20 seconds cat videos or two minute talk video are vastly different to 10mins to 4 hours youtube videos. The time “lost” by wathcing the wrong thing is just very different. I think it isn’t uncommon for users to spend multiple hours per day watching those short clips only to realize most of it was mildly interesting at best and it’s less likely someone sits through a 4h video they dont care about than someone watching 4h worth of a variety of short clips they don’t really care for. Either way I think taking transparency/agency away from the user is terrible.

The goal is to make you click and anything that could stop you is considered a problem. I’d say it’s a short term strategy that will lead to long term failure but I’m not sure anymore. Tiktok and Instagram are feeding their users a bunch of trash too and it still works.

is that a meme or did you accidentally butcher the term “ponzi scheme” which is something entirely different? not saying insurances aren’t often a scam. just a different kind.

Musk pretending he cares about rail while in reality his worst recurring night mare is him being in public transport with poor people. Classic.

and so it begins

i am still falling into the realisation misconception* that i can’t be a kid forever.

You definitely can. I have met plenty of people who preserved this part of themselves. It’s too often outside pressure that makes people abandon it. A few weeks ago my mother berated me for owning a game console as a grown man but it didn’t phase me because the little history I lived through has taught me some lessons. When my father was my age he was working overtime to provide as much as possible for his family. He’d come home tired and stressed and self medicated with booze to somehow keep going. I’d often get a speech about how much he sacrificied for me but here’s the thing, I never asked for it. Did I like living in the big house after we moved from our small rented apartment? Sure, about as much as living in a big apartment complex with a bunch of other kids to play with. What I didn’t like was having a dad who was constantly burned out and angry so I made sure not to live as he did. Recently I took my wife and our dog fossil hunting. We were digging through rocks and mud having a blast and around us were a bunch of kids. Meanwhile their parents were standing in the back complaining there aren’t enough benches to sit on while the kids have fun. I will never get this old. Not in a hundred years. As long as I can hold my hammer I will be right next to those kids digging for paleontological treasure instead of standing in the back with the bitter “grown ups”.

Privacy Enhancing Technologies. A blanket term for anything protecting your identity (Onion, VPN, etc.) I feel like the people asking for this either have a very limited technical understanding of it or completely different motives. You can’t ban encryption. What they could do is ban VPN services from officially operating or certain protocols but that would mostly hit your regular user.

High availability and security are the bane of IT infrastructure jobs. It makes me anxious to think about my MSP days when I’d sit on my couch on a Saturday fully aware that I’m one phone call away from having my day, weekend or even the next two weeks ruined because some customer CEO has full domain admin rights and would give them to anyone who’d ask on the phone or via email.