Athing's recent activity
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Comment on Folks in those $100k+ jobs, corporate types, office workers... What would you say you actually do? in ~life
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Comment on YouTube’s anti-adblock and uBlock Origin in ~tech
Athing (edited )Link ParentIt's the slippery slope argument then. One person does this, then another and another and pretty soon we can't have nice things. It's an argument made in fear of losing what you currently have, so...It's the slippery slope argument then. One person does this, then another and another and pretty soon we can't have nice things. It's an argument made in fear of losing what you currently have, so the person making the argument wants to play the gatekeeper or enforcer.
Empirically, it doesn't hold up.
To google, we are numbers that make up a statistic. Google makes so much money, it actually doesn't need youtube to make money. Apparently it has never made money directly. But... it does bring people into google's sphere of influence, and that is valuable for their overall ad business, which makes more money than God.
To you, the story's simple. "I have means (either money or time) to pay for something I enjoy. 'Cheaters' want to make this thing cost more for me, so GTFO cheaters."
But empirically, it is highly likely no part of your calculation is correct. You don't know how much you are paying for your use of youtube, so you can't know how much it costs you. If you subscribe, they make much more from tracking your activities than they ever do from the few bucks you send their way each month. If you watch ads, you have no basis for knowing how much those ads are worth. Oh, and it has nothing to do with google "supporting" creators. Google is apparently cracking down on "sponsored segments" of videos, which are deals made by creators directly with advertising agents. Why? Because the creators go around Google.
Has google ever been audited for their ad clicks and impressions to see if the payouts actually match the impressions? It's a funny money economy.
Also, how much are "freeloaders" taking away from the creator? If you watch an ad without clicking anything, or if you choose the skip button without waiting 30 seconds for a full view, very little, if anything is made from the ad. You've paid (your time), but nobody else got benefits. You were exposed to 5 seconds of a jingle and the ad buyer didn't even have to pay. Apparently adsense on youtube is divided up into CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) and CPC (cost per click). If you are shown a CPC ad and didn't click, the creator didn't get paid. Google didn't get paid. Only you paid. If I watch 20 videos in a month with an ad blocker, each with a possible four ads, two of which, on average, are CPC ads (I'll never click an ad), and the other two CPM at, say $6 per thousand impressions, then I've cost various creators, drum roll, 14 cents (60% of 24 cents) that month. Less than a penny per video. I've cost google 24 cents. Does it cost 24 cents to host 20 videos and distribute it to a single person? Doubt it. Fractions of a penny.
Now, how much is my time worth? 20 videos a month, 4 ads apiece, half of which I can skip (after 5 seconds), the other half take an average of 30s of my time. That's 23 minutes for the month. Going rate for minimum wage is $15/hr, that's $5.90 Google is costing me to watch ads on youtube. Even at the federal minimum wage, it's still costing me $2.75 for the privilege of watching youtube. Obviously, many many people value their time at more than minimum wage.
And then they go and charge the advertiser $0.24 and pay each creator $.007.
How much does Alphabet make in a year for revenue? They are a public company that makes the vast majority of their revenue from adsense, and this is published. $283 BILLION. per. year. In 2022 (before they put this policy in place). They literally make $35/person/year if you count the entire world population. If you turned their ad business into a subscription business, well, I guess you pay the $12/mo subscription fee. Works out, I suppose.
But remember, you cost them only 24cents a month in ad revenue. This is why I won't subscribe. Google makes more money than God Himself, and if you pay for the "privilege" of getting things ad free, you are literally just paying double.
I take my moral outrage elsewhere.
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Comment on YouTube’s anti-adblock and uBlock Origin in ~tech
Athing Link ParentIf youtube wants to limit itself to a purpose built console or app, that's their choice. They are free to do that. They certainly can control the user experience better that way. They choose to...If youtube wants to limit itself to a purpose built console or app, that's their choice. They are free to do that. They certainly can control the user experience better that way.
They choose to open their market to the general purpose web browser market for greater exposure. That's their choice as well.
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Comment on YouTube’s anti-adblock and uBlock Origin in ~tech
Athing Link ParentOf course I'm entitled. Google is using my computer, my bandwidth, to redirect me to a server I didn't choose to ping. That's on them. I run software on my computer that disallows the redirect....Of course I'm entitled. Google is using my computer, my bandwidth, to redirect me to a server I didn't choose to ping. That's on them. I run software on my computer that disallows the redirect. That's my choice.
