Leftovers

• Seth Godin ☛ What sort of better?

  This is the better of utility. Finding something that does the job it sets out to do.

• James G ☛ We need to define best practices for Stories and links

  When I click on a Story on the BBC homepage, the URL in the browser URL bar stays as bbc.co.uk. I don’t have a link to the Story. When I click on a Story on the Wired home page, the URL bar updates to a URL specifically for the story. But individual pages in the Story don’t have permalinks.

  This is problematic. In the case of the BBC, not having an easy-to-access URL means I can’t share the Story with my friends. Wired does better, giving me a URL to the story. But what if I want to link to a specific page? I wanted to do this with a quote on a Wired story but I can’t.

• Science

  • The Register UK ☛ Mars says hello as NASA's Europa Clipper warms up radar

    The Mars flyby in March was primarily to use the planet's gravitational pull to tweak the Europa Clipper's trajectory. However, boffins were able to use the proximity of the planet to calibrate the spacecraft's infrared camera and test its radar ahead of its arrival at Europa in 2030, NASA has confirmed.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Some thoughts on journals, refereeing, and the P vs NP problem

    For a time, I served as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computation Theory, and in this role I had to deal regularly with submissions that claimed to resolve the P vs NP problem. Finding referees for these papers was sometimes challenging, so I frequently ended up reviewing them myself. Dealing with such submissions involves enough overhead that ToCT, J.ACM and ACM Transactions on Algorithms limit the frequency with which authors can submit work of this sort. But for every submission, on any topic, the overall process was the same: Find someone on the Editorial Board who has sufficient expertise to find referees and make knowledgeable use of their recommendations. If there was no such person on the Editorial Board, then it was always the case that the submission was out of scope for the journal.

    These thoughts are brought to mind by a recent case, where it seems to me that the editorial process broke down.

  • El País ☛ Claude Canizares, NASA astrophysicist: ‘If scientists can’t speak the truth, society really isn’t in a very good place’

    This scientist is now 80 years old, having spent 50 of those years as an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the country’s top universities, where he previously served as director of scientific research and as vice president. Canizares currently co-directs NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, which celebrated its 26th anniversary this year. However, the telescope’s days may be numbered: Donald Trump is planning to slash the U.S. space agency’s budget by a brutal 50%. Canizares is one of more than 300 signatories of a letter published this week warning of the “catastrophic” consequences of these cuts, which are unprecedented in the country’s history.

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — How Science Is Gamed

    Science should not be a game of strategy, but a process of discovery. Yet when dissemination systems are gamed, the integrity of that process is at risk. Our taxonomy is a first step toward reclaiming transparency and accountability within scholarly communication.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Shroud of Turin image matches low-relief statue—not human body, 3D modeling study finds

    Recently, a study using 3D modeling with MakeHuman, Blender and CloudCompare has added more evidence to the debate. The study, published in Archaeometry, compares digital imprints of a three dimensional human figure and a low-relief artistic rendering—similar to a flattened statue—of a human onto a flat sheet.

• Career/Education

  • James G ☛ Communication and understanding

    Listening is essential. What the other person with whom I am talking says gives me more information to tailor my understanding. I can use this information to explain topics in words that are more likely to resonate.

  • The Cyber Show ☛ The Oracle and the Librarian

    Nobody remembers the librarian. The librarian is not so much grey as transparent, with sensible shoes and a pencil skirt. As Dita Kraus or Sayuri Komachi, in fiction, their wisdom is highly tailored, to "help people find what they are looking for".

    In some ways the librarian is the opposite of the enigmatic oracle. Those who remember the old days of academia will have encountered a gentle, magical "information therapist", who seemingly knew not just every book in the building by Dewey Decimal number (and a dozen other categorical frameworks), but walked you to the precise shelf that changed the course of your research and career. She then turned to help another student in a field so highly specialised that you cannot even pronounce it, yet with the same authoritative pose. How is that possible? How does one invisible woman, paid on par with the cleaning staff and not even on the faculty, know nuclear physics, biochemistry, discrete mathematics and modern art history? The reveal is that epistemological knowledge, the meta-understanding of knowledge itself, is a separate and powerful art.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Cassidy Williams ☛ Making a customizable wooden phone for my toddler

    So, I know that I shouldn’t be on my phone as much in front of my toddler but… I do look at my phone. And she wants one. Lately she’d been playing with a pack of gum and pretending that it’s a phone, and I thought… what if I made her one instead?

