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Comment Re:It's coming for the Tropics and the US (Score 2) 105

It's not morons.

It's people overwhelmed with multiple crisis scenarios that they can't handle. Most of us wish for a stable society and environment because it makes it easier to plan a future. You wouldn't build a house if you're not sure it's still going to be there in five years.

Calling people morons instead of understanding the actual problem is also a way to avoid looking at it too closely, probably because the complexity is overwhelming to you, too. Easier to just call people morons and be done with it.

Climate change is very much a social, cultural and political problem and the scientists have only looked at the meteorological and biological side of it.

Comment please don't do such shoddy reporting (Score 2) 105

Europeans are suffering with unprecedented heat during the day and are stressed by uncomfortable warmth at night.

Maybe some are, but both in my place and where my parents live (1200 km away, that's 750 miles for the metrically challenged) temperatures have plummeted to near freezing at night and single-digits during the day (in Celsius, that's the 35 to 45 range in Fahrenheit for the temperature scale challenged).

I don't doubt climate change at all. But shoddy journalism that creates headlines where those allegedly affected go "what? not at all, why are you lying?" only helps the deniers.

If you look at a weather map of Europe, like this one stuck in the early 2000s - https://www.weatheronline.co.u... - you'll see that at least right now only the very, very southern tips of Europe (in Spain and Greece, that's in the bottom-left corner and the bottom-right corner, no not the very corner that's already Africa, damn where were you in geography?) has temperatures above 20ÂC predicted for today, and that's not unusually hot for those regions.

We did have unusually hot weather 2-3 weeks ago, but they were unusual only for the season and still well below ordinary summer days.

Please get your reporting right, or you're only feeding the trolls that claim climate change is made up.

Comment Re:Good Lord (Score 1) 116

Then they can just run Linux (preferably SELinux) and solve the problem.

I wish, and I would welcome it if they did.

However, as one of the foremost SELinux advocates in its early days, I doubt that the government of all places has the capability to do so. Few sysadmins can configure SELinux halfway decently (i.e. beyond the default policies) and the government (outside the military and secret services) isn't a good tech employer.

Also, MS is far more than the OS. With Office and a bunch of other tools, plus lots of custom software made only for Windows, the entrechnment is really, really deep.

Comment Re:Who you are; Something you know (Score 1) 146

The classic "username" and "password" combo provides two pieces of information in order to verify identify: who you are, and something you know.

Actually, it doesn't. Nothing in the username field has anything to do with identity. I can enter whatever I want there, or where it is an e-mail I can just enter whatever I want followed by @gmail.com once I've registered that as my e-mail account.

These are not two differen things. There's no actual difference between "username+password" and "password1+password2".

but using them to replace your password seems like a bad idea.

Only because passwords are such a stupid idea.

I want my biometric devices to have a distress function. Like "if I try to log in with THIS finger, lock the device, encrypt the drive, flush all secrets and require a password to unlock it".

Comment Re:people who drown panic and flail around wildly (Score 1) 204

No matter how enshittified it gets, there seems to an endless lineup of umm.. kids... to create content, get famous, and burn out, for money. I'm having a hard time seeing how youtube is really failing.

The bubble is bursting. These days, you need about a million views per month, every month to have a career on YouTube that actually pays the bills. For one person. If someone else does the video editing for you, add their cost.

A million views equals $5k. The kids realise that as soon as they don't live at home anymore. Pretty much all big YouTubers theses days make their money from Patreon, merchandise or sponsors.

Comment Re:people who drown panic and flail around wildly (Score 1) 204

The algorithm is likely optimising not for your pleasure but for ad revenue.

I see a TON of what is essentially an entire video of product placement, thinly veiled as "10 kitchen gadgets you need to know" or "12 new must-have tech gadgets", probably because a year ago I clicked on one or two of those before realising that they're not really interesting tech news but just full-out advertisement.

It keeps doing that even after I've clicked a ton of them away as "not interested".

It also keeps recommending me old videos from my subscribed channels that I've already watched. WTF?

