And I'd rather not use YouTube! I want nothing at all to do with google. They quite simply do not deserve my money.
How much money has google made on selling my data? What do I get in return? More ads. If I pay google to remove the ads, they still sell my data and they take my money directly. By playing the game at all, you can only lose. So to the extent that is possible, I don't play. I also feel exactly zero remorse for taking advantage of a company like google. Their practices are deeply unethical and harmful, being a monopoly is inherently bad, and stealing from them is an ethical net positive.
Don't be reductive, it makes you look uninformed. This is a much more complex issue than simply paying for bandwidth.
I'm not going to tell you that happy thoughts and a motivational poster will fix you. I will say that once you get past the stage you're in and have the ability to make those big life changes, this part will happen less often and you'll find it easier to break through. When you're generally healthy, it's easier to recover when you're sick. Applies just the same to mental illness as it does to an infection.
Unfortunately, you're in the hardest part. Or at least it feels that way in the moment. I don't have any good advice other than to seek help and do whatever gets you to the next day. Try your best to make small improvements when you can. It is okay to not make progress every day, but you also have to not let that be an excuse. You really have to push yourself. It might be the hardest thing you'll ever do, but you aren't the first to have done it.
Sorry all I have is the same pithy nonsense you get on Facebook. At the core, it's good advice, but you have to know the limits. There are some battles you can't fight. Sometimes you are in a truly impossible situation. No internet comment can help you with that, but you can find help if you can bring yourself to ask for it.
The political system has no interest or even real incentive to fix climate change. Money has corrupted our governments too deeply to alter course in time.
There's nothing that you, I, or any individual can do to affect our current trajectory. Not at any scale that actually matters.
The only answer is to stop producing fossil fuels right now full stop, no conditions, no "phasing out". And that is simply not feasible because of money. Because we've spent the last half a century ignoring the problem.
What do we do? No amount of voting or recycling or buying new cars is going to make any change. It hasn't for 20 years. By the time our society gets its collective head out of its ass enough to vote for political change, we'll already be deep into global famine.
I predict two general scenarios:
1. Status quo. Nothing changes, world governments will attempt a massive last ditch effort far, far too late to make a difference. A huge portion of all species die. From there pick your favorite post-apocalyptic movie.
2. The people wisen up and overthrow their governments, string up oil execs, and force decarbonization at any cost.
We are currently, right now, TODAY at the stage where we must decarbonize at any cost. Literally no cost is too high. If we shut down oil today, it will be hugely disruptive and destructive to global society. A lot of people will die and many, many more will suffer. This will go on for decades most likely. But the alternative is most likely an extinction level event. Global famine and plague, entire species going extinct, loss of coastlines, entire ecosystems collapsing en masse.
Fundamentally, I don't think human psychology at scale can handle that. I expect that nothing barring miracle technology is going to save us, and in our current socioeconomic system, that might be even worse than nothing.
So yeah, I think we're doomed. We let capitalism go on for too long and it's too late to change direction. Those with power have systematically taken it from the rest of us so that the people with the incentive to survive longer than their career don't have the power to. The rest have the power to build nuclear bunkers under a mountain, or a rocket to Mars.
All because some men wanted to see a number go up.
Maybe we'll crack fusion and suck all the carbon out of the atmosphere, but that again simply buys us another few generations until our industrial waste heat boils the oceans. Until then, rich men will attempt to use carbon capture as leverage to extract even more money and power. "Pay me or I turn the climate up another degree" is not far off from what they're doing today.
The only thing that can save us is widespread revolt, strikes, overthrowing governments and forcing action. We've given the political system nearly a century to sort this out, and they are very clearly not interested. It's going to kill us if we don't do something.
What would happen if you went around to every house in your neighborhood and smashed everyone's printers? Would you be fined 0.01% of the cost of damaged items, or would you go to jail?
There is no good answer. Adderall is a miracle drug for people like us.
To get by without, you have two options: incredible discipline and force of will, and overcompensating with other stimulants.
Meditate, exercise, do anything it takes to force yourself into whatever structure fits your life. I'm talking to-do lists for your to-do lists and scheduling your daily time down to brushing your teeth. You have to force structure onto your life to contain your attention and energy. You have to make some truly profound changes in your life.
Or drink way too much caffeine, smoke too many cigarettes and try very hard to not think about the damage you're doing.
The only shortcut I know of is to get enough black market adderall for a couple of months and use that to keep yourself functional long enough to build the systems and habits that can keep you going without.
See the Getting Things Done method, pomodoro, and find a good task management system. Write everything down, find a system for keeping notes. Also try keeping a diary.
Also try to reduce your phone and computer usage. If your phone supports it, use monochrome mode. Push yourself to read more books instead of watching videos or playing games.
