my best guess is, you could've connected from a different ip once 10 years ago and it improperly geolocated that ip as being in a tiny country and now it thinks you're secretly from that country even though you've been accessing the site from a US ip forever. it's the only plausible reason i can really think of. unless they set up a "country estimation" ai or a similar newfangled system and it's convinced for some reason you're actually not american. it's too out there but you never know

Some GEOIP databases are rotting, near as I can tell.

I’ve got a proxy on random machine in a OVH DC in Oregon. Always properly geo-located to Oregon - until a few months ago.

Now YouTube insists I’m in France. Which is quite entertaining, ads wise.

you'd think that by a certain point youtube ads would've been regulated/managed just like ads on tv channels.. it made sense not do to it that way when the platform was in its infancy, but nowadays almost every news channel is on youtube and the platform has the kind of money to manage ad spaces the same way or similar to the way television used to. whether that's the right method of doing it.. there'll probably be some objections to going back to that way of dealing with ads but a new system is needed because allowing instant adsense deployment to the entirety of youtube without any checks to make sure there's no inappropriate material, copyright infringement or scams isn't working out that well

seems to be the reason they go through UI changes every year or so. like agh, there goes my muscle memory again. at least ol' reliable hn is still the same good old plain renderable-by-anything-more-advanced-than-a-toaster html

there is no way you aren't able to discern the obvious differences between physical labor such as digging a hole and something as innate to human nature as creativity. you realize just how hollow a set of matrix multiplications are when you try to "talk to it" for more than 3 minutes. the whole point of language is to talk to other people and to communicate ideas to them. that is something that requires a human factor, otherwise the ideas are simply regurgitations of whatever the training set happened to contain. there are no original ideas in there. a steam shovel, on the other hand, does not need to be creative or to have human factor, it's simply digging a hole in the ground

So why are you wasting your precious comments on the hollow humans here? Leave us alone and talk to LLMs. No doubt they will tell you you’re absolutely right.

you forgot to add "tapestry"!

is your trigger-word "Ethereum"? he's not even talking about trading crypto or anything you could remotely consider scammy, he's talking about a blockchain based naming system. you're freaking out over nothing, go home man...