Consider yourself lucky, because often Bloatware is not so innocuous. Very far from it.
It is a heinous intrusion on our devices. Take Lenovo, for instance, with its addition of utterly useless fn hotkey pop-ups that covers the screen when hitting caps lock!
And MacOS is no better, as they actually completely break the caps lock key by adding a maddening delay to it. E.g. You have to press and hold for it to activate.
Ok that's messed up. If i tap it numerous times in succession it stops toggling, every now and then briefly toggling on. Holding it down at any point in the many-tap sequence activates it as you expect in the first place.
I genuinely don't see any perceivable delay on a Macbook without any third party keyboard customization software installed. Typing caps lock and the letter "a" in quick succession results in an "A" for me.
You could install a basic setup with a "apt install x x x" one-liner in ubuntu, and it would not take more than a few minutes to configure everything with sensible defaults.
The key here probably is, most people don't want to spend time learning enough about Postfix, Dovecot. Etc. To do that.
It's the average per user, not a precise figure that fits on every user, but nevertheless I have seen no evidence to suggest that it would be inaccurate so far. Maybe you can find some?
That, I suppose, is why ad-companies typically invest in anonymization. It may not be perfect, but it is good enough in terms of reaching an acceptable balance between respecting privacy and someone being able to monetize an app or a website imo.
Anonymization of data is largely impossible. That's an opinion of many data protection experts. Combining datasets, using open-source data from gov't sources and likes allows to "single out" individuals in no time. Further, what industry does is largely pseudonimization, not anonymization. Anonymized data is not under the scope of GDPR, whereas pseudonymized data is.
Not to devalue the tireless work of authors, but we must also recognize that students in particular do not have enough money to pay for all these books.
At the same time, it can be argued that writing a single book, and selling it thousands times over, is a bit to "easy" in terms of ways to make money. The hard part is to get people to actually buy your book – it does not matter that you wrote the best book in the world if nobody gives you well deserved attention for it.
Bloggers suffer from the same problem, and it is not necessarily because their work is bad. The truth of the matter just is, nobody cares about quality information anymore (And I am guilty of this as well).
We want fast and summarized answers so we can move on to the important part: solving whatever concrete problem we are working on.
AI will probably delude the little remaining value of information even further, and at a point, nobody will manually write comprehensive information anymore. At least not unassisted by AI, and while the quality may suffer, we must also realize that we do not really need 100% accurate information. If we get a statistically significant amout of accurate AI provided information, then there is no need for anyone to write books anymore. It will be a complete unappreciated waste of their time, and nobody is going to buy them.
Even now that I am in a decent job, I still prefer not to buy books, instead relying on free sources on the internet (not piracy). If a given book/information is not available for free, then it is often not important enough for me to bother (note often – not always).
It is also a matter of prioritizing – reading a book takes me way too long, and the process is far-from comfortable due to my slow reading, and for that reason alone I tend to avoid reading entire books. It strikes me as an antiquated way to gain information even without AI. I may open a specific chapter of interest, but reading the entire thing is painfully tedious, and probably unnecessary.
I read lots of non fiction books. I think the same.
Most of them could condense it's contents in a couple of chapters.
It would be great to have modular books, like Emacs manual. If sections where independent modules you could rearange the book or even create books from a series of sections from diferent books.
That way you could choose different outlines, maybe predefined by the author like, to create books tailed to your needs:
This is what's done with sufficiently academic books in the hard sciences. They are so modular, that books are simply topics with each chapter written by a chosen author, and those authors will treat the chapters they've written similarly to papers they've had published.
I think if you dive deeper in to more rigorous nonfiction books you'll find that less time is spent on the 'pop' side of popsci literature. Which might be where you're encountering that fluff.
I hate to bring it up, but AI would be perfect for that. It could create logical segues between the new chapter order. So you could basically create books on demand based on real content with only the AI providing context.
"writing a single book, and selling it thousands times over, is a bit to "easy" in terms of ways to make money"
$2 profit per book is perhaps a high figure that an author may recieve from the publisher. 2 x 3000 is $6000 for maybe months or years of work. And this would be a 'successful' author. It's not all JK Rowling out there ya know!