> by that kind of logic people shouldn't make any recurring purchase of anything since in future terms might change.
20 years ago, you'd be right. This argument would be paranoid nonsense. But that's not the world we live in.
We live in a world where your car manufacturer wants you to pay monthly for heated seats. Today it's normal for hardware you bought outright only works if you pay rent to someone else, and services like Netflix reduce features and increase the price. Amazon can, at any moment, delete books from your kindle that you already paid for. Digital rent extraction is a huge part of how the tech industry operates today.
Yes, you should avoid subscriptions where you can, because there is a real risk that they'll change the rules to take away what you paid for down the line.
And especially don't trust the advertising company to not put ads in their paid tiers down the line.
Yeah, I'm pretty okay with sponsored segments. By and large, the people I watch only accept sponsors that appear to be legitimate, and the read is generally "here's this service and what it does, give it a try and thank them for feeding me this week!" Or "I've been using this service since they started and I think it's pretty cool"
They're generally not low quality scammy products or designed to extract money or spy (with the exception of VPN ads, but that's a different issue).
I'm alright with them. I tend to skip them more these days because I can only hear about Brilliant and Squarespace so many times in a day
I'm happy subscribing to creators' patreons or Kofi or whatever because almost all of my money goes to them.
Whereas on YouTube, most of my money or ad-generated money goes to Google. YouTube pays creators very little and treats them very poorly. There's a new adpocalypse every few months where YouTube will randomly change the rules, retroactively demonetize and delist videos, while offering no chance to appeal or even have videos reviewed by a person.
Without even considering Google's generally evil and monopolistic behavior, why would I ever willingly give them money?
YouTube's shitty treatment of creators is why every video now has a sponsored segment in the middle. They aren't paying enough and creators need additional income sources. YouTube can decide at any moment without notice to nuke your entire business and give you no option to recover. They keep shittifying the website with shorts and aggressive ads and dark patterns to drive up ad exposure, but this doesn't translate to higher pay for creators. In no circumstance is giving google more money going to fix any of the problems.
All a YouTube plus subscription gets you is YouTube will turn off the ads and dark patterns designed to force you to pay for the subscription. As well, I have exactly zero faith that YouTube won't also start showing subscribed users ads in a year or two.
If someone offered you $5000 to change the email address you've used on every website for a decade, would you? All of your banking and financial accounts, your phone and utility bills, your doctor. Could you even identify every place you've ever used it?
That sounds like an awful lot more than $5k worth of work to me
I am the proud owner of my own firstnamelastname.com
When I first ventured into web hosting, the domain was dead, but still registered. I did a whois and got Firstname Lastname. Not sure what I expected, really.
After some years I randomly checked with my favorite registrar, and it was suddenly available for $15/yr. Immediately grabbed that, no regrets.
A couple of years ago, I got a series of emails from some broker offering me an increasing amount of money for the domain. I think they gave up at $5k, and I never responded. $5k would have been incredible at the time, but by then I was fully committed to my [email protected] email address.
I guess I never really put a website at that domain, it's just an email address. I keep telling myself I'll do it eventually, but it's been almost 10 years at this point...
You can configure your server to download and mirror videos from other instances, but (iirc) only if the remote instance allows it, and if it allows your instance to "follow" it.
The fact that you haven to follow other servers as a server is insane. It also really fucks up federation, because some instances do not allow follows at all. Tilvids does not, which was a major factor in me shutting down my instance.
That said, the mirroring system is really nice. You have all sorts of dials to cache only the x most popular videos for y days and up to z GB. You can have it mirror videos from user subscriptions in a similar way, and right next to the 'download video' button is one that says 'mirror' that does what you think.
P2P as a client is a whole different matter, and I also have never, ever seen my client uploading. I think this is purely a function of how few users are actually on peertube. The chances of you watching the same video as another person on the planet is incredibly small.
I really, really want to like peertube, but it really is completely unusable. Discovery is abysmal because there's no global search. You can't rely on federation to find content because federation is opt-in and has a crazy nonsense mechanism.
Peertube is not fit to run a single-user instance like mastodon unless you only want to publish. It simply doesn't work at all if you only wish to consume video. The only real way to use the service at all is to sign up on the biggest instance you can find and hope they have interesting videos.
I have a server with tons of free disk and a big fat fiber line, and the idea of mirroring peertube videos of small creators sounds like a perfect use for my spare resources. I would love to mirror tilvids to help reduce their server load, but I simply can't because they choose to disallow it.
The only alternative is LBRY/Odyssey, which is vastly more popular, but has some serious issues with violent/extreme/illegal content and is fully wrapped up in blockchain bullshit.