  • Wired ☛ The US Military Is Raking in Millions From On-Base Slot Machines

    The Defense Department operates slot machines on US military bases overseas, raising millions of dollars to fund recreation for troops—and creating risks for soldiers prone to gambling addiction.

• Proprietary

  • Naz Hamid ☛ Naz Hamid • Different Think

    Once I started studying computer science, I was exposed to the HCI kids. They studied Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface. I toiled away in COBOL, C++, and database design. Their parents had enough money that they owned Macs. This was when OS9 transitioned into X and Aqua, and the first fun iMac G3s and iBooks came out. One of my good friends, a HCI kid, had an iMac G3 in his dorm room. It was different: beautiful with its color and translucence. His significant other had an iBook. Yes, I wanted to lick it! I discovered then that the design and interface side of things had its own… culture.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Sean Conner ☛ When vibe coding, isn't the source code the prompt?

      I've been thinking about “vibe coding” (probably overthinking) and how that might effect development in odd ways. And by “vibe coding” I mean in its original meaning, “where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” Since February, I've come across several projects, some commercial, that have been “vibe coded” in such a manner. And I found myself asking myself, what's the source code in this case? What file should be checked into source control? And my answer was “the prompts, of course.”

    • Drew Breunig ☛ FLUX.1-Krea & the Rise of Opinionated Models

      Last week, Krea launched an open model, FLUX.1-Krea, that’s built to avoid the “AI Look”. Their writeup is tremendous: it details the problem, suggests root causes, and details how they overcame the challenge – all while providing necessary context. You should read the whole thing, but here’s the recap: [...]

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot

      It's easy to understand why some programmers love their AI assistants and others loathe them: the former group get to decide how and when they use AI tools, while the latter has AI forced upon them by bosses who hope to fire their colleagues and increase their workload.

      Formally, the first group are "centaurs" (people assisted by machines) and the latter are "reverse-centaurs" (people conscripted into assisting machines): [...]

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Wear Meta’s AI creepshot glasses — or be left behind!

      The Metaverse only made sense if you’d never heard of the hype around Second Life in the late 2000s. It also hooked into the Web3 cryptocurrency scam.

      In no surprise to normal people who aren’t idiots, none of this took off, and Facebook — now Meta — blew $37 billion on this rubbish, for very little output. Second Life is alive and well in 2025, by the way.

    • Colin Cornaby ☛ In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen – Random Thoughts

      And finally – what do you think is going to happen? That microwaves are just going to go away someday? That we’ll all go back to cooking exactly the way we used to? Well you didn’t say that but thats what I want to talk about. Because clearly there is no middle ground and everything has to be done in a microwave. You’re being very inflexible about doing everything in a microwave and that won’t serve you well in the new microwave era. And we all know that a microwave is the solution for everything, has no underlying problems, and the rate of progress on microwaves will be infinite.

      Anyway, I have to go. I’m busy tracking the minutes my chefs are running their microwaves so I know who to fire. This is a foolproof system that there is absolutely no way to game.

    • Axios ☛ AI slop videos are ruining our scrolling

      Between the lines: AI-generated oddities are showing up in our feeds more often because they're lucrative for creators.

    • Wired ☛ A Hiker Was Missing for Nearly a Year—Until an AI System Recognized His Helmet

      "It was the AI software that identified some pixels of a different color in the images taken on Tuesday," explains Isola, reconstructing step-by-step the operation that led to the discovery and recovery of the remains located at an altitude of approximately 3,150 meters, in the rightmost of the three ravines that cut through the north face of Monviso, above a hanging glacier.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ German phone repair biz collapses following 2023 cyberattack

      The founder of a German mobile phone repair and insurance biz has begun insolvency proceedings for some operations in his company after struggling financially following a costly ransomware attack in 2023.

