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But they do. You have to mentally process the incoming data first, then discard it. It's a waste of attention, especially with mind-catching ads you can't figur

But they do. You have to mentally process the incoming data first, then discard it. It's a waste of attention, especially with mind-catching ads you can't figure out immediately. Sometimes they are as blocking as browser pop-ups, e.g.: logotypes (or even full ads) displayed before a responsive UI is shown to you, duty-free zones in the airports, and so on. I am pretty sure we will soon have real-life targeted billboards. Even with the current tech, what prevents a webcam with NN to recognize if you're wearing sneakers and tell the display along your way to show some beanie ads, especially if it's cold outside? If you walk into a grocery store you are bombarded with displays outright, and before checking out you are tasked with cross-sale suggestions. All this crap blocks your mind and steals your attention.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago
we stopped watching tv in our home a few years ago, coupled with pi hole and ublock origin across all browsers, i personally do not see ads and neither does most of my family. if i do see them at a friends house or somewhere, it is a really jarring experience. i was at a friends house recently and they were watching tv. i found the ad break as a horrifying experience. the volume is turned too high, you can't skip it and it becomes irritating after the third ad break in an hour.
- laurent92 5y ago
  Ads are louder as an industry standard. In 2012, USA tried to implement the CALM act, which mandated content and ads to be at the same level (“A/85”), but it didn’t play out because ads are measured individually whereas a program is measured as a whole. Complaints to the FCC are still about the loudness of ads… See https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/the-mixers-guide-to-loudness-for-broadcast.html https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/the-mixers-guide-to-loudnes...
  - aix1 5y ago
    A while back I built an ad/not-an-ad classifier for TV frames based purely on pixels (i.e. not prior knowledge of specific ads). One of the interesting findings -- perhaps obvious in retrospect -- was that ad frames were on average brighter than content frames.
    - eloisius 5y ago
      I’m sure it’s out there, but I had a similar idea to make an audio device plugin like soundflower to pipe audio through and automatically mute when it detects an ad. We really need an OpenWrt-like project for smart TVs so that you could run something like what you created to mute the sound and display art during ad breaks.
      - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
        how about we use a pi-hole to send a webhook whenever a url is blocked and then we can use that hook to do the display art thing? that would be nice
        eloisius 5y ago
        Point ad domains to 127.0.0.1 and run a local https that displays art.
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      How accurate did you get? Are frame-to-frame probabilities pretty independent? I wonder if you can hit some arbitrary threshold by implementing something like "n frames in a row."
      - aix1 5y ago
        The time series of frame probabilities is of course highly autocorrelated, but I never bothered to model that due to lack of interest. From memory, a simple single-frame classifier was >95% accurate (this was quite a few years ago, mind you). In my small-sample and not very rigorous testing, this was higher than human rates. Turns out that on average it's pretty hard to tell an ad from content just by looking at the pixels of a single frame. I am quite confident that it wouldn't be too hard to build an ad detection ML model that would have near-perfect accuracy. That said, an approach based on algorithmically detecting repeated segments of lengths consistent with ad spots would work just as well, if not better. P.S. One thing I thought was really interesting was that the classifier -- that was only ever shown a binary label (ad/not-an-ad) -- learnt an embedding that grouped together entire categories of things across TV networks and geographies (studio news, weather, traffic reports etc).
- rambambram 5y ago
  This. I also block ads and got rid of my tv years ago. But the moment an ad does pop up somewhere, it's really extra annoying.
agumonkey 5y ago
There's something different about streets and web. I'm not sure but on my laptop i kinda expect things to go to the point, fast. A street is not a mean to an end. So a bus stop with some ad.. doesn't really changes everything. Consider web ads more like annoying bus boys trying to get you to order something in their restaurant by stepping in front of you and mirroring every move.
- egeozcan 5y ago
  It changes a lot if you have ADHD. IMHO, it's an accessibility problem for people like me.
  - aqfamnzc 5y ago
    I don't know if I would call it an accessibility problem for me personally, but yeah as someone who has trouble staying focused, a moving screen or flashy ad is almost impossible not to look at, and extremely intrusive. Using the web without an ad blocker is an absolute nightmare for me.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    It really disturbs your way in public space ? Maybe i'm too oblivious to IRL ads.
    - boomlinde 5y ago
      It very much depends on where you live of course. Thankfully, most places regulate public advertisement to some extent, but the level of regulation will differ from place to place.