I am really puzzled by the negative sentiment around adtech on Hacker News, especially since I would guess that a lot of people here have a salary that depends directly or indirectly on advertising.
"Tracking" gets a lot of bad press, so much so that I sometimes wonder if this is not organized by the tech giants (Apple, Google, Facebook) who have access to their own first party and who thus have much less to lose when cross site tracking disappears.
Adtech providers only have access to products you buy/see, for a limited time and without any personal data, meanwhile Google and Facebook know everything about you, your friends, your center of interests the places you go to, along with your name but somehow everyone seems hell-bent on abolishing 3rd-party cookies.
Apple's own apps are not subject to this change, and as noted by other commenters this will probably shift budgets to subscription of which Apple takes its cut.
All this will further the supremacy of walled-gardens and big tech, at the expense of smaller independent players.
I'll be honest, there is a creepy feeling when being tracked cross-site, and adtech providers have collectively failed at providing explanations, and a transparent account of how this works and why this is useful. They have also relied on fingerprinting, which has hurt the credibility of the field.
The issue is that the replacement that are currently in the works (https://github.com/WICG/floc and https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/blob/main/FLEDGE.md) are extremely complex, will still dramatically impact adtech performance and only improve privacy for a very contrived definition of the concept which incidentally benefits once again big tech vendors...
As to the effectiveness of advertising, removing tracking will have a huge impact. And this affects all players in the value chain, not only adtech providers but also publishers and more importantly advertisers which will see their return on ad spent severely impacted. There is a real of loss "social welfare" (I mean in a game-theoretic sense, but also for real if you believe in capitalism) if tracking is disabled.
The freakonomics article gets cited a lot but the industry as a whole is moving forward with a greater emphasis on proving incremental sales.
Advanced clients (who can spend billions per year) have real statisticians doing permanent randomized control trials proving that every dollar spent is providing incremental sales.
I work for an adtech company and we have automatic RCTs for every single client, and guess what, advertising works for most clients. This is on top of fact that we are measuring the effectiveness of dollars spent on us, in addition to the dollars spent on competitors/other channels on which we have no control of course.
The fact that Uber could see no impact when going from 150m to 50m is a testament to the incompetency of their CMO, which could not be bothered to actually measure and pilot the campaigns correctly, not the effectiveness of adtech as a whole.
Thoughts are my own not my employer's.
Well said. What if Apple's popup said "personalization" instead of "tracking"? Advertising works well for most of us, most of the time. Ironically, Apple is spending significant sums on advertising that touts how they are crippling advertising to protect your privacy.
I have read a lot about passive investing (The Intelligent Investor, Mr Money Mustache etc.) but I live in France and it does not seem as simple as in the US to invest in a SP500 index fund for example. Especially if you want something that is quite tax efficient. Does anyone have any advice?
Just want to chime in to say that using a broker to buy index funds should be possible in France as well. I'm in The Netherlands and use DeGiro[1] which is available in France as well, so that might be an option. My investment portfolio basically consists of a few index funds, all can be bought once per month with this broker without a brokerage fee.
As for tax-efficient ways, my french isn't that good so I don't know the details but if I understand this topic [2] correctly you should have some options like PEA, PERCO/PERP, and/or PEE/PEI/PEG
N.B.: There will always be some discussion around this specific broker because their 'default account' contains a clause where this broker is allowed to temporarily loan your assets to other customers. Don't do this. You can get a so-called 'custody account' (which is basically a regular brokerage account) that's only marginally more expensive.
Open an investment account in the USA - it's fairly straightforward. I don't know your tax system in france, but you can invest in the US as an individual or an entity, probably worth talking w/ a tax attorney about how to do it - it's certainly done by others.
Open an ETRADE Securities account if I'm neither a legal resident of the U.S. nor a U.S. citizen
You won't be able to open a brokerage account online if you are not a legal resident or citizen of the United States because we will need some additional documentation from you. If you're not sure if you're a legal resident, see the Help topic Determine my residency status.
Request a brokerage account application by mail, or download it from our Forms & Applications page.
Download a Form W-8BEN.
Complete sections 1 through 6 of the application (the section on options trading isn't required).
Send your completed application and Form W-8BEN, along with your initial deposit and any supporting documentation, to us at:
By regular U.S. mail
ETRADE Securities LLC
PO Box 484
Jersey City, NJ 07303 - 0484
By overnight mail
E*TRADE Securities LLC
Harborside Financial Center
501 Plaza 2
34 Exchange Place
Jersey City, NJ 07311
1-800-ETRADE-1
Thats right. With a PEA you can avoid capital taxes provided you hold your stocks long enough.
As per how to open a brokerage account for alien non US resident, several years ago I managed to open an account at interactive broker while living in hong kong. They have among the lowest fees of all brokers and good software. Pretty sure its also possible to open an account while residing in france.
One thing to note though: as an alien non US resident, any US dividends will be taxed at 30pct in the US, directly deducted by the brokerage company
I use f.lux on my Mac and it has made a real difference in my sleep. On my iPad when I am reading late I use the inverted colors mode which can be triggered by pressing three times on the home button (if you activate the shortcut). I would say this is even more a relief for the eyes, as not only blue colors become warm but all the white that is the background color for most everything becomes just dark. Of course you can't watch movies in these conditions but I highly recommend this for readers.
