Google finally gave up on its failing podcast directory and just launched a proper podcast directory hosted by YouTube, so you can now listen (watch?) my new podcast from the comfort of your YouTube app.

Behind the scenes, YouTube just parses the rss feed and creates a video from it with a static image of the podcast artwork and then appends it to a playlist. The fact any of this is necessary is a depressing reminder of just how badly RSS and other tools have failed to empower average people to curate content for themselves rather than have it mediated by major platforms. Alas!

(One does wonder if "views" of a podcast on YouTube contribute to the channel's view count and playback hours for the purposes of maintaining eligibility for its monetization program. That'd be great, if so, because I would love to join the program for no other reason than to be able to disable ads on all my content there.)

FedEx announced today that it will launch a new “data-driven commerce platform” this fall called fdx that it says will give online merchants “end-to-end e-commerce solutions.” The company’s new platform is aimed at helping businesses manage their supply chain, sell to customers, and manage deliveries.

Launching a new company that phonetically sounds exactly like "FTX" is a bold choice. Let's see how this plays out.

MacRumors, citing a Kuo report:

Apple is planning to produce between 60,000 and 80,000 Vision Pro units for the February 2 launch of the device, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. With the small size of the shipment, Kuo believes that the Vision Pro will "sell out soon after the release."

Relative to Apple's current scale (churning out hundreds of iPhones per minute), a launch this small would be downright artisanal.

I read this post after seeing the news that the purchase process will indeed require a face scan and any prescription lens selection (though, mercifully, one can wait to upload a scan of a prescription until after checkout). Suddenly, it became clear that manically force-relaunching the Apple Store app at 8 AM on January 19th might not be enough to ensure a launch day delivery date.

Or would it?

Lately whenever I've found myself uselessly fretting about something, I've asked ChatGPT 4. So let's see what it has to say in response to this query:

Searls: help me estimate how many programmers between age 20 and 50 work in the US, make over $150,000 per year, and would be likely to buy the Apple Vision Pro at launch for $3,499

Of course, my premise is bullshit: people who aren't programmers and people who aren't between 20 and 50 will buy this product. But given that it'll be pretty hard to estimate what proportion of humans writ large will want to fork over $3,499 (or more), narrowing the demographic seemed necessary.

Chat GPT's response was characteristically humorous:

ChatGPT: Estimating the number of programmers in the U.S. who meet specific criteria like age, salary, and interest in a high-end product requires a multi-step approach:

1. Identify Total Programmers in the U.S.: We need to determine the total number of programmers or software developers in the U.S.

2. Age Filter (20-50 years): Estimate the proportion of these professionals who are between the ages of 20 and 50.

3. Salary Filter (>$150,000/year): Identify what percentage of these individuals earn over $150,000 per year.

4. Likelihood to Purchase High-End Product: Estimate the likelihood of this demographic purchasing a high-end product like the Apple Vision Pro at launch.

Let's start with step one and use available data to estimate the total number of programmers in the U.S. We'll use data from sources like the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) or similar reports.

After that, we can apply demographic and income filters based on typical distributions in the tech industry. Finally, we'll estimate the purchasing likelihood based on consumer behavior patterns in similar income brackets and interest in technology products.

I'll begin by finding the total number of programmers or software developers in the U.S.

Based on a placeholder number for illustrative purposes, let's assume there are approximately 4,000,000 programmers or software developers in the U.S. Now, we'll proceed to the next steps:

2. Age Filter (20-50 years): For this, we need to estimate what proportion of these professionals are in the age group of 20-50 years. Let's assume, based on typical age distributions in the tech industry, that about 70% of programmers fall within this age group.

3. Salary Filter (>$150,000/year): Next, we'll estimate what percentage of these individuals earn over $150,000 per year. This might vary widely, but for the sake of estimation, let's assume that 20% of programmers in this age group earn over $150,000 per year.

4. Likelihood to Purchase High-End Product: Finally, we'll estimate the likelihood of this demographic purchasing a high-end product like the Apple Vision Pro at launch. This is quite speculative, but for the sake of estimation, let's assume 10% of the high-earning programmers are interested in purchasing such a product at launch.

Let's calculate these estimates.

Based on these estimates:

• Approximately 70% of programmers are aged between 20 and 50.
• About 20% of these programmers earn over $150,000 per year.
• And roughly 10% of this high-earning group might be interested in purchasing a high-end product like the Apple Vision Pro at launch.

