Earn rewards
No thanks, I don’t want my data sold to advertisers.
Built in VPN
I don’t trust MS to provide that service, I’ll provide my own thanks.
Built in AI slop
It’s a browser, not only does it not need AI in it, it’s actually improved by not having AI.
Trusted by Microsoft
Well, isn’t that special. It might mean something if I actually gave a single shit what Microsoft thinks about literally anything.
So this is the first chucklefuck they found who thought to harass ChatGPT until it hallucinated the result they wanted I guess. There’s no chance whatever comes out of this has any kind of scientific rigor and it gets laughed out of every serious publication, but RFK will still tout it as proof to justify his batshit policies.
While that sounds plausible I’m hesitant to ascribe too much thought to Trump’s actions. He has always been a moron who is easily manipulated. It could be blackmail, but it could also just as easily be someone with intimate access to him playing him like a fiddle. He’s too fucking stupid to realize the actual consequences his actions have.
They don’t have to, the legal risks alone will discourage businesses from getting involved. Should something manage to get big enough despite that they’ll go after the payment processors to strangle them that way. They don’t care about every little site, they just want to make sure they’ve got their thumb on the 99% of them that most people actually use.
This is such a strange concept. Like fundamentally a subscription is just a mechanism to allow a viewer to easily keep track of new content on a channel. By viewing the channels contents you’re engaging in 100% of the interaction you should be expected to have with a subscribed channel. If Google really wanted to address the problem of old subscriptions people are ignoring they should just prompt people to unsubscribe to channels that they haven’t watched any videos from in a long time. Instead they’re fucking with view counts because that saves them money. The whole thing is fishy, but Google has always treated being inscrutable and capricious as if those were virtues.
Same, but it depends on the goal. If the goal is to have an excuse not to pay creators while still cashing paychecks from advertisers it seems like a pretty smart move. A dick move certainly, but seems to be working exactly as intended.
The problem is that there aren’t any really viable alternatives. YouTube has three major advantages and all three are necessary. First and most critically it has a viable business model (that is it has a way to earn money to pay creators). It’s a shitty business model, but it is viable which already puts it ahead of most services that are coasting on VC funds and hoping they’ll trip over a business model before they go bankrupt. Second it has the infrastructure and capital to actually serve content. Running a video streaming service is the single largest bandwidth consumer you could possibly come up with and that means considerable network infrastructure costs, to say nothing of the storage demands. Third it has network effect going for it. Nobody is going to watch videos on your platform if there’s only a couple dozen of them total. The sheer size and scope of YouTube means no matter what you’re looking for you can find something to watch. It’s a one stop shop for AV content.
Every single competitor to YouTube has failed on one of those points, usually the first one, rarely the second. The last service I saw come close to hitting all three was Vimeo, but it flamed out not even a decade after it launched. Twitch.tv is struggling to make their accounting work and isn’t even a direct competitor because they’re pushing hard for live streams as opposed to pre-recorded videos. Alternatives like PeerTube have no business model and will never attract creators or a mainstream audience. Paid hosting platforms like Floatplane are replacements for traditional video streaming services like Amazon Video or Netflix not really platforms where just anybody can set up a channel and start posting videos.
To paraphrase a famous saying, YouTube is the worst public video streaming service except for every other one. Until someone comes along and figures out how to make enough money to reliably pay creators and has enough capital to actually serve that content reliably and in high quality YouTube isn’t going anywhere.
It seems like YouTube is doing something where they don’t consider views to be actual “views” anymore. I saw one creator reporting that you only get credit as a view if you also leave a comment on the video because I guess Google thinks this will somehow hamper bots? Sounds like a bunch of bullshit no matter how you look at it. Personally I think Google is just trying to avoid paying creators so they’re only crediting them for a fraction of the views they get, but you just know they’re charging those advertisers for every single view whether they’re paying the creators or not.
The thing is it’s not one goal and it’s not rational. There are multiple sub-groups that are each pursuing their own insanity under the larger crazy umbrella. Under the more children group you’ve got, a) capitalists wanting cheap child labor, b) doomsday cultists that want more kids because gestures vaguely towards crazy shit in the bible, c) pedophiles that want more kids because of reasons I will not elaborate on, and d) other doomsday cultists that don’t actually want more children they’re just opposed to abortion and are really dumb. Then under the anti-vaccine groups we’ve got, a) capitalists wanting cheap child labor, b) conspiracy theorists that are just really really dumb, c) contrarians that don’t actually care one way or another they just do the opposite of whatever they’re told, and d) bog standards morons that are scared by the fancy science people words therefore they must be bad.
