At a first guess: It probably could. With careful tuning of bid prices, my guess is that non-targeted (or at least non-user-data-targeted - e.g. "you're on Sports Illustrated, you're probably interested in a special offer off ESPN") ads could turn a profit. But they could turn _more_ profit if targeted, and a publicly traded company would be under irresistible pressure to exploit that.

Facebook doesn't have to price their "get out of advertising jail" card to match the lost revenue - they can include whatever profit margin they like, or they could intentionally run it at a loss. However, lots of analysis has been done on this, and perhaps the most interesting (see https://washingtonmonthly.com/... ) is to analyze how much ad revenue is fairly conclusively linkable to data-based targeting. And the answer appears to be 52%.

My 14yo doesn't understand cursive writing. I think America is on the edge of "can't read postcards from Great-Grandma" to the same extent that, say, Germany was when Suetterlin was abolished. Nothing to do with libraries, though. And, to be clear, there's a huge value in libraries, and a huge value in encouraging people to visit them. They are a quiet place to study, when home may be chaotic and noisy for many people. They are a place where you can get advice on how to look for knowledge. They have good Internet access, for people who don't have that at home. They have people who can advise you on a multitude of things. We need more libraries, and we need everyone to know what they can provide. My sole objection to the original posting was the idea that libraries are storehouses of knowledge - that era is gone. They may be _access points_ for knowledge, but the knowledge itself lives in the digital domain now.

I repeat: the content that was first published on paper is rapidly being digitized. Heck, even most (all?) public libraries now have digital loan options for a lot of their catalog. The era of _needing_ to go into a house of paper to find information has gone, unless you are doing some very specialized research into rare books that have not been digitized (possibly because they are too delicate to do so, or because their owners refuse to let it happen). Not many average citizens need to get into the secret Vatican libraries or the basement of the Louvre to research ancient codexes or grimoires that can ONLY be found in that one place.

Illiteracy rates - or perhaps "stupidity rates" might be a more apposite phrase - are not due to reduced library visitor levels, since people can get the same reading material online. They choose not to because they're distracted by advertising, social media, endlessly scrolling videos of cats, and other engagement spam. And because of other social factors such as the anti-science movement.

Which 21st century are you living in? Libraries as a center of research? Essentially all new written content (science, fiction, etc) is born digital, and physical copies of it are a secondary distribution medium. The only context in which libraries are a practical source of research material is legacy publications that have yet to be digitized - and the list of those shrinks on a daily basis as various archival projects keep gnawing away at the backlog.

In fact, most of those can be muted by pressing the second-from-top softkey on the right hand side of the screen. Not all, but most. This appears to be common knowledge, because that key is often far more worn than the other seven :) As soon as I hear the "pop" when the media player turns on the speaker, I bash that button and never hear a word of the advertising drivel.

That isn't why Apple does parts pairing - they do it so they can control the market for, and hence price of, repairs - so that _they_ can calibrate the point at which you say "ah screw it, I'll just buy a new phone".

John Deere already won their carveout - motor vehicles.

Fish is provided with bicycle and vuvuzela. Nobody asked for this, nobody needed it. IIRC Notepad was originally just an SDK demo of a multiline text entry control.

I see absolutely obvious addictive behaviors (though, in the last year it's gotten better). Again, I'm just not sure what is a workable approach. Her entire society of friends is online constantly, and that is their primary mode of contact - not F2F. And she has a boyfriend she wants to call every evening for a couple hours. In the old days she'd have been doing that on a rotary dial phone.

Plenty of schoolkids in 1998 needed to look up things like breast cancer (I use it as a very easy example) and other things where a keyword search trips up badly for innocuous content. I should know, I had to deal with the tech support tickets and figure out a way to code around these problems. Neither whitelisting nor blacklisting work.

You are missing the point. In the 1980s we communicated with our school friends via notes tossed in class, and landline calls after hours. Today, the expectation from all kids is that the way they connect to someone else is getting their digits/social media add. I can't change that on my own. It would need a bunch of people to change it at the same time, for it to make a difference

Unsustainable. Fun fact, in the 1990s I worked for a company that made various forms of security software, ranging from DSD-listed encryption software to a software suite designed to "write protect" (or rather "vandal protect") DOS and Win 3.0/3.1/95/98 systems in schools. We tried to make some Internet filtering software in 1998 or 1999 based on exactly this whitelisting principle and quickly realized that it's not workable. The only way it is "workable" is if you delegate the whitelist management to some trusted authority, which means in practice you have two classes of net citizen - net citizens who can look up whatever they need to look up ("breast cancer treatment" for example) and net citizens whose access is controlled by a religiously moderated Inquisition who doesn't let them look up anything.

There is a huge difference between "flash an ID to a store clerk, pay cash for my naughty books, no records kept that could be traced back to me" vs "use a system of age verification online which might log and record what you bought, if only because Shein wants to advertise a realistic cucumber toy to me tomorrow". Oh, and also, the latter will never actually stop children from accessing naughty things online, so this entire thing is ridiculous theater.

This article was intensely interesting to me as a step+parent. The problem is, I can't tell my 14yo stepdaughter "OK, we're not doing iPhones any more, we're going out to ride our BMX bikes to the video arcade, and you can swing by Blockbuster on your way back to pick up some videotapes while I fill up my car with leaded gasoline". If we took away her smartphone, she'd be cut off from basically all her friends because that's how her friends communicate. This can't start with one person, it would have to be a movement adopted by a lot of people simultaneously.

Of course not. I was merely making the general point that this is yet another thing that nobody needs and which I would fully remove if I could (like Cortana, in times of yore). I'm a child of pre-MS-DOS operating systems - I want to run only the software I want to run, and nothing that profits someone else.

... to find that the first google result for "remove copilot icon from taskbar" was a simple set of instructions on how to turn it off. I do not want LLMs connected to my operating system, either collecting data for traning their models, nor offering me suggestions for anything.