most people are against you (them)

That has not been my experience, but it’s subjective right? I live in a conservative area. So also generally pro our current law enforcement system.

Oh cool! I didn’t know about this. Thanks for sharing.

Do we know if this is going to be implemented per device or it’s done via geolocation or something? I skimmed the article, didn’t seem to say besides “don’t get excited if you’re outside of Europe” or something to that effect. Basically wondering if this benefit can be gained in the future by importing a phone.

My dislike of Apple is… decades old. But Google sucks too. I need to dig into how Apple treats privacy (someone mentioned that it might not be great on another of these posts) and see how the software ecosystem outside of the Apple store shakes out. I’m hopefully several years out from needing a phone replacement, so I can wait and see how it goes.

Probably preaching to the choir in the largely tech savvy world that is the Threadiverse, but going to PSA nonetheless. If you’re concerned about privacy, don’t use anything associated with Google. Because IMO this is entirely unsurprising.

Commercial software: complete goals x, y, and z and get paid.

FOSS: Project of passion.

Short and black and white version: I’d rather use the software people are excited to make.

My take on what’s realistic: Things are rarely so simple. Commercial software will often (not always) be easier to use. I feel like most users don’t want to expend any more than minimal effort to effectively use their software (which I don’t think is unreasonable). So in those cases and for those users, easier = better.

Also, highly specialized commercial software might be better than any FOSS options. For example, there’s nothing in the FOSS world that can compete with the big players in commercial electronic medical records software.

So, while I love FOSS, and I find Capitalism problematic, sometimes commercial is better.

P.S: The response is more to the concept of the post. Your actual post is both well written and thought out and doesn’t feel at all like “black and white” thinking.

The YouTube adblocker battle is going to be a constantly moving target, so take this with a grain of salt as who knows when it’ll break.

I use Firefox with ublock origin and watch directly on YouTube. I don’t sign in, and I track the content I follow via rss. No ads, no nags, no issues.

Piped and similar as well as yt-dlp are also great and are better options for giving YouTube the middle finger, which I fully endorse. Just giving another option.

I don’t like helping non-tech people because they don’t want to learn. They just want it fixed. I understand the mindset and I’m that same way on other things. But I don’t want to be their “tech guy”.

I do like helping in the FOSS community though because people generally do want to learn.

Oh, yeah. Hadn’t thought of that. Or maybe it’d just blank out the ad while it was playing and you’d just have to wait. Either way, annoying.

I got to thinking you could crowdsource it, like sponsorblock. But that’d probably only catch popular videos, and YouTube could just randomize what ads and when.

The article suggests they’ve tried this:

YouTube employs a wide variety of techniques to circumvent ad blockers, such as embedding an ad in the video itself (so the ad blocker can’t distinguish between the two)

Though a low effort search on my part just now couldn’t corroborate that. But even if current adblocking software can’t handle it, real time commercial detection software exists and could, I assume, be applied here.

I don’t agree with that. Anything they can do can be circumvented as long as there’s people willing and able to do the work. And because YouTube is so ubiquitous I see that continuing.

They could certainly be more aggressive though. I think their pace is elaborate. Boil the frog slowly.

I hadn’t heard any of this. I have very little trouble believing it though. I’ll have to educate myself.

I can’t argue with that!

I enjoyed the all too accurate description.

I get that it’s probably a joke. But I would absolutely go out of my way to get small bills to buy basic grilled sandwiches from this person complete with, what I assume, is barely hospitable service.

I feel like that’s kind of a hipster thing? I don’t care for the label, but I can’t argue it sometimes fits.

Water cooling feels unnecessary and expensive. Like most of my hobbies. I don’t get this particular one, but I can appreciate why people might.

I appreciate what he’s done for the FOSS movement.

I’ve read up his commentary about underage women, choosing to form my own opinion. And yeah I find it pretty gross.

Random article I found said about 26% of people in the US use adblocking services. Working on the assumption that’s reasonably accurate, that’s a pretty big chunk of ad revenue.

Bad behavior in Windows article up on the Fediverse for four hours and no one telling us how their Linux laptop doesn’t have this problem?

My Linux laptop doesn’t have this problem 😁.

Sounds like it’s a combo of bad Windows behavior and buggy implementations, but had to deliver the joke first.

I’ll go research that, thanks for the heads up!

I saw a rumor mill style post that Apple was going to allow sideloading of apps. If so, that’ll probably get me to switch. These changes and choice in software eliminates my gripes with iOS vs. Android.

As a point of clarity, I think both suck. But if Apple removes it’s disadvantages (even if by force) and is the more privacy respecting option out of the box, it makes sense to me.