Remember when China told Google to censor web search results and Google said, “No. How about we show those search results with notes that they were censored and why since the sites will be blocked anyway?”, and China was like, “You can’t show them at all.”, and Google said, “Fuck you. We’d rather lose access to the Chinese market than violate our principles.”, and instantly shut down any service in China that would require censorship or disclosing private data and closed all Chinese offices working on any of those technologies?

What a time we’re living in.

The, “Everyone assumed roles were 100% different, but they were 100% the same, which really says something about you western people.” is distasteful to me and factually incorrect. We can see what people who live and lived without technology and access to shared culture do. Generally, men hunted more and women cared for children more. The observation has been that women spend a portion of their lives pregnant and nursing, so men go out and do things that require them to be away. We haven’t documented gender roles because preconceptions or because we’re western, but through direct observation. Those observations of how people lived could be combined with our knowledge of wear patterns on bones to construct a better understanding of how roles may have been less distinct and how bones wear. The assertion that we have 100% confidence in perceiving people’s entire lives by looking at bones and we can’t trust anything anyone said before because they were all sexist… excuse me… had preconceptions is unhelpful.

uses “lightweight and robust” composite materials to cut weight

Pretty great as an experiment. I wonder how this would fare in crash tests, whether there’s a way to make composites work in practical scenarios.

From the article

even if some users stop using YouTube, there won’t be a loss of revenue because those users weren’t watching ads anyway.

Guys, YouTube doesn’t give a flying fuck that you aren’t going to consume their content without paying. That’s the point. They’re only rolling this out slowly to be sure they aren’t impacting their actual customers.

Lemmy felt like classic reddit for about a week, actual content that I wanted to see, discussions at an adult level. The amount of bandwagoning and “me too”, “fuck corporations” comments has me signing on less and less.

I’ve pirated content and don’t have any issues with it. What has worn me out

• Sites being pirated don’t give a shit that pirates aren’t going to use them anymore. That’s literally why they blocked them.
• Want to consume content without paying? Do it and maybe share with others how you did it, but don’t make the millionth post bragging about how you’re sticking it to the man. Go rob a Tiffany’s and brag about sticking it to that company. And when they install new security measures, post about how unfair it is and you’ll never take stuff from them again. Or don’t. Really. Don’t. I want to see that post about as much as the post about what you had for breakfast this morning.

Some machines use scales to measure the weight of items, scan one item, put it in the “bagging area” (scale), repeat. Many stores have disabled scales because they’re buggy and don’t catch thieves, who learn that to steal, don’t put items on the scale. Now, stores have employees watch and offer “technical support”. “Oh, ma’am, I think this item may have been missed. Let’s check. Do you need help with how to scan items?” I don’t try to steal, so don’t find the machines to be a problem.

Holy fucking shit I had no idea that I couldn’t download a car. So if it’s really easy to take something without paying, it’s legit, but if it’s difficult and I might actually go to jail, then it’s not. Got it.

It’s totally not fair that a Bently costs so much money. Sure, I could, you know, buy a different car, but fuck Bently for their unfair pricing model, so I regularly steal them.

I’m sure Bently would love to have me not stealing their cars and Google could not give less of a fuck about not having to lose money from you consuming content and server resources without paying. Over half of the money YouTube makes goes to creators. Consider who you’re stealing from.

Edit: you = OP

Thank you.

Ways Lemmy is already feeling like modern reddit: Instead of link to an article, we get screenshot of a post with a screenshot of the article.

I heard an anonymous interview with someone who was sickened by their own attraction to children. Hearing that person speak changed my perspective. This person had already decided never to marry or have kids and chose a career to that same end, low likelihood that kids would be around. Clearly, since the alternative was giving up on love and family forever, the attraction wasn’t a choice. Child porn that wasn’t made with children, comics I guess, was used to fantasize to prevent carrying through on those desires in real life.

I don’t get it, why anyone would be attracted to kids. It’s gross and hurtful and stupid. If people suffering from this problem have an outlet, though, maybe fewer kids will be hurt.

• Google employee 1: We made podcasts in Play Music better and adoption went up again.

• Google manager: Oh, that’s neat. I’ll make a bullet point on this week’s team meeting.

• Google employee 2: We spent many millions on a new podcast app and servers, engineering, data migration, PR, integrations and adoption is lower. Actually, nobody wanted it or cares or likes it.

• Google VP: Everyone this can’t fail. Pick the best looking metrics, prepare a series of announcements and get ready for a wave of promotions and it’s all thanks to this superstar manager who’s definitely getting a huge bonus and double promotion so I can spin this like it was a win. The best part? Get ready for a repeat when we replace this again in 2 to 3 years.

As someone who has worked on free Internet services, it used to be easier to make money from ads. A video ad view was worth nearly a dollar US. Audio ads were maybe 7 or 8 cents a listen. Now, a video ad view makes a few cents and audio ads are worthless. They likely did the math about how many audio ads they’d have to play on the phone in your pocket to break even and decided you’d hate it more than they would. Since content owners get just over half of what YouTube makes, they’d probably be pissed about seeing the drop in income too.

Feel free to hate YT. This was an economic decision at around the time when ad revenue had just fallen off of a cliff.

I heard an interview about this new effort. IRS agents used to be rewarded by case count. It’s much easier to audit people who earn salaries because you know exactly what they earned from employers’ reports. Rich people often have many sources of income that take time to investigate. Agents audit normal folks because it’s easy while the rich lie and get away with it.

The goal with this effort has been to change the incentive structure for agents to get the most money.

Thank you because I definitely said they’re the same.

Stupid me. That’s right because skydiving causes nothing but pain.

Censorship is terrible. Except when I want to do it and pretend like I’m the best politician. Then it’s great.

I don’t understand how people see this as showing off, putting stuff in your mouth that you and your body don’t want to be there. Like, why not eat a piece of shit and some stink bugs? Oh right because it’s fucking stupid.

I keep literally all private data in Google. When I opened, refinanced, paid off my mortgage with Chase, I was inundated with calls and mail because my bank sold my data, account balances and contact info. Somewhere within Google is all of my private email and AFAICT, they haven’t ever sold any data from it.

Google does some bad stuff. They sell access to you, not your data.

Just like Gmail and Docs and Keep and Search. Nobody puts any moderately private data in those.

Do you read news? Try it!