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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • YouTube is/ its ads are are extremely privacy intrusive and there isn’t really an alternative to the platform. Next to the comparatively obvious network effects all social media platforms rely on is also because YouTube on its own is not that profitable and probably only really makes Google money via the data collected on the platform. This means only platforms that have a gigantic ad network themselves and are able to monetize said data as well as Google can can actually compete with YouTube— and as you see, there are basically none.

    Also, the whole blocking ad blockers thing is trying to fundamentally reverse the power equilibrium between the website (the server) and the person visiting it (the client); because for the last 40 years or so, the server had the purpose of delivering content to the client which could decide what to do with and how to present said content. This sharing of responsibility between the two comes in many forms, starting with simple things such as screen readers or a reading mode for the browser.


  • This is not necessarily the case.

    You could only use this new system if the old one fails, ie. only for the say 10% of users that block ads, and so even if it were more expensive it would still be more profitable than letting them block all ads.

    But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just “swap out” the video they’re streaming (as they don’t really stream “one video” per video anyway), bringing additional running costs to nearly zero.

    The only thing definitely more expensive and resource intensive is the development of said custom software




  • I understand the downvotes as the comment seems kind of inappropriate, but - as others pointed out - pederasty was really wide spread in Ancient Greece and people thought of boys not in puberty as “good-looking” in a romantic/sexual way, as fucking creepy and weird as we think that is today, so the comment is not entirely wrong: this is the same beauty standard that thought of boys as sexually attractive.



  • Quik@infosec.pubtoMemes@lemmy.mlMe but ublock origin
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    1 month ago

    Billy should really not support them, Ad Block Plus let’s advertisers pay for having their ads checked as “acceptable advertisements”, i.e. is selling out the core functionality of their product. Billy should use uBlock origin, which afaik does not accept donations, he could however support something like PiHole .





  • Quik@infosec.pubtoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe New Internet
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    2 months ago

    Interesting, that seems to be the reason for most. Under which circumstances if any would you upvote a perceived advertisement?

    Would you upvote a well written advertisement that you think makes the company’s intention very clear to the reader? Would you do so if the intention not only sounded realistic, but also like they want to achieve something net-positive?

    Or is it really just being an advertisement that makes you downvote?






  • Interesting take on LLMs, how are you so sure about that?

    I mean I get it, current image gen models seem clearly uncreative, but at least the unrestricted versions of Bing Chat/ChatGPT leave some room for the possibility of creativity/general intelligence in future sufficiently large LLMs, at least to me.

    So the question (again: to me) is not only “will LLM scale to (human level) general intelligence”, but also “will we find something better than RLHF/LLMs/etc. before?”.

    I’m not sure on either, but asses roughly a 2/3 probability to the first and given the first event and AGI in reach in the next 8 years a comparatively small chance for the second event.



  • From how they’re presenting themselves on their website, I would also guess their payment methods aren’t private /anonymous at all. It seems like you could even be forced to use the Apple/Google integration to pay for your subscription (which just means you can’t really pay privately).

    Also, VPNs that have own apps and don’t allow access via OpenVPN are a red flag. You don’t know what their apps are doing and they don’t give you any reason to trust them either.


  • No, but as far as I can tell, it’s a private company in the US (which is pretty bad for a VPN). Also, all of its features are closed-source. The encryption seems to be closed source. That should make you question their motives and integrity. And trust them not much more than Google or Facebook. For everything not privacy related, as their virtual cards and in a sense also phone numbers and email addresses (those could be private, but not using this service), this service seems fine.