I haven’t touched reddit since the APIcalyspe. I’m planning to delete my account but haven’t gotten around to it yet. I was a heavy Apollo user on iOS but never subscribed to it for its push notification service, instead I kept the official reddit app installed and the only thing I used it for were its notifications. I still have both apps installed.

Anyway, I was surprised to see one pop up yesterday, especially since it wasn’t connected to my user activity (a new private message or reply to an old comment of mine or something). The notification was just an ad. More specifically, it was promoting some trending post on the site that had “>12,000 upvotes.” In many many years of having the app installed I’ve never seen that before. Is it new?

Reddit’s had a mildly antagonist relationship with its users for ages, but it feels like they are REALLY intensifying things now. I’m glad I got off the train when I did. And sorry for making yet another post about reddit, I think we’re all getting tired of harping on it here.

Had an interesting conversation with my colleagues this morning. We were pretty split whether phones listen to us for advertising or not.

On one hand, we anecdotally see Google news and ad suggestions based on what we say. We know our mics are on at all times for voice assistant and music detection. But we also read online talking about how there is no evidence about the phones recording us. It's hard to trust anything nowadays.

Recently, I've been thinking pretty hard about how to archive data. Optical media is out, due to my (possibly irrational?) fear of disc rot. HDDs just break with extended use, SSDs have been known to die with either overuse or just existing for an extended period of time. What's left?

I have heard of tape (of some kind) being used for backup in some bigger operations, but with my experieces with VHS, and to a lesser extent, cassettes, they seem to be very susceptible to mould.

Any suggestions?

Now, rationally, I suspect the answer is "Of course!". But I'm looking for general advice, if my fellow Tildesians would be so kind.

This question has arisen while investigating opening a Monzo account. Apparently, you can lock away some money for 12 months and get 5.3% AER interest on it - meaning for every, say, £1,000 I put in, I get £50 back, right?

My question: is that really worth it, in the grand scheme of things? Even if I put in £10,000, I'd be locking myself out of that much money for a grand total of £500. I understand that's a lot to some people (even me), but it hardly seems worth it.

Perhaps there's something I'm missing. Perhaps some bad maths on my part or some other type of interest that I don't know about. All advice is welcome and appreciated!

YouTube limits ad blocker usage in new test
YouTube could be testing a three-strikes policy for ad blocking (Update)
So its clear now that YouTube is going to limit the usage of Ad blockers in the coming future
I use Ublock Orgin with Firefox which basically used to block all ads and on mobile device I use NewPipe

This is sort of a "does anyone else?" type question, but I think it can create some interesting discussion.

We have become accustomed to having many things for free online. Search, social media, news, videos, games etc. The price of course is ads and our personal data. But spending money on these kinds of services that exists for free sometimes feels like a hurdle to overcome. I recently gave the paid search engine Kagi a try, and I spent way too much time pondering whether it was worth the $5. Yet I can spend ten times as much on random physical purchases or a round drinks with only a few seconds of decision making.

Even though we have lived with digital products for decades now, having something tangible and physical between your fingers still feels better. With some exceptions, because most people are paying for streaming services but renting movies in the video store have always cost money, so we are used to that - unlike stuff like search and email which many of us have gotten used to being available for free.

Can this ever change outside very tech-minded people? Because services that rely on subscriptions rather than dataharvesting and ads do exist, but with the exceptions of maybe the big streaming services, few get wider appeal and the masses flock to the so-called free services instead. I find it almost depressing that we have all these brilliant and innovative tech companies around the world doing amazing things, but a good deal of it all ends up with the goal of showing more ads. It is hard to compete with free, but is it possible to challenge the current most successful business model of "paying" with ads and data?

For those that don't know, Art Fight is a collaborative creative project that sorts artists into two teams and lets them upload their original characters. In order to score points for your team, you have to draw the other team's characters, with more involved and polished artworks scoring higher points. I'm participating for the fourth time this year, and if you're going to as well, feel free to drop your art fight URLs in the comments so we can follow and "attack" one another!

So, I’m moving to a new phone and revisiting a lot of accounts, apps, and settings.

When it comes to things like location history or ad personalization or whatever, is it even worthwhile to turn it off? Am I really supposed to believe that because I have some toggle off that Google suddenly doesn’t track where I drive on Maps? Like if they are going to be tracking me, which I assume they are, I might as well be able to see it to rather than have it exist in the aether somewhere where the info is attributed to me but not viewable in the UI.

Even with ads, I know shadow profiles are a thing, and that they definitely have data beyond what they show in the UI, so might as well opt in there too right? Plus, the non-targeted ads I get are basically porn-tier ads or stuff for gay men.

What should I do here? Move into the woods? Feels like I can’t win.

This might be a weird framing but it's been bugging me for a few days. Many fields have a concept of classical training -- this is most common in music but applies in the humanities and many other areas. For example I do a lot of CAD work for my job, but I received what I would consider a "classical education" in design...I learned to draft by hand and physically model before I was ever allowed to work digitally. I got a lot of value out of this approach and it still informs the way I work today.

A lot of people view computers and technology as modern and almost anti-classical, but as the tech industry matures and the internet moves from something shiny and new to something foundational to our society, what will the new classicism look like?

Thanks for reading my question.