan and change your time zone to impress Senpai (ahem, Spain)

Just use multiple pages if needed?

Who needs all their words on a single huge page like some sort of scroll?

Life expectancy is how long you can expect to live from birth. It being 30 implies that you can expect to live 30 years, however in fact you’d most likely live <5 or >50 years

This is less interesting than standard deviation, percentage living to 50/60/70/80, or life expectancy for men/women and at 1/5/18 years old though, as the issue here is it’s hard to tell what is from things like dying in childbirth for both the child & mother and dying as a young child, vs being able to live longer, as we know people have lived well into their 80s and 90s since records began (ie Ancient Greece/Egypt/Sumeria) but this data implies that everyone used to die at 30, when in reality there were likely 2 peaks at 0-5 and 60-80

Given Turkmenistan’s past record it wouldn’t even shock me to find out there’s a law saying people have to do exactly that, but yeah you’re probably right