Originally published at: 24 magic tricks explained | Boing Boing
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Cool guide, but that web page loads dozens of new pages as you scroll down. Ugh.
My favorite magic trick on this listicle was the one where, once it ran out of factoids about magic tricks, it then started appending factoids from a listicle of “tricks to organize your garage” and I just kinda kept scrolling past an endless series of images and paragraphs interleaved with grey boxes labeled “advertisement” that my ad blocker had removed the intended contents from. And magically changed the URL bar to match.
I wonder just how much time was spent building this advertising delivery machine, and filling it with factoids that are just interesting enough to get shared around. I have heard it said that the basic secret of most magician’s tricks is that they are willing to spend absurdly more time and energy on figuring out how to make the effect work than anyone sane would expect it to take. Probably this is a task that could be automated by GPT3 and it’s ilk depressingly soon - here’s your daily dose of distracting and amusing Content, citizen, generated and edited by algorithms designed to optimize for keeping you mindlessly scrolling as long as possible! It may or may not actually be correct, we provide this for entertainment purposes only and disavow any responsibility should you act on this information.
(I am also stoned so I am rather vulnerable to this right now.)
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The link takes you to a spam portal hellsite, and I wouldn’t recommend you click it.
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