Data Lake America

I know, I know, this blog was largely about the attribution cartel for a while, and it seems like my numbers started to go up while I was doing semi-regular updates on that—so shouldn’t I be writing about the attribution cartel more?

For now, not much is happening over there. They’re still going through the motions of trying to make centralized ad attribution tracking into a web standard. Which is kind of weird, considering that we should all know by now that centralization on a few USA-based companies is a bad idea (See Dutch tax office drops Microsoft 365 cloud for own servers and open source by Alina Maria Stan. The #Eurostack, so hot right now.)

The attribution numbers are going to agree with what’s politically expedient for the attribution cartel companies.

Check out the Kyiv Independent site, read ‘Will only lead to more slaughter’ — bipartisan backlash erupts in US over Trump-Russia diesel deal, and then predict how well any pro-Ukraine news site is going to do in the attribution cartel reports.

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

In order to get good ratings from the attribution cartel, sites are going to have to cover the International Criminal Court in the politically approved way, too.

George Orwell wrote, The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. And now, the Big Tech CEOs don’t wait to be commanded. On the timeline where the attribution cartel succeeds, we’ll see that according to the privacy-preserving attribution tracking, slop and pro-oligarch sites sell, and legit sites, not so much.

Related

We still have time to save the halo effect: Ads work better on legit, trusted sites. Even though the Big Tech companies want to treat “content” as a commodity, that’s not how the reputation circuits hard-wired into our primate brains even work. Includes links to research.

Bonus links

Why Does Gavin Newsom Keep Helping the Oligarchs? by Perry Bacon. (Related: How the California legislature is saving us from surveillance dystopia (twice, in 1967 and 2026). If he gets nominated for higher office, he’s going to hand over his campaign budget to Meta and Google…and they’ll put it down the same hole as the Harris budget.)

California just made it legal to turn balconies into tiny power plants by Matt Simon. Basically, plug-in solar could help reduce congestion in the system at peak times — when it’s hot out and everyone’s running their AC, there’s also plenty of sun to strike the panels. (The biggest impact, though, might be in political strength training. Out of all the people who get into politics because of a beef with the landlord or HOA, some stay that way.)

tokens too cheap to meter The price of using machine learning intelligence is decreasing by several orders of magnitude a year and shows no signs of slowing….We are likely to see LLMs running locally at current frontier-quality on commodity hardware in the next 3-6 years.