After my last blog post arguing that advertisers should fall on a well and die, I've given the issue some more thought. After all, how would this little blog survive without ads? How would I keep up my product reviews without advertisers sending them to me for free?

Therefore, I came up with a plan to save the advertising industry from the scourge known as "ad-blockers". It's not precisely cheap, but we can still make it work in volume.

First of all, the Central Bureau of Advertising (or similar agency) has to announce publicly that they intend to make a raffle. The prizes have to be pretty good - The main prize should be at least a car, and the minor prizes should be iPhones (or even better, access to a yet-unreleased version), tablets, smartwatches and the like. You'll need a lot of them, so this is the expensive part. Ad agencies have to create quite a buzz, but then again, that's what they do for a living anyway.

Once we've assembled what is essentially the coolest contest on Earth, we announce the rules. In a nutshell, they will be:

1. Everyone is allowed to claim a prize
2. Winners will be selected via ads, served through the usual channels.
3. Other than reading "you've won", there's no requirement about what the ads will look like
4. The campaign will go on as long as there are prizes left. New prizes can be added at any moment

Here's the genius part: the winning ads will look as sketchy as possible. I suggest flashing gifs straight out of the 90s. Think about it: if the buzz for the campaign is high enough, we won't just have thousands (millions?) of users disabling their ad-blockers; we'll have effectively trained them to click on anything, no matter how suspicious it looks! All you need is to drag the contest long enough for little Johnny to think "I wish I could disable the ads, but then I might miss my chance to win". Once smaller companies start running their own contests in the same way, it's game over for ad-blockers.

There are of course some details to sort out, but I think you get the main idea. Some people will argue that this is dishonest, and that will lead to thousands of virus infections from rogue ads. Don't listen to these people: it's not your problem if some schmuck fails to protect his/her computer, and then again, if you cared about "dishonesty" your industry wouldn't be in this problem anyway.

I'm confident you'll find my scheme worth trying, and I hope this will clear any remaining bad blood between us. No need to thank me.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of gaming for me is to try and pretend I'm the protagonist. That includes making choices the way I'd do them in real life. Of course, I understand that games are escapism, and I'm not blaming those that use games as an opportunity to murder pretty much anything that can be murdered. It's just not my style. I'm more the kind of gamer that's constantly being chased around by the guards I didn't kill because they didn't do anything.

Having said that, I'm having trouble with Angry Birds. I know, I shouldn't expect moral lessons from what is essentially a group of suicide birds bombing an enemy. But am I the only one who has trouble with a game that asks you to bomb a playground, including the kids playing there?

Did you enjoy committing a crime against humanity? Do you need more genocide? Then good news! You can bomb the skate park, somebody's house, and even a cemetery. Not only you get to kill your enemies again, but this time you can get their friends and family too!

Maybe it's because I'm having a bad day. Maybe it's because I'm putting too much thought into it. Maybe it's because I'm sick and tired of the phrase "collateral damage", or maybe I'm just missing some black humor. But in any case, I found out I can't bring myself to finish the game.

I hope that says something nice about me.

So, it's that time of the year again. Apple has unveiled its new ad-blocking technology for the latest iPhone, and people on the internet are losing their minds about why ads are good for you, and how this will be the end of the internet as we know it.

To which I reply: no, they are not. And good riddance. Don't let the door hit you on your way out.

I can't properly outline the mess that online ads have brought into internet users. Slower loading times, annoyingly loud sounds, erosion of our privacy, malware, and constant surveillance of our browsing habits. "But wait", says the marketer, "if we track you constantly, then we can sell you better stuff. If ads are tailored to you, then you wouldn't be annoyed by them - in fact, you would be grateful". To this, I usually reply by not replying, because arguing with someone who thinks I enjoy getting sales pitches is a person I don't bother discussing with.

The technical point is more interesting. If the ad industry where to collapse today, bringing down every ad-supported website along with it, the resulting meltdown is something I'd love to witness. Imagine the ad bubble blows up tomorrow. Thousands of websites disappear overnight. Panic. Chaos. Bloggers on the streets yelling "LIKE ME!" to random pedestrians. Desperate tweens crying in restaurants because they don't know what to do with their food pictures. But then we'd all cool down our collective heads, and realize that most of the stuff we enjoy is already produced for free, is not supported by ads, or both. Without the marketers, the internet goes on.

