Zagorath

Zagorath , 1 month ago

You know what, I actually agree with YouTube's argument. Ad blocking is piracy. In fact, no, it's worse than piracy. If I pirate a movie, Disney makes no money, but it costs them nothing at all. If I watch YouTube without an ad blocker, I'm depriving YouTube of its revenue source and I'm costing them money. Morally, ad blocking sits somewhere between piracy and actual theft.

The thing is? I don't care. I ad block YouTube all the time and feel not a lick of guilt. The reason: Google brought this on themselves. I used to happily pay for YouTube Red. But they have continuously, both before and after that point, been actively hostile to the people actually producing the content they make. Their willingness to bow down to copyright trolls and complete inability to properly apply fair use. They extremely harsh policies on acceptable content, stopping people talking about sex education or mediaeval weaponry being able to reliably makes money.

And the straw that broke this camel's back was when they changed the requirements to be in the Partner Program, locking out all the smaller creators from ever being able to make money on YouTube. I never considered myself a "creator", but over the 5 years prior to that I occasionally uploaded stuff I was doing anyway. I had amassed almost $100 over those 5 years. Not an impressive amount, for sure, but having that taken away from me made me feel unwelcome. I don't think I've uploaded anything public since, and I've been blocking ads on the site since then.

Even worse, not long after this change, they decided to start showing ads even on videos from non-partnered videos, so you can get ads on my videos even though I don't see a single cent.

So fuck YouTube. Ad blocking is worse than piracy, and I say good.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

Sorry, but a shovel is unskilled labour. A forklift driver is absolutely not. In the sense that you quite literally need prior qualifications in order to do it, it's not something any basically functioning adult can do with on-the-job training.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

Using the definition provided by @damnedfurry (appearing as "ObjectivityIncarnate"), yes, they meet that definition. Forklift drivers are not trained on the job, they need a specific licence. That makes it not unskilled labour.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

You can use the "save" function to come later

Yeah you can

Zagorath , 1 month ago

Haha thanks!

But unfortunately, tone doesn't carry well through text, and may be especially poorly conveyed to someone who isn't a native speaker (which I'm assuming, from your username). My previous comment was meant to be read with an insinuating tone, playing on your use of the term "come".

Zagorath , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I am kinda curious what about these were illegal. Like, are they particularly shoddy home-made stuff? Just some boring lack of import permits? Does Czechia have strict laws around sex toys?

Zagorath OP , 1 month ago

I can kinda see it if I squint and don't look at it too long.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

YouTube Premium

Unless you're doing it for YouTube Music, this seems absurd to me. On desktop traditional ad blockers work perfectly, and on mobile there's Revanced or Grayjay.

Anyway, I pay for Nebula.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

I'm a big fan of Nebula, though the calculus is a bit different because there a re probably upwards of 20 creators that I already watched from YouTube on there (even higher if you count the channels rather than the creators), plus a few more that I rediscovered, plus a fair few that I discovered for the first time on Nebula.

The biggest draw is probably the Nebula exclusives. Lindsay Ellis has put out 6 excellent videos since she withdrew from YouTube for good. Many other creators do bonus content for their regular videos, as well as a growing library of exclusive standalone productions. If you tell me which of their creators interest you, I could check and let you know how much bonus content you'd get from them.

But honestly, for me, the best thing is that it's sort of like a Super-Patreon. Sure, I could sign up to all of those creators' Patreons, and that would support them the most, but then I'd be paying well over $100 per month. Instead, with Nebula's annual plan, it's just $30 per year, and still supports them significantly more than a YouTube view, even one on Premium (which is itself significantly better than an ad view).

Zagorath , 1 month ago

I've never actually used Grayjay. Just heard about it for the first time a few hours ago. To be honest I thought it did support playlists. It sounded like if you sign in, you get access to all your YouTube features like playlists and comments. Shame to see that's not the case. My Watch Later playlist is so essential to my YouTube viewing, I guess I'll stick with Revanced for now.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

So Jason just puts out his videos about 4 days early on Nebula. He's done a small number of Nebula bonus content videos, but not very many. If you like his videos, you might also like CityNerd, Stewart Hicks, City Beautiful, RMTransit, and Hoog which all also cover urbanism.

