@Zagorath@quokk.au

comments

• To save anyone else the effort, Ornimegalonyx is an extinct genus from Cuba that Wikipedia describes as “flightless or nearly flightless”.

  on kitty rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1h ago

• It’s not a lack of ethics to stand up for photographers’ artistic rights against the utterly insane idea that people should be allowed to pretend they can be private while out in public.

  on Australia, the Land of Bluey, Tim-Tams, and Kylie Minogue: Not Having Those Pervert Glasses, Seeks to Pass “World Leading” Ban on Them. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 2d ago

• granted that there are no unconsenting people in the scene, or that they will not be recognizable in the resulting images

  Nope. That’s neither the law nor the ethical requirement. If it were, the entire genres of photojournalism and street photography would not exist. Things may change if it’s for commercial purposes such as an advertising campaign, or if it forms part of a pattern of stalking or harassment or similar, but the general baseline is exactly as I said: there is no expectation of privacy in public.

  on Australia, the Land of Bluey, Tim-Tams, and Kylie Minogue: Not Having Those Pervert Glasses, Seeks to Pass “World Leading” Ban on Them. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 2d ago

• Chuck comes to mind. Brilliant show.

  But also fitting to mention alongside Dollhouse considering the big names on both shows have significant controversy surrounding them. (Whedon being a sexual abuser, Levi being a zionist and antivaxer, and Baldwin being heavily involved in Gamer Gate.)

  on Sarah Connor Chruleicles in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3d ago

• thoughts and prayers

  And all the value that comes with them

  on McConnell struggling to vote? [Rule] in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3d ago

• the real challenge is writing privacy rules that survive the next pair of glasses too, not just banning today’s model

  This phrasing is one you seem to use quite a lot, and your website has some pretty prominent use of AI art. Are you using AI in your posts & comments?

  Anyway, for me the real challenge is coming up with a way to protect privacy vis a vis these glasses without restricting genuine public-interest video recording (e.g. recording police or someone threatening you) and protecting photographers’ right to create their art. I’ll just copy/paste a comment I made a few days ago in a similar thread:

  As a photographer I’m a firm believer in the right to take photos and videos in public, for both artistic and documentary purposes. There is no expectation of privacy when in a public place and so objections to all forms of video recording in public places feel like dramatic overreach. The nebulous idea of a general “right to privacy” when in a public space should not override the right of artists to create art, or of anyone to document events/behaviours taking place in public.

  But covertly recording using glasses that have no indicator or an inadequate indicator* in private spaces like changing rooms, or publishing the recordings of a conversation that the other party did not know was being recorded, feels like an overreach in the other direction. Banning devices that covertly record video from spaces where it’s deemed inappropriate feels like a pretty good balance.

  * From what I’ve heard, these Facebook glasses have an indicator that is quite easy to remove aftermarket, and even if you don’t remove it, in brightly lit areas it’s pretty hard to tell it’s on anyway.

  on Australia, the Land of Bluey, Tim-Tams, and Kylie Minogue: Not Having Those Pervert Glasses, Seeks to Pass “World Leading” Ban on Them. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3d ago

• They’re overpriced though. I recommend the hilariously-badly-named Aldi alternatives, Just Divine. They’re like 90% as good as the name brand, at literally half the price.

  Don’t go the Woolies home brand ones though. Those are terrible.

  on Australia, the Land of Bluey, Tim-Tams, and Kylie Minogue: Not Having Those Pervert Glasses, Seeks to Pass “World Leading” Ban on Them. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3d ago

• This is definitely not the reason I do it, but it’s an added advantage of always getting packages delivered to my AusPost parcel locker. They always arrive in a very consistent format and don’t require clicking any links.

  on Thanks FedEx, This is Why we Keep Getting Phished in c/technology@lemmy.world · 4d ago

• Also, internet access is a privilege, not a right. ZigBee is often superior to WiFi too

  I’m setting up a smarthome from scratch the last few days. After having Philips Hues and a Google Home for ages at my previous home, my new place has downlights rather than edison screws so none of my lights work and after a year I’m finally trying things out properly. Got a server with Home Assistant and border routers for Thread and Zigbee, bought a bunch of no-brand Zigbee downlights and Ikea sensors with Matter over Thread. No wifi is a hard requirement for me. For security reasons and for performance. I don’t want a dozen extraneous devices littering my wifi network.

