I would probably argue that it’s not so much pointless as it currently has more limited use cases than conventional means. This may or may not change in the future.

This is exactly it. Unless there is a specific test of a mechanism, all they’ve found is that there is a correlation between the two. There could be other factors, e.g. behavioral, which increases the chances for both.

How about just not auto-convert everything and keep the integrity of the data unless specifically asked to? Is that so hard?

That’s a good question.

There’s actually more value in metadata than just for advertising, such as scientific and general market research. And even just talking about ads, it’s still useful for both targeted and non-targeted ads and is not limited to the YouTube advertising space.

My metadata does more than enough to pay for my usage.

This is a valid point, but should be something that gets addressed on a case-by-case basis since it’s inevitably about that specific employee’s productivity.

Management probably didn’t realize that the work was getting automated.

But the composition is not the same as space dust, and could have a negative impact on the chemistry of the atmosphere.

There’s a few other things that dark matter explains which MOND doesn’t, such as the relative abundances of the light elements and galaxies with seemingly no dark matter present.

Ads aren’t the only form of revenue for them, and historically, YouTube had been run at a loss for years.

I’m sure they’ll try to implement some type of DRM BS into the web

Funny you say that:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/02/googles-plan-to-drm-the-web-goes-against-everything-google-once-stood-for/

You and the other person’s misrepresentation of the reason others are complaining about this are little more than complaining about other people complaining.

Way to be exactly the type of person they are referring to.

If by “afloat” you mean “a flotilla”, then yes.

Don’t worry, this was just the Chinese campaign. The Russian one is still going strong.

At least email has some tools to help mitigate the issue, like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. They aren’t perfect, but they are loads better than telephony.

IP hasn’t been an admissible form of identification for over a decade now.

Now, suppose that someone hasn’t been piggybacking off of their neighbor’s wifi, and it leads to a household with multiple adults renting the place with internet included in the rent, how would you determine which specific person to take legal action against? Secondly, in order to actually file the suit without it being a waste of time, they would have to have independent data showing that this person did indeed do the action and aren’t just making it up, in which case getting the IPs from a third party would be completely moot.

If I remember, tech companies are generally those whose primary products are digitally based. And technology these days has essentially become synonymous woth the internet.

And perfectly demonstrates the flaw in OPs reasoning.

ChatGPT is an LLM tuned to emulate how a human would generate text.

I would imagine that a different type of AI would be used if they wanted it to work with numbers.