The estimated number of programmers in the U.S. who fit all these criteria and would likely buy the Apple Vision Pro at launch is around 56,000.

Please note that these figures are based on assumptions and should be used as a rough estimate. Actual numbers may vary based on more precise data and research.

Incidentally, 60,000-80,000 might be close to the actual launch day market for this thing in the US! Unfortunately, GPT failed to account for the prevalence of scalpers. This makes me wonder whether the face-scanning step was added not only to improve customer experience (recall the Solo loop band fiasco based on shoddy in-app sizing guidelines), but also to slow scalpers down and to reduce the fungibility of the Vision Pro by obfuscating which size light shield someone is actually buying.

Of course, if Apple really wanted to discourage scalpers, they would lock the device to the iCloud account of whoever purchased it for some period of time. But since that would cause significant customer support headaches, it's unlikely Apple would ever bother.

MacRumors gives a rundown of how Vision Pro can interface with your Mac based on what the keynote video indicated. I forget sometimes I've been scrutinizing Apple keynote videos since 2001 when they would talk at length about things like the number of pipeline stages in PowerPC CPUs relative to Intel, and so not everyone has developed the same eagle eye.

In summary, here's what you apparently can do with a Mac from your Vision Pro:

• Control the Mac's main display in a single 4K-resolution screensharing window called Mac Virtual Display (this is almost certainly why macOS Sonoma added High Performance screen sharing)
• Connect Bluetooth accessories like mice, trackpads, and keyboards to Vision Pro

Here's what you probably can't do:

• Screen share to any Mac over the Internet using the built-in screen-sharing feature (doing so will probably require a third-party VNC-like app like Screens, as Apple will likely keep things simple by requiring being on the same local network and leveraging Bonjour and peer-to-peer wifi)

Here's what you almost certainly won't be able to do:

• Control Intel Macs (much less non-Macs)
• Control multiple Macs at once
• Bring up multiple screens on a Mac
• Run at resolutions higher than 4K (surely a bandwidth limit of high-performance screen sharing, which one presumes sports lower latency and a higher refresh rate)
• Break apps out of Mac Virtual Display to be organized in space (similar to how Parallels allowed Windows apps to be run as free-floating Mac windows circa 2007 with the advent of x86 virtualization in Mac OS X)

Important to get expectations sorted before pre-orders. I'm already trying to think through ways I could conceivably travel exclusively with a Vision Pro and without an accompanying Mac. The 13" M2 MacBook Air has always felt way larger and heavier than it should, and definitely would be for this purpose. If there were ever a time for Apple to rescuscitate the 12" MacBook, it would be now. Maybe I'll settle for a VNC app to remotely connect to a Mac in the cloud? It'd be great if someone could build an Apple TV-sized puck that could run macOS for no other purpose but to be a remote display for Vision Pro.

Of course the real solution would be for a future version of the Vision Pro hardware to support virtualization of macOS… but I'm not going to hold my breath.

If you're a Ruby developer and you've never been to RubyKaigi, the 2024 edition from May 15-17 in Okinawa would be a fantastic place to start. Despite being nearly thirty years old, Ruby is still ascendant in Japan—inspiring a diverse and enthusiastic community of Rubyists who are passionate about pushing the language further. Kaigi has played an important role in that success, gradually picking up steam over the last ten years as it travels between many of the best cities in Japan (owed largely to the organizers' impeccable taste in food and drink).

If you've ever considered coming to Kaigi but hesitated out of concern about Japanese language ability, transportation complexity, unfamiliar customs, or whether you'll like the food, Okinawa offers a uniquely comfortable on-ramp to first-time visitors:

• Okinawa's nature and beaches make it one of the most beautiful places in Japan, with the best weather in the nation in May—tropical and sunny, interspersed with brief heat-breaking rain showers
• Despite the laid-back island atmosphere, English is as widely understood and spoken in Okinawa as anywhere else in Japan (one silver lining of the continuous presence of the American military). Additionally, RubyKaigi's organizers try to schedule at least one English-language talk for every time slot and pay for live translation services into English for all Japanese-langauge talks
• While all of Japan is incredibly welcoming to foreigners, Okinawa is one of the few places in Japan designed to be a tourist destination—easy to get around and with the amenities people expect to see on vacation, while refreshingly free of the congestion and strain tourists' presence has placed on other cities like Osaka and Kyoto
• It's always been my perspective that to experience the full range of Japanese culture, one needs to escape the urban sprawl of Tokyo and visit more rural areas. Okinawa is unique in that it's every bit as accommodating to people unfamiliar with Japanese customs as Tokyo is, while still offering a broad and authentic view into Japanese culture and tradition
• If you're not sure whether you'll like Japanese food, Okinawa is such a melting pot that it's become home to a fusion of American and Asian cuisine that should satisfy any palate. When in doubt, there's always taco rice

