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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Winter:
    -10°C outside, sometimes colder; comfy +22°C inside. Sun sets at 1600, but that’s what tea, candles and mood lighting is for. Everything is nice and quiet outside, with an occasional noise of snowplows after it snows.

    Summer:
    30°C outside, 30°C inside (aircon is not common here in older houses). Hotter in the sun in the middle of the sea of asphalt and concrete that is called “city”. Sun sets at 2200 and rises at 0400.

    When the sun rises it’s like fucking Jurassic Park outside when all the birds wake up and start making noises. And by “birds” I mean not lovely songbirds like blackbirds and skylarks but pidgeons, crows and seagulls (and no, I don’t live by the sea; I live pretty much as far from the sea as one can in my country. The city is overrun with seagulls.). They seemingly love to scream right into the ventilation shafts of apartment buildings.

    When the sun sets in summer all the inebriated revellers come out and start making noises including loud and off-note singing, loud laughing and loud inarticulate screaming. Add loud boomboxes to the mix and it’s one hell of a racket.

    Also, mosquitos. Lots of mosquitos.



  • start using alternatives like lbry and/or peertube

    Sure. But actively using YT without paying for Premium and blocking all the ads will affect them more, and if enough people do it, might actually catalyze it to go Twixxer levels of enshittification, which would be just as beneficial for growing the userbase of those alternatives with the side benefit of getting rid of one of the gatekeepers. Fediverse saw a huge growth in popularity following the recent enshittification of Reddit, after all. “Build it and they will come” has a corollary that goes “Destroy it and they’ll go elsewhere” :)


  • Dude just watch the ads so people get paid…

    I don’t care. Hypothetical incomes of other people are not my problem or obligation. Next you’ll be saying I must eat at restaurants at least three days a week and attend all concerts and drama plays in my town because otherwise people don’t get paid.

    You’re not automatically entitled to free content

    Correct. First I need to manually set up my tools, and then these tools get me free content automatically. But I don’t care about entitlement; it’s a spook. It’s all down to risk-benefit. The risk of blocking youtube ads is basically nil, but I benefit by wasting less time and not having loud, imbecile and completely irrelevant audio-visual crap annoying me. I also pirate all my music, movies and shows. Because I don’t care. I like free stuff. Copyright is a spook, anyway.


  • Vivaldi with uBlock Origin here. A simple refresh of the page makes the popup go away, often for the rest of the session. For me, it’s YT without ads as usual. I might need to clear uBlock cache and refresh filter lists to make it work even better. There’s also a Tampermonkey script for blocking the popup, but I haven’t tried it yet.

    As a side note, I’ve seen a lot of talk about boycotting Youtube. There are 3 things to consider with this:

    1. Boycotting YT will give Google exactly what they want, getting rid of the “freeloaders” who don’t pay for Premium and block ads.
    2. Boycotting YT will hurt small creators who don’t see much ad revenue (if any) anyway. Views and likes are what make small creators visible to the algorithm, if these drop off, their reach will diminish.
    3. Boycotting YT won’t affect big creators with sponsorships, healthy Patreon community, millions of subscribers and views.
      Best way of defiance here is not stopping to use YT, but on the contrary, generating as much traffick to YT as possible while blocking the ads.




  • Didn’t have time to go into details in my last post. I think the most important traits of technofeudalism are regulatory capture of the government and ubiquitous rent-seeking—“you’ll own nothing” (I highly doubt in the “…and be happy” part).

    The big corpos have realised that extracting value is easier and more profitable than creating value. Hence subscription everything including heated seats and better acceleration in cars, platform economy (Uber, Air BnB et al.). The latest Unity fiasco is also an example of a company trying to extract as much value from the game developers as possible, and it will not be the last attempt at this.

    What makes technofeudalism possible is the IT infrastructure of the world (hence “techno”). Uber-like platforms and subscription services for hardware were not practical half a century ago, but ubiquitous Internet access, smartphones and DRM makes it easy today.

    In short, just like the peasants in the old feudal ages had to pay to the lord to have a place to live and make a living off the land (and realistically had nowhere to go to where this was not the case), in technofeudalism you have to pay for your techno-lord corporate middlemen to have a place to live and be able to use the tools (software or hardware) you need to make a living with no realistic alternatives due to regulatory capture.




  • Celsius makes weather so much easier; freezing point of water is the one most important temperature for weather conditions, what kind of precipitation and surface conditions you can have. Having it as the reference point for temperature just makes so much sense. With celsius, you can understand the general weather from a single glance. Negative numbers? Ice and snow. Positive numbers? Rain and mud. Plan accordingly. And the general comfort zones are all at around 10° steps wich makes everything nice and round.

    Fahrenheit on the other hand has the zero at some completely nonsensical reference point that has no relation to what weather conditions are possible.


  • Celsius is easy, everything important is a nice and rounded number: -40°C is freezing point of vodka; -30°C is fucking cold; -20°C is cold but tolerable; -10°C is pleasant winter weather; 0°C is when roads get icy, better be careful; 10°C is pleasant autumn weather; 20°C is room temperature and pleasant spring/summer; 30°C is haaawwt; 40°C is you-must-be-shitting-me hot; 80 to 100°C is good sauna; 110°C is those-crazy-Finns sauna; 120°C is the-bloody-Russians-joined-the-sauna-party; 250°C is pizza oven; 1000°C is ceramics oven; 1500°C is steel smelting. Everything above use K instead; substract 273 to get C if you must.

    Fahrenheit is a fucking mess where nothing makes sense and nothing is a rounded number.