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      I think it makes navigation harder for me; I notice that it's a lot harder for me to parse out actually relevant information in busy spaces like airports/cities. Particularly while doing something like driving, because I'm juggling a lot of information in those situations and paying more attention to the people around me, rather than just focusing on signs. For a long time I thought that was all just due to crowds/stress and nothing else, but I'm increasingly convinced that part of it is just that it's harder for me to pick out when scanning a room where the signs are the indicate where I'm supposed to be. Also seems to make it more likely that I'll walk past an indicator or miss something while I'm trying to navigate the space. I'm always paranoid inside of these busier spaces about whether I'm going to miss something important and end up walking in the opposite direction of where I need to go. It may depend a lot on not just the area but also what you're personally used to; navigation in these spaces are a skill that people get better at over time. I suspect that some of the difficulties become less difficult as people's brains get better at filtering things out or recognizing indicators that they need to zero in on. In the same way that after a while playing a game you start to instinctively zero in on certain UX choices or indicators in a level, people also instinctively start to zero in on how a city indicates important information (is the sign always green, does it tend to show up in a specific place). So this might also be more of an early-user UX problem for people who don't go into the city all the time or who are particularly susceptible to getting distracted by motion/colors. ---- There's a lot of research that brains are really good at learning to filter out advertising; part of the arms race in advertising isn't just with ad blockers, it's figuring out how to present ads in increasingly unusual ways where your brain won't just do pattern recognition and literally just refuse to process or register them. Human brains are heckin good at pattern recognition. But that means that there is an arms race with advertisers trying to figure out what the next evolution is with billboards or how to trick your brain to register things, and it means that people who are less equipped to do that filtering or are just unfamiliar with the space often end up getting thrown in the deep end because their brains aren't trained to do that filtering yet, or are trained to filter different things.
jtbayly 5y ago
- SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
  I strongly disagree, his comment is not an ad, it is content. We all came to this page looking for comments like that. Every single experience in life changes the way I think and feel, that doesn't mean everything is an ad, the defining characteristic of an ad is the fact that it is unwanted, that it is imposed on people as an attention tax imposed on some other experience we actually want.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The difference is that his "ad" is relevant; you are on a comment thread about ads reading his (relevant) reply, similar to seeing an ad about a phone in a phone store. In contrast, ads in most public places are completely irrelevant and unwelcome.
  - wowokay 5y ago
    Idk, I have never been upset about ads in real life, I wouldn't consider most if any as unwanted.
- shmageggy 5y ago
  Another difference not mentioned by sibling comments is that ads are purchased. They are necessarily the domain of the well-funded and therefore already-powerful, and whose purpose is to typically to enhance their purchasers wealth or power. They are a tool for inequality.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Not really. Comments are comments. Not ads. You came here to read the comments. Nobody paid some ad company to show it to you and force the ideas into your head. The fact you agreed with the comment doesn't mean it's an ad, it means you found it persuasive.
sacado2 5y ago
If browser ads had a real-life equivalent, they would be more like that creep who suddenly pops in front of attractive women in the street trying to grab their phone numbers, and no matter what you do you'll never get rid of him and he'll be following you on your way back home (probably to provide you with a "better user experience"). If all web ads were limited to a static gif here or there in the corner of a web page, I don't think adblock plus would be a thing at all.
- ouid 5y ago
  ad blocking would absolutely be a thing still. Fundamentally an ad blocker is just a filter on what portions of web page get loaded. It is my intention to increase the signal to noise ratio on the things I experience, so I would filter these things out myself at the brain level. I'm just automating the process and offloading it to the browser, and there will always be strong incentive to automate things.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    If ads were just gifs or pngs that loaded from the same site, did not noticably impact page load times, and were displayed alongside the main content (analagous to ads in a magazine) I would likely not bother blocking them (and blocking would be more difficult: how would the blocking software know that they were ads and not part of the main content of the page?) I block ads when they do things like take over focus, are distractingly animated, slow down the page, overload my CPU, etc.
    - whiplash451 5y ago
      In fact, most ad blockers do just that: they filter out all ads but the ok-looking ones that fits a non-invasive standard.
    - micromacrofoot 5y ago
      I would also not bother blocking them… I intentionally tolerated ads for years, the flash era was pretty bad… but almost quaint compared to the onslaught of ads that know everything from who your friends are, how much money you make, and what dandruff shampoo you use… (plus that one time you googled “butt plugs”) and for what? so they can still occupy the majority of screen space and intentionally distract me? yeah give me the buzzing “swat the fly” ads instead please
tekromancr 5y ago
We do have real life targeted ads. The NYC Link terminals, for example, can detect tons of data about the devices people carry, and the comings and goings of the owners, and sometimes link them to their ad profiles. ads for display can then be selected accordingly. This isn't even particularly new tech, they prototyped roadside billboards thay could infer what radio stations the cars driving by were listening to, and this was in the early 2000s
- aesthesia 5y ago
  > they prototyped roadside billboards thay could infer what radio stations the cars driving by were listening to Any idea how this was supposed to work? I don't know how that information would leak out unless it was just listening for the audio from a car with windows rolled down.
  - banana_giraffe 5y ago
