This isn't a charity focused on aiding the homeless or something like that. This is a charity focused on teaching programming. When there's perfectly good open source alternatives to slack it IS their fault since they should know better. If not for being immune to such problems then atleast for saving money since IMO a non profit should be as lean as possible. A for profit company can justify using a SaaS in a cost / benefit calculation, having to face competition so they need to move very fast etc. This isn't the case for a non profit.

I have always found the argument of "They deserve this because they should know better" to be a very bizarre way of thinking.

It implies there is only one correct way to think or to prioritize or to approach a problem. It also (pointlessly) tries to shame someone for something that has already happened and cannot be reversed.

I'm still baffled that youtube doesn't simply splice ads in the video stream directly and relying on client insertion through API endpoints which can be blocked. If they did video injection on the backend they wouldn't have any problems with ad blockers, it would literally be impossible to block. Even if the client would recognise ads somehow the server can just decide to serve the video of the ad while ignoring any seeking from the client so at best the client can mute the ad.

Then, the ad-adverse users will just use software that downloads the video and reprocesses the file to remove the ads. Ytdlp already does this with SponserBlock integration, and I imagine detecting ads is something AI would be pretty good at.

Of course, you lose the ability to mindlessly browse YT with no ads or get the dopamine hit of clicking an interesting video. I'm sure that's something YT considered if they pushed this option. They don't want you to just watch the few vids from your subscriptions per day and close the app.

Its not too hard to detect ads in video streams, even old school analog VCR's could do that.

Watching TV shows without adds was one of the selling points of those back in the day.

Some more modern digital ones had near real time features where they would play with a delay of a lets say half an hour and used that time to remove the ads.

If you have stream from Youtube containing ads you can trivially skip ahead.

And Youtube could do nothing about it because random skipping is one of the base features of every video player ever.

> Even if the client would recognise ads somehow

Sponsorblock uses community driven marking of ads edited into the video.

I think you're right, that you wouldn't be able to skip an ad at the beginning of the video - you would need to predict for the user he will want to watch a video to load it earlier in the background to skip the ad, so only skipping ads in middle of the video would be possible.

> you would need to predict for the user he will want to watch a video to load it earlier in the background to skip the ad

Not sure I understand this. I don't think it's possible even now to load the video in the background, youtube is already smarter than this and it will load a short period of time whenever u seek anywhere, it doesn't just download the whole thing if you pause the video.

And the way I'm suggesting wouldn't be mitigated by sponsorblock since you wouldn't be able to skip it if you want to stream the video. Only way would be to use yt-dlp and remove the ads automatically but I suspect a tiny percentage of users would go to that length to avoid ads

> Not sure I understand this.

Imagine that you open the video on one tab, see where the ad IN MIDDLE of the video is (e.g. because of a system like Sponsorblock, other users reported it), click on progress bar to go after the ad, the system is probably smart enough to show the ad anyway - OK, you mute the ad, and open the same video again, and watch it from the beginning. By the time you get to the ad, you can switch to the other tab, where the ad already played.

Of course it wouldn't work if the ad was at the beginning.

The way I imagined it you wouldn't know where the ad is, they can insert it on the fly at any point. It wouldn't count in the video seek bar.. at any random point they want they can just insert it and you can do nothing about it except mute it and wait it out.

Video is not a single stream, but many smaller chunks daisy chained after each other. Reason for this is that you can then change i.e. quality of video and it will seamlessly change - because it will start daisy chaining higher quality chunks and show them in the player.

So what you are describing is already happening, ads are added directly into video stream, problem is that ads need to have access to API, because you don't want to show an ad for menstruation pad to a guy so you also need to know which user is watching and that's what cookies and the whole login is for, so you are effectively hitting a design limitation of the system.

And no, you can't do this ad selection on the server, because for example when you have 10 users behind a NAT how are you going to tell which user is which from the server point of view? So you need to be calling these APIs from the client side.

This is close to being correct, but it isn't. Server side ad insertion is possible, and the tech already exists. See, your browser by default sends cookies to the server with every web request, no JS required. Simply* add the ad videos to the list of chunks.

