fosstulate
@fosstulate@iusearchlinux.fyi
- Comment on YouTube’s ad blocker crackdown now includes third-party apps 6 months ago:
No one wants to scale enough to compete.
I don’t consider scale important from the perspective of making and consuming good videos. People get hung up on it when citing barriers to competition with Youtube, and while it’s certainly there, it only matters to Google itself (so it can continue to plausibly lie to its customers about ad impression numbers). In fact YT was at its creative peak when scale was lacking.
It makes no difference to me whether a knowledgeable hobbyist has 20,000 subs or 250,000. I don’t care about their “content” suitability for advertisers (that creepy term can get nuked). I certainly couldn’t care less whether the algorithm promotes their work, deserving as it may be. This sort of creator operates on the assumption their viewers are intelligent, and is typically savvy enough to route around YT with alternate donation/support mechanisms. These people will continue on any platform. For them, quality is an end in itself rather than a feed-in to a metric. I would rather watch a badly filmed insightful critical appraisal of a new piece of hardware than Canadian/Black Technology Man’s 8K press release rehash full of slick cuts and pointless b-roll.
Scale is the concern of middlemen.
- Comment on What are your complaints about Lemmy? 7 months ago:
The big news/current affairs instances are characterized by autistic screeching that has only a passing relevance to the article posted. See iusearchlinux.fyi/post/5429432
You can take the commenter out of R*ddit…
- Comment on Cricket: Australia have withdrawn from their men's T20 series against Afghanistan over continued restrictions on women and girls in the country under the ruling Taliban 7 months ago:
Cricket Australia has withdrawn.
- Comment on Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent 7 months ago:
Sound advice, but if this article is any indication, corporate web2 now anticipates garbage. The junk presumably gets backfilled with their best attempt at quality data where it can be found. It true, it invites prospective contributors to think carefully about their opsec.
- Comment on Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4 7 months ago:
The OS isn’t the reason anyone uses a computer, it’s the applications it can run.
When given two doors to choose from, desktop computing and mobile computing, most people aren’t going to explore desktop alternatives to Windows. They’re largely going to stick to mobile, with all the learned helplessness that entails.
- Comment on ‘Disaster’: Dick Smith blasts record January migrant intake 7 months ago:
He’s right.
- Comment on Inside the quota-driven culture that boosted police searches from 88 to 550 a day 7 months ago:
May I suggest contacting your state’s legal aid service. They could certainly point you to the right resource if they don’t already have the answers.
- Comment on Inside the quota-driven culture that boosted police searches from 88 to 550 a day 7 months ago:
Stop-and-searches are part of a deliberate strategy of “proactive policing” used by NSW Police. … The idea is to reduce crime by increasing police interaction with the community.
That’s fishing.
- Comment on The FTC and DOJ want to make sure it’s legal to repair McDonald’s ice cream machines 7 months ago:
I read that the machines are engineered to ‘break’ easily as a pretext to force cleaning. Supposedly McD’s worry in a scenario with non-self-sabotaging units is that the worst franchisees would rarely clean, leading to customers getting sick, leading to brand risk worn solely by McD. You’d be better placed to determine the truth of that.
- Comment on The FTC and DOJ want to make sure it’s legal to repair McDonald’s ice cream machines 7 months ago:
It doesn’t surprise me in the least that franchisors would stop selling ice cream, and claim the machine is out of order. It’s by far the most rational response from their perspective. It also has the benefit of conditioning your customers not to expect ice cream. But that then begs the question: who owns the McDonald’s experience, the experience deliverer or the brand owner?
- Comment on [deleted] 7 months ago:
AI filtering of Reddit isn’t the way. The way is leaving the platform. This is beginning to remind me of the ‘decrapify Windows’ YT videos that offer 20-step multi-application guides for getting a tolerable experience, instead of explaining how to install Mac/Linux.
- Comment on [deleted] 7 months ago:
Reddit will program new mod bots to deal with organic responses the advertiser doesn’t consider constructive. That opens another revenue stream: charging advertisers for sub-specific bot tweaks.
The interesting question to me is, when does normie realize his sub has been co-opted to function as a focus group, and decide to look for a new forum.
- Comment on Why is defederation an option when Limit/Mute exist? 8 months ago:
We don’t want defed because it’s a sledgehammer ‘solution’ that immediately denies us agency and reeks of Reddit-tier pre-emptive sub banning.
The Nazi Bar idea is for the most part a boogeyman.
- Comment on Avast fined $16.5 million for ‘privacy’ software that actually sold users’ browsing data 8 months ago:
People should consider using a double-blind scheme with cloud-connected managers.
The site/service gets the actual credential, being two components <randomcomplexity><specialrule>
The manager gets only <randomcomplexity>
Consider the example of
U})wJAL0}RhIr’)Rgs{,&^>I3/versusU})wJAL0}RhIr’)Rgs{,&^>I3/basedStatus of Dmitri and Ji Yuan: crushed
- Comment on Our [Stack Exchange's] partnership with Google and commitment to socially responsible AI 8 months ago:
‘Socially responsible’ is newspeak for corporate-controlled.