    An archive of the company behind that tech [1], has this to say: > Each car radio sends out a signal at a frequency higher than the one it is receiving from the radio station. When a car passes by one of the MobilTrak sensors, the sensor picks up on the signal to determine what the driver is listening to on the radio And US6813475B1 seems to be the patent behind the tech. If they ever really could find that sort of signal in the noise of the real world, I've got to imagine that improved tech for in-car radios, not to mention people listening to their phones via Bluetooth and SiriusXM, has rendered it even more broken. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020720075012/http://www.mobiltrak.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020720075012/http://www.mobilt...
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      > Each car radio sends out a signal at a frequency higher than the one it is receiving from the radio station. Why would it do that? I thought car radios were merely receivers, not transmitters. This is insane...
      - 5y ago
Fnoord 5y ago
What annoys me most is advertising on highway and in traffic. I am not allowed to use a smartphone because it distracts me; fair enough. What about safety on the road though? All these signals are pure noise, irrelevant to traffic.
- shukantpal 5y ago
  Should we cut down all trees next to road? They’re a beautiful distraction.
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    Its voluntary and you need to deliberately watch them. They're not planted to catch your attention in ANNOYING ways.
    - Supermancho 5y ago
      I would say the same about anything on the road that isn't specifically for safety/traffic shaping. > They're not planted to catch your attention in ANNOYING ways. Even some of traffic shaping signage are specifically designed to be that way. More importantly, this is about a freedom of expression. If I want to yell about my fruit farm or hold a sign for your product; is that different? How does the freedom to express yourself contend with some idea of limiting "commercial advertisement"?
      - Fnoord 5y ago
        Safety on the road is more important that the freedom to annoy drivers. Also, you can express yourself elsewhere instead of on the road. And, on top of that, a driver doesn't have the freedom to completely ignore the expression (not yet). I can ignore some yelling fellow on a market (never liked that annoying, noisy shit either btw) with noisecancelling earplugs. One can't drive with a blindfold. I'm sure there is gonna be QQ over AR in driving, partly justified. However, less is more. Plus, AR could allow you to get traffic signs in a HUD. Can't miss them.
Seirdy 5y ago
> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. … Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. -- Adaptation from a Banksy essay in defense of remixing ("vandalising") public advertisements. Fundamentally, all these ads share the quality of showing people content they didn't ask for to lure consumers into spending money they otherwise wouldn't have. Why the wouldn't I block them everywhere? It's disgusting. I know many people like to argue that they're a "necessary evil" to pay for content, but I have little patience for this argument because it assumes that vendors are entitled to the success of their flawed business models, and people should give up freedoms to support the industry. My consciousness is not for sale, sorry.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  This essay looks amazing. Can you please reference it?
  - tomjakubowski 5y ago
    The quoted essay is called Cut It Out. Hard to find a full text of it without OCR noise. https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/banksy-accused-of-plagiarism-by-zine-author/ https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/banksy-accused-of-plagiarism-...
    - docfort 5y ago
      Banksy on Advertising “People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girifriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are “The Advertisers" and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs. - Banksy
whiplash451 5y ago
They definitely do. Ads in the subway carry an outstanding cognitive load. A simple experiment helps understand this: just walk through a super ad-heavy subway (Paris or London) then through a much lighter one (Vienna). The difference is significant. The mental experiment is literally different.
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  The only reason ads exist is to reprogram our brains and make us want things we didn't previously want. It's brainwashing. People who say ads in public spaces do not bother them might be easier influenced than they understand. I often hear people say ads don't work on them but we're all susceptible to being manipulated.
  - bnralt 5y ago
    Indeed, ads aren't charity. If companies are spending $1,000 per adult in the United States for advertising (which the are, from the figures I can find), that's because they either: A. Expect the ads will manipulate spending habits to bring in more than $1,000 of profits per adult on average (with the actual spending needed to reach that profit being far in excess of $1,000, considering profit is only a fraction of revenue). B. Don't expect the ads to manipulate spending habits, but are stuck in game theory hell where companies waste a vaste amount of resources (10x the budget of NASA) merely to maintain the status quo, because any company that doesn't will fall behind its rivals. C. Some mixture of A and B. The cost to the public is mental intrusion (if mental intrusion didn't work, companies wouldn't buy ads), financial (in case A), and also the bad habits that advertising companies and the companies that deliver them push on us so that we can consume more (sedentary culture of watching TV to consume more ads, mindless browsing to consume more ads, encouraging political fights with family to increase engagement and consume more ads). It's hard to not come to the conclusion that advertising is a huge blight on modern society, and exactly the kind of thing collective action by a society should be fighting against.
- grishka 5y ago
  Ads in the subway just shouldn't be a thing, period. You already pay for the ticket.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
Everybody draws the line somewhere else, but I hope you agree that "stealing your attention" is different from requiring an active action to be able to continue onward towards whatever task you were trying to accomplish (even if you might consider both unacceptable).
gjs278 5y ago