The HAI crew also operate the Wendover YouTube channel, and under that brand have released a bunch of really good documentaries, including the incredibly moving "Final Years of Majuro". There's also the channel "Extremities" from them, which "brings you the stories of how and why the world's most remote settlements exist". They have their game show, Jet Lag, which is really good, but I think that's on YouTube on a delay; they've recently also announced an upcoming series called "The Getaway", but other than the name and being from that crew, no more is known about it. Completely unrelated to them, there's the channel "neo", which I find satisfies much the same itch as HAI.

For tech news, there's The Friday Checkout, OzTalksHW, and TechAltar, but I watch none of those so can't comment precisely on their content.

No explicit privacy advocacy I'm afraid.

For science, there's Minute Physics, The Science Asylum, and Real Science which are their ones most similar to the ones you listed, but there are also a whole heap that do science from a different angle, like Atlas Pro, which uses real paper atlases as a framing device for talking about world geography; Tibees, who talks through scientific papers; Tier Zoo, who teaches about animals through the lens of video game logic; and Simon Clark, who is primarily focused on climate change through the lens of what science and technology we can use to help prevent it. I still watch and love Stand Up Maths and Steve Mould on YT though.

Not sure I'd ever say Lemmy has a "liberal" bias. More explicitly anti-liberal, tbh. But still, Nebula has TLDR, who do an impeccable job of producing a BBC or ABC-style news show with an explicit goal of leaving their own personal biases at the door and creating a show that avoids bias as much as humanly possible. Their semi-regular "The Editorial" is excellent, with them going over the mistakes they made and issuing corrections. There's also J.J. McCullough, who I don't watch, but have been lead to believe is a right-wing (but not far-right—more the sort of traditional conservative you might have typically expected before the 2000s) creator who seems to cover things in current affairs. And just recently they've added a new channel called Morning Brew, which I'm still trying to get a read on, but seems to be news primarily with a business focus. They've also recently announced a new news division, but we don't know exactly what form that's going to take yet or what sort of content will be coming out of it.

As far a misc entertainment, it's a very personal thing that's hard to give recommendations for. NileRed is listed under the science category, but his videos are often so bizarre that I'd say they're more like light entertainment. There is a huge amount of stuff covering media criticism, some with very serious tones, some much more casual; some looking at the art through specific lenses (there are a couple of queer creators in particular), others who take more of a film production bent, and ones who view it through the lens of pop culture. The film and media categories are probably the strongest part of Nebula. There's edutainment like Extra History. I have never had an interest in professional tennis, but have found CULT TENNIS to be a shockingly interesting channel (one of the ones I discovered through Nebula). A whole bunch of music channels like 12tone, Mary Spender, and Polyphonic; personally, I find them all far too focused on modern music for my tastes as a classical fan. Also technically listed under the "music" category is Tantacrul, though really I'd say many of his videos should be must-watch for anyone doing any sort of software UX design, even though he's specifically focussing on music notation/composition software. LegalEagle is weirdly categorised under "news", which I guess makes sense because a lot of his videos do cover current events, but fundamentally I personally view him as an entertainment channel who talks about the law. If you're a gamer at all, Razbuten is excellent, especially his "...For Someone Who Doesn't Really Play Games" series, where he introduces his wife, who is a non-gamer, to various different genres of games.

Personally, I couldn't ever replace YouTube entirely with Nebula. There's just way too much stuff on YT, and their discovery algorithm has gotten so good. They're really good in some niches, and much weaker in others. Some of the niches they're weak in, they're pretty obviously never going to enter. Live-streaming gaming, for example. But others they're expanding into all the time. When I first joined, they didn't have a single urbanism channel, and now they have most of the big urbanists on YouTube. These days Nebula is big enough that I have to check a couple of times per day to be sure that, if I look at the "latest videos" section of the front page, I don't miss anything entirely. (Though there's always the dedicated latest videos page if I did miss something from the front page.) Latest Videos has been a great way that I've come across entirely new channels and even niches that I wouldn't have thought to be interested in before. It's big, and varied, and growing a lot. I think it'd be hard not for someone to get their money's worth from it.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

Oh I see. Yeah I do use those from time to time. Would be a shame not to have them, for precisely the reason you describe.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

Oh, another thing just occurred to me. There are also Nebula-exclusive podcasts. I listen to The Urbanist Agenda, hosted by Jason Slaughter, with regular guests including (but not limited to) the other urbanists on Nebula.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

Another platform that I haven't yet signed up for, but probably will before too long, is Dropout. Created by the former head of the YouTube channel CollegeHumor after the old owners collapsed at the hands of a private equity firm, it now hosts a whole range of comedy content, from game shows (Um, Actually is mostly available on YouTube, and is excellent), to sketch comedy (clips from Game Changer and Make Some Noise are available as YT Shorts—I've seen them called a spiritual successor to Who's Line Is It Anyway, especially after Wayne Grady guest starred in an episode), and their D&D show Dimension 20. It's entirely in that "misc entertainment" category, and all from one single studio, but it's shockingly good for that.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

Oh, yeah. I guess I just took that as a given. @sugar_in_your_tea, this is worth knowing too, if you weren't already aware.