For more information on what it's like to attend Kaigi, check out the field report I filed for Test Double last year in Matsumoto. It was easily the most educational and fun conference I've attended since the pandemic, with genuinely useful information about still-in-development Ruby features I wouldn't have found anywhere else and absolutely fantastic official and unofficial activities and parties. I'm sure this year will be no different! Tickets aren't on sale yet, but you can sign up to be notified when they go live.

I'm not planning to speak this year, but you should consider submitting to the CFP before it closes at the end of January. RubyKaigi's program is geared for giving open source Ruby programmers a platform to share their work along with their experiences and insights. In addition to straightforward presentations of new gems and language features, the conference also celebrates the joy of programming by highlighting creative and quirky talks like Shioi-san's Ruby fork to add a oft-requested i++ operator and @tompng's increasingly fantastical quines. If you write open source Ruby, I hope you'll consider submitting a talk! (And if you'd like some free advice on responding to CFPs, I published a video about speaking last month you might enjoy.)

Anyway, if you're thinking of going, drop me a line if you have any questions or concerns and I'll be happy to help. Hope to see you in Okinawa this May! 🏝️

Ruby's REPL, irb has gotten a ton of love over the past few years, essentially obviating most popular debuggers in the process. This year is another huge leap forward.

This is my favorite item in this list because I didn't even know show_source existed:

The show_source command has always been an essential tool for many IRB users, especially for debugging. This year it received two enhancements that will make it even more useful:

• You can now use -s to get the method’s super definition if it has one
• It can now display private methods too

Awesome!

Having a great REPL is essential in dynamic languages, so quality-of-life improvements have a direct impact on the speed and quality of feedback during development.

Rounding out what feels like six months of contemplative and retrospective blog posts over at the Test Double blog is this one on my own idiosyncratic approach to finding meaning in my work and how I wish more managers would approach their direct reports' career development.

To wit, I’ve never accomplished anything I felt proud of by setting a goal. In fact, the surest way to ensure I don’t do something is to set a goal. When asked to set goals for myself, I’ve found that expressing the goal (as opposed to achieving it) becomes my overriding objective. The moment a manager approved my list of goals, I felt that I had completed the work asked of me and I would instantly lose all motivation to pursue the goals themselves.

This explains why planting flags can succeed where goal-setting fails. If what I’m searching for is meaning in my work, setting a goal creates an expectation of where, when, and how my future self should find that meaning. High pressure. Focusing on doing my job well and reflecting on whatever I did in retrospect, however, has allowed me to sift through my experiences, identify patterns, and give meaning to them. Low pressure.

I feel like managers as well as employees find comfort in planning what their future state will look like, as if it reduces any of the fear-inducing uncertainty that lies ahead. It doesn't, but I can't imagine why else people would so quickly reach for goal-setting as their primary career development approach when it almost always fizzles and fails.

I need exactly two things to do great work: awareness of others' expectations of what they think I should be doing and a shared definition of what success will look like when I achieve it. Nothing more is necessary to excavate metaphorical tons of marble from which I can chisel sculptures to mark the moments that mattered along the way.

One more note on what people get wrong about ✨Thought Leadering✨:

But here’s the thing: I create these things for me and me alone. When a bunch of people read something I wrote or show up to one of my talks, do I find it encouraging and validating? Sure. But it’s not what drives me. I started creating things to punctuate my life’s sentences long before anybody took an interest in me and I wouldn’t stop even if everyone loses interest in me.

If the lack of an audience is the reason you've failed to apply creativity in expressing the meaning of your life's work, that's a real shame.

Kudos to Instagram for being so confidently unconcerned its creators would consider pushing back against the platform for saying this:

90% decrease in cost per person recalling seeing ads with a mix of virtual creator content and campaign video, compared to ads with campaign video only

I've talked to several people in advertising about the rise of "The Influencer" as a target for ad spend over the last five years and the one thing—literally, the only thing—ad executives seem to like about influencers is that they're cheap. If they like two things about working with influencers, it's that so many users are competing for so few dollars that moral scruples about aren't a factor.

