A billboard costs money. A cafe also has your brand name on it but can be operated at a profit.

I don’t know what this is really all about but I’m just thinking through possibilities. It could definitely just be a stupid marketing fad. The number of eyeballs a cafe will get in a metropolis like Seoul is tremendous. If they had a cafe in every town across bumfuk suburbia that would be another story.

I mean LOL maybe???

It seems like there are probably ways they could do that without calling so much attention to themselves.

Like a LAN party just a lil bigger.

I think you make a wise point for most people. I’ll bet it’s a pretty cool community, though. You can maybe avoid the worst things about tech through smart moderation but you can’t step back in time to the pre-smartphone era that way. If crowds of young people are rediscovering drugs, card games, and sitting around fucking each other I’d call that good news for the world.

I hear this argument a lot and I’m not disagreeing per se. But we should be clear. It can be dangerous for 1 out of 10 cars to be driving 55 instead of 75. But it would be safer by far if all 10 cars drove 55.

Dude can we get so much as a copyright violation from Warner Bros on this shit?

How old is this article? Is it a reprint from years ago? Because he talks about suddenly pivoting his data by “conversion rate” and having an AHA moment about how we measure success.

Except… conversion rate is a bone-standard, absolutely ubiquitous way to measure traffic quality in ecommerce. No one places ads without knowing how many of them lead to conversions. Defining your conversion event is often part of setting up an ad in the first place.

He then goes on to describe his hand-rolled script that analyses mouse movements to differentiate humans from bots.

Except… that’s exactly what the “I am human” checkbox from CloudFlare and Google have been doing for years.

CloudFlare have said that about 30% of Internet traffic is bots. This is well known. It could easily be 70% for some sites.

I would say that there’s nothing to see here, but it’s probably a little worse than that: just adding some really shaky analysis and anecdotal data to an already widely-covered topic. Are we actually going to trust an internet marketer’s hand-rolled mouse movements analysis over CloudFlare?

I’m not.

Nobody pays for ad impressions anymore. Haven’t for… gosh like a decade.

There’s a lot of stupidity in adverting, but eventually people stop coming back to dump more millions into a bunch of bot page refreshes that don’t lead to sales.

I think the Lemmy perception of AI boils down to just a few things:

1. but it hallucinates!
2. I hate tech bros
3. but the MIT report!

Of course there’s more, like underlying fear of losing jobs, stealing from artists, and being dehumanized in general.

I happen to care a lot about those things too, but ranting on about 1-3 doesn’t actually help and is just people repeating each others points in a circle jerk. Meanwhile AI is on the move.

Is anyone going to talk about how the amounts don’t remotely match up? If you just cancel them all out, you still get Open AI buying $160 billion in Oracle compute.

I’ll just offer some facts as a counterpoint to the prevailing narrative here.

My employer, a major multinational tech company, is pushing AI use internally so hard it hurts. After studying it they announced it was saving our software engineers about 4 hours a week net, or half a day. Thats as of now with adoption still growing and new tools being explored constantly. Half a day weekly is 10% of our software engineering budget which is a large number, and the company will without a doubt pay a significant sum to continue getting that benefit to get more out of their staff, who are their biggest cost of doing business.

I live in the dissonance between, on the one hand, the narrative in places like Lemmy that AI is shit and doesn’t do anything right and these companies have no monetization plan, and on the other hand, seeing it dramatically change my enterprise workplace and provide real value.

Yes engineers are confirming to my very own ears that they are using AI tools and they have their uses and save them time and toil. For example, we had one version update to push through hundreds of teams all with disparate front end code, and it was not possible to just script the update for them all because custom integration work would always be needed, but we did come up with a prompt that could use a set of documentation and entity mappings to accomplish the update in under a minute with a high rate of success. This is just how things are staring to get done. It hasn’t replaced engineers, but it is fast becoming one of their most powerful tools.

Yeah. Signing up for a social service doesn’t make you the most technical person in the world.

One reason it’s dangerous is that the rest of the economy sucks, so AI is masking bigger problems which will become evident and tumble out of control when the money has nowhere left to go.

Lemmy is not the most tech savvy people on the internet nor the customer base for AI. Where did you get either of those ideas?

I know right? It’s not a bubble if there are transactions between the different companies in an industry. Nothing here shows that these investments are self-supporting circular, nor that all of this is propping up the economy.

Circle != bubble

Oh I completely agree. My point is that just because it was driven by bots doesn’t mean it was fake and therefore we can ignore it (I believe some people have that perception when they hear that some online uproar was driven by bots).

Enough with the agentic experiences.

Bring on the entish experiences.

Nice. None of those “go woke go broke” boycotts ever actually materialize into meaningful business pressure.

Unless you’re fucking Cracker Barrel.

The thing is people were persuaded to GAF. We hear “driven by bots” and we think “oh so it was fake.” But bots are merely the PR mechanism of choice in 2025. In prior decades it might have been AM radio and a bunch of press releases faxed around or influence networks pumping the talk shows for airtime or church networks getting people riled up from the pulpit. But the game has always been the same. It’s only the tools that have changed.