TheTechnician27

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captcha-solver/

Yeah, uBlock Origin not working would take me from liking YouTube a fair bit to making it unusable.

• I use Proton but keep legacy Gmail accounts around to ensure I still have access to accounts I may have forgotten about or people I knew a long time ago sending a stray email. The only other usage is logging into YouTube.
• I use a Captcha solver extension.
• I use uBlock Origin to block all their ads.
• I don’t use their DNS.
• I use DDG over their search engine and Firefox over their browser.
• I don’t use Google Drive or their office suite (I think the latter is abysmal to use tbf).
• I use DeepL over Translate.
• I use NewPipe for YouTube on mobile and have a subscription to Nebula.
• I no longer use Google Maps, opting for OSM instead.
• I still use Android and unfortunately can’t unlock the bootloader but have degoogled as far as I know how, including never even registering a Google account with it (F-Droid + Aurora Store).

YouTube is far and away the biggest means by which I interact with Google, and that falls off a cliff if I’m forced to interact with a mess of their ridiculously shitty ads every time I have to use it. uBO has likely saved hundreds of hours of watching ads over my lifetime (and probably thousands of dollars from not being subconsciously influenced by ads), and I’m not paying a subscription fee to such an unethical company to get rid of the ads. This would bring me from YouTube as a timewaster to YouTube only as strictly necessary. Even though I don’t support them directly through ads, I do support them by supporting creators I like monetarily, by sharing links and maintaining the network effect, and by giving them plenty of metadata by interacting with their service. If they do this, they ensure that I continue to monetarily support competitors like Nebula and permanently lose a grip they’ve had on me since I was a kid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6R_WTDdx7I

Robot clearly never watched the ending of Fallout 3 about letting the humans do it instead.

Is there such a community here? Maybe you could start one.

I blame both, much in the same way that I’d blame a quack doctor and parents bringing their kids to the quack doctor.

13 words per minute isn’t impressive

Worse than that, it’s abysmal. That would’ve been a failing grade back when I had a few months of mandatory typing classes back in 6th grade. 40 WPM was an A, and arguably that was overly generous due to factors like 1) most students weren’t nearly as exposed to the keyboard in their daily lives as they are today, 2) the testmakers probably didn’t fully grasp how important the Internet would become, 3) the test intentionally obscured the keyboard so you had to go by feel, and 4) because of (2), the class was very short despite taking you from knowing no typing to using all the English-language keys. (I just barely passed it IIRC in the 45-ish WPM range.)

On a whim, I decided to pull up a typing test – something I haven’t done in probably 5 years – and tried to see how I could do by simulating the speed of hunt-and-peck. I really tried to make it excruciatingly slow, and it still came out to just under 20 WPM. Next, I tried to see what I could do if I only had my left hand, and it was 35 WPM with 97% accuracy. If you chopped off one of my hands, I could still type 2.7x faster than the average kid in that school’s fourth grade could – bearing in mind that that’s the average, meaning as long as the data is roughly normal, about half of the students fall below even that.

That’s completely insane in a world where this iPad generation almost assuredly has tons of exposure to the QWERTY keyboard layout. It’s just inexcusable, it’s absolutely not the kids’ fault as them doubling their average typing speed after actually being taught to type shows that, and it totally tracks that it’s in Oklahoma.

It’s genuinely frightening to me that so much European rhetoric against Roma people sounds like 1950s US-era rhetoric against desegregation. Like the US is incredibly racist, and Europeans still somehow find ways to shock me over how they talk about an entire ethnic group.

Please just watch this.

Really throwing stones from a glass house here, aren’t they?

The students will learn using a mixture of artificial intelligence platforms on their computers and virtual reality headsets.

Suspicions immediately confirmed that the principal is a complete fucking dipshit who just wants to chase whatever trends sound futuristic. What an awful person for putting kids through this garbage.

He actually threw $44 billion at it because he’s a fucking idiot who wanted to manipulate stock prices and then was masterfully forced into the purchase by Twitter’s legal team.

However, yes, he has since been destroying it, likely to the benefit of investors such as the Saudis.

Right? Like they’re trying to equivocate and act like radio waves are this strange thing that science doesn’t quite understand yet, when in reality they’re unbelievably well-understood, and it’d be ridiculous to insinuate that radio waves passing through your body perturb it in any even remotely harmful way. The only reason this study had to exist is because of a bunch of psychotic quacks and grifters who say this kind of thing with zero evidence.

You would get more damaging radiation from the potassium-40 in a single banana than you would spending your entire life immersed in humanity’s ocean of RF waves, and that’s because a radio photon isn’t fucking ionizing.

Not really. In terms of engaging with posts, oh my god, absolutely it’s worse. Twitter and its clones suck when it comes to engaging with things people post (but Mastodon at least makes it a bit better by increasing the character limit). But there’s just something different about following a hashtag versus following a Lemmy community. Like for example, when it comes to getting highly detailed, up-to-the-minute news about things, Mastodon beats Lemmy every time. Additionally, I can see people’s random, one-off takes that wouldn’t really warrant a post on Lemmy.

I would argue too that it’s not even true that you should just be focused on following hashtags, but rather that you should be trying to do both.

To me, Lemmy is the type of place I could kill two hours; for Mastodon, it’s maybe 15 minutes, but that doesn’t make it inferior, just a different use-case. It’s pretty apples-to-oranges.

“Say the line, Adam!”

Quick, someone post “Cascade” from Homestuck and bring down the entire fediverse.

Absolutely! And what I ran down is just the extent of the features I personally interact with; there are a fair few more, including one that aims to combat clickbait by changing clickbaity titles.

FYI, SponsorBlock isn’t just for skipping sponsored segments. SB gives you granular control over the sorts of sections you can skip, and it only auto-skips sponsors by default. However:

• There are several categories of section, including intro animation/intermission (“an interval without actual content”), preview (i.e. where the information already exists later in the video), sponsor (a segment made in return for payment from a third party), unpaid/self-promotion (e.g. “buy my merch”), interaction reminder (e.g. “remember to like and subscribe”), and endcards/credits. (There’s also “filler tangent/jokes”, but I haven’t tried this one.)
• For each of these categories, you can choose to disable altogether, show in the seek bar, prompt to manually skip, or auto skip.

So even if you would never want to skip a sponsored segment in your life, the extension still saves a ton of time if you have no/limited interest in watching even just one of the above-listed categories.

The original Engadget article which was syndicated here:

(Yahoo! News isn’t as bad with link rot as MSN is, but it’s still not great)

Moreover, they note that it’s a small community with three subscribers, which could actually hold weight as evidence of brigading if we were on Reddit. But on Lemmy? Nah, you kind of just see everything.

If we’re sorting by new on /r/all, I need to scroll back several pages on RiF to even see something that was posted 30 seconds ago; the chance that more than a few users will see the same feed there is tiny.

On Lemmy, by contrast, sorting ‘All’ by new gives me posts in the last 10-ish minutes on just the first page; things just move a ton more slowly. Consequently, there’s a lot more outsiders who are liable to see and interact with your post in a small community.