You don’t need an entire VPN just to block ads. I use RethinkDNS on Android and it blocks ads in most apps.

I don’t really remember SQL, does it prevent you from using a range of values? I can understand why leap seconds would be an issue.

I don’t really get why people use any time other than ms/seconds since the epoch for anything other than displaying that time to the end user. Having time just be a single number with no time zone shenanigans makes writing logic like that so much easier.

Oh ok :(

As it is now, only people who read about it or live there and try to find the song will ever even know about the block. If Google refused and was kicked out of Hong Kong, just about every single citizen would notice and the government would have to explain precisely why they decided to ban all Google services over a song about freedom. I don’t think the people in charge would last long if that happened, considering how integral Google’s services are to many people’s lives.

Orb of Enhancement?

No, some guy named Taylor has to train the model for you.

W take. I have no problem with my public comments being used as training data for AI as long as they’re public. I just don’t want some shitty private company to hoard them like they fucking own them when they don’t.

There are 309 million possible ways to combine 6 letters. I would wager only a few million are even remotely pronounceable. The notion that someone can claim a bunch of those words and prevent other people from using them, even in unrelated areas, is completely absurd. There are over 8 billion people on this planet, words get reused. They should just fucking deal with it.

They can’t catch you if you hide it behind their router so they can’t see it.

I also think that all consumer hardware should have mandatory open source APIs and, when viable, a way to replace the current software.

Why is it legal to bait and switch people by adding ads after you pay for it? Every single TV should be refunded.

Yeah, I see video monetization as running on a similar model to that of free to play games. The majority of people either don’t make you any money or only very little money, but they boost your engagement and popularity metrics so that you get more ‘whales’ that do things like donating on Patreon, choosing to watch sponsors and use affiliate codes, and buying merch.

Ads are only the worth the actual amount of business they generate. I know that a lot of people don’t realize that even if they never intentionally buy something from an ad, the familiarity of seeing things in an ad makes them more likely to pick it over something else down the line. However, this still only works if you have any disposable income and don’t immediately hit mute, close your eyes, and count to 30 when an ad comes on. A lot of people using ad blockers would just devalue the ads themselves if they were forced to watch them. The people with the money just pay for Premium.

Or you could wait 70 years and leave 34 million to people in your will… The point is that there is no mathematically correct choice.

Instead of not watching them, you can just use SponsorBlock!

Yep. My point is that there’s no easily calculable, mathematically “correct” moment to push the button. Same goes for buying a graphics card.

Compound, which more closely models the actual rate at which computing power has grown over the years.

You have a magical button. If you press it now, you will get $100 and it will disappear. Every year you don’t press it, the amount of money you will get if you do press it goes up by 20%. When should you press the button? At any given point in time, waiting just one more year adds an entire 20% to your eventual prize, so it never makes sense to press it, but you have to eventually or you get nothing.

Same thing with graphics cards.

Yeah, and no ads unless they’re inserted by either the podcast creator or distributor. I do wish we had some sort of sponsorblock equivalent, but I know that AntennaPod doesn’t have any sort of backend, so implementing those features would be a pretty big undertaking.

Can’t help with music on the phone, but try AntennaPod for podcasts if you’re on Android. It’s FOSS.