Top all-time · #3992
Jacek Złydach
Personal blog · jacek.zlydach.pl/blog · on HN as TeMPOraLprogrammingculture
Jacek Złydach's personal blog at jacek.zlydach.pl covers programming and culture. Since 2019, 19 different Hacker News readers have linked it 59 times, most often “Advertising Is a Cancer on Society”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (18) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jacek Złydach's essay "Advertising is a Cancer on Society", which argues for banning advertising. Other linked posts cover algebraic effects, the nyan-mode Emacs package and blocking distractions.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 18 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Home page of Jacek Złydach.
Most-linked posts?
- Advertising Is a Cancer on Society5 people · 31 mentions · first linked 2019-07-31
- Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)5 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2022-02-12
- Algebraic Effects – You Can Touch This (2019)3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-07-24
- /v/2048/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-07-03
- Going far, going small (2018)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-07-16
- /blog/2020-05-25-blocking-distractions-with-mikrotik-router.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-25
What Hacker News says?
Immediately reminded me of something I read a couple of years ago https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html , which has some strong opinions on why advertising should be banned
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “What if we made advertising illegal?”Submitted Advertising Is a Cancer on Society as a story · 692 points
HN discussionQuit and do something that isn't fundamentally detrimental to everyone's quality of life. http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend”Submitted Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019) as a story · 284 points
HN discussionFor any that haven't seen it- a great essay on advertising and how it relates to cancer: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “Instagram ads Facebook won't show you”Submitted Algebraic Effects – You Can Touch This (2019) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat's why I keep saying[0] advertising is a cancer on society . TV and news are one of the first media it consumed so thoroughly people don't remember there was a time where ads weren't expected, or default, or integral part of anything. -- [0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “The correct amount of ads is zero”Submitted Going far, going small (2018) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI note the author is very much involved in companies projects and social media platforms that all depend on advertising. http://jacek.zlydach.pl/index.html I'd respect his position more if he was not on LinkedIn or Facebook and did not work on commercial projects.
Comment linking /index.html
on “Advertising Is a Cancer on Society”Submitted Algebraic Effects – You Can Touch This as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttp://jacek.zlydach.pl , yes? I eagerly await this piece. I can think of a lot of people (and groups) who would find it enlightening!
Comment linking /
on “Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?”Submitted Going far, going small (2018) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> While some advertisements may be dishonest, I don't feel that that can be said of advertising. I believe that it's not some , but upwards of 90% of advertisements that are manipulative and dishonest, and that's before talking about methods of delivery. Therefore, I feel justified in accusing the whole industry. I've expanded on the topic at length here: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html .…
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default”Submitted Going Far, Going Small as a story · 1 points
HN discussionEnjoy! http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html Advertising is a cancer on society (last update: 2019-10-02)
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “Who is Facebook's mysterious “Lan Tim 2”?”The sentiment definitely resonates. The way I see it, advertising is a cancer on modern society[0]. The two big tech-related social problems so frequently discussed these days - surveillance capitalism and outrage culture - are directly caused by it. > Perhaps I'm growing increasingly blind to any positive impacts of the discipline, but ethically I find it hard to separate the fraudsters from the engineers that enab…
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface”> You can appreciate that a modest site trying to survive through ads isn't necessarily evil just because it looks for a way to make money off its content? It's not necessarily evil, just statistically very likely so :). It's still affected by the conflict of interest, though. Making money off content directly means you either ask readers to pay up, or you extract that payment somehow , whether they want it or not.…
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent”100% efficient everything is an unimaginable dystopia. All that's nice, and good, all kindness and love and happiness, all that exists within economic inefficiencies. It's the slack that lets us be human. That said, of the four examples you mentioned, only one has the distinction of being a metaphorical cancer on modern society, entrapping everything it touches in negative-sum games until it burns out all value and…
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “Bored of It”Setting aside my shock at you invoking motte-and-bailey here, given that I'd apply it to your counterargument first, here are some concrete proposals: - Ban most of the advertising as it's known today, recognizing it for the cancer on modern society that it is (see: [0]); - Make vendors pay for costs of disposal of their products; this would curtail the profitability of shit-tier products and planned obsolescence; -…
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “Parable of the Sofa”The height of the desktop era was before surveillance capitalism was a thing. With web came the on-line ads, which, being a cancer[0], infected the business models of increasing amount of software. Then the mobile exploded, and the new breed of native software - apps - were designed to be user-hostile pretty much from the start, and continue to be so. -- [0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.ht…
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “Slack have blocked using the website on mobile”> How has the web been tainted with ads? * https://www.superhighway98.com/seo * http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04 * https://voxeu.org/article/advertising-major-source-human-dis... * https://www.forbrukerradet.no/side/new-study-the-advertising... * https://danielmiessler.com/blog/google-amp-not-good-thing/ * https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/1…
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “PWA Store”can you show the 2048 clone? EDIT : My bad, I see you posted the link elsewhere (link for posterity http://jacek.zlydach.pl/v/2048/ ) TBH 6 hours seems a lot longer than I would have expected.
Comment linking /v/2048/
on “AI's $600B Question”> You should also post the 2048 clone as proof. I posted it twice already in this thread, but I guess third time's the charm: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/v/2048/ (code: https://git.sr.ht/~temporal/aider-2048 ). It's definitely not 100% correct (I just spotted a syntactic issue in HTML, for example), and I bet a lot of people will find some visual issue on their browser/device configuration. I don't care. It works on my…
Comment linking /v/2048/
on “AI's $600B Question”http://jacek.zlydach.pl/v/2048/ https://git.sr.ht/~temporal/aider-2048 There's a full transcript of the interactions with Aider in that repo (which I started doing manually before realizing Aider saves one of its own...). Before anyone judges quality of the code - in my defense, I literally wrote 0 lines of it :).
Comment linking /v/2048/
on “AI's $600B Question”http://jacek.zlydach.pl/v/2048/
Comment linking /v/2048/
on “AI's $600B Question”You're, perhaps unintentionally, doing a bait-and-switch argument. Sure, communicating about the availability of a product is important; in fact, it's crucial for functioning of a market. But this is not what marketing, or advertising in particular, is about in the real world. It's not what people mean by these words. I wrote about it some time ago at length[0]; skim the list and tell me how any of that - all of whi…
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review”Sure, I'm not denying it. I still[0] maintain that advertising is a cancer on modern society, and I've successfully steered my career away from anything related to adtech. HN itself is a diverse crowd, there's a large crowd with strong anti-marketing sentiment here, including people currently working in adtech. Also, there are degrees to everything. I'm picking on influencing here because it's extremely direct and b…
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “Is Turbopack really 10x faster than Vite?”> Social media has become a reminder of something precious we are losing in the age of LLMs: unique voices. Social media already lost that nearly two decades ago - it died as content marketing rose to life. Don't blame on LLMs what we've long lost due to cancer that is advertising[0]. And don't confuse GenAI as a technology with what the cancer of advertising coopts it to. The root of the problem isn't in the genera…
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “We're losing our voice to LLMs”I think that advertising is the main problem. Most issues caused by social media ultimately originate from this way to generate money out of wasting people's time. Cut that source of revenue and suddenly there is no longer any incentive to get people addicted, encourage outrage, promote misinformation/clickbait, etc. Related: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html (I totally agree with all of it)
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?”I want the ads banned. For many reasons, which I've listed and described at length here: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html .
Comment linking /blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
on “French cities trying to ban public adverts”
