I know Lemmy hates AI, but this actually would be a perfect use for it. The problem is the idea of what an ad is. Yes, you could try to use secondary characteristics like image color or sound normalized volume (WhyTF do youtube ads still sound 3x louder than content? are we living in cable era again?), but they would be error-prone for any content more visually intense than a podcast. They would also not capture sponsorblock content like “I love showing you all these foreign countries but what I love even more is having my internet connection secure” that match the video flow. A crowdsourced lookup table of all known ad clip fingerprints would go a long way, until ad videos themselves start being AI-generated on the fly for that sweet personalization revenue.

No, what I really want is to distill the idea of what I want to see into an AI and have it filter out what I don’t want to see for me. I know an ad when I see one, so AI can too. Pre-roll/mid-roll ads? Gone. Sponsorblock content? Gone. Like and subscribe? Skipped as if it didn’t exist. Virtual billboards on the sidelines of sporting events? Overlayed with kittens. Idiocracy banners squeezing the video from either side? Cropped and rescaled. Watermarks? Excised and content-aware-filled.

The last frontier is when the content itself is secretly an ad, imprinting upon you some idea or point of view. You’ll have to watch out for that one on your own.

In the ultimate, you’d need to do something like run a headless browser in a virtual machine, have it play out and record the entire video, then use something like AI to splice out the ad segments and distracting elements (a souped-up sponsorblock will work for a while, but eventually ads will be injected into the raw video stream at random intervals), and present the pristine finished content to you. Basically we are going to re-invent TiVo all over again xD.

In worst case, you can’t start watching until the pre-roll ad timers expire. This is how adblocking works on Twitch streams currently - you can only see a purple screen even if you block the ads.

And yes, the headless browser will need to use AI for human-like mouse movement and to solve captchas - basically whatever state-of-the-art technologies spammers and scrapers are already currently using.

Google is anticipating this future and is trying to implement and force hardware-based DRM for web video before then.

Stripping down to a skeleton of a software is standard troubleshooting procedure. Ever had a plugin crash and consume 100% cpu? I had. Only way to sense is that fans are spinning up and page is laggy, and then look in about:performance and there it is. No one would have ever suspected that the website you’re visiting is deliberately introducing bugs in secret if it thinks you’re adblocking.

It’s a tarpit. If they simply displayed a blocked “no vids for u” message, you’d get outraged, go complain online, look for workarounds, and eventually find a bypass. If everything still works but poorly, you get annoyed, turn off your adblocker to troubleshoot, possibly blame the adblocker for being “buggy” and keep it off. Their help page solution implies they are hoping for just that. There is no “smoking gun” blocked message to go complain online about, even though it is indeed their servers that are degrading your connection on purpose in secret. Or maybe you give up and leave their ecosystem entirely, which is no big loss for them.

The proper solution is to develop an adblock that they cannot detect is blocking ads. This may require actually downloading the ad video in background, and then lying that the video has played.

it might detect those elevated stress levels [for callers] and it will automatically default going to a human being

Damn. I get ice cold emotionless during an emergency, going straight to the point of reciting location and event when calling 911. Now I will have to also remember in the back of my mind to throw in a wavering voice and a couple of shrieks maybe to have my call routed properly. What a future.

What about the “Protocol on Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices” that somebody linked above? Not sure if it’s the same as the “1996 Geneva Amendments” you mention, but both Ukraine and Russia are listed as signatories, and the language does seem to me to cover this exact situation:

Article 7
Prohibitions on the Use of booby-traps and other devices

1. Without prejudice to the rules of international applicable in armed conflict relating to treachery and perfidy, it is prohibited in all circumstances to use booby-traps and other devices which are any way attached to or associated with:
   (a) internationally recognized protective emblems, signs or signals;
   …
   (d) medical facilities, medical equipment, medical supplies or medical transportation;

It says “medical supplies”, without reference to humanitarian aid, and clearly stressing in “any way associated with”. A “red cross” is also a recognized emblem. I can appreciate how “humanitarian aid” can be narrowly defined as medical supplies under direct control and chain-of-custody of the Red Cross Organization and doesn’t apply to random medkits. But I can’t see how this language above would not apply.

Or is it the case that this would be a crime, committed during war, but not a war crime? How does that work? Does it have to be a violation of a specific Geneva Convention® version to count as a war crime, and not just any UN war-related convention?

otherwise empty bike lane

Over here in New York, everyone got an e-bike and now we get bike jams in the bike lane during commute hour. Dunno how I should feel about it. Aladeen? :(: Still faster than a car for sure.

I know you are just nitpicking on whether the current dictatorship has an official policy to deport American citizens, but I want to clarify, for the benefit of anyone else who might not be aware of this, that the American government has in fact already deported multiple American citizens by mistake. This GAO investation found that while ICE doesn’t keep track of such stats, based on the data that is available it must report that indeed “ICE and CBP took enforcement actions against some U.S. citizens.” The numbers are in the hundreds-arrests-per-year range, and dozens-per-year deportations. There are many interviews in the press with American citizens who say they were illegally detained or deported. Some Americans had to sneak back across the border after being illegally deported. Many Americans sued and won settlements for their illegal deportations, so now it is official court record that such events happened.

This is not just a matter of ambiguity, cases of “who can really know whether that person was a citizen or not”. These are cases where CBP has been clearly negligent, where the victims had been able to procure for display real birth certificates, real passports, and the agents wouldn’t look at them. The court-appointed lawyers would “lose” the documents and claim none were received in front of the judge, or there would not even be court hearings at all, just deportations. When sued later, no one would take responsibility, no one reprimanded, just settlements paid out. Sometimes the CBP would get sued, receive a court judgement affirming that the victim was a citizen who was unlawfully deported, then ignore the judgement and deport them again. This has all already happened… under past administrations. The implication is that the willful negligence under the current one will not get better.