Google does it's thing, hoping in the aggregate, most are going to allow them to use a redirect to serve ads.
I do my thing, keeping my computer from doing things I don't want it to do.
Google can always embed ads in videos so no redirect is required. Watch the video, the ad is always there, for all time. But they choose not to do that because they believe it will make them less money, in the aggregate. In fact, the reason why people see such crappy ads are because they are ubiquitously served by ad servers, rather than being narrowly tailored to the content and the people likely to be consuming said content. It makes them cheap.
I am not responsible for helping Google make money, and I have the right to make my computer do only the things I want it to. That is my entitlement. There were video servers prior to youtube, and there will be video servers after youtube. In fact, youtube is responsible for putting many of these video servers out of business.
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Comment on YouTube’s anti-adblock and uBlock Origin in ~tech
Athing Link ParentThis is a common fallacy I see in this thread. You pretend one part of the world changes while other parts of the world are forced to stay static. In a world where everyone had ad blockers and the...This is a common fallacy I see in this thread. You pretend one part of the world changes while other parts of the world are forced to stay static.
In a world where everyone had ad blockers and the only exchange on the internet was cash money, what other changes would you envision?
For this, you can look at history. There is the old freeware or "freemium" method, for one. Most of the internet was like this prior to embedding ad servers into everything. Anyone remember shareware? Most news sites work this way now. There are other ways of making money as well. See the sponsored ads embedded in many videos on youtube (in addition to the youtube ad server-served ads). Youtube could understand that it's about people who want to show off their video projects and sell their servers space directly to the creators. An ad agency within Youtube could help set up creators with sponsors to show embedded in their videos. That could be a freemium model as well.
I'm officially middle aged now. I've seen the internet grow up through the late 90s-early 00s. I've seen the change. One thing remains constant. Creative people look for ways of displaying their creations, be it writing or video or photo, programming... anything. As the internet grew up, it got taken over by investors and other money-people so now, in addition to the creators, you have grifters and con-artists trying to make money via ad servers. Google regularly cons their own creators by leading them to make video creation into a job, then demonitizing them (essentially firing them) at the drop of a hat. All creators I've followed have been demonitized at one time or another. I know this because they post about it.
Google isn't hurting. It wasn't hurting prior to this change in ad blocking policy and it isn't hurting now. They are making more money than God. They were making more money than God before the change, and now slightly more after the change.
And it's not for me to dictate how a company makes money.
Google wants to make money by forcing my computer to download something I didn't ask for and explicitly don't want. It's in the name. They "redirect" to an ad server. In the old days, these redirects would go to an ad server that had such limited bandwidth that the ad would freeze and I would just have to sit there for minutes for the ad to finish stuttering. Then came along people who created tools to keep my computer from downloading things I don't want. I use those tools. If Google wanted to, they can embed ads directly into videos. I would only be able to skip them by physically reaching over to my computer and skipping them, just like in the TV/TiVo days. But that method, while ensuring I see at least a couple seconds of the ads and making things virtually un-skippable, doesn't make Google as much money as targeted ads which somehow always end up being the one with the guy dressed in yellow talking to an emu.
So Google does their thing and I do my thing. Artists and creatives will always find a way to display their work; they are generally not, at their core, doing these things for money.
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Comment on Grand jury in the US state of Georgia returns indictments in Donald Trump 2020 election case in ~society
Athing Link ParentEveryone’s giving the right reply, but to see how this might play out, look to Cambodia. Not a single person opposing Hun Sen on the ballet because they were all put in jail for various made up...Everyone’s giving the right reply, but to see how this might play out, look to Cambodia. Not a single person opposing Hun Sen on the ballet because they were all put in jail for various made up crimes. Very easy to abuse to go against your political enemies.
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Comment on Taylor Swift has successfully implemented a strategy of recreating and releasing exact copies of old albums to maintain ownership of her songs in ~music
Athing Link ParentMy understanding (and backed by the article) is that Swift holds the copywrite. What is held by the label is the physical recording and the ability to sell copies of that physical recording....My understanding (and backed by the article) is that Swift holds the copywrite. What is held by the label is the physical recording and the ability to sell copies of that physical recording.
