I think they should be disrupted with a decentralized solution where people buy and produce locally. None of this garbage sold en masse

Decentralized has become the de facto nonsense solution advocated on HN to any problem, it seems.

You just called that person’s comment “nonsense” and lumped it in with a vague category of other supposedly nonsense comments. That’s not a useful contribution to the conversation.

If you don’t understand what they are proposing, ask a question. I know exactly what they’re talking about and I agree that decentralized services underpinning markets of local goods will play an increasingly important role in the economy.

I agree that they should be be replaced by something like what you describe, but could they be disrupted that way in reality?

Yes, they just need one feature which Amazon could never have in order to disrupt it. They also need feature/price parity.

I wonder if, to reach price parity, you would have to anti-sell as much as you sell. So people’s overall bills go down because they have less stuff but everything they have they really need.

The un-match-able feature could be personal attention from people in your local economy. That also increases the price so there would have to be excellent marketing to help keep your dollars in that economy: you’d get your beer from a local distributor, and they would also market other local products to you. This is extremely difficult to manage now, so part of the decentralized system would have to be helping make that easier.

Essentially, the killer feature is anti-McDonaldsificstion. McDonalds isn’t actually the best possible food in most people, but it is the best possible food you could sell most people and still channel the profits through one bank account.

Decentralized platforms, by not having that requirement, can offer something better.

Someone’s gotta put up the great surveillance blanket of China

Social engineering at its finest.

Also common spy recruitment tactic.

Does anyone know how this would relate to Qt signals/slots?

Yeah those foresee pop ups can go suck it. I mean what are people thinking? It’s stupid really. But then again, that’s what people do: in the pursuit for money they shit chemicals in rivers and don’t clean up their garbage. Or they toss garbage in the recycling bin.

I’m not sure exit intent pop ups are the same as polluting finite natural resources, and the more I learn about the recycling industry the more I believe that everything is just trash any way (reduce and reuse are the only viable paths).

Also, as a quant marketer I can tell you: exit intent works. Most traffic bounces and never returns. Being able to capture email and nurture leads is a profitable way of maximizing the return of your traffic.

There’s a reason why every furniture store is going out of business and has someone twirling signs: we are evolved to pick out movement and change. An exit intent that inverts the color scheme is obnoxious but only because you have to see it.

The interesting question (for me) is how obnoxious do you go before you start to hurt returns.

This comment is (oddly) unlikely to be popular on HN (odd because of HN’s heritage as an offshoot of YC), but exit intent works. It’s one of the first things I put in place at any new company.

Notably absent from this comment: the slightest awareness that "your traffic" is composed of people who have preferences.

Yeah, no doubt, "exit intent works", if the only thing you care about is "the return of your traffic". This mindset is exactly how we got to the situation described in the OP.

You are making things worse for your users. You don't care, because you don't think of them as users, as people, as human beings, you think of them as "traffic" whose "return" you want to "maximize".

You are the problem.

Content has a cost; I don’t apologize for maximizing the return of that investment.

I’m personally not offended by exit intent pop ups. They are an expected part of the browsing experience. I don’t think of them like the pop ups (or pop unders!) if the early 90s. An exit intent is limited to the window displayed.

That said, I do strongly believe in respecting user preference. If a person clicks the “no thanks” button I do cookie that preference and suppress additional exit intents. And I have problems with how some companies hijack the back button on mobile to show exit intent style content.

But I disagree with the sentiment that surfacing an offer to a user is hostile.

I definitely agree that the pop ups work, but consider plastic—it works really well also. The problem is that once everything is package in plastic now the streets are littered with it.

Every page we visit has the same things to generate revenue littered all over their sites because it works—but what about the content? It’s becoming secondary to the littered advertising.

Ads used to be strategically similar to the content presented—but now things follow us around the Internet based on purchases in grocery stores etc. The pop ups want me to spend my time helping companies improve their products for free. Where’s the content going? Anything but the primary content on websites is litter in my opinion.

I suppose it’s the frequency of them too: a foresee pop ups on ten sites the frequency becomes like plastic bags following me to the park from the shopping centers, to the rivers, etc. You can’t escape them until they’re eliminated.

>I’m not sure exit intent pop ups are the same as polluting finite natural resources

My time is finite, and so is my ability to reset focus once distracted. Pop-ups add up.

Still not close to the same. I pollute a river and generations struggle. I distract you while you’re browsing online and the real impact rounds to zero.