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

we stopped watching tv in our home a few years ago, coupled with pi hole and ublock origin across all browsers, i personally do not see ads and neither does most of my family. if i do see them at a friends house or somewhere, it is a really jarring experience. i was at a friends house recently and they were watching tv. i found the ad break as a horrifying experience. the volume is turned too high, you can't skip it and it becomes irritating after the third ad break in an hour.

laurent92 5y ago
Ads are louder as an industry standard. In 2012, USA tried to implement the CALM act, which mandated content and ads to be at the same level (“A/85”), but it didn’t play out because ads are measured individually whereas a program is measured as a whole. Complaints to the FCC are still about the loudness of ads… See https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/the-mixers-guide-to-loudness-for-broadcast.html https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/the-mixers-guide-to-loudnes...
- aix1 5y ago
  A while back I built an ad/not-an-ad classifier for TV frames based purely on pixels (i.e. not prior knowledge of specific ads). One of the interesting findings -- perhaps obvious in retrospect -- was that ad frames were on average brighter than content frames.
  - eloisius 5y ago
    I’m sure it’s out there, but I had a similar idea to make an audio device plugin like soundflower to pipe audio through and automatically mute when it detects an ad. We really need an OpenWrt-like project for smart TVs so that you could run something like what you created to mute the sound and display art during ad breaks.
    - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
      how about we use a pi-hole to send a webhook whenever a url is blocked and then we can use that hook to do the display art thing? that would be nice
      - eloisius 5y ago
        Point ad domains to 127.0.0.1 and run a local https that displays art.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    How accurate did you get? Are frame-to-frame probabilities pretty independent? I wonder if you can hit some arbitrary threshold by implementing something like "n frames in a row."
    - aix1 5y ago
      The time series of frame probabilities is of course highly autocorrelated, but I never bothered to model that due to lack of interest. From memory, a simple single-frame classifier was >95% accurate (this was quite a few years ago, mind you). In my small-sample and not very rigorous testing, this was higher than human rates. Turns out that on average it's pretty hard to tell an ad from content just by looking at the pixels of a single frame. I am quite confident that it wouldn't be too hard to build an ad detection ML model that would have near-perfect accuracy. That said, an approach based on algorithmically detecting repeated segments of lengths consistent with ad spots would work just as well, if not better. P.S. One thing I thought was really interesting was that the classifier -- that was only ever shown a binary label (ad/not-an-ad) -- learnt an embedding that grouped together entire categories of things across TV networks and geographies (studio news, weather, traffic reports etc).
rambambram 5y ago
This. I also block ads and got rid of my tv years ago. But the moment an ad does pop up somewhere, it's really extra annoying.