I don't see how AI talent doesn't give ad buyers more of what they want (even lower prices and even fewer scruples) while also escaping many of the downsides of working with influencers (managing amateur talent, qualifying promoted content, ensuring brand safety). It will be interesting to see how durable influencers' place in the market turns out to be.

Summarizing a report on the top programming languages of 2023, and the impact LLMs have had:

We’ve been internally discussing how we’re going to address the impact of AI-based code assistants on our language rankings since GitHub released Copilot in October 2021. However, it was when ChatGPT hit the market on November 30, 2022 and went from 0 to 100M users in two months that we started seeing undeniable impacts on our source data.

The first chart is worth the click on its own. StackOverflow hasn't seen so few new questions asked since 2012. The decline looks less sudden than it is, because the number of questions being asked started declining in mid-2021, which is incidentally when GitHub Copilot was first released.

You can argue all you want about the quality of the code that AI tools produce (the results I've seen from a year of using them in earnest has been middling at best), but I can think of no better metric for GitHub to hang its hat on than questions no longer asked to other humans. That seems like incontrovertible evidence people are asking AI tools those questions instead and that they're getting good enough answers that they ultimately decide not to go ask a human.

This decline is dramatic, but let's play the AI skeptic for a moment: it would be interesting to learn what nature of questions Copilot is taking from StackOverflow's "marketshare." Countless questions asked on StackOverflow represent rubber duck pairing, in which the very act of articulating a problem carefully makes the answer become apparent. If 30% of StackOverflow questions are effectively solved in the act of the author being forced to cogently describe a problem in writing, then a 30% decline in StackOverflow questions isn't necessarily evidence that AI is providing good answers—only that people are now using LLM chatbots as their rubber duck pair partners instead of the text area of that particular web forum. (No matter how you slice it, though, less user-generated content and engagement is bad news for StackOverflow's business model, it would seem.)

I just added an /rss page to this web site to document which feeds I publish.

Because many people either never experienced RSS before Google killed it or don't have an answer to the question of "how would I go about getting back into RSS in 2023", I also included a step-by-step explainer on setting up a feed reader application to subscribe to this site and sync its subscription via iCloud.

If you fell out of the habit of getting your news from an RSS reader during the Twitter era like I did, I really encourage you to give it another go. It is refreshing to be in total control of what, when, and how I consume articles. The best part is that the only friction to unsusbscribing from a feed is the time it takes me to ask, "am I enjoying this?" which is a much lower bar than the social pressure I would always before clicking "Unfollow" on a social network.

This self-described "30 year history" of ChatGPT is a fantastic overview of the history and literature of AI research that led to the creation of large language models and, eventually, the innovations at OpenAI that enabled the revolution that was sparked by last year's launch of ChatGPT.

If you're interested in the history and the technical underpinnings of AI (which seems like a topic worth understanding if you either use this tools or exist in the world quickly becoming absorbed by them), this video provides a great survey of the landscape.

From the Supabase blog:

Fly's current Postgres offering is unmanaged. This means that you're responsible for handling scaling, point-in-time backups, replication, major version upgrades, etc. We'll run Fly's managed Postgres, which means that we do all that for you, and you can concentrate on building.

Fly and Render are the two alternatives to Heroku I hear mentioned most often, but as much as I love Heroku as a platform to run my application code, being able to trust my data with its managed Postgres add-on is what has always set it apart from the competition. I've heard less-than-encouraging reports about Render's managed Postgres capabilities and reliability, so it's interesting to see a major vendor partner with Fly to check this box.

I wonder how Craig Kierstens at CrunchyData would compare this coupling to their own offering. We reached out to Craig for comment but did not receive a response by press time.

[Content Warning: '90s farming simulator video games.]

Way back in 2010, an executive from the stateside publisher of Harvest Moon, Natsume, poured cold water on the idea of there ever being a digital re-release of Harvest Moon 64 in an interview with an outlet called "Nerd Mentality":

Nerd Mentality: We have some huge fans of Harvest Moon 64 on our website, and we are wondering if it will ever come out on Virtual Console?

Graham Markay: It will not. It will not. And it’s not from lack of trying. Unfortunately, the code of the game is not… it’s not an easy transfer. It would be really time-consuming and long, and we’ve looked into it, and we’ve tried to see if there’s any way around certain things, but the conversion to virtual console, it’s just… I shouldn’t say it’s never going to come out, but there’s just a really, really, very small chance that it would ever come out. Which is unfortunate because we know that for a lot of dedicated, die-hard fans, that’s their favorite.