Eventually you’ll die and no one will care about that time you got annoyed. But no one is ever going to swim in the Gowanus... at least not without billions of dollars being spent...

Me? Sure. Multiply that by the number of internet users globally, and the number of interactions they have with these sites. A half second of distraction is double-digit man-years every day.

Or, you can think of it in the context of how easily it is for some people to lose their train of thought. An unexpected distraction of even a split-second can mean minutes of trying to remember what was forgotten, and the mental effort involved therein.

There's a reason why people complain about pop-ups: they represent a real cost to our limited focus and therefore productivity. That means a lot of good ideas and a lot of work gets delayed or goes unrealized towards efforts like "how to clean up polluted environments."

The problem is that pop ups work and companies have A/B tests to prove it.

It is surprising how freely the average user gives up their email address.

The sad truth is that these practices work so websites will continue doing them.

Im sure the lawyers thought of that angle, but the mining company currently doesn’t do anything to effect change so they probably won’t unless their customers (tech companies) demand a change.

It really is unfortunate. The mining company should build out proper infrastructure but I’m guessing they just delegate to (corrupt) locals.

This is no different than all the global environmental issues we’re facing with large scale production facilities (bottled water, petroleum, etc. are a huge problem too). The indigenous populations are getting fucked over because they live in remote areas prime for exploitation. Then the factories close down and don’t clean anything up.

I should point out this is also happening in developed countries like Canada and the USA. For instance, what is the difference between children mining cobalt and children being exposed to mercury poisoning because their rivers upstream there’s a paper plant dumping toxic waste into the food supply in Ontario, or petrol industry in Texas poisoning neighboring schools with chemical fumes.

But I mean, you see what’s wrong here right? The lawyers thought about it from the angle of who’s actually responsible, but realized that suing that company probably wouldn’t accomplish much lasting change. So they made up reasons to also sue popular tech companies, in hopes that embarrassing them will help serve the lawyers’ goals. That’s not how the process is supposed to work.

Absolutely, but when the process itself doesn’t work, then what? Gotta take a different approach and apply pressure somehow.

"And I would encourage the people at Glencore to take this seriously" is the harshest thing they actually say about them . The company that fronts for people responsible for unimaginable amount of horrors from Putin's inner circle to Dictators all over the world.

This is not a mishap Glencore is tied to so much corruption (ties to every dictator imaginable)and despicable practices across the globe.

The mining company will only respond to supply and demand.

Look at what China is doing with peoples DNA—it’s creepy to imagine what the possible outcomes will be with machine learning etc.

Meanwhile I submitted my DNA to ancestry and learned interesting things about my family.

Anything may be used for good or evil.

Also take a look at Git Extensions. I like this product a lot. It’s open source

Smart people gravitate to AI like a magnet. Or completely tangential things like starting a bakery, restaurant, etc.

We’re all going to be left in a Wall-E universe though unless they help fight climate change.

I think you're right on the AI, and I think Google agrees. https://ai.google/

Problem is, while there's certainly money in applications of AI (the ad auction is one of them), it's unclear that "AI" as a discipline is a money-factory like ads is. Google's looking for a money factory to replace ads because they're worried about that revenue stream being fragile (for the reasons ocdtrekkie highlighted).

Fight climate change? How?

"The smart people" provided a recipe for preventing/fixing climate change several decades ago. The politicians have never gone along, and now it's pretty much too late. It's no use hoping for a magic technical solution -- the one that would have worked was "Tax externalities and reduce CO2 emission".

"the one that would have worked was "Tax externalities and reduce CO2 emission"."

Why?

Internalizing externalities with a tax only works if the actual correct amount of those externalities equals or exceeds the amount that would reduce demand for fuel enough to stop climate change.

This is a huge assumption that I never see anyone even acknowledge needs to be demonstrated.

I think in fact they are far less, but my point is that debating that would be a red herring, since people seem to talk of externalities while never even believing in the concept, and that tension needs to be resolved.

The externalities are a number that in principle has a correct value, and the increase in price to change behavior sufficiently to stop warming is another number that independently has a certain value. But you have to have a logical reason for thinking they match if you think internalizing the costs is a solution.

Mother Earth has a magical technical solution. It’s called a “hard reset” so hopefully we can come up with something better.

I am smart and I find AI as it is currently practiced utterly boring (always did, ever since my first course on neural networks back in university). I think I am not alone here.

Have you thought of potential ways to use AI to help some problem domain you’re interested in? Like maths and other sciences it’s important to have an interesting application that you can get behind. It’s just a tool after all.