Hijacking the scroll wheel has existing long before "AI". Many "high end design" websites that want to "tell a story" get woo'd into thinking it's a good idea. It's terrible, and feels like your scroll wheel is stuck in quicksand.
Parallax scrolling effects were very cool ~2010. By 2015 or maybe earlier it already felt like me-too design that's unoriginal and a little annoying. By 2020 everyone and their mom has it and it's super tiresome. Now it just screams slop design (among a million other signals).
"Normies" aka the average user on Meta. They have no concept of what "admin privileges" means and don't really care. I still have a hard time convincing my clients to use secure passwords. I have clients who were phished for substantial amounts of money and STILL don't implement proper security measures.
Ads embedded on the playing field? Sure. Billboards visible or sponsor logos on uniforms? I get it. Actual commercials? This is a solved issue for decades, there are "alternatives" as others have pointed out. This is a "Boiling frog" situation.
No, there's nothing really to do. They aren't producing the feed, they're essentially hosting a stream from another broadcaster.
For instance, if you have Paramount+, you can watch sports broadcast by your local CBS station through it. That station is going to be running commercials, Paramount+ has no input on it. The most they can do is run ads over their ads.
I'm assuming there's something similar with Disney+. You can watch your local ABC broadcast or ESPN broadcast of a game, but you're just getting that broadcast as being currently aired.
But even for broadcasts wholly owned and controlled by a streaming platform, like Thursday Night Football on Prime, there are just times when it would be dead air. I don't entirely mind commercials in that instance. Nothing else is going on.
Let’s reverse the situation, they were able to add ads to sport events, so they can definitely remove ads and show the main event cameras if they wanted to. But they’re picking up showing ads indirectly through some other service.
I noted that the streaming service, like Paramount+, would be able to overlay their own ads over the broadcasted commercials, but they won't have control over the cameras. That's on the broadcast station, they're the ones controlling the remote production.
Paramount+ can only rebroadcast what my local CBS affiliate is broadcasting.
I think only Netflix and Prime have deals to actually produce sports broadcasts.
> But even for broadcasts wholly owned and controlled by a streaming platform, like Thursday Night Football on Prime, there are just times when it would be dead air. I don't entirely mind commercials in that instance. Nothing else is going on.
I.e. instead of dead air, they could show some live feed in the spot that other broadcasters use for commercials.
What's happening in that time is just random bullshit. They'll run bits on the jumbotron, hold raffles, go play games with people in the stands, etc. All sponsored by "<SO AND SO>, the official <THING> of your <LOCAL SPORTS TEAM>". Or, in other words, ads.
You could show the players and coaches on the sidelines, but that's also rather boring. It'll be a couple of guys shooting the shit on a bench, or a couple of guys hunched over a table, or some guys warming up.
The best thing they can do is like information from other games maybe.
Honestly, I was going by my most recent experience, which was F1 in Singapore last year. (I’ve been in Singapore at the time, but haven’t managed to get to a good spot, so I was watching it online a couple blocks away.) That thing had ads every minute, but the race obviously doesn’t stop during the breaks.
> What's happening in that time is just random bullshit.
Are most sports events like this? It sucks then, but the playing games with people in the stands thing sounds better than just plain ads. Mix that with sidelines shots, some alternative commentary maybe (with some instant replays?), and sure, information from other games, and you get a nice, coherent broadcast with some ads from the stadium but none that are as out of place as the usual commercial breaks.
Does uBlock work on commercials aired as part of a stream/broadcast? I don't mean where they interrupt the stream and insert an ad, I mean that it's part of the video produced.
I genuinely don't know and am asking out of curiosity.
I'm unsure. I believe I've seen Telemundo at certain events, but they could have deals to rebroadcast and they'd have the same options as Paramount+. They can run ads over the broadcast ads and swap the audio feed with their own. The broadcast feed should have at the very least; a video feed, a crowd/stadium audio feed, and the commentary audio feed. So they could just not rebroadcast the commentary audio and replace it with their own.
A lot of the ads on the field and perimeter are themselves inpainted. And becoming more and more offensive over time, with animation and flashing and such as technical capabilities improve and viewers become accustomed and don’t revolt.
I'm sure somewhere there's an ad exec ready to rollout personalized in-game ads that say "hey Chris Morgan, try Henson's ball wash!" From data provided by your smart TV and your secret profile from data brokers.
The other day I wanted to gather Reddit comments about a solar panel vendor. Claude doesn't have access to I had Gemini do some "deep research". When I fed the verbose report back to Claude it basically said it was a bunch of "hallucinated bullshit".
Indeed, I just wanted to try out Gemini Deep Research with their gated access to Reddit. The next step would be for me to use Claude Code to load each URL and write it's own analysis - in this case I just offloaded some of the searching to free Gemini rather than burn my paid Claude tokens. That being said, I trust Reddit comments just about as much as I trust AI analysis on topics like this (solar leasing company evaluation)
I've never had a Gemini Deep Research report that didn't sound like a load of pseudo-intellectual BS. It always starts with a long grandiose preamble and then sounds way too academic, almost like a caricature of academia.
I didn't read it, I just used Gemini to gather a list of Reddit URLs I will then have Claude "read" using my Chrome with an authenticated Reddit session.
I regularly drive 450+ miles to a family camp and need to stop at least once just to stretch my legs/change drivers/eat. The drive can take anywhere from 7-9 hours depending on traffic. 900 miles range is cool but it's not worth a huge price premium. Sort of like the Concord; while it's technically possible it's not worth the money.
The extra range seems to mostly come from big increases in aerodynamic efficiency rather than just jamming a huge battery into the chassis so I'm not sure it would demand a huge premium, at least not because of the BOM.
Currently there is no "Republican party" just Trump loyalists. In 2030 the party might still be called the same but I doubt it will have moved far from the principles of today.
I don’t know how old you are but the GOP has 180’d on trade, international relations, unions, Social Security, and Medicare among many other issues over the past 30 years.
It showed VIZIO revenue numbers ($1B hardware sales at -0.8% profit margin, ~$500M ad revenue at 61% profit margin).
Based on that, it seems to me that TVs are a one-time-sale commodity with low margins, while ads are continual revenue generators with high margins. This makes the incentive extremely clear.
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