I suspect in the near future (if not already) ChatGPT data will be sold to data brokers and bough by Amazon such that writing a prompt will end up polluting Alexa product recommendations within a few minutes to hours.

Oh for fuck sake

Can we not ruin every technology we develop with ads?

Let’s also not ruin every discussion with speculation about how someone will eventually ruin everything with ads.

Watch Adam Curtis Century of the Self. I don't think he set out to explain ads in tech, but to my mind it answers a lot about how ads specifically came to power.

Might be of interest - new AC series: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jun/14/shifty-...

We need to make ads cost more than they are worth - here's one small way (what are others?): https://adnauseam.io/

Haha that's brilliant. Does it actually 'work'? I expect there is more to recording ads than simply a click?

Also is this somewhat not just lining Google's/ad networks pockets? They won't care about even a large-ish number of people using this add on.

So, this works only for a subset of ads, specifically, ads that are CPC (cost-per-click) (sometimes called CPL -> cost-per-link), this wouldn't work for CPA campaigns (cost-per-action), which only pay out when a sign up or some other arbitrary action is performed by the user.

The larger adtech companies will have some form of bot-activity-detection, _but_ plenty will let it all just slip on by. (I've personally written a Babashka script at $job that checks performance of our publishers, and flags any fraudulent-seeming activity)

Somewhat ... But it's not just about costing the advertised money but also obfuscates my actual interests with lots of noise.

when there's a need to make money, but there's noone who wants to pay (but they want to use the service), then it naturally falls onto being ad-driven.

> no one wants to pay

Fewer people went to pay. That’s the crux. Companies wanting mass market penetration, rather than just accept the natural size of the market.

Turns out that it doesn’t matter whether people want to pay. Many paid services also include advertising.

I suspect that in the near future nobody will directly read product recommendations.

Well there was a post on mathmemes a day ago about teaching kids set theory as a foundation for math with some discussion of PA. So maybe related ideas are echoing across the intertubes in this moment?

> teaching kids set theory as a foundation for math

Very reminiscent of the New Math pedagogy of the 1960s. Built up arithmetic entirely from sets. Crashed and burned for various reasons but I always had a soft spot for it. It also served as my introduction to binary arithmetic and topology.

I've noticed this too. I will be researching a topic elsewhere and then it seems to pop up in HN. Am I just looking for patterns where there are none, or is there some trickery happening where HN tracks those activities and mixes in posts more relevant to my interests with the others?

HN has a single front page for everyone, so it's a recency illusion. You pay more attention to details and skim over titles you haven't been thinking about.

It may also be that there's some common cause for (1) a topic being on HN's front page and (2) someone researching it elsewhere. E.g., maybe a couple of days ago there was an interesting social-media post related to it, and (1) one person saw it and wrote up something interesting enough to get on HN and (2) another person saw it, started digging around to find out more, and then read HN.

(I am not suggesting that that very specific sequence of events happened in this case. It's just an example of how "I was looking this up for other reasons and then I saw something about it on HN" could genuinely happen more often than by chance, without any need for weird tracking-and-advertising shenanigans.)

This proves that ChatGPT sells your data to HN which then decides which posts to put on the front page.

Incidentally, this also proves that GP is the main character.