For instance, RFK Jr. himself is just a really stupid conspiracy theorist. I don’t know if he’s expressed any specific opinion on birth rates but he likely doesn’t really care outside of maybe going after specific birth control pills because of whatever insane conspiracy theory is hot this month.
Tanking the economy thereby massively increasing financial insecurity, you know the number one thing that discourages people from deciding to have kids.
It’s crazy to me how often people get in trouble for using work devices for personal stuff, particularly porn. This should be one of those things they teach people in school “do not use work devices for personal things”. It really should be considered common sense these days.
It will definitely crash because it’s being kept afloat by VC money right now. Once that dries up and these AI companies start raising their rates to generate a profit companies are going to realize the AI is way more expensive than an actual programmer. It’s also not a question of recognizing quality because companies have all kinds of metrics in place explicitly for trying to measure program quality (usually poorly, but what they do measure incredibly well is how many bugs software has and how long it takes to deliver new features).
While AI can deliver code quickly not only is that code low quality and incredibly hard to fix it’s also riddled with both obvious and subtle bugs. The QA departments are going to be working overtime and scaling up massively to try to keep up with the pure crap the new vibe coding departments are going to be churning out. The executives won’t be able to tell if the code is low quality, but they will be able to read the reports showing they went from a month to deliver a new release with a 10% defect rate to two months to deliver a release with a 50% defect rate, and it’s still costing them nearly the same amount despite a significantly reduced head count.
Spoiler alert, it will last at least a few more years, possibly longer. Trump and his gestapo have made it clear that the US is closed for business as long as he’s in charge. The next great depression is just getting started.
He’s a CEO that’s practically the job description under late stage capitalism. That and being an amoral piece of shit that would happily grind up children if there were no consequences and it would earn them 1% more profit.
He isn’t yet but he really wants to be. At the moment what’s left of the US government is still holding him back some, not everyone is willing to go along with his complete disregard for the law. The real turning point will come down to the next election and whether he’s managed to rip out enough democracy and replace it with a sham to guarantee his “win” or not. The biggest roadblock towards that is unfortunately the Supreme Court a body that has already been almost entirely corrupted thanks to decades of work by previous Republican presidents.
So yes, he isn’t a dictator yet, but it’s not looking like there’s anything stopping him from getting there eventually.
Yes in general, but it’s not really economical for Lego to stand up a manufacturing facility in every country they sell in. If their current factory produces enough parts to meet their needs it doesn’t make any sense to open new factories just to skirt tariffs. It wouldn’t be a problem in the first place if the tariffs weren’t ridiculously high. You can’t blame Lego for not wanting to saddle their customers with tariffs on something that’s free to people living in sane countries.
It didn’t used to. It used to be that medical debt was excluded from your credit report. That changed recently though thanks to, you guessed it, Republicans.
Don’t drag Rocko into this, he doesn’t deserve that.
Fun fact, that show is now 32 years old, and the final season aired 29 years ago. TIL Netflix made a Rocko’s Modern Life special in 2019.
The problem is Vance is the main one pushing the christo-fascist stuff. Trump is a greedy stupid narcissist which can (and has) caused plenty of short term damage. Enough short term damage can stack up to long term damage, but even that is recoverable. Over a long enough time scale foreign relations can be patched, soft power slowly restored. Nothing he has done domestically has been too catastrophic yet. Vance though has the potential intelligence to do some seriously long term lasting damage, the kind of stuff that would E.G. enshrine his particular flavor of Christianity as the national religion and make anyone who isn’t male and white a second class citizen. Once society gets tilted in that direction restoring it becomes incredibly hard. Like overthrow the government hard.
Trump in contrast is basically a toddler throwing a temper tantrum. Sure he might break stuff, but broken things are easier to repair than things that have been maliciously constructed. The fascist systems Vance might build are far scarier than whatever Trump comes up with because what Trump makes never lasts. Just wait a little while and it will naturally collapse from greed, incompetence, and infighting. Vance I fear could make something stable though.
The silver lining in this I suppose is that Vance lacks the conman skills that have allowed Trump to weaponize morons and force others to go along with his delusions. Without the throngs of MAGAts supporting him Vance won’t be able to strongarm the rest of the GOP the way Trump has which would hamper his efforts.
Great opportunity for all of them to highlight the MAGA infestation that’s breeding far right terrorists on their platforms. Oh, those weren’t the radicals they were looking for? Weird those seem to be the only ones there, better luck next time.