Edouard Chazal

Bad Ads On Websites

René Ritchie is right to compare ad-exchanges to black-boxes, you never know what you’ll get :

We also have no ability to screen ad exchange ads ahead of time; we get what they give us. We can and have set policies, for example, to disallow autoplay video or audio ads. But we get them anyway, even from Google. Whether advertisers make mistakes or try to sneak around the restrictions and don’t get caught, we can’t tell. It happens, though, all the time.

When bad ads appear, we report them and ask that they be disabled. Since different people in different geographies see different ads, it can be a challenge to identify them, and it can take a while to get them pulled. It’s a horrible process for everyone involved.

It’s so bad, our tech team has been exploring their own “bad ads” extension that would identify any resource-heavy ads that violate our policies, and provide us with better information so the ad network can more easily find and kill them. And yes, we’re well aware of how insane that sounds.

→ iMore

The Day the Computers Betrayed Us

“What we can say is that when things work in new ways, they break in new ways,” Alexis Madrigal wrote in The Atlantic after a glitch waylaid the NASDAQ stock exchange for three hours in 2013, causing a panic.

→ The Atlantic

Bill Gross Didn’t Short China

‘‘Woulda coulda shoulda,’’ he said. ‘‘Obviously I wish I’d shorted a bunch of shares but that’s the bane of the portfolio manager: never happy.”

→ Bloomberg

Robots On Wall Street ?

As automation in financial services grows, computers and algorithms have taken on some of the traditional work of traders, clerks and financial advisers. Now, a host of startups that use artificial intelligence to write news stories and other reports have set their sights on writing work at banks and financial-service companies.

→ The Wall Street Journal

The Bloomberg Terminal : Inside The Esoteric Ecosystem That Keeps Finance Hooked

Even high culture has acknowledged its status. Last week the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History started displaying the old Bloomberg keyboard of bond market legend Bill Gross as part of its “American Enterprise” exhibition.

For bankers, traders and money managers, these examples of the terminal’s ubiquity are entirely unsurprising, with many admitting a near-addiction. “I genuinely don’t know how I’d manage without the terminal,” says Matt Russell, a fund manager at M&G Investments in London. “It’s quite sad, really.”

→ Financial Times