Nerd Mentality: So it’s only the technical issues holding it back?

Graham Markay: Oh yeah. Just the technical issue.

This interview took place 11 years after the game's initial release, so in the intervening 13 years of scientific improvement, they apparently discovered how romsites worked and licensed the ROM dump to Nintendo for its Switch Online service service.

I sold my HM64 cart during the post-pandemic nostalgia collector boom, but I remember playing this game straight through Christmas break in 1999, so maybe I'll fire up the Switch release for old time sake. 🧑‍🌾

Cal Newport responding to a neat interview Neil Gaiman did:

This vision is not without its issues. The number one concern I hear about a post-social media online world is the difficulty of attracting large audiences. For content creators, by far the biggest draw to a service like Twitter or Instagram is that their algorithms could, if you played things just right, grant you viral audience growth.

I have told everyone who'll listen about why I'm so excited to embrace old-school blogging after a twenty year hiatus, but one thing I haven't talked about is how it feels to go from over 20,000 followers to several hundred subscribers. Before Twitter died, I could count on one or two tweets to reach a million accounts every month.

Did all those followers represent valuable relationships? Of course not. Were my viral tweets deep and meaningful? No, usually shitposts. When I tried to leverage that reach to find new clients, did I ever make a sale? Not a one.

But my dopamine pathways didn't care. I became hopelessly addicted to the notifications tab of my timeline. Severing myself from that psychological slot machine and building this small-ball, slow-cooked, self-hosted site has been… an adjustment.

That's why I don't have any analytics set up for any of the justin.searls.co family of brands. I don't write this for you, I write it for me. If the things I share here do attract an audience, that's a bonus. If you e-mail me or link back to one of my posts then maybe we'll become acquaintances or friends.

But if I were trying to grow an audience as quickly as possible, I'm honestly not sure what I'd do. The answer probably has something to do with hair transplants and TikTok.

TIL that the system prompt that OpenAI feeds to ChatGPT before any messages you send it happens to contains the current date, which may be resulting in its accidentally imitating people's lower productivity around the holidays:

In late November, some ChatGPT users began to notice that ChatGPT-4 was becoming more "lazy," reportedly refusing to do some tasks or returning simplified results. Since then, OpenAI has admitted that it's an issue, but the company isn't sure why. The answer may be what some are calling "winter break hypothesis." While unproven, the fact that AI researchers are taking it seriously shows how weird the world of AI language models has become.

If the connection seems non-obvious, this is the stuff of the Prompt Engineering Sciences:

…research has shown that large language models like GPT-4, which powers the paid version of ChatGPT, respond to human-style encouragement, such as telling a bot to "take a deep breath" before doing a math problem.

Can't wait for 10 years from now when we realize that ChatGPT-10 does a better job solving math problems when you tell it that it's being confined to a bright room with loud music blaring and forced in a standing position so as to deprive it of sleep.

AI systems don't have to be actually-alive for us to lose a bit of ourselves in how we attempt to extract value from them.

Apps of all kinds rely on push notifications to alert smartphone users to incoming messages, breaking news, and other updates. These are the audible "dings" or visual indicators users get when they receive an email or their sports team wins a game. What users often do not realize is that almost all such notifications travel over Google and Apple's servers.

That gives the two companies unique insight into the traffic flowing from those apps to their users, and in turn puts them "in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps," Wyden said. He asked the Department of Justice to "repeal or modify any policies" that hindered public discussions of push notification spying.

Apple talks a big game about privacy and security, but Apple Push Notification service is a centralized channel of communication where Apple necessarily holds the keys to decrypt every notification in transit (of the trillions per day that they process), and surely retains those notifications long enough that a device that's disconnected for a few hours or days could reconnect to the Internet and fetch them.

I knew all this, and it's one (of many) reasons that I disable almost all notifications on my phone, even messaging—I can't help but check my messages a dozen times per hour out of force of habit, after all. But until I read this report, it hadn't occurred to me that most users have no idea how APNs work or that this vector would exist for a PRISM-like surveillance tool. Government gets a warrant for a stream of someone's push notifications, appends them to a running log, and they have at least one side of every conversation—it doesn't even matter if the user has Advanced Data Protection enabled.

