That's a good point. It's very likely that TPG demands constant growth meaning more profits each year. So Fandom has to put ads everywhere to meet the goals.
The content is created by volunteers. But fandom is a for-profit company. In its early days when it was known as Wikia, they maintained a fairly small team of people running the site. So they just had to make enough money for paychecks and bills.
Here's my take on what went wrong. Throughout the years they grew. Because the company grew, they hired more hr people - more money needed. So they hired marketing teams, data science and so on. The costs skyrocketed.
So now they're putting ads everywhere because they don't have that much more traffic than 10 years ago but the company is much larger.
I believe code holds meaning even without a compiler or interpreter. I can read code and discern its functionality. I can even recognize existing algorithms such as quicksort. I can achieve the same understanding with pseudocode, which lacks an existing compiler. Similarly, prompts possess meaning; I can comprehend the task delegated to a machine learning model by reading the prompt.
I agree that both code and data are akin in terms of meaning. Transitioning from Assembly language to Python liberates us from concerns about registers and low-level intricacies. Python directs our attention to the problems we aim to solve, in contrast to low-level languages where a significant effort is spent on specifying hardware operations. High-level languages emphasize outcomes, enabling us to focus on the result rather than meticulously instructing the hardware. AI propels us further along this trajectory.
In this sense, I view a prompt and code as rather similar.