melfie

Obviously, you know the answer. Yes, I take your point about paying for something that provides value, and generally would agree if not for the corrupt political system that allows a corporation like Google to have the near complete hedgemony that YouTube enjoys. As it stands, there are basically 4 choices right now:

1. Watch ads and let them spy on you
2. Pay them while they still spy on you with a guaranteed real identity
3. Use smaller platforms that have few creators contributing content, many of which are for-profit and may one day go public and turn into something resembling Google today
4. Use ad blockers / alternative clients to have your cake and eat it too. 

Since Google also wants to have their cake and eat it too by charging you while still tracking you, and at the same time, mistreating the users and creators responsible for their success, it follows that the members of a left-leaning and tech-savvy community like Lemmy would overwhelmingly choose option 4 while also doing option 3 whenever possible.

Part of the reason why I self-host is to avoid being tracked under my real identity that is required for payment. No way I’m paying a big corpo with a surveillance capitalist business model to spy on me to avoid their ads. Sounds akin to paying the mafia for protection.

I’m sitting here reading this as my spouse watches the stock YouTube client with ads on a TV that also has SmartTubeNext installed. Evidently, the ads are preferable over a less refined UX when you’re less neurodivergent and don’t jolt out of your seat whenever a stupid, loud ad comes on. As much as I’d like to say DRM will kill YouTube, objectively speaking, it probably won’t. What it may do instead is kill YouTube clients with better accessibility for neurodivergent folks like SmartTubeNext.

If you watch the Everyday Astronaut Elon interviews, it’s clear he knows a lot about rocketry, understands the workings of SpaceX in minute detail, and is obviously not just a disconnected CEO. While I’ll concede that he has played a great part in the success of his companies, I really don’t like the idea that pieces of shit like Elon and Bezos will have an oligopoly on space travel. I’d really like to see reusable rockets become more of a commodity with a lot of competition, because the future of space travel is too important to be under the control of dickheads like them.

Must be nice to not worry about injuries bringing financial ruin like in the USA.

I haven’t really compared the specs of between them recently, but I have the Pro, and the main decider for me at the time was that it was $50 more and has Ethernet. That being said, I added a USB Ethernet adapter to an Onn device and it works, though the first one I tried didn’t work. It was worth the $50 at the time not to deal with that for the Shield.

Anyone successfully installed LineageOS on Nvidia Shield or Onn devices? I ran the Konstakang AndroidTV build of Lineage on a Raspberry Pi 4 a couple years ago, and it was nice in how uncluttered and non-spywarey it was, but I ended up buying a Shield because hardware decoding never worked well and the frame rate drops were unbearable.

I don’t want any device for my TV that makes it hard to install free apps like Jellyfin without logging into an account. I tried fake accounts with Apple devices in the past and ended up with a couple devices that were basically bricked when the fake email account I used got disabled due to lack of activity.

Same. I think it’s also possible to flash them with LineageOS, but swapping out the launcher and using adb to remove anything superfluous is all I’ve done so far.

I currently use rclone with encryption to iDrive e2. I’m considering switching to Backrest, though.

I originally tried Backblaze b2, but exceeded their API quotas in their free tier and iDrive has “free” API calls, so I recently bought a year’s worth. I still have a 2 year Proton subscription and tried rclone with Proton drive, but it was too slow.

Self-driving in general has been overhyped by grifter tech bros like Elon and really shows the current limits of ML. Today, ML models are basically fuzzy, probabilistic functions that map inputs to outputs and are not capable of actual reasoning. There is a long tail of scenarios where a self-driving car will not generalize properly (i.e., will kill people). Throwing increasingly more data and compute at it won’t suddenly make it capable of reasoning like a human. Like other ML use cases, self-driving is a cool concept that can be put to good use under the right conditions, and can even operate mostly without human supervision. However, anyone claiming it’s safe to let today’s “self-driving” cars shuttle humans around at high speeds with no additional safeguards in place either has an unrealistic understanding of the tech or is a sociopath.

I don’t see a problem with thumbnails that accurately portray the contents of the video, since only a small number of characters can fit in the title and a screenshot of one frame from the video doesn’t say much, so it can be difficult to get a sense for the video at a glance otherwise. I do get really annoyed with thumbnails that are deceptive in any way. If the thumbnail seems like it might be deceptive, I’ll usually read the comments before watching the video, or quickly scroll through it to see if it’s BS or not. Sometimes, the thumbnail advertises something that happens at the end of a 20 minute video that could’ve been 30s, in which case, I’ll scroll usually through to the end instead of watching the whole thing. If it weren’t for the thumbnail, though, I might not have watched it all.