*By "simply" I mean it's technically possible, I know it's not simple to implement.

It's also already done for many podcasts, they'll have changing/seasonal ads for all episodes they're hosting. Which is confusing if you're listening to a 10 year old episode and get some new ad.

> Video is not a single stream, but many smaller chunks daisy chained after each other. Reason for this is that you can then change i.e. quality of video and it will seamlessly change - because it will start daisy chaining higher quality chunks and show them in the player.

Don't think this is correct, if you're on a slower connection you will see it takes a while when changing stream quality, the video "seamlessly" changes because it's still playing the current quality stream while the new quality stream loads. It would make no sense to send more than one quality at the same time because it would incur higher bandwidth costs and they care a LOT about bandwidth costs. I'm a premium user and even though I have higher quality enabled by default they STILL downgrade and not showing the highest quality possible unless I force it on specific videos.

> So what you are describing is already happening, ads are added directly into video stream, problem is that ads need to have access to API, because you don't want to show an ad for menstruation pad to a guy so you also need to know which user is watching and that's what cookies and the whole login is for, so you are effectively hitting a design limitation of the system.

They can do the tracking by user all the same, as long as the user is logged in they know what ads to show on the server already. This is already a problem when the user is using youtube without an account in an incognito window so if the client hacks the tracking side just show them default ads for their region. This is already a solved problem

Don't give them ideas! Also I think that there's a non trivial engineering effort required to inject ads into the video stream as well, for example with bookmarks and so on. Probably they'll do it but as last resort.

I suspect this war on adblockers is also non trivial and the "last resort" would win them this war forever. For a company the size of youtube the effort would be trivial.

There would likely be huge processing overhead for splicing ads into a stream, right?

No, you can concatenate video segments with basically zero cost if the segments are encoded using the same encoding parameters and afaik youtube already re-encodes user videos.

What's to prevent ad-blockers from just skipping ahead when there's an ad playing?

Simply refuse to send original stream packets / ignore seek requests by the client until the ad duration has passed. Sure you could pause / mute / alt tab for that duration but the point is being annoying so people buy premium if they hate ads so much.

Can authors even claim such rights though? I doubt think they even had such agency to begin with

If they're the rightsholders, they can do whatever they want with their IP, including changing licensing terms, adding contractual obligations forbidding certain types of use, forbidding sale, etc.

I feel like that would bounce hard off first sale doctrine. But what do I know.

You still have to adhere to license and copyright terms after first sale.

You can't sell a Bluray disk to a movie theater and give them the right to charge an audience to watch it in the theater later.

If rightsholders are worried about certain uses of their IP being found to be fair use, they might then change the terms of release contractually to stop or at least partially prevent training.

Idk how it is in the US but in eastern Europe that's only true if surge is on and even so considering how shitty the quality of service was before Uber it's fine.

And it’s still shitty. Uber/Bolt is like on par with 90s taxis. At least here there was a short attempt to make things better in early 2010s with nicer cars and trying to force drivers to be nicer. But then it was „disrupted“.

I far, far, far prefer Uber (or Lyft, in the US) wherever I am, over whatever local taxi service there is. Yes, the quality of cars varies a lot. Yes, you never know if you're going to get a quiet driver or a way-too-talkative one.

But I know what I'm going to pay up-front, can always pay with a credit card (which happens automatically without annoying post-trip payment), the ride is fully tracked, and I can report issues with the driver that I have an expectation will actually be acted upon. And when I'm in another country where there are known to be taxis that scam foreigners, Uber is a godsend.

Yes, pre-Uber taxis were expensive and crappy, and even if Uber is expensive now, it's not crappy; it's actually worth the price. And I'm not convinced Uber is even that expensive. We always forget to account for inflation... sure, we might today say, "that ride in a taxi used to cost $14, but in an Uber it costs $18". But that ride in a taxi was 15 years ago.

If you think that Uber deal was not thought out well it didn't get a chance when the drivers became AI autonomous and hacked the old drivers out of car. Then as they threw out the driver police hit there lights and let the AI go with a warning for throwing trash out but us passengers got raped by a feeldown seizure of mess to ride with the crazy driver not paid to controlled substances felony party too other passengers. So in response to nontraffic citation and no evidance because self incriminating with forced treatment to more meds but not allowed? What a choice red pill or six blue pills all illegal to have.