agumonkey 5y ago

There's something different about streets and web. I'm not sure but on my laptop i kinda expect things to go to the point, fast. A street is not a mean to an end. So a bus stop with some ad.. doesn't really changes everything. Consider web ads more like annoying bus boys trying to get you to order something in their restaurant by stepping in front of you and mirroring every move.

egeozcan 5y ago
It changes a lot if you have ADHD. IMHO, it's an accessibility problem for people like me.
- aqfamnzc 5y ago
  I don't know if I would call it an accessibility problem for me personally, but yeah as someone who has trouble staying focused, a moving screen or flashy ad is almost impossible not to look at, and extremely intrusive. Using the web without an ad blocker is an absolute nightmare for me.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  It really disturbs your way in public space ? Maybe i'm too oblivious to IRL ads.
  - boomlinde 5y ago
    It very much depends on where you live of course. Thankfully, most places regulate public advertisement to some extent, but the level of regulation will differ from place to place.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    I think it makes navigation harder for me; I notice that it's a lot harder for me to parse out actually relevant information in busy spaces like airports/cities. Particularly while doing something like driving, because I'm juggling a lot of information in those situations and paying more attention to the people around me, rather than just focusing on signs. For a long time I thought that was all just due to crowds/stress and nothing else, but I'm increasingly convinced that part of it is just that it's harder for me to pick out when scanning a room where the signs are the indicate where I'm supposed to be. Also seems to make it more likely that I'll walk past an indicator or miss something while I'm trying to navigate the space. I'm always paranoid inside of these busier spaces about whether I'm going to miss something important and end up walking in the opposite direction of where I need to go. It may depend a lot on not just the area but also what you're personally used to; navigation in these spaces are a skill that people get better at over time. I suspect that some of the difficulties become less difficult as people's brains get better at filtering things out or recognizing indicators that they need to zero in on. In the same way that after a while playing a game you start to instinctively zero in on certain UX choices or indicators in a level, people also instinctively start to zero in on how a city indicates important information (is the sign always green, does it tend to show up in a specific place). So this might also be more of an early-user UX problem for people who don't go into the city all the time or who are particularly susceptible to getting distracted by motion/colors. ---- There's a lot of research that brains are really good at learning to filter out advertising; part of the arms race in advertising isn't just with ad blockers, it's figuring out how to present ads in increasingly unusual ways where your brain won't just do pattern recognition and literally just refuse to process or register them. Human brains are heckin good at pattern recognition. But that means that there is an arms race with advertisers trying to figure out what the next evolution is with billboards or how to trick your brain to register things, and it means that people who are less equipped to do that filtering or are just unfamiliar with the space often end up getting thrown in the deep end because their brains aren't trained to do that filtering yet, or are trained to filter different things.