After having been through this crap and now being on the other side of the desk, I've come to the conclusion that this is simply standardized testing for adults, with all of the same myriad problems. It doesn't identify what you're actually looking for, gives you more false signals, and alienates the talent you actually want.
The way we do these at my current job is extremely productive for us. We look for two things, apart from basic competency: problem solving, and asking for help.
It's structured as a two 90 minute pair programming sessions. Interviewee shares their screen, and we work through the problems together. Obviously it's pretty hands-off, but we guide and nudge where appropriate. Here and there, when they use something that relates to a deeper topic, I'll ask questions to gauge how deep their knowledge goes. Like asking if they know how C#'s foreach works under the hood. Not as a selection criteria, but simply to get a sense of how much they know.
Use of a search engine is openly encouraged. A lot of the time, we don't even care if the program actually runs. If they struggle with syntax or the correct function overload, we'll help them out after giving them a little time to find the solution.
I also throw in a problem designed to get them stuck, and ask questions I expect they can't answer. A good programmer asks for help and admits when they don't know. A bad one bullshits their way through.
We want to hire programmers who can do a real job in the real world. Implementing red/black trees on a whiteboard blindfolded isn't a job skill, it's a party trick. That's not something a programmer will ever need to do.
In the real world, real people use google and stack overflow. They don't have encyclopedic knowledge of the entire language's syntax. They ask their coworkers for help or opinions.
Our interview process is designed to show us how a person will function in a scenario as close to the job as possible. Because that's what we're hiring them for. We look for their ability to work through a problem with the resources that everyone always has. We look for how they work with others and how much they lean on coworkers.
This has worked out extremely well for us. We've hired some very talented individuals, and have totally avoided the archetypal shitty dev. The people we hire immediately mesh with the team, and learn and grow the way all programmers do.
Granted, we are a small company and we have the time to have our own programmers giving interviews. We also have a much higher need to be so selective. But every single person who has made it to the technical interview has remarked unprompted that it's the best interview they've ever had. And I mean 100%.
It's because we treat candidates the way we'd treat our own employees. They get to know what the job is like, and we get to know how they'll do the job.
1. There's no defense against an attacker with physical access
2. The malware you're describing is the main argument against smart TVs. It's installed by the manufacturer, at the factory, and receives regular updates. No third party attacker required.
A smart TV is a dumb TV with an extra processor. No matter how you shake it, the smart features are extra hardware added on to the dumb TV.
And besides, smart TVs are already much cheaper, because the manufacturer is spying on you and selling that data in perpetuity. They're injecting ads into your TV menus and keeping that profit.
Your smart TV is priced so low because it's subsidized by the manufacturer selling your privacy.
What you're talking about was a paradigm shift in the fundamentals of electronics. Silicon wafers in the trillions are cheaper to make than vacuum tubes in the thousands. It was a radical shift in the way the industry worked. It literally revolutionized the entirety of global society.
Meanwhile, Samsung took the guts out of the cheapest android tablet they could find and stuffed it in a TV. It's really not at all comparable.
I do Bluetooth hardware for my job. At the scale that TV manufacturers operate at, I would be extremely surprised if Bluetooth cost more than a dollar for them to implement.
I operate on the scale of hundreds to thousands of units, and Bluetooth adds less than $5 to each unit. At millions, I assume it's more or less free.
"the market" is why we're in this situation. The healthcare cost crisis is simply not a problem that capitalism has any mechanism to address.
Capitalism balances supply and demand by modulating prices. When demand is above supply, prices go up until demand drops. When supply is higher than demand, prices go down to bring demand up. But demand for healthcare can't go down. There is no force opposing price increases, so prices must tend toward infinity.
When it comes to life-or-death situations, people will pay just about anything. The market will bear almost any price, and the entire operating principle of capitalism is to increase prices to the limit the market will bear.
There just is no mechanism by which capitalism can consider the value of human life. Otherwise we wouldn't have to write laws to prevent children being maimed in factories, or prevent people selling snake oil as a miracle cure, or create entities like the EPA to prevent companies poisoning entire towns. The only solution is for the government to intervene and cap prices.
The only reason you'd ever lower prices for healthcare is because it's the morally right thing to do. Capitalism does not recognize the concept of morality. There is no internal force which could lower prices, so it must be an external force.
How much money has google made on selling my data? What do I get in return? More ads. If I pay google to remove the ads, they still sell my data and they take my money directly. By playing the game at all, you can only lose. So to the extent that is possible, I don't play. I also feel exactly zero remorse for taking advantage of a company like google. Their practices are deeply unethical and harmful, being a monopoly is inherently bad, and stealing from them is an ethical net positive.
Don't be reductive, it makes you look uninformed. This is a much more complex issue than simply paying for bandwidth.