Thanks for the breakdown and the link, cool to learn about the new (well new to me) tech, sad to see it’s gonna probably bit us in the butt at somepoint.

I didn’t mean like they just strait up embed video.mp4 on page for the video, but as far as I understand on their backend they still have actually video files of various resolutions and such that they serve to you.

Even if the page isn’t giving you a copy of a strait up file in the way it might in 2000, the player is still pulling a copy of a pre processed video file stored on YT’s servers, and in order to have the ads as part of that same file in order to make adblock very hard to implement they’d need to re-process it any time they want to show an ad that hadn’t been already inserted into the video.

I could be completely wrong tho, I don’t work at YouTube and haven’t built a video sharing site before.

Debian or Alpine would be perfect. Debian has bigger repos, better hardware compatibility, and maybe a bit more stability. Alpine is scary lightweight and a small ISO download.

If they did that then they’d have to re-encode videos for each veiwer (which would require an insane amount of processing power), or give up on tracking and have contextual only ads.

Their only real option is to have ads as separate files and then use the magic JavaScript to tell your computer to play one file then the next, which is where adblock comes in like “naw, let’s not do that”.

As much as I love making fun of Apple, isn’t it all Apple silicone made in house? If they’re not coming with Nvidia cards and Apple is not open to the idea of people modifying their computers it shouldn’t matter how easy it is to install Nvidia graphics (not to mention Nvidia Drivers are a pain on Linux sometimes too).

POSIX is just a set of Unix-like standards for software. Mac is based on BSD if I recall correctly, they had Xorg and stuff as an option to install and things aren’t 1 to 1 compatible but closely related.

robust networking

Dude you just gave me flashbacks to traumatic times trying to get Wifi to work on Linux

As weird as it sounds you can (with poor performance). With something like Limbo or Termux you can actually get Windows or any x86 OS running underneath Android on a phone.

Fun project maybe, but not really utilitarian though. Never used apple so can’t actually report on how well their emulation and/or translation layer is working on Arm.

I think the issue is that Netflix always had a lot of debt and thought they could grow a lot more. They had a really solid income, then suddenly their catalog was shrinking thanks to the million other streaming services while they simultaneously started declining in subscriptions right when the cost of debt skyrocketed (even if some of their debt is still at lower rates).

Not that I’m cheering on the price increase by any means, nor am I currently a subscriber. Still though in some way I can see why they’re doing it and have a feeling we’re just at the tip of the iceberg in how bad tech corporate services are going to get for a bit.

On an unrelated note, VPNs and/or I2P are cool things to check out.

Edit: One thing too to bring up is that password sharing may still be a breeze. If you set up a VPN - not a commercial one but you setup yourseld on either on a VPS or on your home network - as long as anybody is on it they’ll look like they’re from the same household.

My understanding is that they mostly haven’t, with a couple exceptions like a few ISPs offering to priorities to pings for gaming (as FeelThePower mentioned), throttle certain protocols (e.g. Torrenting), or refuse to carry traffic for certain sites (e.g. Kiwi Farms). All of this would be prevented under net neutrality.

As far as I’m aware though, an extremely overwhelmingly portion of traffic (like you’d have to do a lot of digging to find an example otherwise) already adheres to net neutrality since it’s pretty pointless for a company to spend resources and goodwill to mess with traffic.

I don’t think too much will change. It is nice in the sense it will prevent an ISP from doing things against specific sites, although like mentioned above most of the protections are theoretical ATM.

I’m not on IOS, but I’ve heard Brave browser on IOS has adblock so that might be a way to avoid ads. Sites like various Invidious instances run in any browser would also be a way to dodge ads.

Any browser that accepts plugins would also work, but I’m not sure if they exsist or not.

Shh, nobody mention that half your apps are probably rendered in chromium.

Unfortunately there’s ads in Firefox too, and they’re opt out instead of opt in. I’m certainly not a fan of it, but outside of LibreWolf until servo becomes a thing I think should be right but we’re stuck choosing lesser of multiple evils.

I’m not quite sure social media accounts and the Nobel Prize make a good comparison. I get what you’re saying about the exclusivity idea, but in my mind “exclusive” social media can’t really be that much of a draw if there’s a million alternatives and it doesn’t bring anything new to the table (it’s not decentralized or federated if you need approval from a central authority).

I do find it a bit funny that their adblock-block is to my knowledge just client side JavaScript. Ya’ know, the kinda stuff adblock is built to cutout.

Unless they’re going to be splicing up videos to put the ads into the same file (which would be astronomically resource intensive) or only allow YouTube in app and in seriously locked down Web-Environtment-Integrity browsers it’ll be impossible prevent a device from running or not running code as the user see’s fit.

YT isn’t going to drop premium any time soon. Subscriptions are astronomically more revenue generating then ads, and given YT was always operating at a loss until they stopped reporting revenue altogether premium will probably be the only route to scrape by.

Not to say they can’t enshittify it by raising prices and adding restrictions, but I can’t see them doing anything but trying to force more people to it.

I paid for it for a bit a while back, and it was decent. Of course free tools give considerably better features (adblock, sponsor block, DRM free downloads, better privacy). That and personally not wanting to financially support YT for a variety of reasons has kept me away from it for a long time.

They usually drop in price. They were just selling the 6a for $200 like a month ago, so given a bit of time you can get a good deal on the second-to-latest generation.

We’re seeing this all over the tech and tech adjacent space. Can’t grow forever at a loss, especially not with increased interest rates and a potential economic downturn.

My guess, if you want to have decent services we’re going to end up needing to pick few (or a suite of the basics) to pay for on a monthly basic and cut out all the “free” stuff that is/will get enshittified.

Pixel devices, devices with custom roms, and devices that you used ADB bridge to disable or uninstall “system” apps.

Only in the most remote deserts, wilderness areas and oceans can you find a sky as dark as our ancestors knew them.

It varies depending on what country your in, but I don’t think people realize how little of a percentage densly populated areas make up of the world. If you’re in the US unless you’re in a place like NY City a 20-45 min drive can get you to a place zero light minus occasional blinks from cell towers/planes/sattalites - and there will also probably be public land there you can go on for free.

And hey, look, the fact stuff like sattalites are interfering with observing the sky isn’t great, but if that sattalite is used for powering agricultural equipment and gathering agricultural data that keeps a billion people from starving to death I’d say that’s a worthy trade off.

Like a life saving drug with side effects, there’s always trade offs as technology and society advance. And mitigating side effects when possible are great, but I thinks it’s important we don’t act like the side effects are occurring in a vacuum, and I would rather live now than in the past without the tech we have now.

You can usually override zoom controls in the accessibility settings of most browsers. Comes in real handy for me

My guess is it would be considered a general purpose computer, assuming it runs standard Win/Linux and can run any software even if it’s specs and shape are geared towards games.

Not a lawyer though, just guessing