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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • No, you misunderstand. You get seconds assigned to your token. It doesn’t matter where in the video you use those seconds.

    So if you watch an ad you get say 60 secs of video until you need to watch an ad again. You can watch 30 secs, then skip 2 minutes ahead and watch another 30 secs, then you get an ad. In reality the times would be larger, but to illustrate a point.

    In the current setup YT uses, if you watch an ad, watch 2 secs of video, then skip ahead of the next adbreak, you get more ads.

    And yes as stated, a separate client can get around this. But as also stated there will always be ways around it, it’s just a matter of making it harder. If it’s beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, it’s good enough. And YT has been banning 3rd party clients anyways, so that makes it even harder.



  • Yeah I’m thinking of a system like this:

    A user opens a session to watch a video, the user is assigned a token to watch the requested video. When the user isn’t a premium subscriber and the video is monetized the token is used to enforce ads. To get video data from the server, the user needs to supply the token. That token contains a “credit” with how many seconds (or whatever they use internally) the user can watch for that video. In order to get seconds credited to the token, the user needs to stream ad content to their player. New ad content is only available to stream, once the number of seconds they were credited have been elapsed.

    One way to get around this is to have something in the background “watch” the video for you, invisible, including the ads. Then records the video data, so it’s available for you to watch without ads. But it would be easy to rate limit the number of tokens a user can have. There’s ways to get around that as well. But this seems to me well beyond what a simple browser plugin can do, this would require a dedicated client.

    The idea is to make it harder for users to get around the ads, so they’ll watch them instead of looking for a way to block ads. In the end there isn’t anything to be done, users can get around the ads. Big streaming services use DRM and everything and their content gets ripped and shared. With YouTube it would be easy for someone to have a Premium account, rip the vids and share them. But by putting up a barrier, people watch the ads. YouTube doesn’t care if a percentage of users doesn’t watch the ads, as long as most of them do.

    My point was, there’s ways to implement the ads without sending metadata about the ads to the client.


  • I’m not talking about the player or the controls being server-side. I’m talking about the player being locked into a streaming mode where it does nothing but stream the ads. After the ads are streamed, the player returns to normal video mode and the server sends the actual video data.

    This means no metadata about the ads are required on the player side about the ads.

    Sure you can hack the player into not being locked during the streaming of the ads. But that won’t get you very far, since it’s a live stream. You can’t skip forward, because the data isn’t sent yet. You can skip backwards if you’d like, with what’s in the current buffer, but why would you want to? You can have the player not display the ads, but that means staring at a blank screen till the ads are over. And that’s always the case, one can simply walk away during the ads.

    Technically I can think of several ways to implement this, without the client having meta data about the ads. And with little to none ways of getting around the ads. Once the video starts it’s business as usual, so it doesn’t impact regular viewing.



  • Oncoming drivers? I’m getting blasted by “cars” behind me. Fucking trucks or even lifted trucks with their headlights at my eye level. And it seems like lights are getting brighter as well, or people drive with their high beams on. My rearview mirror is auto dimming, which helps a lot. But since I drive the speed limit these trucks are swerving back and forth behind me, blinding me via the side mirrors.

    Man we really really need restrictions on size and weight of cars. It’s getting ridiculous out there.



  • Really I’m gonna need a source for that old timey radio claim. Because that sounds like it’s made up and even if it’s not, correlation does not mean causation.

    There is no known mechanism for non ionizing radiation to have ANY effect on the human body or individual cells besides from a warming effect. And even the warming effect is quite small, there are normally a lot of other factors that have a way bigger effect on the temperature. See the Mythbusters episode where they tried to warm a chicken on a radar emitter. The turning of the radar cooled it down more than any warming from the radar did.

    If there is any truth to claims that non ionizing radiation harms humans, physicists would be all over that. That would mean new physics in an area where there hasn’t been any new stuff for a long time now.

    But it turns out we understand it pretty well and see no mechanism for any harm to occur. In that context all of the studies that find no relation are meaningful. If there seems to be no relation and there isn’t a mechanism to do anything, why would anybody think there is anything to find? Turns out it always comes down to FUD, to further some kind of an agenda.


  • I know a lot of folk that work at MS or have worked there, they are all very good people. They are highly motivated professionals that are top in their field. MS is a rich company and they recruit the best they can. However those are not the people making any kind of decisions. And it’s a cut throat company, if the budget gets cut, you are out on your ass. At least in most of the world, where strong employee protection isn’t a thing.

    Don’t get me wrong, MS has a lot of bad apples just like any other company. Useless managers who say dumb shit and take praise for other peoples work. A leadership that doesn’t care about anything except their bonuses and the bottom line. But at least as far as the engineers go, there’s plenty of really good folk.

    People also seem to forget how huge MS actually is. And a lot of the time the different branches within the company are as far away from each other as can be. Even within the same branch one can only talk to so many people.


  • I’ve seen it as well. A part of it is because posts get down voted, so when you scroll down it gets displayed twice since it moved in the ranking in between loading. This also means if a post gets up voted, you can easily miss it. It’s only an issue with posts that have few votes usually, so not a huge deal.

    But I’ve also seen where the same few posts just repeat twice for seemingly no reason. I’m not really sure how the data gets retrieved. With other systems I’ve seen a “session” associated with a cursor. That cursor moves through the data, maintaining the order. That way it doesn’t matter that stuff changes in between client data retrieval. Lemmy doesn’t seem to work like that, simply querying the database with filters. That isn’t the best honestly.








  • At a consulting job I did recently they got an AI for a specific task to have an 25% rejection rate. Which I thought was pretty good and the team working on it said there was no way they could do better, this is the absolute best.

    So they went and asked the customers if they would be interested in this feature and how much they would be willing to pay. The response was nobody was willing to pay at all for the feature and a 25% rejection rate was too high.

    The reason customers gave was this meant they still need a human to check the results, so the human is still in the loop. And because the human basically has to do most of if not all of the work to check the result, it didn’t really save that much time. And knowing their people, they will probably slack on the checks, since most are correct. Which then leads to incorrect data going forward. This was simply not something customers wanted, they want to replace the humans and have it do better, not worse.

    And paying for it is out of the question, because so many companies are offering AI for free or close to free. Plus they see it as a cost saving measure and paying for it means it has to save even more time for it to be worth.

    So they put the project on ice for now, hoping the technology improves. The next customer poll they did, AI was the most requested feature. This caused some grumbles.