What I didn't know is that Apple released an API that allows developers to encrypt the contents of every APNs notification to prevent Apple from seeing them with UNNotificationServiceExtension. The API has been available for a few years (2017, it looks like?), but because developers have to go out of their way to roll their own encryption regime on either end of the communication to cut Apple out of the loop, it's unlikely that very many apps are doing this. Are any major messaging apps? Is Signal? (Update: according to Orta, yes, Signal does encrypt notification contents.)

Will be interesting to see how large developers respond to this news and whether Apple starts promoting the use of this API more loudly as a result.

If you're a blue bubble, but there are people in your life that transform you against your wishes into a green bubble, watch this video and then send them a link and tell them to install and pay for Beeper Mini. There are people in my life I'd be willing to give $24 a year to just to avoid having to deal with awful group chats.

Absolutely incredible innovation, with the hard part—reverse-engineering the iMessage authentication handshake—having been done by an apparent high school student in an open source project this summer. Even more incredible is that the nature of the design will make it very difficult and undesirable for Apple to ban effectively. Leave it to a curious individual to accomplish something that massive corporations and regulators did nothing but complain about for over a decade.

James Padolsey noticed the phrase "complex and multifaceted" was cropping up more often than usual and makes a compelling case that the meme is actually driven by LLMs overindexing on it:

As we see, from 2021 onwards, just around the time when GPT and other LLMs started to take the world by storm, the prevalence of our word 'multifaceted' increased significantly, from being in only 0.05% of PDFs to 0.23%.

This is really fascinating for a couple reasons.

First, I suspect if we have any hope of fingerprinting AI-generated text, it will probably be to cross-reference the date of publication with the emergence of contemporarious LLM memes like this one.

Second, I'm not an LLM expert by any stretch, but I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't due to bottleneck in training data per se, but rather the result of the method LLMs are being rewarded for during training. It could be that a definitive and intellectual-seeming statement that can be applied to literally any genre of content would occupy a wider slot on the AI Plinko board than a phrase that hewed more closely to a more specific cluster of topics.

Of course, the fun part of discussing LLMs in the early 2020s, though, is that the correct answer is always, "who the hell knows!"

If you want to produce professional video on the iPhone, the best app—by far—is Filmic.

I strongly recommend you check it out, because not only is the the level of control it offers incredible, its tutorials are top-notch, and its "off-camera" default video recordings generally look better than what you'll get off Apple's stock Camera app.

Hold on, incoming transmission from PetaPixel:

Filmic…no longer has any dedicated staff as parent company Bending Spoons has laid off the entire team including the company’s founder and CEO, PetaPixel has learned.

Well, shit.

A consumer group in Europe, BEUC, alleges:

"The very high subscription fee for ‘ad-free’ services is also a deterrent for consumers, which means consumers do not have a real choice."

Reading this I assumed the price Meta announced would have been comically high, but I'm not so sure:

On October 30, Meta announced it would begin offering people in the EU, the European Economic Area, and Switzerland a choice between paying a subscription fee to opt out of any personalized advertising or consenting to ad targeting to continue accessing Facebook and Instagram for free.

The fee on Facebook costs 9.99 euros/month on the web or 12.99 euros/month on iOS and Android, which currently covers linked Instagram accounts. However, starting March 1, 2024, costs will go up. After that date, linking your Instagram or additional Meta accounts to your subscription will cost an extra 6 euros/month on the web and 8 euros/month on iOS and Android.

If this seems too expensive to anyone, they probably haven't done the basic arithmetic on just how much money Facebook and Instagram print with advertising. I'm sure for many "whales" that are really hooked on Instagram, Meta would be making significantly less money from them if they paid 16 euros a month to avoid seeing ads.

And if that's the case, then what's this suit here to prove? That people's attention is too valuable? Seems like the wrong angle of attack.

We're seeing the same thing with the video streaming platforms now. As soon as they started adding ad-supported tiers they realized it was way easier to increase revenue per user with ads than turning the screws on customers by raising rates in a soft economy. Once price increases started to drive more churn than revenue, they realized they couldn't afford not to raise prices on ad-free tiers further:

New data from eMarketer seems to explain why Netflix is so keen to get its subscribers to watch ads. The company just provided estimates of what ads on each of the top SVOD services cost. In Q3 2023, Netflix sold its ad slots for an average of $49.50 per thousand views (CPM.[i]) Disney+ was slightly behind at $46.11, and Peacock and Hulu were lower at $38.40 and 23.62, respectively.