• Security

  • The Register UK ☛ Antivirus vendors fail to spot persistent, nasty, stealthy Linux backdoor [Ed: The issue here is the malware, not "Linux backdoor"]

    The malware appears as a Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) and uses a variety of techniques to avoid detection, including hiding session logs to evade scanning, implementing a custom string obfuscation system, and concealing itself from debuggers by using the legitimate libselinux.so.8 shared library file name. It also contains hardcoded passwords to allow the operator easy access.

  • New “Plague” Backdoor for Linux Hijacks SSH Using Malicious PAM Module

    Security researchers at Nextron Systems have discovered a stealthy backdoor for Linux systems, called Plague, that uses a malicious authentication module to silently gain access to servers.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • New Statesman ☛ The Online Safety Act humiliates us all

      And so, if leadership is the art of prioritisation, it is unclear why Keir Starmer’s party is spending so much energy on the Online Safety Act. As an exercise it does not appear to support any of the main goals. It seems only to have created unnecessary strain in national politics.

      At the time of writing, there are more than 450,000 people with doubts. That is how many signatories there are on the petition, “Repeal the Online Safety Act” on Parliament’s website. The petition is supported by both left and right, Nigel Farage and Owen Jones.

    • EFF ☛ Data Brokers Are Ignoring Privacy Law. We Deserve Better.

      Yet a recent paper from researchers at the University of Californian-Irvine found that, of 543 data brokers in California’s data broker registry at time of publishing, 43 percent failed to even respond to requests to access data.

      Let’s stop there for a second. That’s more than four in ten companies from an industry that makes its money from collecting and selling our personal information, ignoring one of our most basic rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act: the right to know what information companies have about us.

    • Don Marti ☛ common sense one, bullshit documents zero

      Some recent privacy news: Meta violated privacy law, jury says in menstrual data fight by Margaret Attridge on Courthouse News Service. This was a big class action case over the Flo app, which was covered in the 2019 Wall Street Journal story You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook by Sam Schechner and Mark Secada. Flo and the other defendants settled, and Meta stuck with the case until the end. (Or is it? No news on whether they will appeal.) I used RECAP to get some of the public files from the case, and it looks like Meta’s failed defense relied on two long bullshit documents.

    • Zimbabwe ☛ Why Data Verification Laws Will Break the Internet, Trying to Fix It

      This push is gaining traction globally, and it is centred on data and identity verification laws. The idea is to force platforms to confirm users are who they say they are, or at least how old they are.

      On paper, it makes sense. No more kids stumbling onto adult content. No more anonymous trolls hiding behind burner accounts. And no more shady accounts scamming the vulnerable.

      But the people who understand how the internet works, engineers and security experts, are not impressed. In fact, many say this is how you break the internet, thinking you’re saving it.

• Defence/Aggression

  • SBS ☛ Chinese national charged with foreign interference after allegedly targeting Buddhist group | SBS News

    The AFP has alleged the woman, who is also an Australian permanent resident, was tasked by China's public security bureau to covertly gather information about the Canberra branch of a Buddhist association named Guan Yin Citta.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Space Force preps infrastructure, operators for target-tracking mission

    The service has been working closely with the intelligence community to develop a framework for managing a layered moving target indicator capability that pulls data from space sensors and other sources and feeds it to operators to better track threats on the ground — a mission that’s typically been conducted by aircraft.

  • USMC ☛ The Marines now have an official drone-fighting handbook

    On the heels of fielding the military’s first attack drone team, the U.S. Marine Corps added another weapon to their drone-fighting arsenal: a 90-page handbook all about employing small, unmanned aerial systems against the enemy and integrating them into formations.