This. When I'm working at night on my desktop or laptop, I'm using f.lux. When I'm browsing the web late at night, I have my brightness set as low as it can go, and invert colors. Unfortunately the flickering of changing pages, images, etc. and going from a page that has a white background to one that is black (which shows up as white inverted) still wakes my wife up, so when I anticipate flickering, I have to hide under the sheets to read like a little kid reading past his bedtime.
Further, the minimum brightness on iPads is still blinding. You have to download a specific "night browsing" browser just to get it to go lower, and if you are in an ebook reader, you are reliant on them having something to help.
Ultimately, I found that for ebooks I'm just way better off with one of the new Kindle Paperwhites, which I'm absolutely in love with. However I still find myself wishing that they had a native way to invert the colors of text. This is trivial to do with common ebook/text doc formats, and I really wish they'd make it an easy "night reading" feature. Having the entire screen with a white background causes unnecessary eye strain and brightness when reading at night. Reading white text on a black background is SOOO much easier on the eyes in a low-light situation.
Taking it a step further, while I hate backlit screens for night reading, one of my favorite reading setups is using a "terminal green" on black in Stanza on my iPad. Now if only the Kindle Paperwhite could do color...
I see this exact statement repeatedly and it concerns me. F.lux isn't designed to make things "easy on the eyes." If you're having that reaction, and you feel it as strongly as your post implies, it may indicate a different health problem.
You should consider getting glasses or altering your prescription. And if you're suffering eye fatigue it's probably not a great idea to be reading on a screen late at night regardless of the colors. Research "eye strain" for other suggestions that may help you.
In fact quadrupling the number of pixels does not result necessarily in a 4x multiplication in bitrate, much less in general. That is because a movie recorded for example at 4K resolution is not at all the same as 4 different/independent 1080p movies that you would stick together in the same 4K frame. There are correlations/statistical properties that are exploited in the first case by the encoder and that does not exist in the second case. I have seen somewhere (though I can't find the reference) a back of the enveloppe calculation using Fourier analysis that showed that to multiply by 4 the number of pixel you only needed to multiply by 2 the bitrate. So, if HEVC has 50% bitrate savings that would explain the claim that 4K HEVC could have the same bitrate as 1080p AVC. Of course there is much more happening in HEVC than just a Discrete Cosine Transform (motion compensation etc.) so I don't know how this really applies in practice, and I haven't done the tests myself...
The 2x factor reason is pretty intuitive if you understand that video compression is still fundamentally representing superpositioned signals from 2D Fourier Analysis and that multiplying by 2x the number of pixels in each direction is no different for perception than if we doubled the DPI. Double the DPI yields up to 2x the possible frequencies needing to be represented up to the Nyquist frequency that would cover each possible interpolated pixel. This is part of why noise in film or audio makes representation much tougher - noise is typically higher frequency and rather random (although distribution depends upon brown, white, pink, etc. noise).
4x number of points in real space -> 4x points in Fourier space, the Fourier space is still 2D. I don't get your reasoning.
OTH if you increase the DPI you bring in higher frequency components that are not that important for perception, so you can compress them more heavily.
I was confused with a different concept, disregard that part. FFT is by definition reversible for a discrete signal like a quantized image so each pixel must be reversible, so it has to be 4x total space used with no further operation, correct.
Quantization and filtering are the more important parts of the encoder than the FFT / DCTs since the transform is 1:1 reversible. Compression isn't just the mathematical accuracy of a signal when it comes to lossy algorithms as you know. A 720p video upscaled to 1440p should theoretically be exactly the same size for the sake of effective quality but encoders don't care about just the math and apply perceptual filters because simply doubling pixels looks really bad perceptually it turns out.
Another side of it is that video compression, like image compression (and analogously audio compression), works largely by exploiting limitations of human vision. We can't discern high spatial frequencies as precisely as we can discern low frequencies.
It stands to reason that if you shrink those details even smaller, as is the case with 4K, you'll need even less precision for those coefficients.
I'll be honest, there is a creepy feeling when being tracked cross-site, and adtech providers have collectively failed at providing explanations, and a transparent account of how this works and why this is useful. They have also relied on fingerprinting, which has hurt the credibility of the field. The issue is that the replacement that are currently in the works (https://github.com/WICG/floc and https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/blob/main/FLEDGE.md) are extremely complex, will still dramatically impact adtech performance and only improve privacy for a very contrived definition of the concept which incidentally benefits once again big tech vendors...
As to the effectiveness of advertising, removing tracking will have a huge impact. And this affects all players in the value chain, not only adtech providers but also publishers and more importantly advertisers which will see their return on ad spent severely impacted. There is a real of loss "social welfare" (I mean in a game-theoretic sense, but also for real if you believe in capitalism) if tracking is disabled. The freakonomics article gets cited a lot but the industry as a whole is moving forward with a greater emphasis on proving incremental sales. Advanced clients (who can spend billions per year) have real statisticians doing permanent randomized control trials proving that every dollar spent is providing incremental sales. I work for an adtech company and we have automatic RCTs for every single client, and guess what, advertising works for most clients. This is on top of fact that we are measuring the effectiveness of dollars spent on us, in addition to the dollars spent on competitors/other channels on which we have no control of course. The fact that Uber could see no impact when going from 150m to 50m is a testament to the incompetency of their CMO, which could not be bothered to actually measure and pilot the campaigns correctly, not the effectiveness of adtech as a whole. Thoughts are my own not my employer's.