fosstulate

fosstulate , 2 months ago

I wish pirate streaming operations a speedy death.

fosstulate , 2 months ago

Are you trolling? No enterprise would ever compete with free. They will scream for an onerous legislative solution, which will make all our lives more difficult.

fosstulate , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

No one wants to scale enough to compete.

I don’t consider scale important from the perspective of making and watching good videos. People get hung up on it when citing barriers to competition with Youtube, and while it’s certainly there, it only matters to Google itself (so it can continue to plausibly lie to its customers about ad impression numbers). In fact YT’s offering was at its creative peak when scale was lacking.

It makes no difference to me whether a knowledgeable hobbyist has 20,000 subs or 250,000. I don’t care about their “content” suitability for advertisers (that creepy term can get nuked). I certainly couldn’t care less whether the algorithm promotes their work, deserving as it may be. This sort of creator operates on the assumption their viewers are intelligent, and is typically savvy enough to route around YT with alternate donation/support mechanisms. These people will continue on any platform. For them, quality is an end in itself rather than a feed-in to a metric. I would rather watch a badly filmed insightful critical appraisal of a new piece of hardware than Canadian/Black Technology Man’s 8K press release rehash full of slick cuts and pointless b-roll.

Scale is the concern of middlemen.

fosstulate , 2 months ago

Assume for a moment the platform providers are in a game of chicken, continually eating costs in the hope of soaking up subscribers from their (at some point) defunct competitors. Every year this competition continues, the victor needs to make increasingly outrageous changes to the service offering in order to bridge the profitability gap. Or perhaps they are betting that a chunk of savings will come from reduced spend on rights, in a market with fewer bidders for programming?

Are investors in the conglomerates even agitated yet?

fosstulate , 2 months ago

The big news/current affairs instances are characterized by autistic screeching that has only a passing relevance to the article posted. See iusearchlinux.fyi/post/5429432

You can take the commenter out of R*ddit…

fosstulate , 2 months ago

Pixel Pirate II Hollywood Trailer yewtu.be/watch?v=cdK0RoO5hpY

fosstulate , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

This is an interesting response. It makes me wonder whether the real risk of piracy to game publishers isn’t so-called ‘lost’ sales, but having their control of the initial impressions window undermined by genuine critical reception*. Marketing efforts are seriously compromised unless they operate in an information void. Denuvo provides that void.

[*] Video game reporting outlets not included for reasons that should be obvious in the year 2024

fosstulate , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

In addition to reducing the volume of waste being created

That will amount to a cynical coercion of the public in some way. I’m being forced to work for free in the form of sorting waste at point of disposal, and worrying about fines, all so that industry’s line can continue going up. So that plastics production growth can largely continue on trend. Paper and plastic recycling are like cycling up the hill of environmental conservation in top gear. Loads of pedal revolutions that (ultimately) only slow the rate of decline back down the hill.

If the product has a high energy cost involved in new production, that’s when industry actually does the right thing. Aluminum is a great example. Generous deposit schemes are found all over the world. They’re voluntary and well managed. But paper and plastic are cheap to manufacture by comparison, and the costs can be passed through to the consumer, so industry and government conspire to do just that (the mechanisms of which are then greenwashed).

fosstulate , 3 months ago

You need more training in corporate risk management, grasshopper! AP/AtProto isn’t a revenue opportunity, it’s a potential front for which they’ll need to have a battle-ready product and brand. Ever heard the saying ‘engagement is containment’?

fosstulate , 3 months ago

Fuck scale.

fosstulate , 3 months ago

Sound advice, but if this article is any indication, corporate web2 now anticipates garbage. The junk presumably gets backfilled with their best attempt at quality data where it can be found. It true, it invites potential contributors to think carefully about their opsec.

fosstulate , 3 months ago

The OS isn’t the reason anyone uses a computer, it’s the applications it can run.