jtbayly 5y ago

SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
I strongly disagree, his comment is not an ad, it is content. We all came to this page looking for comments like that. Every single experience in life changes the way I think and feel, that doesn't mean everything is an ad, the defining characteristic of an ad is the fact that it is unwanted, that it is imposed on people as an attention tax imposed on some other experience we actually want.
Nextgrid 5y ago
The difference is that his "ad" is relevant; you are on a comment thread about ads reading his (relevant) reply, similar to seeing an ad about a phone in a phone store. In contrast, ads in most public places are completely irrelevant and unwelcome.
- wowokay 5y ago
  Idk, I have never been upset about ads in real life, I wouldn't consider most if any as unwanted.
shmageggy 5y ago
Another difference not mentioned by sibling comments is that ads are purchased. They are necessarily the domain of the well-funded and therefore already-powerful, and whose purpose is to typically to enhance their purchasers wealth or power. They are a tool for inequality.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Not really. Comments are comments. Not ads. You came here to read the comments. Nobody paid some ad company to show it to you and force the ideas into your head. The fact you agreed with the comment doesn't mean it's an ad, it means you found it persuasive.

sacado2 5y ago

If browser ads had a real-life equivalent, they would be more like that creep who suddenly pops in front of attractive women in the street trying to grab their phone numbers, and no matter what you do you'll never get rid of him and he'll be following you on your way back home (probably to provide you with a "better user experience"). If all web ads were limited to a static gif here or there in the corner of a web page, I don't think adblock plus would be a thing at all.

ouid 5y ago
ad blocking would absolutely be a thing still. Fundamentally an ad blocker is just a filter on what portions of web page get loaded. It is my intention to increase the signal to noise ratio on the things I experience, so I would filter these things out myself at the brain level. I'm just automating the process and offloading it to the browser, and there will always be strong incentive to automate things.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  If ads were just gifs or pngs that loaded from the same site, did not noticably impact page load times, and were displayed alongside the main content (analagous to ads in a magazine) I would likely not bother blocking them (and blocking would be more difficult: how would the blocking software know that they were ads and not part of the main content of the page?) I block ads when they do things like take over focus, are distractingly animated, slow down the page, overload my CPU, etc.
  - whiplash451 5y ago
    In fact, most ad blockers do just that: they filter out all ads but the ok-looking ones that fits a non-invasive standard.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    I would also not bother blocking them… I intentionally tolerated ads for years, the flash era was pretty bad… but almost quaint compared to the onslaught of ads that know everything from who your friends are, how much money you make, and what dandruff shampoo you use… (plus that one time you googled “butt plugs”) and for what? so they can still occupy the majority of screen space and intentionally distract me? yeah give me the buzzing “swat the fly” ads instead please

tekromancr 5y ago

We do have real life targeted ads. The NYC Link terminals, for example, can detect tons of data about the devices people carry, and the comings and goings of the owners, and sometimes link them to their ad profiles. ads for display can then be selected accordingly. This isn't even particularly new tech, they prototyped roadside billboards thay could infer what radio stations the cars driving by were listening to, and this was in the early 2000s

aesthesia 5y ago
> they prototyped roadside billboards thay could infer what radio stations the cars driving by were listening to Any idea how this was supposed to work? I don't know how that information would leak out unless it was just listening for the audio from a car with windows rolled down.
- banana_giraffe 5y ago
  An archive of the company behind that tech [1], has this to say: > Each car radio sends out a signal at a frequency higher than the one it is receiving from the radio station. When a car passes by one of the MobilTrak sensors, the sensor picks up on the signal to determine what the driver is listening to on the radio And US6813475B1 seems to be the patent behind the tech. If they ever really could find that sort of signal in the noise of the real world, I've got to imagine that improved tech for in-car radios, not to mention people listening to their phones via Bluetooth and SiriusXM, has rendered it even more broken. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020720075012/http://www.mobiltrak.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020720075012/http://www.mobilt...
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    > Each car radio sends out a signal at a frequency higher than the one it is receiving from the radio station. Why would it do that? I thought car radios were merely receivers, not transmitters. This is insane...
    - 5y ago

Fnoord 5y ago

What annoys me most is advertising on highway and in traffic. I am not allowed to use a smartphone because it distracts me; fair enough. What about safety on the road though? All these signals are pure noise, irrelevant to traffic.