(Though with SponsorBlock, you can achieve much the same thing on YouTube, albeit in a more morally grey way.)

Zagorath , 1 month ago

I actually mostly love Sponsor Block for its non-sponsor things. Stuff like cutting out intro animations, cutting long silences in recorded streams, skipping "interaction reminders" ("don't forget to like and subscribe"), and occasionally jumping straight to the music in music videos.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

Good to know!

Zagorath OP , 1 month ago

It's trivially obvious that that would be the case. Paying people to do the checkout costs maybe 5 minutes per customer, total. Paying them to constantly watch the customer is going to be 20–40 minutes per customer.

I'm guessing that they thought they could develop the technology to remove the need for people to observe constantly, and have just now decided that it's impractical.

Zagorath OP , 1 month ago

Weird, that post doesn't seem to have been federated to my instance properly.

Zagorath OP , 1 month ago

Yes, in America they own grocery stores under the "Amazon Fresh" brand, some of which were famous for their "Just Walk Out" technology, where you scan on your way in, and then seemingly-magically got charged for everything you bought just by putting it in your trolley and walking out. When they first started out, there were news stories about how people even tried tricking it but still got charged correctly. It was never, until now, revealed how they actually did it, with people believing it was probably done via automated camera detection.

Zagorath OP , 1 month ago

You can get effectively the same thing via "Scan & Go" technology. Here in Australia, one of our two main supermarkets has it. You download their app, and when you enter one of the stores that supports it, you click the "Scan & Go" button in the app, and then scan the barcode of things you want to buy (or scan the digital scales after weighing your fresh produce), and then when you leave, you click pay, scan your phone, and walk out. It sounds way worse when I explain it like that than it really is. In reality, it's enormously convenient and I will now go out of my way to go to one of these stores rather than the competitors which don't support it. It's only been here for about a year now, but according to this video something similar (using a specific hand scanner, rather than a phone app) has been around in the Netherlands for at least 5 years.

And if I'm reading the article correctly, even these Amazon stores already support the same kind of thing.

So as cool as it would be for convenience if this really worked purely through technology, that technology is not needed to reduce the labour required in supermarkets.

Zagorath OP , 1 month ago

Sounds like they're doing a "scan & go" type technology. You scan things yourself as you put them into your basket, then you can just walk out, so no need to line up at the self-checkout.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

You can see from the screenshot you posted that it was only posted one other time in this community. And that was by me, posting many hours after this one. So you blaming @Stopthatgirl7 is very unfair.

As for why I posted it, simple: federation problems. I looked and didn't see it already posted, because for whatever reason, on my instance when viewing this community, it didn't appear. Only when someone else posted it and linked to this post on their instance did I ever become aware of it. If you look at this post on my instance you'll note only two comments show up, and that's because they're the comments I forced to show up by manually searching for them using a different instance's URL. (Not sure why, but even when trying to search for it, I can't get your post with the actual screenshot to show up on my instance, hence my reply to this comment instead.)

Zagorath , 1 month ago

Eh personally I don't think there's a problems with cross-posting. They're different communities and different people might subscribe to them.

As for the federation issue, I don't think you should have thought of that. I know I didn't. Apparently it's a long-lived issue with lemmy.world federation. Anyone would have assumed federation issues were resolved a while ago.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

The worst thing about the Internet is that instead of April Fool's being something you deal with from the morning until noon on 1st April, it's something that basically might last from late on 31st March until the afternoon of 2nd April, and you have no idea whether something someone did was supposedly on 1st April for them or not.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

From the comments on the article:

There was this brief shining moment when we had Google Now and Google Inbox and, at least for me, they were incredibly useful tools. Then they transformed into a content chum box and a stale email platform respectively and, while I think I know why, I’ll never understand WHY.