When given two doors to choose from, desktop computing and mobile computing, most people aren’t going to explore desktop alternatives to Windows. They’re largely going to stick to mobile, with all the learned helplessness that entails.

fosstulate , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

It doesn’t surprise me in the least that franchisees would stop selling ice cream, and claim the machine is out of order. It’s by far the most rational response from their perspective. It also has the benefit of conditioning your customers not to expect ice cream. But that then begs the question: who owns the McDonald’s experience, the experience deliverer or the brand owner?

fosstulate , 3 months ago

I read that the machines are engineered to ‘break’ easily as a pretext to force cleaning. Supposedly McD’s worry in a scenario with non-self-sabotaging units is that the worst franchisees would rarely clean, leading to customers getting sick, leading to brand risk worn solely by McD. You’d be better placed to determine the truth of that.

fosstulate , 3 months ago

Reddit will program new mod bots to deal with organic responses the advertiser doesn’t consider constructive. That opens another revenue stream: charging advertisers for sub-specific bot tweaks.

The interesting question to me is, when does normie realize his sub has been co-opted to function as a focus group, and decide to look for a new forum.

fosstulate , 3 months ago

AI filtering of Reddit isn’t the way. The way is leaving the platform. This is beginning to remind me of the ‘decrapify Windows’ YT videos that offer 20-step multi-application guides for getting a tolerable experience, instead of explaining how to install Mac/Linux. Time spent on a rotten foundation is wasted.

fosstulate , 3 months ago

We don’t want defed because it’s a sledgehammer ‘solution’ that immediately denies us agency and reeks of Reddit-tier pre-emptive sub banning.

The Nazi Bar idea is for the most part a boogeyman.

fosstulate , 3 months ago

Advertisers can pay more to stay in the room than you will realistically pay to have them expelled.

fosstulate , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

People should consider using a double-blind scheme with cloud-connected managers.

The service you’re setting a password for gets the actual credential, being two components <randomcomplexity><specialrule>, whereas the manager gets only <randomcomplexity>

Consider the example of U})wJAL0}RhIr’)Rgs{,&^>I3/ versus U})wJAL0}RhIr’)Rgs{,&^>I3/based

It protects against password database compromise at least. Keyloggers, MITM, etc. are another matter.

fosstulate , 3 months ago

I suspect a lot of users with silly warnings in their profile like OP described haven’t bothered configuring their Upload/Download preferences. The tools for managing slot numbers and queue scheme (round robin v. FIFO) are all there.

fosstulate , 3 months ago

‘Socially responsible’ is newspeak for corporate-controlled.

fosstulate , 3 months ago

Has it occurred to you that commerce might see advantage in weaponizing the Streisand effect?

fosstulate , 4 months ago

So you’re telling me the model cannot consistently run at a profit, even through it relies on a massive unpaid labour force.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

That’s not the look of a bigot, it’s the look of a man who’s fed up with low-rent posturing clickbait. The look of someone who got a Salon article entitled What your household’s toothpaste preferences say about White Fragility™ that he knows will be paygated or cookienoticed after two seconds’ scrolling.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

Alternative frontends don’t fall under piracy by any definition. Youtube’s servers are publicly accessible.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

Telemetry, advertising, etc. are ultimately web page elements that I can download or block. The paid offering might have a TOS that requires acceptance of such, but those terms do not bind me as a free, public visitor. I think Youtube is doing its best to have people buy its nonsense argument, as part of a wider campaign to shift the public’s understanding of web site versus web service. For what it’s worth, I don’t see them ever putting their money where their mouth is by pay-walling the whole site.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

Care to demonstrate ‘looks worse’? Are visual artifacts showing up? Are the sources DVD or BD? What encoding speed is in use? What special parameters are specified (More Settings box) in the video tab?

fosstulate , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Banding and blocking are associated with low bitrates. Bitrate is a key consideration in video encoding. Either it is constant, where you set a value of 2000 kbits, 5600, etc. and Handbrake sticks to it, or variable, where you set a quality rate factor, and Handbrake then adjusts bitrate on the fly to maintain quality X. Variable approaches will provide an average bitrate.

Occasionally DVD sources will compress really inefficiently: no matter how much bitrate you throw at it, the encoded result is substantially worse than source. But typically I’ve found RF 18-21 does a good job. I use mediainfo to ascertain bitrates and other information.