- Comment on Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci announces retirement after ABC interview walkout 8 months ago:
Those traits are pitfalls of being a high trust society.
- Comment on I need music from a 2009 Aussie Movie that doesn't appear to have made a huge impact - Beautiful Kate 8 months ago:
PMing you shortly
- Comment on Passkeys might really kill passwords 8 months ago:
Vendors will use passkey implementations as vectors for lock-in. Guaranteed. Workplaces need to accept BYO.
- Comment on ‘It went nuts’: Thousands join UK parents calling for smartphone-free childhood 8 months ago:
The elephant in the room is that parental controls development is a total wasteland, and has been for years. There’s no money in it. FAMAG is actively hostile to it and phone OEMs haven’t got a dog in the race and already contend with razor-thin margins. It’s one dimension of a broader political problem of digitization that smarter legislators and politicians have surely noticed by now, which is that unlike human beings, users increasingly don’t have any rights or agency worth a damn, and are treated with with contempt.
I like that a grassroots movement has remembered that parenting should be at the heart of children’s technology access, but I fear such groups’ ‘useful idiot’ value to authoritarian elements up to the same old tricks.
- Comment on Solving the supermarket: why Coles just hired US defence contractor Palantir 8 months ago:
Grocery shopping is best done at small privately owned businesses. Small supermarkets in particular are and should be treasured by local communities. Something about their ownership structure and their lack of scale makes them more accountable to shoppers. They can’t afford to engage in the data wrangling red and green do to work out the maximum price the market will pay for tuna on Thursdays between 6 to 7pm. The fresh produce is often better quality, the PA music less insipid (or absent totally, hooray for Aldi), the stock actually looks a bit different quarter to quarter. It’s simply a better balance of power between org and individual.
If you’re shopping at large corporate retailers, especially when making vice purchases, you’re best using protection
- Comment on Apple Vision Pro Owners Are Struggling to Figure Out What They Just Bought 8 months ago:
Simple solution. Kensington lock attached to the gonads. The device can helpfully warn others against theft with an LED projection on the wearer saying Big Cojone Security is active.
- Comment on Bluesky opens to public registration 8 months ago:
What I’ve long been curious about is whether the service provider can derive a subscriber identity to the number. I mean of course the telco knows I’m me, but does Bluesky? Or is it just a valid mobile to them?
- Comment on Real estate lobby blames high-paid union tradies for housing shortage in Queensland 8 months ago:
The only shining light in the housing affordability debate in Australia is when an economist gets the mic on something like Q&A and says the causes are juiced immigration and the tax code. But the other panellists invariably squirm, and the host obligingly steers the conversation back to a place where all the propagandists feel safe.
- Comment on The Fediverse is starting to break walled gardens [TechAltar] 9 months ago:
The videast himself doesn’t think he’ll post his videos to the Fediverse as it lacks monetization.
That’s code for YT can spit in my sharecropping face as much as it wants.
- Comment on How Disney and Warner Bros. Are Causing Internet Piracy to Boom | Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever. 9 months ago:
Sometimes I wonder whether these ‘piracy back on the menu’ write-ups are entertainment industry plants whose purpose is to manipulate congress critters.
- Comment on AMD’s new CPU hits 132fps in Fortnite without a graphics card 9 months ago:
I hope red and blue both find success in this segment. Ideally the strengthened APU share of the market exerts pressure on publishers to properly optimize their games instead of cynically offloading the compute cost onto players.
- Comment on Victoria’s Robinsons Bookshop apologises after owner’s call for more ‘white kids’ on book covers 9 months ago:
I somewhat agree with the sentiments. There’s a monoculture in Australian popular publishing that tends to be reluctant to acknowledge its own existence. Its preferences and peccadilloes are obvious to any switched-on reader. I’ll continue to shop there.
- Comment on PlayStation To Delete A Ton Of TV Shows Users Already Paid For 11 months ago:
While Gabe’s famous line still holds true, I find that repeating it without qualification is increasingly glib, because vendors are making the matter a technology issue instead, thanks to years of investment in DRM techniques. In the long term, either side’s ability to enforce its will on the other will come down to availability/control of compute resources, and unit economics.
Keeping corporate at bay is going to require a combination of maintaining the commons, seeing genuine competition in cultural production, improving consumer legal frameworks, and becoming politically conscious of our entitlement to digital rights.
- Comment on Walmart, Costco and other companies rethink self-checkout, some stores removing them 11 months ago:
In my day it was a sight of your ID alone, and only on the cashier’s discretion. Which is still the norm today at many retailers. I will never use any POS system that requires an ID scan/PII provision as a default.
- Comment on Walmart, Costco and other companies rethink self-checkout, some stores removing them 11 months ago:
It’s probably my inexperience with self-checkout speaking, but I would never enter PII into a corporate terminal for the sake of a six-pack.