Pretty easy to prove in court that Swift's version is not the same physical recording as the one the labels own.
That’s because the master recordings of her first six albums belong not to Swift, but to her former label, Big Machine. She and her co-writers retain the copyright for the songs as compositions, meaning if someone wants to reprint her lyrics in a book or — crucially — make a new recording of any of her songs, only Swift and her co-writers need to approve, and only they profit.
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Comment on Advice on contact lenses causing red eyes in ~health
Athing LinkI used to wear toric contacts before getting eye surgery. If you work on a computer, you tend to stop blinking. Not a character flaw, just how we work. This is especially bad if you wear contacts....I used to wear toric contacts before getting eye surgery. If you work on a computer, you tend to stop blinking. Not a character flaw, just how we work. This is especially bad if you wear contacts.
Try the rewetting drops. There are special lubricating drops specifically for contacts. Clean your contacts well each night after you remove them if you wear them more than one day consecutively. Torics try to rotate in your eye, that's how they correct astigmatism, so what might be happening is they are getting dry, and they are irritating your eye as they try to rotate as they rewet. Keeping them better lubricated, both with drops and, if you are reading or looking at computer screens, taking more frequent breaks, will help.
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Comment on Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement in ~tech
Athing Link ParentThey are using "books1" and "books2", of which there is very little know about what was in them. Discovery should uncover what was in these datasources. Books1 is likely "BookCorpus". Apparently...They are using "books1" and "books2", of which there is very little know about what was in them. Discovery should uncover what was in these datasources. Books1 is likely "BookCorpus". Apparently very little is known about books2, which is much larger than books1.
So here's something... I asked ChatGPT "give me the first sentence of Max Porter's novel "Lanny" (an interesting novel I just happened to have close at hand) and it returned (after a prompt to get it on track when it initially gave the first sentence of the jacket summary):
Apologies for the confusion. Here is the actual first sentence of Max Porter's novel "Lanny":
"Dead Papa Toothwort wakes from his standing nap an acre wide and scrapes off dream dregs of bitumen glistening thick with liquid globs of litter."
Which is a word-for-word exact quote of the text. There is some copyright infringement happening here.
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Comment on US Supreme Court strikes down President Biden's student loan forgiveness: Now what? in ~finance
Athing Link ParentThat's not fair. Nobody knows the future. If you don't like the system, you look to change the system, not appeal to particular people. The current system dictates that supreme court judges are...That's not fair. Nobody knows the future. If you don't like the system, you look to change the system, not appeal to particular people. The current system dictates that supreme court judges are judges for life. It's specifically designed to keep judges from making political decisions about their retirements in the exact manner you are wanting Justice Ginsberg to make here. The Supreme Court is supposed to be above politics.
Now, there's obviously a problem in that one political party has played a very very long game and by doing it over the last, literally 30 or 40 years, since the 70s and 80s, injected politics into the Supreme Court. That needs to be addressed.
But addressing this does not mean you also inject counter-politics into the system erratically by making it a political party habit of forcing your own judges out just so you can replace them with a younger, ideologically aligned judge to "keep the ideological line" alive.
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Comment on What are some antiquated things that most people still do out of a force of habit, or that are now unnecessary but have lasted culturally? in ~talk
Athing Link ParentWhat's messed up is at work when I get used to working in MS office, with it's fancy autosave everything feature with OneDrive, and I go back to my CAD (which has, as everyone knows, a UI from the...What's messed up is at work when I get used to working in MS office, with it's fancy autosave everything feature with OneDrive, and I go back to my CAD (which has, as everyone knows, a UI from the early 2000s and the program stability to match) and have gotten out of the habit of saving after every operation; of course CAD crashes and I lose 2 hours of work.
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Comment on Are we stuck on a innovation plateau - and did startups burn through fifteen years of venture capital with nothing to show for? in ~tech
Athing LinkI think it's the concept of "innovation" that we a currently too close to to judge properly. To take your list in order, the hotel chain and taxi chain were innovations, not in hotel chains and...I think it's the concept of "innovation" that we a currently too close to to judge properly.
To take your list in order, the hotel chain and taxi chain were innovations, not in hotel chains and taxies, but in dispatching through a distributed network of mobile devices. That's the innovation. That a couple companies slipped under the rules and undercut the established business networks and fucked a bunch of people over is just business 101 par for the course. That will always happen. The networking and dispatching innovations stay and are used everywhere now, even by the established businesses.