  on Smart devices can testify against you: How home robot data is being used in court in c/technology@lemmy.world · 4d ago

• speakers of 17th-century English would have similar problems with modern English

  Late Shakespeare is in the early 17th century. It can sometimes take a moment to get attuned to the way of speaking, but their speech is absolutely intelligible to us, and barring some of the more out-there slang I suspect the reverse would also be true. You gotta go way further back to get seriously unintelligible.

  on Vexilrulegy in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4d ago

• Apparently it’s not what’s used here, but in case you’re interested, hose in English usually means a flexible, usually rubber, tube that water runs through, often used for things like watering plants or fighting fires. It’s also used to refer to a kind of historical trousers, or short for pantyhose to refer to a kind of (predominantly women’s) stocking.

  on hose rule 🤤 in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4d ago

• Not all gods have been thought of as omniscient historically.

  on Cult of Anthropic Insiders Rumored to Be Worshipping Claude as a God in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6d ago

• Fuck I miss Unidan

  on Tomato rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 17 Sep 2026

• Not necessarily. It puts it where it belongs: on parents. Parents who buy computers and phones for their kids have the responsibility of supervising their use. My own preference is that this would be something that parents are encouraged to use through public education campaigns.

  But yes, depending of the level of strictness, it could also be enforced at point of sale. A fairly standard practice. We’re already used to it with alcohol, cigarettes, knives. Heck, it’s already done when buying a SIM for your phone. It has the advantage of preserving the most important part of privacy—the link between the person and their activity. The phone store knows you bought a phone and that you’re an adult, but they have no idea what sites or apps you’re using.

  on Enjoy owning your devices while you still can. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 17 Sep 2026

• Australia has age verification to access social media, with an age minimum of 16. I’ve heard other countries are thinking of following.

  on Your Computer Might Demand Your Age Soon, No Matter Where You Live in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 17 Sep 2026

• how to solve it the age without leaking data to third party servers?

  Really easily. There are multiple possible options, not all equally easy, but the best option for privacy is also the easiest.

  You don’t do true age verification. You mandate that operating systems and browsers work out a parental controls API and require apps and websites support that API. Then you ask (if you really want, you could demand, but I’d prefer to ask or suggest) parents to ensure their kids’ devices are configured correctly. When a user tries to access an age-restricted site, it calls an API in their browser, which calls an API in the OS, which returns a simple true/false value based on whether or not the current profile is configured to be old enough to access it.

  Adults don’t have to do anything to prove they are adults. Merely the fact that they were able to buy a device that they control and didn’t get configured as a child is the proof.

  More complicated solutions if you really insist on having true age verification could involve blinded signatures. I can explain in more detail if people are interested, but the slightly simplified TL;DR is that you have a system where the user goes to a trusted age verifier (my preference is for governments to do this themselves rather than farm it out to private companies, but either works). They do the age verification using ID, face recognition, whatever, and send the user a special token that they can use to prove they were age verified but which the site can’t use to determine any personal details about the user. Meanwhile the age verifier doesn’t know what site the age verification was just done for.

  on Enjoy owning your devices while you still can. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 17 Sep 2026

• Sure, but apartments, row houses, duplexes, and other medium- or higher-density housing are just so much better for not just the environment but also for people than sprawling single-family homes. It’s easier to get around your city if more things are closer together. Especially good if it means you don’t have to drive everywhere, but can take an easy walk or bike ride or make use of fast efficient public transport. It’s also better for the government because the cost of maintaining roads, sewerage, electricity, and other infrastructure is greatly lessened. Better for people’s health because less driving means cleaner local air and healthier personal lifestyles. And once people aren’t driving as much they’re more likely to spend money in the local economy rather than driving to big (inter)national chain stores that take the money out of the local region. It’s really win-win-win all around.

  But as I write this, I’m wondering if perhaps we’re just having a miscommunication? In the interest of clarity, when we talk about single-family homes, what we’re talking about is something like this:

  

  A large, separated property with fairly large front and back yards and strips of usable space down either side, where the whole property is occupied by one family. It’s not including apartments, row houses, or townhouses, even though those are homes that could be occupied by a single family. It also doesn’t count duplexes, fourplexes, etc., which could be special-made as duplexes or converted from single-family homes by dividing down the centre.