I feel this so hard. Inbox was so great and being forced back into old-school Gmail was so disappointing. RIP Inbox.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

No, not in FPTP. You vote for the candidate who you least disagree with out of those with a reasonable chance of victory, or you waste your vote.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

Can I put in a good word for disc golf? Can be played in what is for the most part a completely normal park. A park with more of its natural tree and bush coverage than most parks would have, even, since the obstacles are part of the game.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

I think that's somewhat true, but less true than most other activities. Much less true than team sports like football (any of the sports anyone calls football) or cricket. It's quite easy and normal to go for a walk through a park where people are playing disc golf. You'd never do that down the middle of a football game. Even regular golf, because of the greater distances involved and higher risk if you get hit, walking through the course (if it's permitted at all) is not an especially comfortable prospect.

It's certainly not something that should be taking up all the space in every park, but having 2 or 3 courses in a large city? Completely reasonable.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

bro and or broette

Personally I quite like "bruh" as the gender-neutral version of "bro".

Zagorath , 2 months ago

has no proof to debunk it

Yeah, because you can't prove a negative. He doesn't need to debunk it, only to provide an alternative explanation which is more likely. Occam's razor.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

Occam's razor won't get you to the correct conclusion for all possible combinations of truth values and evidence, but it is always the best process to follow. You might end up getting new evidence later that means you update your belief, even update it to believe in something which previous evidence meant Occam's razor lead you to dismiss that conclusion. But it helps you arrive at the best conclusion based on current evidence.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

Because assuming that is a way bigger assumption than something like "faulty hardware", especially since this guy has stories about other things that we know are faulty hardware.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

Not exactly. It's concerning, for sure, but they're not actually displaying your name in association with your review. It's only stored alongside your account. They seem to be claiming that the purpose is to ensure people aren't providing fake reviews.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

Google+ was a Facebook-like social media. It was only ever supposed to be real names, so no issue.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

I mostly agree. The one thing I will say in favour of defederation is hate content. Meta has incredibly lax moderation. People can literally say "this person deserves to be killed", or even "I would absolutely murder this person if I came across them" and Meta will be like "yeah we understand this may be disappointing to you, but we're gonna allow that to stay" if you report it.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

There's definitely users who will do that here. There are on any platform open to sign-ups by the general public. But my experience has been that it's very likely to get removed if mods or admins are made aware. I don't think I've ever gotten a positive response on Meta.

Zagorath OP , 2 months ago

I'm a bit of a triceratops (yeah the algorithm has no clue what i wanna type)

Are you saying you don't want to be a triceratops?

Zagorath , 2 months ago

This is not the rule 34 I was expecting.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

It really is impressive. Steam is honestly a pretty shitty platform in a number of ways, but their competition just keeps managing to be worse.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

I'm gonna guess you're German? I believe I heard that German banks are gradually moving towards the international standard where debit/bank cards are indistinguishable from credit cards and so they'll be supported by online platforms.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

I think they may have remedied this eventually, but for a long time they were in violation of consumer law. They went a long time misleadingly displaying prices to Australians in USD despite having Australia-specific prices, and once they finally fixed that they still continued imposing international transaction fees on purchases.

I think they've mostly, if not completely, gotten rid of this recently, but they used to do some really gross exploitative psychological tactics during their sales. Then there's the DRM inherent in the platform requiring you to run their client in order to play your game—yes, other platforms apart from GOG all do this too, but that's the point: Steam is bad, but others are even worse. This becomes especially bad when you consider the risk of losing access to all your games just because Steam decides you should, or because you disagree with a changed terms of service.

Then there's just the ways that it's bad for the gaming industry. Steam acts as a monopsony as game developers are basically doomed to fail if they're not on Steam. Steam's strong emphasis on its regular sales cycle might appear good to consumers at first, but like the net neutrality violations in "unlimited bandwidth to [our partner website]" coming from your ISP, this creates a short-term benefit to consumers in exchange for causing longer-term harm.

Oh and also I'm salty about their recent in-game overlay redesign, and the fact that it took away the ability to "ctrl-f" to help me find the achievement I'm working on.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

Haha the guess was just because I've seen users complain about how a website "doesn't accept my bank card" many times before, and it's almost always been German people. Over there, I believe, the most standard average person gets a card that isn't compatible with most online payment systems.

But yeah especially with a government as sketchy as that I can see why you'd want to use something with a bit more privacy.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

but also frankly speaking not their fault

Oh yeah for sure. But it doesn't really matter whose fault it is, what matters is that it's bad for developers and consumers, and it's a reason to want competitors to succeed, and to be frustrated that they're not.

Zagorath , 2 months ago

This might be Photoshopped, but this one, featuring a former Australian Prime Minister, isn't.