The illegal money machine is more networking. The blockchain might be overblown, at least for the moment, but the use of digital currency is not. In the US and Europe and other well established places, there is a well established banking system; all's well and good, no need to tread those waters except to make a buck. In other places, the local brick and mortar banking system is not well established and the banking is done through smartphones. And as for the blockchain, the trustless money machine establishes a way of moving currency around that doesn't go through banks. For illegal use, legal use, that's kind of up to the user, no? But it starts a conversation, and once it becomes regulated, the tech can be a real financial tool. The financial system as a whole is kind of skeevy in that way, even with government back currencies. The only reason dollars or euros are any good at all for purchasing a candy bar at the corner store is that there's regulation to prevent the games billionaires play from affecting the value (too much). Put that onto the blockchain, and digital currency's a real currency again.
And for the fake plagiarism machine; this is just a display of raw computing power. The concepts they are using were laid down on paper in the 80s, but the machines to implement them are just now being built. Is it useful? Who knows. Right now it does the same thing college grad English majors do for minimum wage when they make SEO websites for a few bucks. It's been out for all of 2 seconds and it's kind of a cool toy. I am curious about it's usefulness as a tool, particularly to summarize and reformat writing without losing meaning. The only thing that's clear right now is it's a super expensive and resource intensive way of interpolating words. As far as "intelligent", I think it's pretty clear it's not, but it does kind of redefine our methods of measuring machine intelligence and the limits of our current methods of going about AI.
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Comment on What are your favorite sports, how they're different from other sports, and what do you like about them? in ~sports
Athing LinkI love road cycling. I raced at the amateur level for a while, both on the road and on the velodrome and I still ride with a club. Was Cat3 on the road and Cat2 on the track. It’s kind of a dying...I love road cycling. I raced at the amateur level for a while, both on the road and on the velodrome and I still ride with a club. Was Cat3 on the road and Cat2 on the track. It’s kind of a dying sport in the US. Lance Armstrong kind of killed it a bit after pumping it up and the pandemic did a number on the sport at the amateur level with a ton of races being canceled.
Nothing beats winning a sprint at 40mph pedaling under your own power. That’s some real fun you don’t get with any other sport. Lots more contact between cyclists than you’d think for a “non-contact” sport. We were almost head butting on some of my track races. I was involved in some pretty spectacular crashes too.
I'm a mechanical engineer. Likely soon to leave the corporate environment (I'm in my notice period now, in fact). But this is what I've observed in my 9 years of working in a corporation.
The corporate environment is a bit unique. It's an encapsulated version of a market. My engineering is applied to very specific problems in this environment, from performance of our products all the way to solving an inability to obtain a desired part (need to design in a new part) and the inexpediency of changing a lot of older designs to use a new thing to avoid having to buy an old thing or to gain the ability to buy lots of new things to bring prices down.
Part of what I do is creative. In the same sense of artistic creativity, but rather than the art driven by human emotions, it's driven by human desired function. Rather than using paint on paper to evoke a sense of the variety of emotions which come with the human condition (fine arts), we use, say, machined metal shaped to perform a human defined function in space and time.
The other part is making decisions. I have to sit with other humans to decide how the business operates. Not in the sense of buying and selling, but in the sense of what we decide our product to do and how it might appeal to a customer. At the individual level, I have the leverage to shape, in a small way, the millions of dollars of business our product produces. I have to negotiate the performance and cost of our product with executives who match this to what might appeal to our customers. It's a fractal structure where I'm making decisions at the very small level over my own work, working with small teams of 5-6 people to make decisions at larger levels, who then work in teams of 5-6 groups to make decisions at yet a larger level, all the way up through the VP level who makes decisions at a very high level to the executive corporate suite who makes the top level decisions.
The world of business is a world of people talking to people to achieve a goal. A corporation, specifically, is a fractal machine for doing this kind of business. Working in that machine is to operate the levers that make the machine move. Every lever in that structure has some level of ability to change the company, with peons like me having a small lever that can make very minute changes and VPs having very large levers which make very large changes to the company, but with very little ability to make very detailed changes. At a low level, I have to respond to tiny perturbations in the corporation. At the VP level, they have to respond to very large directional changes to the corporation.