  • USNI ☛ Attack of the Drones - USNI News

    The Small UAS and Counter-SUAS Integration Course at Camp Pendleton focuses both on employing their unit’s portable Class 1 drones – including those bearing munitions – in the offensive attack and in neutralizing enemy systems that could jam electronic signals, attack or surveil Marines’ positions. The course teaches them how these systems, including counter-sUAS or attack drones, and “first-person view” goggles or monitor systems can support their units’ existing arsenal.

  • Site36 ☛ After Russia, US company replicates Iran's drones - but their design dates back to the 1980s in Germany | Matthias Monroy

    Some rival states are currently building visually similar flying wing kamikaze drones. The origins of the technology lie in a development by Dornier in the 1980s. Initially, only Israel pursued the concept further.

  • The Atlantic ☛ One Way Parents Can Fight the Phone-Based Childhood

    But this misses a key part of the story. The three of us collaborated with the Harris Poll to survey a group of Americans whose perspectives don’t often show up in national data: children. What they told us offers a comprehensive picture of how American childhood is changing—and, more important, how to make it better.

    In March, the Harris Poll surveyed more than 500 children ages 8 to 12 across the United States, who were assured that their answers would remain private. They offered unmistakable evidence that the phone-based childhood is in full force. A majority reported having smartphones, and about half of the 10-to-12-year-olds said that most or all of their friends use social media.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ UK: Social media people smugglers to face jail

    The British government is looking to pass new legislation to clamp down on people smugglers who use social media to promote their services, including English Channel crossings, fake documentation and accomodation.

  • Greece ☛ Countering smugglers on social media

    The government discovered that smuggling networks were driving increased migration flows from eastern Libya to Crete by spreading false information online. Social media posts in closed groups surged by up to 50% in the first half of July alone.

    Smugglers sent three key messages to potential migrants in Libya: Tunisia has closed its borders as a route to Lampedusa; treatment of migrants arriving in Italy is poor; and Greece offers the opposite experience as a “friendly” and “safe” destination due to proximity and good summer weather.

  • FAIR ☛ Media Blame NYC Shooting Not on Mayor Adams, But on Candidate Mamdani

    Zohran Mamdani’s stunning upset victory in June over frontrunner and former three-term New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary thrilled some and disturbed others. Whether you love him, hate him or never heard of him, Mamdani has not yet won the general election or been sworn in as mayor. But that hasn’t stopped corporate media outlets from blaming him for a horrific mass shooting—that took place while he was out of the country.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Former Rolling Stones Musician Mick Taylor Claims His Stolen Guitar Is at the Met

    The Met claims that the guitar was owned by Adrian Miller in 1971. How Miller acquired the guitar is unclear. However, the museum says the instrument’s provenance since that year has been carefully documented.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Register UK ☛ UK needs bit barns to lead AI deployment, says Blair group

      In its report, Blair's think tank says Britain lacks the resources to keep up with the US, China and the Gulf States, which are all pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into vast, energy-hungry datacenters for AI training. The UK doesn't have the money, the available land or the energy resources to follow suit, it adds.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ What Does It Take to Write a Global Conservation Report? A New Assessment of Sharks Offers Answers

• Finance

  • Financial Express ☛ ‘Samsung has begun laying off US staff,’ claims employee; ‘don’t know how far-reaching it is’

    Samsung employees are reportedly the latest to be affected by the wave of tech layoffs this year. A woman on Reddit, who goes by the username “UndercoverGeekGirl”, has claimed that the South Korean company has started laying off its US staff.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ The Mothership Vortex

    Some time ago I hypothesized that all Democratic Senators are using the same text-spam contractor, and wondered whether there was some way to block the entire network. This resulted in many, many replies from people incorrecting me and each other with their zero-information theories.

    Well, I was right. They are all using the same contractor. But the reality is even more horrible than you probably imagined.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Palantir posts 48% revenue growth and beats expectations across the board

    Business highlights in the quarter included the U.S. Army consolidating 75 legacy Palantir software contracts into a single 10‑year enterprise agreement with a ceiling of up to $10 billion, signaling a shift to “a la carte,” volume‑based artificial intelligence procurement. Alongside the deal, Palantir introduced its TITAN mobile AI targeting unit, a software-led, hardened system for real‑time battlefield analytics that further cemented its role as a prime contractor in defense modernization.

