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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Netflix has stopped being a product I am interested in a long time ago.

    When they started out, they had a lot of stuff. These days, you’ll have to subscribe to 5 or 6 services to watch a lot. And every service makes their own shitty shows to attract more customers. And 99% of them suck, with the occasional succes.

    Right now, Netflix is too expensive for what they offer. But clearly they think they can get away with raising proces, so I guess most people think it is worth it or simply don’t care.




  • YouTube is simply squeezing hard now.

    They are big enough that 90% of the people who do look at videos do it there. So a video that is posted elsewhere simply does not get the exposure that it does on YouTube.

    That gives them a lot of power. And they use it to squeeze as much money as possible from anyone they can. Now, if they would do big squeezes, people would notice and they would at least try to find other sites.

    So just like abuse, it’s a slow process of tearing little barriers down of what is acceptable, until at some point users one by one start to realize it has all turned to shit.

    But that is going to take a lot of time, and until that happens we are just going to see more reports about all the things YouTube does.

    We will keep seeing angry nerds upset about it, and they will block ads and work around it. But nothing else will change. And that is such a small part of the userbase of YouTube that they don’t even feel it.

    So I’m going to block ads, watch what I want to watch as long as the site is usuable without ads, and I will stop using the site when ads can no longer be blocked. YouTube is simply not that important to me.


  • The problem is people are only going to change their behaviour once the consequences hit them, and with global warming, the consequences won’t really hit them until a long time later.

    The second problem is the consequences are dramatic. And very hard if not impossible to turn around.

    To really get people and companies to change their behaviour, we would need an immediate consequence to behaviour that is bad for the environment.

    Bottom line is, some people try, some people don’t give a shit, and in the end we will have to deal with it.

    I hope governments are watching carefully, we will need to keep a lot of water away from us in the future, and we’ll have to deal with the changing climate too.


  • I do agree that quality control should catch things, but we are all human and we don’t catch a 100%. So if quality control is flooded with too much things to catch, the chance of one slipping by increases.

    Also, a lot of FOSS is based on volenteers, do we just ask those people to put in more hours? Who is responsible anyways if something makes it through and actually causes damage to something or someone?

    I find the decision quite reasonable. You at least filter out the party most likely to pull something shady. We should still be very careful, but it takes away some the work.








  • The number of ads per hour of video is higher. And people get addicted to the dopamine fix. Short videos generally will have to be incredibly stimulating to keep people watching.

    Your dopamine goes through the rood for 15 seconds or 30 seconds, after that it drops down again and you need the next video to get it higher again and again. In between the videos you get ads, so in the end they lure you into watching a whole bunch of ads.

    They optimize their algoritms so they know what keeps you watching. Could be cute puppies, could also be fake news about how everything is somebody elses fault, but they just want to keep you watching. They don’t care about the truth, they need your eyes on the ads.

    And that is how generations will be ruined.


  • They had a service I paid for. I paid for youtube without ads. Just that. And then they changed prices and made me pay for something that I did not need, YouTube Music. So I canceled.

    They had me as a subscriber, they just wanted more money and lost me.

    And I block ads. Not specifically for youtube, but for all sites and apps that I can. I use Blockada and most days the number of blocked tracking cookies goes over 1000. Laat 24 hours it is 3426 trackers blocked. Is it really necessary that I am being tracked that much?

    I don’t think so, and I am not even talking about malware, or crypto ming scripts that will be loaded as ads. Most ads are not checked properly so I have no idea what malicious bullshit I can get on my systems without even asking for it.

    If I find something that I use a lot and adds value, I will donate some money. For example, I support some creators on Patreon.

    And ads always do their best to be loud and intrusive. And if I have a guest at my house that is loud and intrusive, they don’t get invited back. The same with ads.

    Remember when ads were just a small rectangle on youtube? You clicked it away and that is it? That was the way. Serve ads in a normal, non intrusive way and I can handle them just fine.


  • This remind me of my school. At the time they used some software to block sites. So I searched for the name of that software, and found an executable file with that name plus config.

    I executed it, and much to my surprise, I could now configure the filters for the whole school. I tested it by entering the URL of a game my classmates was playing at that moment. It was a very weird sensation to see his game getting closed by the software the moment I added it to the blacklist…

    So:

    • I and every other students had read and write acces to the directory where the software was installed.
    • The directory was indexed to make it easier for students to find.
    • There was no extra password or authorization.

    I showed a classmate. Told him to not show anybody else. A week later, he added the startpage to the blacklist. As a result, if you opened Internet Explorer, it would close immediately. Obviously, this caused admins to check out what was going on…

    It was fixed later, but it was fun while it lasted.


  • The point for me is that the government automatically seems to think that cash payments are for something illegal. And all of a sudden, the burden is on me to proof that it is not.

    While technically speaking, paying with cash is a very legal way to pay and should not require any explanation at all. Nor should it be more difficult.

    Of course, there is a limit, and I get that paying a 2 million dollar house in cash is reason to at least ask where that money came from. But 3000 dollars or 100000 are amounts of money that in my opinion do not deserve the same amount of checking.

    A lot of random but legal stuff can be done with 10000 dollars of cash. And yes, sometimes you use cash because you don’t want your identity known. Doesn’t mean you are doing something illegal. If the government thinks it is illegal, they should open an investigation and proof it.

    Instead they put the burden on you. Doesn’t seem fair to me, and a limitation on my personal freedom to spend money however I like.

    Not to mention, even things that are legal now, could be made illegal by governments to come, and dictators or oppressive regimes will have no problems with checking logs to see which assholes did something that goes against their values in the past. For that reason alone, governments should only be tracking the minimum amount of information they need.