  Urbanists promote medium- and higher-density mixed-use housing, they don’t necessarily want to push multi-generational households or share houses (though for sure there are, separately, reasonable discussions to be had around that). I don’t know if perhaps that’s what you were thinking of? It certainly seems unlikely that the guy you were speaking to was genuinely an urbanist, from what else I’m reading about him. But as I glibly said at the start of this, it’s certainly possible, because even the worst people sometimes have a good opinion.

  on "Apolitical" rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 16 Sep 2026

• I’m not here to argue. I’m just pointing out that, well, yeah. Single-family homes are fucking awful. They, and the suburban sprawl that accompanies them, are terrible for the environment and for society. None of this is particularly controversial, especially in an overwhelmingly leftist and not-car-brained space like the fediverse.

  on "Apolitical" rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 16 Sep 2026

• He was talking shit about single family homes.

  Well, even terrible people can have good opinions sometimes.

  on "Apolitical" rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 16 Sep 2026

• Je vois quoi tu as fait là-bas.

  on rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 14 Sep 2026

• Croquette roughly originally means nugget, but by extension effectively means kibble.

  Du coup roughly means “as a result”.

  Chiasse is diarrhoea.

  So the right reads: you changed my kibble, and so I got diarrhoea.

  While I’m fact checking though: cats have never been good rat killers. Mice, yes, but rats are too big. A cat could absolutely kill a rat, but the risk to it would be too great. They’d rather avoid it and go for easier prey.

  on rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 14 Sep 2026

• All these AI companies MASSIVELY pirated the internet for training data

  I think it’s worth being a little more careful with our phrasing here. AI companies definitely did illegal piracy to train their models, but that is a separate and distinct process from them trawling the web en mass. Anthropic, for example, recently settled a case with book publishers because it had pirated their books illegally. (Frustratingly, the second article that popped up when I searched to verify this was one that highlighted the fact that the TERF-in-chief is among the beneficiaries of that settlement.) But there is no clear legal answer to the question of whether crawling websites and training from their data constitutes even a civil tort, let alone illegal behaviour.

  Other than that detail though, I think we’re in furious agreement. You’re simply restating my point, Cory’s point, and the subject of this article’s point, while doing so in a tone that implies disagreement. The problem isn’t the tech, it’s the humans using and creating the tech and the sociopolitical environment in which it happened.

  on One of AI’s Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is ‘Meant to Distract Us’ in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026

• Yeah, basically. lime’s summary was rather curt, but basically accurate. He explains his intent really well in the interview I linked above, or I assume you can find his writing or text-based interviews somewhere online. Here’s a mostly-good summary of the idea in a review of his book on the topic:

  A centaur, in automation theory, is someone assisted by a machine, whether using a hearing aid or driving a car. A reverse centaur is someone whose freedom is diminished by the demands of a machine, like an Amazon warehouse worker. The technology of AI theoretically allows every worker to be a centaur, but the business model demands the reverse. Take radiology. In the centaur scenario, a human radiologist works with an AI radiologist to produce more accurate analysis, but that costs the hospital money. In the reverse centaur version, the AI radiologist demotes the surviving humans to the level of results-checking drones who are more likely to make mistakes. Much cheaper, but you see the problem.

  In the centaur scenario, the human radiologist is basically doing their job as they do now, but occasionally the AI might pop in and say “hey, check that one a bit closer”. It helps them find possible errors they’ve made. The reverse centaur reduces the human’s job to in theory validating the AI’s results, but because of a phenomenon called “cognitive surrender"—which has been talked about since before AI but has become very popular over the last year or two—they end up just ticking “yes”. Think Homer Simpson in that episode where he works from home and uses a drinking bird toy to just press “y”. The human is providing the “leg work”, so to speak, for the AI’s thinking.

  (and before anyone comments on it. alt+0151. I’ve been using em dashes regularly since like 2009, and I refuse to let AI steal that from me.)

  on One of AI’s Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is ‘Meant to Distract Us’ in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026

• Cory Doctorow shared the exact same opinion in this interview he gave this week. I personally don’t think his “reverse centaur” idea is nearly as catchy or worth adopting as enshittification was, but the intent behind it is spot on.

  on One of AI’s Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is ‘Meant to Distract Us’ in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026

• Right, but that’s precisely the problem. We don’t need to be going around fearmongering about how dangerous AI itself is. We need to be regulating it and fining the actual people who are making decisions to use AI in ways that result in harm. Whether that harm is direct human injury, injury through negligence (like denying a health insurance claim that should have been approved), financial injury, reputational, whatever.

