New York Times learns the possible risks of programmatic advertising

This is one of those cases where humans are so good at seeing patterns they&#x27;ll intuit the presence of an intelligence (artificial or otherwise) where none exists. The only algorithm here is &quot;Apple paid for a placement on this date&quot;, rather than anything content-aware.<p>(With regards to how actual content-aware ads treats this sort of case: My recollection is that waaaaay back in the day AdSense shipped with a &quot;death and tragedy filter&quot; such that if it detected the page was about them it would turn ads off. The Google which made that decision is no longer - these days it&#x27;s an unchecked-by-default setting controlled by advertisers. Somewhat surprisingly for Google, the filter was <i>really</i> unsophisticated - on the order of a simple keyword blacklist. Some of my SEO buddies had CMSes which would flag words thought to be problematic for writers, so that an innocuous phrase like &quot;Getting your taxes done doesn&#x27;t have to be a Greek tragedy&quot; didn&#x27;t end up killing ad revenue from the page.)

As a comment on the site says - this is almost certainly <i>not</i> programmatic advertising but a premium placement paid for by Apple at least a few days ago.<p>Also, I don&#x27;t see how this is intellectually stimulating, of interest to a Hacker, or anything other than a mildly amusing picture. Amusing pictures have a place, but this doesn&#x27;t seem to belong here.

This is not newsworthy. If you hit the refresh button enough times on upsetting news stories I am sure you will find a somewhat offensive ad every now and then.

I&#x27;ve worked with Apple on homepage advertising and believe the likelihood of that placement being programmatic is very low.

&gt; reproduced without further comment<p>Maybe you should add a comment? What&#x27;s the problem?<p>Only thing I can think of is the jet in the ocean and a picture of the ocean, but that&#x27;s a stretch.