shukantpal 5y ago
Should we cut down all trees next to road? They’re a beautiful distraction.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  Its voluntary and you need to deliberately watch them. They're not planted to catch your attention in ANNOYING ways.
  - Supermancho 5y ago
    I would say the same about anything on the road that isn't specifically for safety/traffic shaping. > They're not planted to catch your attention in ANNOYING ways. Even some of traffic shaping signage are specifically designed to be that way. More importantly, this is about a freedom of expression. If I want to yell about my fruit farm or hold a sign for your product; is that different? How does the freedom to express yourself contend with some idea of limiting "commercial advertisement"?
    - Fnoord 5y ago
      Safety on the road is more important that the freedom to annoy drivers. Also, you can express yourself elsewhere instead of on the road. And, on top of that, a driver doesn't have the freedom to completely ignore the expression (not yet). I can ignore some yelling fellow on a market (never liked that annoying, noisy shit either btw) with noisecancelling earplugs. One can't drive with a blindfold. I'm sure there is gonna be QQ over AR in driving, partly justified. However, less is more. Plus, AR could allow you to get traffic signs in a HUD. Can't miss them.

Seirdy 5y ago

> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. … Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. -- Adaptation from a Banksy essay in defense of remixing ("vandalising") public advertisements. Fundamentally, all these ads share the quality of showing people content they didn't ask for to lure consumers into spending money they otherwise wouldn't have. Why the wouldn't I block them everywhere? It's disgusting. I know many people like to argue that they're a "necessary evil" to pay for content, but I have little patience for this argument because it assumes that vendors are entitled to the success of their flawed business models, and people should give up freedoms to support the industry. My consciousness is not for sale, sorry.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
This essay looks amazing. Can you please reference it?
- tomjakubowski 5y ago
  The quoted essay is called Cut It Out. Hard to find a full text of it without OCR noise. https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/banksy-accused-of-plagiarism-by-zine-author/ https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/banksy-accused-of-plagiarism-...
  - docfort 5y ago
    Banksy on Advertising “People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girifriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are “The Advertisers" and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs. - Banksy

whiplash451 5y ago

They definitely do. Ads in the subway carry an outstanding cognitive load. A simple experiment helps understand this: just walk through a super ad-heavy subway (Paris or London) then through a much lighter one (Vienna). The difference is significant. The mental experiment is literally different.

trompetenaccoun 5y ago
The only reason ads exist is to reprogram our brains and make us want things we didn't previously want. It's brainwashing. People who say ads in public spaces do not bother them might be easier influenced than they understand. I often hear people say ads don't work on them but we're all susceptible to being manipulated.
- bnralt 5y ago
  Indeed, ads aren't charity. If companies are spending $1,000 per adult in the United States for advertising (which the are, from the figures I can find), that's because they either: A. Expect the ads will manipulate spending habits to bring in more than $1,000 of profits per adult on average (with the actual spending needed to reach that profit being far in excess of $1,000, considering profit is only a fraction of revenue). B. Don't expect the ads to manipulate spending habits, but are stuck in game theory hell where companies waste a vaste amount of resources (10x the budget of NASA) merely to maintain the status quo, because any company that doesn't will fall behind its rivals. C. Some mixture of A and B. The cost to the public is mental intrusion (if mental intrusion didn't work, companies wouldn't buy ads), financial (in case A), and also the bad habits that advertising companies and the companies that deliver them push on us so that we can consume more (sedentary culture of watching TV to consume more ads, mindless browsing to consume more ads, encouraging political fights with family to increase engagement and consume more ads). It's hard to not come to the conclusion that advertising is a huge blight on modern society, and exactly the kind of thing collective action by a society should be fighting against.
grishka 5y ago
Ads in the subway just shouldn't be a thing, period. You already pay for the ticket.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

Everybody draws the line somewhere else, but I hope you agree that "stealing your attention" is different from requiring an active action to be able to continue onward towards whatever task you were trying to accomplish (even if you might consider both unacceptable).

gjs278 5y ago