This is 100% why Reddit made the API changes the originally brought many of us over. AI companies scraped the web, made LLMs, and Reddit missed out. They wanted to make sure the next ones paid them.

I’ve often said most Internet ads are ableist. They, quite literally, are meant to rip your attention away from what you’re doing.

Holy moly 🫪

Soldiers ≠ Cops

What I hate so much about the modern versions is that not only do they try to make him not a bad guy, but they out that stupid scene with Jabba in right after it. Narratively it serves the same purpose as the previous scene and the dialogue is nearly identical. Plus it really cheapens how big of a threat Jabba should be. Han steps on him. Jabba was throwing people into a pit just for shits and giggles. Why would he let someone step on him? Some scenes really should stay deleted.

No! And the reason I say no is because Greedo didn’t shoot at all! In some versions they both shoot and in some Han shoots first and in some second. In the one I grew up with (VHS box set, face edition) he is the only one to shoot.

A video of a bee in microgravity. https://youtu.be/SF-IuZwVWMU

Oh that’s interesting, I wonder if it’s easier to get heartburn in space? It’s common to need to sit upright to keep the acid down.

Efficiently packing 17 square cows.

Obviously when discussing milking cows, we assume a spherical cow universe.

I could’ve sworn I read that some people did some research on the accent of folks from where he was from and the conclusion was that he did say “for a”. Exaggerating it, if you say it like “fer a” then sort of slide from one to the other like “fera” and sort of drop a little enunciation off the end you basically end up with “fer”. So to me, I think he said “for a” and that was his recollection as well, but either way the quote is basically entrenched as “for” so I don’t really think it’s worth trying to fight to correct people. Especially when the argument is so full of weird details, but if you just listen to the clip it sounds like he fucking just says “for” lmao.

I was thinking about a similar thing recently because I got a Star Wars question wrong in trivia. The question was what planet is cloud city on. I said Besbin but apparently it’s Bespin. Without looking at the word in a subtitle or knowing what it is beforehand they sound exactly alike as far as I can tell.

AccuWeather must have picked this trick up from radio stations on Facebook. At least in the past a lot of them would make memes and throw their logo on it, I can only guess in the hopes people would see the logo even if they’re downloading and sharing and not clicking the share button.

I FUCKING HATE THIS COUNTRY.

I feel like you’re not getting the vision. It would be the same process as subscribing, but money just gets drained from a pool per ad instead of a flat monthly fee. It’s not something you’re seeing a popup for. And it would never cost 5x what an ad costs. It would only ever cost $4 to watch a video without an ad if an advertiser was willing to spend $4 to show you an ad. To put that in perspective, ad impressions are bought in units of cpm which stands for cost per mille which is the amount they pay for one thousand impressions. That would be $4,000 cpm. That’s absolutely insane. That’s orders of magnitude more than what it is today. Nobody is ever going to spend that much to show you an ad unless it’s some crazy profitable, super targeted, ultra niche campaign.

The whole point of this thought exercise is to explore what companies make in a month from ads versus what they charge for a month of ad free service. People bid for your attention. I think I should be able to bid for it myself instead of paying some opaque, flat rate per month.

You wouldn’t prompt them every time. And it would be no more difficult than serving the ads which are also charging every time they’re shown.

Not necessarily, like if it was YouTube you’d just deposit money and maybe set a maximum amount of money you’re willing to bid. Honestly most standard banner ads are from Google too, so they could handle that. For streaming services you’d need to set it up for each individually, but that’s no different from setting up billing for each of them. They wouldn’t need to talk to each other.

And I was pretty specific about PiHole over AdGuard’s public DNS. And to be honest, the person you originally replied to was as well.

But what does a pihole (which is DNS blocking) do that AdGuard’s free public DNS (which is DNS blocking) doesn’t? Of course uBlock Origin alongside them is better, but what’s a pihole specifically doing?

I’ve said this a few times in various places, but I’m really surprised we aren’t allowed to bid for ad space for ourselves to not show an ad the way advertisers do for ads. Obviously a flat monthly rate is simpler, nobody is denying that, but just from a purely “free market” perspective (which shareholders love to say they want while using the government to crush opposition) why can’t I pay slightly more than whatever small amount of money someone is paying to show me an ad to not see the ad?

Realistically I don’t think we’ll ever see that because it’s a fairly complicated. I don’t have any hard data, but I can’t imagine that the majority of users using something like YouTube Premium are getting a “good deal.” Sure, some folks probably watch all day every day and they get the better end of the deal, but I’d bet for a lot of folks YouTube makes more money off charging the subscription than they would showing the ads. Which is sort of an odd scenario we’ve gotten ourselves into (but amazing if you’re a company that serves ads).

Have you ever seen a letter or symbol somewhere that was not in copyable text and wondered how to even go about searching for what it is called? https://shapecatcher.com/ Just draw the symbol you see and it will find Unicode symbols close to it. Very useful.