The disruption worked in most cities I use uber in. It’s far more trustworthy to use uber.

But drivers got to eat

Why don't they just order it on food delivery. I heard that it massively cut margins on the greedy restaurants, so can't be inflation there...

who cares about the drivers....

Especially because in 10 years from now they will progressively get replaced by AI like Waymo, so no point into making sure they are happy in the long-term

So you could run battle.net inside Steam? That would be fun, I've had issues with battle.net on wine / lutris

Yes, Battle.net runs flawlessly in Steam, have zero issues playing D2R and D4 this way. In fact D4 ran flawlessly on Linux on Day 1, which came as a bit of a surprise to me.

The only thing I still can't run is League of Legends. I hope someone can figure that out somehow

Lutris doesn't have to mean Wine. It can launch apps via Proton too (and so can Heroic). I think it uses https://github.com/Open-Wine-Components/umu-launcher behind the scenes, not sure, but so far I haven't run into any issues with this approach.

This is exactly what I do, works great. I may have had to try one or two different recent versions of Proton via the drop-down, but it's way less hassle than when I used Lutris.

I played WoW for several years this way without much issue. The only tweaking I ended up doing manually was to try to figure it out how to get the game to let me enable ray tracing, which I did get working but ended to being too much of a performance hit for my to leave on most of the time anyhow.

This is what I do, it feels weird, but works perfectly and is the least effort solution

Fwiw I think the ratio of times I needed to go to google for a solution instead of an LLM is like 20:1 for me so your mileage may vary. Depends a lot on the specific niche you're working in.

Unrelated to software but recently I wanted to revive an old dumbphone I haven't used since 2014 and apparently I had it password protected and forgot the password and wanted to factory reset it. I found the exact model of the phone and google had only content farm articles that didn't help me at all but Gemini gave me the perfect solution first try. I went to google first because I had no faith in Gemini since to me it seemed like a pretty obscure question but guess I was wrong.

In the interest of full disclosure my setup is quite esoteric for unreal dev. Linux and nixos no less. To be honest I'd probably have given up on nixos long ago without LLM support. It's actually really quite handy to be able to share a declarative specification of my environment.

Google search has been enshittified. Kagi is where you get real search results now.

Unsure why this is downvoted. "Google search has been enshittified" should be a common sentiment here.

From gemini.. (edited for brevity)

Kape Technologies Owns: ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate

> is there any suspicion that Kape Technologies is influenced or has ties to the Mossad?

Yes, there is significant suspicion and public discussion about Kape Technologies having ties to former Israeli intelligence personnel. While a direct operational link to Mossad has not been proven, the concerns stem from the company's history, its key figures, and their backgrounds.

...

Kape Technologies is owned by Israeli billionaire Teddy Sagi. While Sagi himself does not have a documented intelligence background, his business history, which includes a conviction for insider trading in the 1990s, has been a point of concern for some privacy advocates. The consolidation of several major VPN providers under his ownership has raised questions about the potential for centralized data access.

----

Sure there isn't direct proof but there wasn't any proof the CIA was driving drug trade while it was happening. Proof materializes when the dust settles on such matters.

Israel has universal conscription and anyone smart enough to get out of hauling a rifle around in the hot sun is going to leap at any chance to do so. So some kind of intel background among tech people in Israel isn't nearly as meaningful as it is in other countries where joining the IC is a very deliberate choice.

But more importantly, you can't just make grandiose claims (especially about privacy tools!) then just say "Proof materializes when the dust settles on such matters". You can claim that about literally anything.

It doesn't apply imo as OP is probably not a high value target of the govt, he just wants to bypass his govt restrictions and I doubt the situation is so bad that the govt will send people physically to deal with people circumventing the block.

Your solution could technically work over any kind of open connection / data transfer protocol that isn't blocked by the provider but it would be an absolute pain to browse the web that way and there are probably better solutions out there.