Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • YT and TT are platforms that breed weird quirk uniformity. They all grab your attention with the same phrases (“you’ll never believe …”, “what about [insert something outrageous]? Let me explain …” etc.) For a while, everybody had the same Ikea shelves behind them crammed with shit. Then I think we moved on to neon signs. It used to be fashionable to show off your expensive big microphone, probably much to the delight of its manufacturer. And that’s why I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the manufacturer paid some influencers to hold the tiny mike prominently in the shot like they would hold a dog poop bag filled with poop from a stranger’s dog. And then it was copied.




  • I fear this will be an uphill battle for YT. I have this gut feeling that Meta and OpenAI here are employing the flooding the zone strategy to hurt and maybe displace YT. The sheer flood of slop with the occasional enjoyable nugget of content flooding YT from the pAIrates will be harder to filter out, clog up servers, and users like you and I will get annoyed and gradually consume less content. YT loses market share and some new platform can move in for the kill, operated by Meta, OpenAI and/or other such reputable companies. It’s not easy to monetize this crap, which is a loss leader at this point. It doesn’t look to me like enough people will subscribe to these services to be financially viable. They have to find other ways. So pivot to video 2.0 - this time with so-called AI! Sigh.



  • You have to phrase it as a question to get the money. When you buzz in you get something odd like 7 seconds to answer the question. If you just say “Eiffel Tower” then Ken Jennings will now probably just stare at you expectingly to rephrase your reply in that time. I think in the past Alex Trebek may have prompted candidates to rephrase their non-question answers but I haven’t seen that happening in a while (but I don’t watch it that regularly either so 🧂).

    The whole point of the show is that the standard quiz show mechanic question->answer gets put on its head. The clue on the wall is the answer and the candidates have to provide a question it answers.



  • You have inadvertently hit the nail on the head. They just call it socialism. There are several shades of poverty, for different reasons. One shade is due to the fact that a lot of services, like welfare, education, and medical, are only available to you in your hometown, probably the one you were born in. But if you have migrated from bf nowhere Gansu province to a big city where the jobs are, you rid yourself of that safety net. It’s hard/costly to change this hometown registration so most don’t and become quasi undocumented workers in their own country. And they are the ones who work insane hours in shitty and dangerous work conditions and it’s then who will look for anything to save a yuan.


  • It’s been a while since I’ve been to China. But even in the 2000s it was not uncommon to have to pay for toilet paper at a vending machine. Not at all public facilities but the more local you went, the fewer tourists would be there, the more this happens. So getting roll for watching an ad is an improvement.

    And as the article points out, they cannot have nice things, i.e. free sandpaper toilet roll, because people will just steal it. I feel like this becomes exponentially less dystopian when you frame it as you can either have no paper at all or watch the ad/pay for it.

    And there is another cultural difference. The Chinese are more like the Romans when it comes to these bodily functions. Much more willing to take care of it communally or at a hole in the ground surrounded by a thigh high “modesty” barrier. So asking an attendant for extra roll is something that the majority of Chinese would have less of a problem with, I think.










  • I think your definitions don’t quite match common use. When people think about sideloading, they think about installing apps from a third-party source that are not approved by the primary vendor. That’s precisely what Google is going to block.

    See the end of my pervious comment. The fact that we call that “sideloading” in common parlance is a magic trick Google has already played on us and we ate it up. Resist.

    The way I understand sideloading is installing an app through a way that isn’t Play. So F-droid - as one example - is sideloading because you need to go through the overly dramatic warning messages to enable the install from unknown sources. If all the devs in F-droid’s repository theoretically registered with Google, nothing will change. The only difference is that Google wants to know who made it. They make it harder and shittier and thus limit our choices, yes. But they don’t block everything outright.

    The problem arises for apps, whose developer doesn’t want Google and by legal extension the American judiciary to have access to their information. That’s a privacy concern that I find very concerning too. I’m not defending Google’s choices here. I hate it. I also don’t like the inevitable hyperbole going the other way.


  • Not defending Google but I have a but (no typo - although I’m the proud owner of a double t version as well. But I digress.)

    Google is not getting rid of sideloading. They are implementing a registration process for devs and then do a check if they have the info on record before allowing an app to be installed. It is possible for you to download an APK from wantsomalware dot com and install it as long as the developer registered with Google - as all the malware dipshits will manage to do on burner accounts, which will not curb the spread of malware, which is their stated aim. Technically, your bank could distribute its app on its website as long as they registered with the Goog. But it will render abandoned projects uninstallable and that’s the rub.

    Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like this either. Twisting their words though isn’t helping either.

    Corey Doctorow pointed out that it is mad that we call it sideloading. Installing an APK is the same, whether it’s coming from Play, F-droid, or the dark web. There should not be this distinction. Lobby your politicians on this matter. G will not GAF about this petition - it’s PR for the cause at best. Only the tag team of legislature and judiciary can set this right.