• 0 Posts
  • 287 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 8th, 2023

help-circle










  • A solution would be for an extension to download the entire video 2x and delete the difference.

    I don’t think that would work. It would be trivial for YT to put different ads in different time slots which would leave a differencing engine with no way to tell what was content and what was ad. However that thought gave me another one; the core problem is the ability to differentiate between content and ad. That problem is probably solvable by leveraging the NPU that everyone is so desperate to cram into computers today.

    Nearly all of the YT content I watch, and it’s a lot, has predictable elements. As examples the host(s) are commonly in frame and when they’re not their voices are, their equipment is usually in frame somewhere and often features distinctive markings. Even in the cases where those things aren’t true an Ad often stands out because its so different in light, motion, and audio volume.

    With those things in mind it should be possible to train software, similar to an LLM, to recognize the difference between content and ad. So an extension could D/L the video, in part or in whole, and then start chewing through it. If you were willing to wait for a whole D/L of the video then it could show you an ad free version, if you wanted to stream and ran out of ad-removed buffer then it could simply stop the stream (or show you something else) until it has more ad-free content to show you.

    A great way to improve this would be by sharing the results of the local NPU ad detection. Once an ad is detected and its hash shared then everyone else using the extension can now reliably predict what that ad looks like and remove it from the content stream which would minimize the load on the local NPU. It should also be possible for the YT Premium users to contribute so that the hash of an ad-free stream, perhaps in small time based chunks, could be used to speed up ad identification for everyone else.

    It wouldn’t be trivial but it’s not really new territory either. It’s just assembling existing tech in a new way.



  • Libertarian here. According to you I don’t want to help the poor so can you please explain to me why I’m spending hours every month doing volunteer work that has positive impacts for the disadvantaged?

    It’s long been said Libertarians are just Republicans that want to smoke weed and distance themselves from the outwardly racist rhetoric.

    Some are but not all. The people who repeat that line really don’t like to be confronted with the reality that there’s a lot more to a libertarian than weed. As an example the party platform started pushing LGBTQ rights clear back in the late '70s, long before anyone else was.

    There certainly are selfish bastard libertarians but undesirables exist in every party and I maintain that we shouldn’t define a group by its worst members.


  • Why would I, a right wing libertarian, lend my time to developing a piece of software that I am unable to make a profit from?

    You are making a reductionist argument that the only thing that motivates a libertarian is profit. It is certainly a motivator but it’s certainly not the only one. Libertarian’s have a long history of association with FOSS, for example my own stretches back to the mid-90s. I have no desire to make money from it but I have a strong desire to stay out of the clutches of BigTech as much as possible and so I contribute to FOSS as I can.

    Something like bitcoin is the kind of tech project of that mould that i think attracts the right wing libertarian.

    A lot of libertarians push on cryptocurrency not because of a profit motive but because of the freedom and privacy aspects. To use myself as an example I don’t hold crypto as an investment but rather as a way of holding a currency that isn’t subject to the US Federal Reserve system.

    Are there some libertarians who fit your descriptions? Absolutely there are, and they are generally referred to as Anarcho-Capitalists, An-Caps for short, but just like every Democrat isn’t a Progressive not every libertarian is an An-Cap.






  • Simple mechanisms for flagging/reviewing misinformation would be helpful

    It would be helpful but it would only be a band-aid on the sucking chest wound of economic issues. There’s also the very real problem of who gets to declare something as “misinformation”. There’s absolutely no way I would entrust our Government with that power and I trust the private companies running Media and Social Media outlets even less.


  • The Russian and Chinese propaganda machines are making headway for two very clear reasons:

    1. Liberal Immigration Policy.
    2. Rapidly diminishing economic prospects.

    The first one is nearly brain dead simple to resolve. Tighten controls on immigration. Like it or not that seems to be what many voters want and the continuing refusal to be responsive to that makes politicians out of step with their constituents. Are these Representative Democracies or not?

    The second is more nuanced but also relatively straightforward; stop outsourcing Blue Collar / Manufacturing work to low labor cost places like China. In fact the whole trends needs to reverse and those jobs needs to brought back!

    That’s it. Those two things explain the rising support for the “Far Right” in both the Europe and the United States. The person pulling the lever for a Right-Oid candidate isn’t doing it because they love Russia or Putin, they are doing it because they want meaningful employment that allows them to be at least somewhat comfortable.