For the same reason everything is moving to being ad based - because ads pay more, and because the high income users who are willing to pay to get rid of ads are the most valuable users to show ads to.
Google and Facebook showed the way. Consumers see FREE service and it sets the market equilibrium. Retail Windows licenses were already a slim minority. Those who would buy Windows 11 LTSC for Home would be an even smaller group.
It is primarily driven by the expansion of the diagnosis itself. DSM-3 Autism (1980) is quite different from DSM-5 Autism (today). We use the same word to describe two different things. Today's autism includes things that used to have totally different names. It also "allows" for a diagnosis much later in life. Autism used to be something very specific and discreet. From another perspective, the rate may not be soaring. That is, many more people in the 1980s and 1990s would be autistic by today's new standard.
That's just because today we understand it better. What "autism" used to mean is a certain set of comorbidities that appear to be caused by autism combined with external factors, but that's just because we didn't know how things were connecting to each other back then (and there appears to still be a lot to learn about that).
Our economy is being propped up by this. From manufacturing to software engineering, this is how the US economy is continuing to "flourish" from a macroeconomic perspective. Margin is being preserved by reducing liabilities and relying on a combination of increased workload and automation that is "good enough" to get to the next step—but assumes there is a next step and we can get there. Sustainable over the short term. Winning strategy if AGI can be achieved. Catastrophic failure if it turns out the technology has plateaued.
Maximum leverage. This is the American way, honestly. We are all kind of screwed if AI doesn't pan out.
They’re not going to stop until the definition of a company is: A C-suite and robotics+AI to do the actual work. No labor costs. That’s the end goal of all these guys. We shouldn’t forget it.
The pairing has become almost flawless as well. Years ago, it was slow and inconsistent, but now the hotspot feature is almost perfect and automatic. Honestly, I don’t really think about it anymore.
I walk my kids to school every morning. And I walk to pick them up. It's a 10 minute walk to get them, so that's about 40 minutes of walking each day. I could drive and get there in 2 minutes then wait in a line. It would probably cut the time in half, but walking is better for the environment (noise, pollution, safety, wear and tear), me, and my relationship with the kids (we, y'know, talk while we walk).
There's people that live even closer that drive their kids to school. One of them lives literally 19 houses down the street from it.
I also have a rule where if I can go somewhere within 20 minutes on a bike, I'm taking my bike. Most places I go fall under this rule, and I live in what most would call a suburban hellscape.
My wife used to drive to work. Driving took longer than walking. But she still drove.
I think it's less about easy vs hard and more about the culture around driving in the US.
That's great - for me the problem is weather. Where I live it's hot, >80s Fahrenheit, >28 celsius, for 4 months a year. So unless I want to always be sweaty, I can't really walk more then 10 minutes at a time.
I tried biking to work for a while - 13 miles. During summer/fall, it was pretty nice, I'd go early in the morning, shower at the gym, and then bike home. 2 workouts a day when the weather was fair.
The sweaty part, you'll get less sweaty as you get more in shape, both exerting less and retaining heat less efficiently due to lower BMI. But - you'll probably never not be sweaty if the distance is anything significant like, say, 13 miles.
Let's talk about colder climates. I was a consultant for a few years, and got to travel all over. I recall visiting Calgary in the winter, and some maniac dev manager biked to work every day, rain, snow or shine. 6 miles he said (helpfully translating units for me).
In the US a large number of people have moved to suburbs in the south. On a bad year our lows are in the 90F range. Add in asphalt architecture and in the sun temps are commonly 125F+
Monopoly in charge of the world's video content shows users what is most profitable instead of what they want to see. "Content creators" suffer as a result. Brain rot content is real, it's profitable, and it's only going to get "worse".
Does anyone remember the internet before pop-up blockers? Like, right before. It felt like the same thing to me. The internet was infested with pop-ups and becoming borderline unusable, and then comes along the pop-up blocker (and other things, but I'm simplifying here) and there was a "golden age" which is now giving way to a new wave of advertising-based atrophy. Not sure what happens next.
One idea for what happens next, that rhymes with pop-up blocker revolution, is Gates' "disintermediation of everything" via AI, where agents on our behalf will be able to "find me a video I like and don't show me the ads", "renew my electricity contract and don't let them soft-scam me with their tricky pricing structure", "buy groceries online and don't get tricked into buying candy from a promo", etc. Agents make become like popup blockers in that way. Subsequent to that, I reckon we may see some sites adopting TOS forbidding people to have AI agents visit on their behalf.
The analysis in this article shows that revenue and likes didn't actually go down, though. Just views. That's only bad for sponsors overall.
I do wonder how this applies for smaller channels, though. Larger creators may get better revshare to make up for whatever the heck is happening. The little guy always gets screwed.
Issue for me with cars isn't space vs no space, it's the amount of stress, time and money that is wasted in car-centered societies. 20 minutes to work. 20 minutes home. Add another 20 minutes if you do anything else but home to work. That's an hour a day. You've also wasted an hour doing nothing that might have otherwise been spent walking. Now you need to borrow another hour for the gym or some kind of physical activity… and that assumes you don't drive to a gym (one of the the most bizarre things people do). But that's two hours a day that just feels "wasted," and that's a best case scenario. Then there is the cost of the car, insurance, gas, maintenance. The hours that all translates into. Add it all up over the year and you spend like 15-20% of your waking hours dealing with the reality of the car. For some, it's more.
I also feel like a peculiar externality of car-centric society is anger. I get why. You are wasting all your time in the car. You aren't walking. No exercise. Fast food. Parking. I can see why people who are pro-car want space—they are angry all the time. They need space to cool off. There is even a face that I call "car face" which is that kinda pissed off for no reason always in a rush face. People who "love cars" and don't find it "stressful at all" seem to have this face to the max.
Yeah, I didn't even account for that. Drive enough and you get into an accident. Add all the hours and cost to dealing with that. You'll probably get somewhat injured, even if minor. Physical therapy and healing time. Lifelong back pain. Now you DO need to drive to a gym for physical therapy. More car time.
I also think about how my nutrition has declined DRAMATICALLY with a car. Gone are the days of fresh lettuce and berries unless you drive to the grocery store every day. Gas stations should sell ozempic at the pump.
> it's the amount of stress, time and money that is wasted in car-centered societies
Commuting by train also involves a lot of stress: unexplained and indeterminate delays, filth, crime, dependence on multiple stages (walking, bus, train, walking, etc.)
That’s the tough part; it’s self-reinforcing :) both are causes and both are effects, and we’ve got to break the cycle somewhere.
But no, all of them. Low usage causes service cuts, which cause low usage because you can’t rely on transit, causes delays because there isn’t enough service to make up for failures and there isn’t enough investment for grade separation and maintenance, etc
Gmail search doesn’t work well either. It simply doesn’t find things. Almost as if they have stopped indexing and repurposed resources towards LLMs.
And whatever there is left to index and search has been completely overrun with slop.
Search is over. Internet as we knew it is over. Something new has emerged in its place, and we are still calling the new thing the old thing.