Same… Have done for ages now. Don’t know how anyone puts up with the default behaviour.
Same… Have done for ages now. Don’t know how anyone puts up with the default behaviour.
Surprised it’s not zero already honestly.
It’s times like these when I’m glad I refused to even log into Google to view YouTube, let alone buy subscriptions. I also refuse to view downloading content (without logging in) that’s freely available to be viewed as piracy.
These subscriptions are undoubtedly a rip-off. For those saying creators get a “cut”, there’s a reason why sites like Patreon exist. It’s substantially better for creators if you subscribe to them directly that way and get your videos from Patreon. Same with Nebula etc. If I really had to pay then I’d do that (and do already for some stuff that was never on YouTube anyway).
You can get enough subs for the price of a YT premium to get plenty of content to watch, even if you don’t want to subvert Google. So there’s zero reason to throw money at them for this. None at all.
We need the New Zealand solution: automatically rezone all property in good locations to allow higher density. Override/reject “objections” intended to help NIMBYism and increase property values for owners at the expense of everyone else. Anything but a serious supply increase is just tinkering say the edges and really a waste of time.
Maybe this explains why the result quality is so terrible. I’ve found Brave Search to be surprisingly good, and even the likes of Metager/Mojeek to be better than they used to be relative to the big players. DDG is not too bad, but went noticeably downhill when Bing started introducing AI features - presumably since these are largely not included in DDG, the remaining original search mechanisms aren’t as good.
I really feel like we’ll be back to starting web rings and distributing bookmark files etc soon though. Relying more on community resources than faceless companies that will undoubtedly be looking for the next way to screw us over.
Some of us remember there was a time when things like Reddit didn’t exist, and neither did Facebook, Twitter etc. Lots of people lived just fine without them then. It’s completely possible to take a hard line on this stuff and just refuse to use sites/apps/products that don’t respect your privacy. Remember, there’s always a smaller, friendlier or mechanical version.
I think what’s likely to happen isn’t that we’ll see one replacement for YouTube, but a large number of niche and possibly subscription based or peer to peer sites that collectively end up offering everything of value that YouTube does/used to.
And this is why you shouldn’t allow things essential to your life to be mediated by some faceless tech giant. Self-hosting may be more effort, but you can at least guarantee that any issues won’t be as a result of some bureaucratic nonsense or administrative error. This is not just smart home stuff - there are similar examples affecting email, photo galleries, file storage, etc. etc.
Stressful training and work environment, long hours, and the pay isn’t that great either. This really is the government’s problem to solve - and it’s probably not going to be solved just by paying people once to complete their degree, it will have to be throughout their career by providing more pay and more support. Which of course means the public will eventually end up footing at least some of the bill - but the alternative, where education is compromised, will end up costing even more.
Handing it to LibreOffice or Abiword I guess. Or for cloud fans, Google Docs. I don’t think anyone is going to go without a word processor because of this.
Interesting for the alternative OS options - a device like this one would be great if there were some really good serviceable Linux distro for phones … And yes, I know they exist, but they’re not up to the level needed by most people for a daily driver. As for Android, it’s a nice idea to have a phone that lasts that long, but would it actually be reliable and fast enough to use for 8 years?
Sadly, no option to get this in Australia besides grey import, which is going to be pricey. I’m going to keep an eye on the way this line of phones goes in future, but for me at the moment there are too many unknowns and the price tag is too high.
Or you could make public transport run faster and more efficiently and faster, reducing the number of people who drive.
Social networking should be done on personal devices anyway. Bearing in mind the risk still exists even in that scenario that bad actors can still buy data from data brokers to infer location, personal particulars etc of most users of the big social networks anyway.
But I suppose the rail loop that serves all 10 people who currently catch the 903 bus is still on the agenda with a price tag of $100 billion. Good stuff Andrews.
So why does that sick note from your doctor say, “As a large language model, I can’t actually diagnose your medical condition. But here’s a note I might write if I were your doctor…”
So instances that are actually supporting CSAM material can and should be dealt with by law enforcement. That much is simple (and I’m surprised it hasn’t been done with certain … instances, to be honest). But I think the apparently less clearly solved issues have known and working solutions that apply to other parts of the web as well. No content moderation is perfect, but in general, if admins are acting in good faith, I don’t think there should be too much of a problem:
There seem to be concerns about “surveillance” of material on Mastodon, which strikes me as a bit odd. Mastodon isn’t a private platform. People who want private messaging should use an E2EE messaging app like Signal, not a social networking platform like Mastodon (or Twitter, Threads etc.). Mastodon data is already public and is likely already being surveilled, and will be so regardless of what anyone involved with the network wants, because there’s no access control on it anyway. Having Mastodon itself contain code to keep the network clean, even if it only applies to part of the network, just allows those Mastodon admins who are running that part of the code to take some of the responsibility on themselves for doing so, reducing the temptation for third parties to do it for them.
There should be a law forcing energy companies to charge the best pricing they have on offer to all customers at all times, instead of the current nonsense of having to ring up the power company every year when the year’s pricing deal “is expiring” to avoid being put on extortionately high “default” rates. Not only to save money, but also time, as I am sure I am not the only one who hates having to wade through which “deal” is supposedly the best each year on pain of being given a big bill if I don’t want to be bothered.
High levels of infrastructure spending = eventually, high levels of tax. A “big build” is not a “free build”.
And infrastructure spending is almost certainly needed, so that isn’t much of a point to argue on either. What the opposition should be asking is whether the right infrastructure is being built, as that will ultimately determine whether we get an improved standard of living out of it rather than just a big tax bill.
IMHO Mastodon needs to have some kind of automatic update scheme to roll out bugfixes to these kinds of problems quickly … if there are enough instances out there vulnerable to this or any subsequent issues like it, we could end up with a situation where someone starts coopting Mastodon servers as part of botnets and costing their owners a ton of money in bandwidth bills, getting them IP-banned in various places, etc. The only way to fix this is fast automatic updating.
Perhaps it’s unfair to people who want to have kids but can’t that IVF is so expensive, but really, there’s one thing that affects birth rate more than anything else: cost of housing with decent nearby amenities, infrastructure etc. If housing were cheaper, people would have more kids… Simple.
So if you want to solve the social equity problem, subsidize IVF. If you want the birth rate to increase, knock down the barriers to entry and high costs in the housing market.