I’m really curious if they can make video injection of ads cost effective.

It feels like mangeling video streams into one, potentially re-encoding the video as they go… sounds expensive

I think people love to hate Steve. The one thing people love more than a great figurehead, is hating one. I think that Steve had a great internal model of how to combine form/function.

iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, but it may as well have been. It brought the smartphone to the mass market.

Part of it was a great advertising campaign, which unlike the smartphones at the time, pitched it as a luxury good as opposed to an executive enterprise one. You owned a blackberry to answer emails wherever and whenever you were, you owned an iphone so you can check Google Maps. A large part of it was redefining both the form factor, and use case of a smartphone.

so, we’ve moved from “ots not real” through past “maybe its real, but its not.human caused” all the way to “its real and we can’t do anything about it”/“its too late to do anything about ot”

If Facebook hasn’t had a mas exodus, neither will Reddit.

Facebooks death is slow and ongoing, and I’m pretty sure Reddit’s will be too.

If I have to keep a chromium browser around, in addition to Firefox, I’d rather edge than mainline Chrome.

CPM/RPM isn’t per day, it’s pay per 1,000 views.

Again, im not naive enough to think that everyone can block all ads without consequence.

So I don’t use sponsorblock.

If I’m that offended by a sponsor spot, I can always skip it (an option usually unavailable with typical ads) or just close the video. If you’re pushing crytoscams, I’m pushing close.

This is a naive take TMHO.

Youtube has been rolling this out, phased, slowly, for the last few months. Judging peoples reactions and engagement levels.

They are only mildly foolish and know that ad block users are some of their most engaged and tech savvy. Just like ad block users generally know that youtube can’t exist without ad, and if everyone used them, we might all be worse off.

Roll it out quickly, and you create awareness and ignite the fuckery out of the arms race, do it slowly, watch the engagement, and try to find the best messaging to bring “us” “back on side”, and maybe they stand a chance to shift the needle.

(Firefox nightly + ublock origin for the record, had ad block messages on/off from Youtube for about a week)

Firefox currently enjoys protection from being “relatively niche” in the browser market (aka not Chromium based trash).

But if I had to place a bet on which browser would put effort in to protecting your privacy, including which extensions are installed, my bet would be on Firefox over Chrome.

This only applies if a username is a email

And if it is then what happens when people actually email someone? Autocorrect during login?

It’s stories like this that don’t surprise me as much as make me ask: How the fuck do you store and process this much data to get anything useful out of it.

Which is a possible future.

But it’s less likely if more people use Firefox.

Install Firefox.

Use Firefox.

Google can only act like this because of their market share.

Oh great. Another place on the web where my usage of it will simply feed some new language model.

I think it’s going to have a slow death.

Right now it’s going through it’s “Lady gaga phase”, doing more and more ridiculous things. Maybe this is the equivalent of a meat dress.

Eventually people will grow tired of the drama. Either it is a good product at the end (Lady Gaga is a pretty bloody great singer) or it’ll be dead.

By paying Mozilla a big fat check to set the default search engine to Bing.

So your answer to “Google is evil use another browser” is… if we all swap to Firefox google will kill it?

Google is keeping Firefox alive because 5% of all web users using Google search by default is pretty useful for them.

If you want to avoid that, simply use firefox and set your search to DuckDuckGo/Bing. If Google drops them, Microsoft have already shown a want to step up into that position.

There are multiple issues at play here, on both the legal and ethical levels. But your a whole lot of wrong.

At the Legal level, the DMCA Act protects search engines and grants them protections to index websites. A for profit (!) AI does not have those same DMCA benefits (or at least, it hasn’t played out in court yet).

On the ethical level, well, I want people to find my website, google wants traffic, it’s a trade. An AI can be used to make content that sure as shit sounds like my website, and if I have enough “content” out there, it can even be asked to emulate your voice. The AI will be used in place of your website instead of a tool to find your website. This competition for the same click is the basis of several laws being written and coming into effect currently because Google indexing your website in near real-time and serving news and no through click is a dick move.

The law is slow to catch up, but it will probably get there.

Not to mention your comparison to a book I wrote… if I created a unique character for said book, lets say, Bucky Bouce. Then I would own the copyright on that character for a long time thanks to Disney. A machine learning model being trained on my book would not be able to differentiate between the word “mesothelioma” and the character Bucky Bouce.

If I invent a new way to cure “mesothelioma”, and publish that in a scientific paper, I can still file a patent on that cure. I can then own that process for quite some time. If I’m rich enough I can even drag it through the courts to extend that protection. Looking at you Bedaquiline.