  • The Register UK ☛ IT firing spree: Shrinking job market now looks worse

    According to the BLS, May needed to be revised down by 125,000 jobs to just 19,000 added jobs; June had to be revised down by even more, with 133,000 erroneous new jobs added to company payrolls that month. That meant just 14,000 new jobs were added in June.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Tesla awards Elon Musk $29 billion in stock amid compensation battle. What to know

    Under the pay plan, Musk would receive 96 million shares valued at around $300 each as long as he remains in an executive position at Tesla for the next two years. On Musk’s social media platform X, the special committee said the executive has not received “meaningful compensation” for his work for eight years.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ In-N-Out's owner is leaving California. Is the state a bad place to do business?

    Experts and economists interviewed by The Times paint a more nuanced picture. Although California’s steep taxes and stringent environmental regulations have pushed some firms to leave, the state remains the fourth-largest economy in the world, boasts a diverse pool of talent and is a hub of technological innovation, they said.

    “The popular media narratives have characterized California as one-dimensional,” said William Riggs, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Management. “We continue to be a magnet for investment in tech, biotech, entertainment and green energy, as well as being an agricultural hotbed for the planet.”

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Kansas governor joins lawsuit against Trump administration for federal funding losses

    “Federal agencies have done all of this without any advance notice, without any explanation to the state recipients and in direct contravention of the will of Congress,” the lawsuit said. “The state recipients’ sole offense has been that they used the grant funding precisely how they had promised in the grant applications — and as they were instructed by the agencies at the time of the grant award.”

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Silicon Valley’s Dream Tech Job Is Disappearing

    What really strikes me as sad is not the loss of things like Nerf guns at desks — that story, embedded in this piece, is more anti-pattern — but the sense of bottom-up, collaborative community that many of these companies once had. The sense of building the future was real, not just in terms of the products, but in terms up reinventing what a workplace was. Many of them have fallen back on more traditional models.

  • The Register UK ☛ Jeff Bezos' space web untangled

    Bezos has used a portion of his accumulated wealth on such things as The Washington Post newspaper (2013), a divorce (2019), and a Venice destination wedding for his second wife (2025), among other splurges. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

    Yet Blue Origin, his privately held aerospace company, has been his most ambitious and costly endeavor outside of Amazon, one that has consumed increasingly large amounts of money since he founded it almost 25 years ago. Casual observers conflate Blue Origin with Amazon's Project Kuiper broadband satellite network and it's easy to see the confusion, since Bezos founded both. But while there are connective threads between the two, the companies march to very different beats and it remains unanswered if Blue Origin will have as great an impact on the world as Amazon.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Latvia blocks 10 websites spreading Russian propaganda

      Latvia has been blocking websites with Russian propaganda content since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. At present 414 websites have been taken down.

      NEPLP tracks such resources through residents complaints, reports from government reports, and its own monitoring.

    • Press Gazette ☛ Reddit claims top spot as most cited domain in AI-generated [sic] (LLMs) answers

      It was cited twice as often as Wikipedia in the top ten most cited domains across AI [sic] (LLMs) in the three months ending 30 June, 2025, the platform said.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Zuckerberg fired Meta’s fact checkers for community notes. It barely works.

      Meta declined to answer my questions about how many notes it has published, how many participants are in the program or whether there’s evidence it is making an impact, despite promising to be transparent about the program.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Russia has opened 76 criminal cases over donations to Navalny-founded Anti-Corruption Foundation in past three years

    The number of cases tied to FBK donations is growing. In 2022, courts received two such cases; in 2023, four; and in 2024, 25. In the first seven months of 2025, Mediazona identified 34 new donation-related cases filed in Russian courts.