The algorithm is shit these days.

Comment Re:people who drown panic and flail around wildly (Score 1) 204

Revenue is a bullshit number. YT keeps its actual profits (which is the number that matters) a secret.

I should be more specific, though. I mean "dying" not in the immediate sense, that's why I said slowly and it'll be around for years to come. But the time where everyone wanted to be a YouTuber because it's easy money are over. You need over a million views per month, every month to make YouTube a viable career choice these days.

Lots of even big channels these days are largely and openly finances by Patreon or sponsors. That means that they are no longer tied to YouTube in any meaningful way. Which means the platform is now interchangeable and the moment a competitor appears with similar numbers of users, the content creators can move elsewhere.

I was there when the dot-com bubble burst (for some reason I hear that in the voice of Elrond in my head, despite it's not actually that long ago, anyway) - I saw first hand how quickly your entire business can disappear when your only leg is "I'm very popular and have lots of users". The first company I worked for went from "we're in the top three" to "we're a subsidiary of someone else and btw 90% of you can go" in a week.

Comment Re:people who drown panic and flail around wildly (Score 1) 204

Again, no.

I do realize that most advertisement these days is not a direct incentive to buy but brand marketing.

What do you think does it do to your brand imagine if your brand keeps pissing me off? My ex insisted on using YT for music over loudspeakers and to do that from her phone (no adblocker). I'm a man, but if for whatever reason I ever find it necessary to buy women's period products, I know which brand I absolutely for 100% will completely avoid.

Comment Re:people who drown panic and flail around wildly (Score 1) 204

There isn't any meaningful competition.

I've tried Rumble myself both as a viewer and as a content producer (very small channel), and it's just... not even in the same league, barely on the same continent.

But there's always a chance a competitor suddenly appears when some VCs with deep pockets decide it's worth the gamble.

Comment Re:people who drown panic and flail around wildly (Score 1) 204

Absolutely not. The YouTube customers are the people buying ads on the platform.

YouTube is fleecing them by raising the number of ads they can bill them for, even though they're force-showing them to visitors who have very clearly expressed that they don't want ads and are more likely to hold the ads against the customers who paid for them than see them as an incentive to buy or as a positive brand-image thing.

Comment people who drown panic and flail around wildly (Score 4, Informative) 204

And that's exactly what YouTube is doing.

YT is dying. Slowly, and it'll be around for years, but it's dying. The algorithm is starting to fail in very obvious ways, like recommending you the same videos constantly, despite you've scrolled past them a hundred times before. The content has become thinly veiled advertisement in addition to the actual advertisement they shove down your throat in increasingly aggressive manner. Most of the large content creators don't make much money anymore on YouTube and would probably jump ship the moment a competitor with a comparative audience size appears.

They're desperately trying to keep the cash cow alive somehow. And when you run out of ideas to innovate and make a good product, you start to ask yourself how you can fleece your customers for more.

Comment Re:There is no paradox (Score 1) 315

It's true that there is the assumption that technology and innovation will reduce interstellar travel times drastically, the way they have reduce travel across an ocean from many weeks to a few hours.

I do agree that most people probably are off by at least two orders of magnitude in estimating realistic interstellar travel times. With technology we can predict as probably going to happen, we're still on the order of hundreds of years to even nearby star systems.

Unless some magical technology breaks the light-speed barrier, space will not be "another ocean".

However, star-faring civilisations are still possible. They wouldn't be any kind of space kingdom, but independent star systems that just happen to have a common ancestry. They would certainly communicate, and the technology for that basically exists already, at least in the nearby area ( And if we can only travel to a few of the nearest stars, would we want to? Is there anything there we want?

Humans do a lot of things simply because we can. And what is vast resources today isn't so much tomorrow. Just 200 years ago, all the gold in the world wouldn't have enabled you to fly to another country for a quick visit to relatives. King, pope, peasant, no difference, simply wasn't possible. Today, anyone with an average income can do it.

So in another 200 years, who's to say that a space ship to a nearby solar system is not well within the budget of a wealthy nation?

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