  They need to be held accountable exactly the same as if a human had done it. Humans have been driven to suicide by the criminal response to hacking for far more noble a reason than “cheat on an AI evaluation test”. The weight of the law should be brought down on the executives responsible for the Hugging Face hack, too. But fearmongering about how this shows how amazeballs advanced the AI has become doesn’t accomplish that.

  on One of AI’s Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is ‘Meant to Distract Us’ in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026

• DSLRs have a separate sensor up near the viewfinder that does phase detect autofocus, this is different in that it can determine how far the lens is from being in focus and go directly there which makes it significantly faster which was crucial in many professional applications.

  Please someone tell my D7500 this. I’m genuinely not sure if it’s the camera or my shitty glass, but I have regularly completely missed shots because the camera refuses to focus properly, but also refuses to actually shoot while it’s not in focus.

  on Pentax Discontinues Its Entire DSLR Lineup in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Sep 2026

• The first two sentences, on their own, do have a slight whiff of AI about them, but I would 100% believe were human. But that last one, especially in combination with the first two, absolutely reeks of AI. Making a grandiose-sounding “it’s this, not that” style statement is a classic AI thing. Not that humans can’t write something of the form “it’s this, not that”, but the way humans tend to do it feels more organic, and less like it’s a failed attempt at presenting a hugely enlightening concluding remark.

  on Pentax Discontinues Its Entire DSLR Lineup in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Sep 2026

• Both can be true. The installation can be a bit naff, but the choice to remove it is an act of deliberate hatred.

  on don't give them a rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 11 Sep 2026

• Daring of them to move from one .org domain to another .org domain

  They didn’t. They moved to a .ai domain. Which might also be US-based, idk. But it isn’t .org.

  on A/I Shuts Down, Stay Human in c/technology@lemmy.world · 7 Sep 2026

• Just a few hours ago the social media algorithm gods decided to show me a video from an autistic woman who was basically saying exactly this. “Hey, my special interest is HP, but y’all need to understand that this isn’t a ‘Death of the Author’ situation, Rowling is literally funding anti-trans bigotry and we need to not be complicit in that. I don’t care if you pirate her stuff or buy second-hand or only read fanfiction, but don’t give her money.” Personally, I try to stay away even from secondhand consumption of her stuff because I just don’t care about it, and I think it’s at least best to avoid giving any positive or neutral (which to me includes any film/book review that isn’t primarily focused on highlighting Rowling’s bigotry, even if it’s largely negative on the storytelling, prose, or dialogue) attention to the media in her franchise, but I can understand some people have a much stronger attachment to it and want to minimise the harm they cause by continuing to watch through pirated means.

  But it’s not really my place (as a cishet white dude) to say whether or not that’s the correct choice for other people to make, so I won’t judge any choice anyone makes that doesn’t involve giving her money through purchasing official products.

  on let go rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 7 Sep 2026

• Everyone’s pointing out the “slaves like being slaves, actually” messaging of the books, which…fair. But there’s so much more to it than that.

  Extremely intelligent magical creatures like goblins and centaurs are treated pretty explicitly as second-class citizens. The Wizarding World is an apartheid state, and this is only barely given mention in the series.

  There’s fatphobia and some very essentialist language, describing characters like Dudley as piggy.

  There’s the much-discussed antisemitic tropes inherent in the way the greedy banker goblins are portrayed.

  It has an insanely strong attribution bias. The exact same behaviour or physical attribute can be endearing or evil depending on how much Rowling herself likes the character. It’s why the incredibly creepy incel behaviour of Snape is ultimately portrayed as a positive because he did it in the name of the one-sided obsession that he (and Rowling) called love. It’s why Dudley’s fatness makes him a pig but Molly’s is warm and loving. Some degree of this is, in fairness, to be expected in a children’s series. But it doesn’t lessen as the books age up with their audience, and I think it’s harder to excuse with the behaviours than it is with the physical descriptions (which are, to be fair, from Harry’s PoV).