I still remember the "older days" in which advertising was restricted to a couple pop-ups here and there. And I can tell you: that early internet was anything but "dead". There was an incredible amount of content long before the advent of advertising. Which is why I cannot understand how anyone would believe that the internet needs cash to survive. There was plenty of content before ads, and there will be plenty of content afterwards, too

In a following article I'll detail replacements for popular websites and apps based on technology we already have, to show that ads are more a convenience than a necessity. But I want to repeat that a volunteer-run internet would be incredible. Would we lose several of those San Francisco startups burning cash as fast as they can? Yes. But I'm still not sure why should I even care. Marketers are free to continue spreading the notion that they are the saviors of the internet if they want to. But I'm also free to keep recommending Adblock Edge and Disconnect to everyone who wants to enjoy the internet as it was meant to be.

A final thought: The fact that the side with more money has not prevailed in this discussion makes me a little less cynical. If their rooms full of paid commenters have not squashed this discussion yet, then we must be doing something right.

A couple days ago I found a very interesting article, titled A neural network in 11 lines of Python. I always wanted to get a visualization of how a neural network works, so I took this as my opportunity. Taking that article as a base, I created a nice visualization of the simple case, and it ended up looking very nice.

This post is a small version of that. I'm going to show you how a neural network does its magic, using the magic of Javascript and SVG graphics.

The computation should proceed as follows: for neuron 3, we'll first multiply neurons 0-2 by the value of the edge that connects both neurons, sum those three values, and apply the sigmoid function to the result. In formal terms, $$n_3 = sigmoid(n_0 w_{0,3} + n_1 w_{1,3} + n_2 w_{2,3})$$ where n_i is the i-th neuron, and w_i,j is the weight that connects the neuron w_i with the neuron n_j.
The sigmoid function guarantees that the value for neuron 3 will be a value between 0 and 1. We repeat the same process for neurons 4 and 5.

So here we can see what our network is actually computing. If you have not yet read the article to the end, there's a very good chance that our network is returning random garbage, and that's fine - we haven't trained it yet, so of course the output makes no sense. This is called the forward step, in which I test my network and see what it's being computed.
For the second step, backpropagation, we'll need to write a couple tables, and see how bad our results are.

So we have now applied our corrections to the green weights, but how about the red and blue ones? We'll also correct those by applying a variation of the same principle: once I corrected the value for the output, I have to distribute the amount of error into every weight that contributed to its computation. This will allow me to correct the values for neurons 3 and 4, which I'll finally use to correct the values for the remaining weights.
This process is called backpropagation, because I'm analyzing the network backwards to correct the errors I made when computing forwards.

Now all that remains for the training process is for me to repeat these steps over and over, until the er ror (shown underneath) is small enough.

This is a very simple neural network (although not the simplest), implemented in Javascript. I've skipped some details in order to make the whole process simpler - If you want something slightly more challenging, I definitely suggest you to read the original article, which goes into the right level of detail.

I still want to improve on this, but I'm not entirely sure how. I think it would be nice to see how some neurons are given more (or less) weight, but I'm not sure how this should look like. If you have any ideas, feel free to tweet me.

Note: If you are quick enough, you might have noticed that the bias unit is missing in the hidden layer. The short version is: yes, it is. I only noticed once it was too late. I'll try and fix it in future revisions of this article.

Dear Spotify,

I think it's time to realize that you are not the service you once where. At first it was subtle, like that time when you changed the shade of green of your logo to the ugly one you are using now. Then there was that issue with offline mode, in which I lost a whole playlist because your synchronization with Windows Phone doesn't work. I guess I should have seen the signals back then.

But now... now you changed. More specifically, you change your Terms of Use, and I can only use you if I agree for you to collect my pictures and track my location, among others. And that's where I have to draw the line. Spotify, I'm breaking up with you.

Wait, let me rephrase that: I already broke up with you 10 minutes ago, when I canceled my paid subscription. This is just me being polite.

Let's be honest here: I was not paying for music. I can get free music pretty much everywhere - call it Youtube, Vimeo, MP3 forums or torrents, finding free music is not particularly difficult. I was paying those € 10 because I preferred that to paying with my data, like so many other services. But if you are going to build a profile of me anyway that is related not to what I like to listen (which is what you are supposed to care about) but about what I do in my daily life (which is none of your business), then what's the point? I was paying to get away of the claws of marketing, and that is now gone. And so am I.

I guess I'll just go back to the old way, building my own music collection and listening to it wherever and however I want. I may even get back to my old idea of a streaming server. I know we had our issues before, like when I kept looking for videogame music and you kept showing me crappy piano versions of them. Or when you wouldn't change the title of Fabiana Cantilo's misspelled album even after I pointed it out repeatedly. But this time it's different. This time I'm gone for good.

Bye, Spotify. I'll show up later on to collect the titles on my playlist, so I can download them later. You can keep my e-mail address. It was a throwaway anyway.