YouTube has more than 1 video for every human alive on this planet. I can’t help but wonder: what is the value of all this?

It’s unfortunate that this has to be a bad thing.

Bandcamp was sold off without the unionized employees. If you’re doing this to be pro-labour, you can’t really support Bandcamp right now.

https://www.thefader.com/2023/10/31/bandcamp-united-files-unfair-labor-practice-violation-claim-against-songtradr-and-epic-games

Yep! The person said that they are starting with salmon because it’s a lower barrier to entry. Food manufacturing is a harder thing to start up from scratch with new tech.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I met one of the food scientists who work here.

The big thing about what they’re doing here is that they’re not extruding the product, so you can actually have customized textures in your food that mimick structures and textures in animal protein. Think a slab of steak with marbling vs a hot dog or a hamburger patty.

It’s a huge next step towards great meat alternatives. It might not be perfect yet, but that’s only a matter of time.

Thanks for taking the time to educate me (and any passing readers.)

Don’t they have partnership agreements and secondary products that repackages their data as insights? (I’m thinking Cambridge Analytica.) It’s not a direct sale, per se.

Repackaged data in the form of other products is one way to do it.

Say you can justify each piece of data collected via a UX element. Someone said in the comments: low battery, charger ad. Where do you draw the line between data for the product vs data for profit? You don’t. It’s all embedded in the idea of “the product”.

This is a company that sells ads AND data. They collect everything. Consumers don’t seem to care. Tiktok is still popular. People see this post and will still download Threads.

It’s important for people to understand the industry justification behind data collection and why it’s so widespread across the industry so we can have this conversation about what “too much data” actually means. Serving me relevant ads like places near me for food? I guess that’s a feature. A face aging app that we train to feed a military database of faces to track down deserters? Not so much.

Okay I’ll bite. I work in product management for capitalist software companies. Every single software product you use has trackers built in unless if you’re hardcore FOSS.

Even if the company has no interest in selling your data, it’s still really hard to learn about user behaviours in the real world in order to figure out what to build next. Many of these trackers are UX tools, much more than selling your data tools. My previous employer fully anonymized and aggregated usage data, but we can’t necessarily say the same for other companies.

These trackers are the industry default and honestly, I don’t know where we’d be without them. We use them to measure the success of what we build and to look for surprises/opportunities.

On that note, for products and websites that I like, I sometimes intentionally turn off my ad and privacy blockers for them (as long as it’s not intrusive). It’s hard to do our work without that data.