I don't understand this question. Book reviews are not summaries. And even they were, "why do people read books, instead of just reading summaries?" is still a ridiculous question.
When I was at university (Oxford, UK, 2009), I bought about four key books, and spent well over 100GBP. I simply couldn't afford more. I had a student loan which covered tuition and some of my living costs, as well as a bursary from the university which covered some of my other living costs (but not all!).
What was annoying was that our library didn't have enough books for all the students. We'd all be assigned the same reading list for the week, and then have to race to the library to get the books before they were all gone.
Imagine someone from a 3rd world country. Let's say India.
Even the books like K&R C, Tanenbaum operating systems or CLRS / Skienna Algorithms will be north of 1000 INR in India.
Count 5 - 6 such books per semester, that's at least 5k - 10k INR. But for obscure books the price often goes to 5K for a single book. Let's say 10K INR.
Which is a significant amount, and for some students can exceed a month's living expenses for a semester.
So they're hesitant to spend that much. Often they end up with shittily written local books.
Now imagine you want to consult some book for specialist topics, like Windows internals or something, you will have to sell an organ.
The part about search engine optimization is most probably highly inaccurate; you do not need special SEO skills to rank highly for low-competition niches, so that's that.
The key part, I think: ...the business model focuses on quantity over quality...
This shows that you are dealing with inept spammers, and not someone that is particularly skilled at either SEO or mass-content creation. This model can be killed practically overnight if YouTube cought up on it.
Latest glass screen I've broken I did it while sleeping... fell asleep while reading reddit, woke up with the sound of the phone hitting ground.
And that's one of the best outcomes I've had while falling asleep while using the phone. Worst ones have been sharing a link of whatever I was reading/watching to random people, liking random whatsapp statuses of people I didn't talk to since years and other similarly embarassing stuff.
Maybe I should stop using a phone before bed.
I'm not clumsy at all, but pixel 7 is so slippery, that if you put it on a table/laptop with little aderence and maybe a bit of inclination, it can fell off.
Meanwhile my older pixel 5 is the total opposite - it feels good in the hand and the grip is not slippery at all
My even older pixel 3 is betweenn p5 and p7, it has a glass back but it's not that bad compared to p7.
There are other advantages to plastic backs too: cheap, easy to replace, (usually) lighter compared to glass
I am pretty damn careful with my phones, and still managed to break 3 in the last 20 odd years (which I think is good going!) - one was knocked out my hands when someone bumped into me in the street, one slipped when I was showing a friend something, and my latest - I've no idea when the back glass smashed - it was in a case and one day when I cleaned the case I found the back was smashed.
I usually have both a screen protector and a case, but accidents happen.
Sometimes things just fall out of your hand. You could be distracted by someone suddenly talking to you, bump into something, and lose your grip. Or have you never dropped a fork in your life either? Some people just get unlucky and it happens to their phones.
I've probably dropped mine at home 3 or 4 times, usually when trying to pick it up or set it down - but I got a nice soft case around it so nothing ever cracked. The real mystery is why people don't put a basic protective case on their expensive handheld devices.
And yet, people purchase new phones...some will be fashion-choices, some lost, most dropped.
And then (for the last two) it's a rush to get a replacement.
I regularly keep an eye on 'adequate' phones...just in case i fall in a river again and have to get a new-to-me one.
Regardless of the reason, of course not acceptable. We have to insist on complete transparency, and life-time bans should always be liftable through some sort of dialogue. It is impossible to have a productive relationship with someone that abuses AI to conduct reviews that should clearly have been done by a human. Facebook cannot be trusted. Period. Their conduct is extremely abusive.
Same lack of proper review prevents people from restoring hacked accounts, even in cases where it is completely obvious that the accounts were hacked. E.g. The name and/or e-mail was changed by a user in a different country than the account owner.
If Facebook has access to such sophisticated AI, then it is quite amazing that they cannot deduce (even without AI) that an account was hacked. A set of if statements in their code should be enough to check for typical suspicious circumstances. E.g. The user is suddenly in a different country, and happen to change their name (highly unusual and very suspicious circumstances)!!