  • 404 Media ☛ The Anti-Porn Crusade That Censored Steam and Itch.io Started 30 Years Ago

    Keywords and tags have never been a useful metric for distilling nuance. Pushing for regulations based on them is repeating a 30-year history of porn panic online.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Pentagon’s New Isolationism

    Parnell’s characterization of the new policy was vague, but it represented an abrupt departure from long-established DOD practices, and an important shift in the way that the military engages with the outside world: A Pentagon that has already grown more insular under Hegseth could end up cutting itself off from thinkers and ideas beyond the building, or at least those with which the administration disagrees.

  • New York Times ☛ University of Virginia Appoints Interim President After Ouster

    Reached on Monday after the announcement, Mr. Mahoney said he knew he had been nominated for the interim presidency by several former students, colleagues and alumni, but that he was otherwise “coming in cold,” and had not been briefed on the details of the Trump administration’s actions against the university.

  • Court House News ☛ Smithsonian denies White House pressure to remove Trump impeachment references

    The Smithsonian says it will add Donald Trump back into its presidential impeachment exhibit “in the coming weeks” and denied any White House pressure over the temporary removal. The museum cited display and design issues for taking down the placard, which had noted Trump’s two impeachments in 2019 and 2021.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Techdirt ☛ Substack’s Algorithm Accidentally Reveals What We Already Knew: It’s The Nazi Bar Now

    But here’s the thing about algorithmic “errors”—they reveal the underlying patterns your system has learned. Recommendation algorithms don’t randomly select content to promote. They surface content based on engagement metrics: subscribers, likes, comments, and growth patterns. When Nazi content consistently hits those metrics, the algorithm learns to treat it as successful content worth promoting to similar users.

    There may be some randomness involved, and algorithms aren’t perfectly instructive of how a system has been trained, but it at least raises some serious questions about what Substack thinks people will like based on its existing data.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ Even happier eyeballs

    Give the IPv6 attempt priority, then with a delay start a separate IPv4 connection in parallel with the IPv6 one; then use the connection that succeeds first.

    We also tend to call this connection racing, since it is like a competition where multiple attempts compete trying to “win”.

    In a normal name resolve, a client may get a list of several IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to try. curl would then pick the first, try that and if that fails, move on the next etc. If a whole family fails, it would start the other immediately.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • TechCrunch ☛ Spotify raises subscription prices | TechCrunch

    Spotify announced on Monday that its premium subscription prices will increase for users in multiple markets across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific region.

  • Reuters ☛ Spotify to raise premium subscription price in select markets from September

    The streaming company is also benefiting from Apple's (AAPL.O), opens new tab approval of its U.S. app update to show subscription prices and external payment links, after a judge barred the iPhone maker from charging commission on off-app purchases.

  • [Old] The Future is NOT Self-Hosted

    A few months ago, Amazon announced that Kindle users would no longer be able to download and back up their book libraries to their computers. Thankfully, I still have access to my library because I saw this video by Jared Henderson warning of the change and downloaded all ~400 of my books immediately.

    But for those that didn't, the only way for them to view the books they own is through a Kindle or the Kindle app.

    Which raises the question: do they even own those books?

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Big Tech Lobby Has the DOJ in a Stranglehold

  After a scorched-earth lobbying campaign, the Department of Justice walked back its own lawsuit blocking a $14 billion tech megamerger pursued by tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) just weeks before the case was set to go to trial.

  Instead, the Justice Department approved the deal with a weak consent decree — a legally binding order imposing some obligations on the combined firm to maintain market competition. In doing so, officials overruled their own antitrust division, whose initial complaint on the merger laid out a litany of anticompetitive concerns.

• [Repeat] Don Marti ☛ living with a bigger ad duopoly

  But the duopoly are still "growth stocks." The market expects Google and Meta market cap to increase faster than the number of people in the world increases, and also faster than the rate at which people get more money to buy more stuff. On average, that would mean, as Myles Younger wrote, the share of GDP that goes into advertising will have to increase. The duopoly can’t keep their status as growth stocks by just picking off the rest of the advertising business. They have to grow advertising.