If you watch vapid slop content on Youtube, that’s on you. Don’t blame Youtube for giving you what you apparently want. I watch howto’s, “edutainment”, science and engineering stuff, conference talks, and overall generally positive, helpful content. This is a totally different thing from Netflix, which is mostly just fiction. I’d never pay a subscription for that. The cost of Premium seems like a fair value for what I get out of it, especially since creators get a higher payout for Premium views.

Yeah, Google still tracks you. So does absolutely everyone else, including your ISP that you’re paying for. Until you make it illegal, that isn’t going to change. I’m not going to put everything on hold waiting for better consumer protection laws, shit’s way too dysfunctional for that to be realistic. Life isn’t perfect.

Shallow content comes from trying to manipulate the recommendations algorithm and “go viral”. Without a recommendations algorithm, the incentive disappears.

I found it fascinating beyond just the geopolitics of video cards (although the existence of that right there is wild).

It’s a really neat look inside China with “real people” (not trade shows, uptight salesmen, or politicians). I don’t speak Chinese but it also seemed like Steve Burke had spent a lot of effort learning. He seems very talented and smart while staying humble. That’s rare.

Despite it being a 3 hour video about smuggling, the most discomforting thing for me was the left-handed driving in HK and I find that hilarious.

I think, in this particular case, it’s aggressive apathy/incompetence and not malice. Remember, Trump didn’t even know what Nvidia was.

AI’s don’t have a skin color or use the bathroom so you can’t whip your cult into a frenzy by Othering it. You can’t solidify your fascism by getting bogged down in the details of IP law.

You need to properly detect that they’re bots first and then they’ll just figure out how to spoof that. Then you’re back to square one.

Abstractly, POW doesn’t need to determine if you’re a bot or not. To make a request, as a human or bot, you need to pay in cpu-time. The hope is that the cost is not so high that a human notices very much but for a bot trying to hoover up data as fast as possible, the aggregate cost is high.

I think the more horrifying aspect is that they’ll just build ever bigger datacenters to crunch POW tests faster and the carbon cost will skyrocket even more.

Don’t you also need a developer license? So that’s like an additional $8/month subscription to sideload on iOS.

Or I could be wrong 🤷