I pulled these settings from a DVD profile I made. They go in the ‘More Settings’ box

bframes=16:ref=16:fast-pskip=0:dct-decimate=0:aq-mode=2:aq-strength=1.0:qcomp=0.65:me=umh:me-range=32:psy-rd=0,0:deblock=-3,-3

fosstulate , 4 months ago

The elephant in the room is that parental controls development is a total wasteland, and has been for years. There’s no money in it. FAMAG is actively hostile to it and phone OEMs haven’t got a dog in the race and already contend with razor-thin margins. It’s one dimension of a broader political problem of digitization that smarter legislators and politicians have surely noticed by now, which is that unlike human beings, users increasingly don’t have any rights or agency worth a damn, and are treated with contempt.

I like that a grassroots movement has remembered that parenting should be at the heart of children’s technology access, but I fear such groups’ ‘useful idiot’ value to authoritarian elements up to the same old tricks.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

THEY KNOW

SHUT IT DOWN

fosstulate , 4 months ago

The threats are what keep us alert, circumspect and fleet-footed in our use of web technology. Always have done.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

Vendors will use passkey implementations as vectors for lock-in. Guaranteed. Workplaces need to accept BYO.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

I want to view multiple tabs at once, in a split-page view where I can scroll on one tab, then mouse-over to another and start independently scrolling on that one. It’s probably the key feature I miss from Vivaldi. Is there some insurmountable obstacle in the engine that prevents implementation, or is it stubborn devs?

fosstulate , 4 months ago

Simple solution. Kensington lock attached to the gonads. The device can helpfully warn others against theft with an LED projection on the wearer saying Big Cojone Security is active.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

It’s all noise is what it is. Applications and code shouldn’t come prefaced with value judgements, ‘ally’ statements or inclusion/exclusion messaging of any sort. Our world is hard enough to navigate without software development falling to the culture wars.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

What I’ve long been curious about is whether the service provider can derive a subscriber identity using the number. I mean of course the mobile network operator knows I’m me, but does Bluesky? Or is it merely a valid mobile number to them?

fosstulate , 4 months ago

Press releases like this are corporate signaling to US Congress that they would like some lawfare and are willing to pay for it.

Pirate streaming growth itself doesn’t ‘threaten legal services’ as TF suggests. Any threat that arises is created by industry’s market response. It comes back to margins. Netflix could decide overnight to invest in a long-term ‘hearts and minds’ approach that includes a quality platform user experience free of hostile design, non-discrimination amongst devices, relaxed household access rules, attentive customer service, commitment to finishing programming properly, improved stream quality, etc. Becoming the Valve of streaming represents an expenditure increase, though. You’re now a lower margin business with a very sticky and content customer base. That’s not a story industry wants to tell its investors, knowing they will respond with ‘you should be petitioning for bills that enable more market captivity’.

They do the right thing only as a last resort, because the right thing is expensive.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

Funny definition of ‘agreement’

fosstulate , 4 months ago

The videast himself doesn’t think he’ll post his videos to the Fediverse as it lacks monetization.

That’s code for YT can spit in my sharecropping face as much as it wants.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

Better to create a whitelist instead. Webrings used to be popular in the 90s/00s.

based.cooking demonstrates the way forward. Recipes are text; perhaps a small photo or two as a prep/serving guide, but nothing more than that.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

mclovin

fosstulate , 4 months ago

I hope red and blue both find success in this segment. Ideally the strengthened APU share of the market exerts pressure on publishers to properly optimize their games instead of cynically offloading the compute cost onto players.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

If my hardware is to be used as a public space then I expect it to be provided for free. While I foot the cost, it’s my property solely, and encryption status of the contents remains completely irrelevant. You sound like you’ve drunk the corporate KoolAid.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

The onus isn’t on the environment owner to lock down app space and secure data to the nth degree, it’s on developers not to ship poorly behaved apps. My files don’t exist in a public space like they are rubbish on a residential nature strip, free to be pilfered by randos. They aren’t free game in any way.

fosstulate , 3 months ago

Thanks for posting, OP.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

Sometimes I wonder whether these ‘piracy back on the menu’ write-ups are entertainment industry plants whose purpose is to manipulate congress critters.

fosstulate , 4 months ago

Have you got Jasc Animation Shop?

fosstulate , 4 months ago

Sean, are you a risktaker by nature?

Oh yes. I once read a pop-up picture story book about giraffes.