The privacy argument is extremely important, also in regards to avoiding tracking via ads, but I do not think bypassing or blocking ads is the way forward. In the free democratic world, we really should aim to do better than this, and instead try to actually develop privacy respecting alternatives that is not going to undermine the internet, further empower the big players, or hurt website owners unnecessarily – including Google/YouTube.
The obvious problem with such tools is that it may allow bypassing YouTube's ad-wall, and as a website owner I can see why that is problematic. It is bad enough that local GDPR interpretations can practically prevent website owners from monetizing their websites via interest based ads.
For YouTube it probably does not matter as much it would to smaller sites and bloggers, but it is still a violation of their TOS. So, if you want ad-free, consider simply paying.
Besides, I am personally not too worried what Google might be using my data for. Thankfully, Google is owned by a US-based company – I would be more worried if the company was placed in China, Russia, or any other country that does not care about freedom rights at all.
Of course, there is always the risk of data-leaks, and that's a valid point – but then why do we tolerate that the government has data on us!? That's even worse than a company tracking us!!
The issue with YouTube isn’t the ads, it is the number and length of ads combined with a monthly premium option that is far too expensive for what it offers.
You may make the argument that YouTube includes music, but the quality and capabilities of the platform are very poor compared to competitors.
The problem is most content creators are only publishing on YouTube, so that is where you have to go. If you are a content creator please publish on peertube so we have options. If you know a creator, likewise encourage them to publish there.
Content creators (the ones that we actually hear about and make money off Youtube) are too addicted to the algorithm to even consider dropping Youtube. At most you'll find some of them hedging a bit and joining something like Nebula or Floatplane
I believe that we will have to adopt some guerrilla tactics to win this war: we need to make it clear to creators that they won't make any money if they continue using Youtube. More people using frontends is a start, making Sponsorblock a feature even better, and I'd say that we should even have to run some pirate Peertube instances to copy the content away.
I often consider Kant's first formulation of the Categorical Imperative as a moral guide.
Internally I paraphrase it as: if everyone does this [action that I intend to do] will it be a good thing. I notionally insert "[everyone] who would wish to".
This situation is like the 'desire path' situation where an authority has imposed a pathway, but many pedestrians choose a different path because that is more useful. Ultimately the unpaved walking route will ride, and could cause a quagmire to form (in UK); should one then take the less practical, imposed, paved walkway?
I think the same conclusion forms for me. No. Because eventually the lack of utility in the imposed pathway will be made clear, and then the flaw will be designed around and utility will be increased.
Some might see this as shortcutting (ha!) the categorical imperative...
So yes, video sharing services need to be financed. But this doesn't mean we just roll over and accept alterations to the fundamentals of the web that make it worse.
Ultimately, my connection is that the whole system of brainwashing (advertising) people to increase consumption, or redirect consumption according to other characteristics besides thrift|utility, is detrimental to humanity (and the Earth) and needs to be done away with.
> So yes, video sharing services need to be financed.
I'm entirely unconvinced that even this is true. Today's platforms and software are built around control and centralization, which is indeed expensive. But there's an obvious alternate path. Instead of preventing users from downloading media, embrace it. Build ipfs into browsers. Link to videos on ipfs. Add a "pin" menu item right on the browser UI for videos/images so that users can easily save copies of what they like and help serve it. Make it so you can subscribe to a channel by pinning an ipns name so you automatically download and seed new videos you're interested in. Let people pin to their (paid) cloud storage too.
There's a huge design space here. Expensive centralization is a tiny fraction of what's possible.
> I do not think bypassing or blocking ads is the way forward. In the free democratic world...
Ads are psychological warfare against the human mind. Advertising campaigns are designed/directed by unscrupulous mercenaries trained in the latest psychology, willing to use every manipulative technique known to science to manipulate you on behalf of the highest bidder. This mass-manipulation undermines democracy and is broadly harmful to society in general.
And, what about switch statements? In theory it is said they should be faster, but I am not sure that's necessarily the case.
Another option would be to keep a database with the numbers indexed, and then compare with performing a database query.