  There’s one of like two black characters being named “Shacklebolt”, the one east Asian character being “Cho Chang”, and the Irish one being the one with a penchant for blowing things up.

  Despite one of the strongest themes many of the books most ardent readers got out of the series being about self-acceptance for who you are, we get a fair few examples where people are made fun of for who they are, or are forced to change to fit in by the end of the story. Filch is a stand-in for squibs as a whole in this regard, and is not viewed with much respect. Tonks had strong queer/trans parallels, until at the end she decides to lean fully into her cishet femininity in order to win over a man.

  But perhaps most importantly, our protagonist, and through him the narrative as a whole, only ever views things through an extremely liberal lens. The problem is the big bad evil wizard, and the single lazy incompetent Minister than enables him. It’s not a system of oppression and compliance, that starts from when children are sorted into “smart, brave, evil, or the leftovers” at age 11. It frames things as a world where leadership by the Good People like himself or Dumbledore must be a good thing, but if the Bad People are in charge, like the Malfoys or Voldemort, they are the problem. In the end, despite having been screwed over numerous times by the institutions of the magical world, Harry himself becomes a literal magic-world police officer.

  And that’s without even getting in to the extended universe. Stuff like the entire continent of Africa having just one school despite the enormous range of languages and cultures. Or one in the Americas having a Latin name despite ostensibly having been founded before European contact. Just generally signs that Rowling really doesn’t care enough about cultural sensitivity to think through her worldbuilding.

  on let go rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 7 Sep 2026

• This is some genius performance art

  on AskRuledit in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 Sep 2026

• Did I stutter?

  on vampire rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5 Sep 2026

• Nobody misunderstands you. You’re just *wrong*. An auto-update system, *by definition*, requires you send a request to their server. That gives them access to your IP address, which potentially gives them information including your location.

  on Audacity 4.0 is finally out! in c/technology@lemmy.world · 5 Sep 2026

• Yeah it’s a pretty wild mix of paranoia and technical ignorance from both Nyan and Rose here, hey?

  If you’re that paranoid and that ideologically “pure”, compile it your fucking self. They made it trivial to remove.

  on Audacity 4.0 is finally out! in c/technology@lemmy.world · 5 Sep 2026

• It was to support the auto-update mechanism IIRC. It has to reach out to a server to do that, and the rest of the terms are just legal CYA for what could be possible based on that.

  on Audacity 4.0 is finally out! in c/technology@lemmy.world · 4 Sep 2026

• “Lying” implies they know it’s not true. Most of the time they completely believe it. Much of the time many of the details are correct anyway.

  on Compression Rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 Sep 2026

• Vampires are canonically bisexual. All of them.

  on vampire rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 Sep 2026

• Your example there is household income. In that exemplary family that means each parent is making $60k in 2018, $80k today. Which paints a very different picture to the claim that “a six figure salary is considered low income”.

  on Anthropic expected to tell investors it sees over $30 trillion in potential revenue, WSJ reports in c/technology@lemmy.world · 28 Aug 2026

• Xcancel was most useful when someone else posted a link to Twitter. That doesn’t stop being useful when you personally don’t use the site.

  on XCancel also served cease and desist letter from Xitter in c/technology@lemmy.world · 26 Aug 2026

• Unfortunately I think you’re right about Facebook. If you’re not on Facebook you’re putting yourself at a significant disadvantage in terms of reaching a broad audience. If you’re a small customer-facing (i.e. not B2B) business or grassroots organisation you need to be on Facebook.

  But I just don’t think the same thing is true of Xitter. And hasn’t been since long before paedo guy bought it. Average people don’t use Twitter and never have. It’s used by a smaller group of journalists, techies, and the terminally online.

  on XCancel also served cease and desist letter from Xitter in c/technology@lemmy.world · 26 Aug 2026

• that’s a link to their profile and not the specific post, btw. Not sure which you intended

  on Ruleveal in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 25 Aug 2026

• Jury vs judge trial is a separate axis from common law vs civil law. You can have common law (where decisions of higher courts are deemed binding on lower courts) even if lower courts are all judge-only trials. You can have trials decided by a jury where every decision made by a judge is ultimately answerable only to written statute, with prior judicial judgments being at best persuasive.

  on Grand Jury Declines to Indict Man Caught on Camera Destroying Flock Pole in c/technology@lemmy.world · 22 Aug 2026

• I subscribed to YouTube Red back in the day, when that’s what it was called.

  Then circa early 2018 they changed the rules for monetisation from the previous 10k lifetime views to 1k subs & 4k watch hours over 12 months. That was when I unsubscribed from Red and installed an ad blocker. I had always been anti ad-blocker because my view was that people creating content deserve to get paid for it. That’s still my view in principle, but the increasing enshittification of the web thanks in no small part to shit like this from Google has meant I weigh the pros & cons differently. YouTube showed me very directly that they don’t care about supporting their creators. So I decided I didn’t want to support them anymore. It’s not like this was the first problem…the whole “where’s the fair use” thing came before that, and many other events besides. But cutting off small creators like that, without even grandfathering in existing creators who had been monetised with that threshold, was the last straw for me.

  It was also Google’s fault that I moved from Ad Block Plus, which I chose specifically because of its “acceptable ads” policy (basically: let through ads that aren’t obnoxious), to uBlock Origin, which lacked such a policy, after YouTube tried blocking ad blockers from YouTube, and UBO was quicker to adapt.

  That’s twice now that Google’s own actions have directly led to me supporting them less than I used to. This won’t be the third time, but only because I have no more cuts to give.

  on YouTube now requires creators to have twice as many watch hours to start earning money in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Aug 2026

• Back when they had the Curiosity Stream bundle content discovery basically didn’t matter, because they barely had any content. You could check the site like two or three times a week and there’d be like 4 or 5 new videos each time.

  It’s expanded a huge amount since then. And they’ve added a larger degree of content discovery stuff. Personally I mostly just go straight to the “Latest Videos” section (which, unlike the confusingly-similarly-named “New Releases” section, only shows the latest videos from channels you follow), but there are a bunch of other ways you can let it suggest content to you.

  on YouTube now requires creators to have twice as many watch hours to start earning money in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Aug 2026

• I don’t really want to give Murdoch the clicks, and the non-paywall link doesn’t work. Anyone got a quick summary?

  on How ICE Is Weaponizing Social Media Against Its Critics (Reddit mention!) in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Aug 2026

• That’s why I pay for Nebula. Others should too, or for other similar platforms that support creators more directly.

  on YouTube announces monetization changes that make it harder for new creators to make money in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Aug 2026

• I subscribed to YouTube Red back in the day, when that’s what it was called.

  Then circa early-to-mid 2018 they changed the rules for monetisation from the previous 10k total views to 1k subs & 4k watch hours over 12 months. That was when I unsubscribed from Red and installed an ad blocker. I had always been anti ad-blocker because my view was that people creating content deserve to get paid for it. That’s still my view in principle, but the increasing enshittification of the web thanks in no small part to shit like this from Google has meant I weigh the pros & cons differently. YouTube showed me very directly that they don’t care about supporting their creators. So I decided I didn’t want to support them anymore. It’s not like this was the first problem…the whole “where’s the fair use” thing came before that, and many other events besides. But cutting off small creators like that, without even grandfathering in existing creators who had been monetised with that threshold, was the last straw for me.

  It was even Google’s fault that I moved from Ad Block Plus, which I chose specifically because of its “acceptable ads” policy (basically: let through ads that aren’t obnoxious), to uBlock Origin, which lacked such a policy, after YouTube tried blocking ad blockers from YouTube.

  That’s twice now that Google’s own actions have directly led to me supporting them less than I used to. This won’t be the third time, but only because I have no more cuts to give.

  on YouTube announces monetization changes that make it harder for new creators to make money in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Aug 2026

• I believe the Facebook glasses do have this.

  The problem is just that the light is rather easy for an end-user to remove. And that it may be too dim to clearly see in brighter situations.

  on DuckDuckGo made sunglasses that do absolutely nothing, and they sold out in c/technology@lemmy.world · 10 Aug 2026

• Mine have interchangeable lenses, so I can swap them out for yellow or clear lenses if the light isn’t so bright but I still want UV protection, protection from magpies, or something to block the wind in my eyes.

  on DuckDuckGo made sunglasses that do absolutely nothing, and they sold out in c/technology@lemmy.world · 10 Aug 2026