Spatula City,
We sell spatulas…
And that’s all!

“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

Betteridge’s law of headlines

Dissapoining that people won't look past he's religious.

It’s interesting. Do we think those same people care that Mamdani and el-Sayed are Muslim? Because in those cases it’s obvious that a person being religious doesn’t mean they espouse the most conservative version of their religion. There are progressive Christian churches and even entire denominations, but we seem less willing to offer the benefit of the doubt to a Christian.

I can understand, though. In the US we’re far more familiar with the abuses and failings of the religion more familiar to us. We’re more likely to have entrenched opinions colored by years of exposure to the most regressive parts of the religion.

It's hilariously sad to me how many rubes easy marks people are still paying Google for the pRivIlEge to have their eyes and brains assaulted by ads.

What ads? If you mean normal YouTube ads, no, Premium removes those. If you mean sponsor sections of video, it’s no SponsorBlock but now if you start skipping ahead during those sections of a video you can click a button that jumps you to the end of the ad. This is a Premium feature.

Edit: Oh, I forgot they added a “Premium lite.” I can understand why that might appeal to a subset of users, but that’s definitely not for me.

Either use a front-end without ads

Easy enough on PC, but my usual use case is the video playing on my iPhone, so…no.

or stop using it

Why? It’s a service I enjoy and find valuable to me.

"but it's such a value!" no it isn't

I’m pretty happy with the value I get for premium. I watch/listen to a shitload of educational content and political commentary on YouTube. It also includes YouTube Music so I have my music streaming covered there, too. I probably get more value-per-dollar out of my premium subscription than my Nebula subscription (which is also fantastic, by the way).

you're just gullible and naive.

Yeah, how dare I spend my money on something useful to me and in the process help support the people who make the shit I watch. (Though admittedly, while premium views are worth far more than ad views and literally infinitely more than ad-blocked views to channel creators, that isn’t the bulk of their revenue, which comes instead from sponsor deals and Patreon/channel member subscriptions.)

Or complicit. Which is worse.

Complicit in what?

You do you, my friend, but don’t act like you’re better than others because you disagree with how they consume content compared to you.

Even two years ago, I remember someone telling me they saw a YouTube video that said you could always tell an AI generated image because their noise map would be the same in R, G, and B. And I tried to explain to this person that that depends entirely on how the image was generated, on what platform, by what model and method, what post-processing was done, etc.

And I was told I was ignoring their evidence. 🙄

Or people like music and video streaming and don’t like ads, and they consider the price acceptable.

/shrug

They raised my price here in the US a few months ago. $27 for the six adults on our family plan. Probably four who actually use it. Totally worth the value for my situation.

You do you, though, I genuinely could not possibly care less whether someone else does or does not pay for YouTube premium. It’s weird that you do.

I think the idea was that within an image the noise in red would match the noise in green and the noise in blue, because whatever system they were looking at picked a single noise map per image? Something like that. And yeah, it was reasonable because it was absolutely true of the laziest stuff out there (which is most AI stuff, which is why we use the word “slop”). But my counter-argument wasn’t that the method couldn’t work, it was that it couldn’t always work. Because image generation is done in thousands of different ways and post-processing exists.

The thing that I wish was better understood is that “slop” = “low effort.” Artists can make some pretty amazing stuff when AI is merely a part of their toolset and they still put effort into their work. But that means that not all AI is slop, and thus if you really want to detect AI, you can’t rely on it always being slop.

Cool! I’m glad that works for you. My usual use case is on phone or TV apps, so I’m limited.

That doesn’t really surprise me. Plenty of people already have ESPN, and would watch F1, but do not have Apple TV and won’t pay for it just for F1.

Houston in the 70s, I just saw this shot in a recent episode from Wendover. Not that it’s like, a different city or anything, but the same area has far fewer parking lots and is somewhat more walkable now. Still a lot of parking lots, but definitely improved at least:

This is how you make change happen in a first-past-the-post system. Primary elections are so important.

What makes you think they were genuinely trying to win? They have no interest in changing the status quo. It's been very good to them.

And that’s why they were genuinely trying to win. Centrist Dems are all about the status quo. This isn’t the status quo.

Really? I very much enjoyed 5 and San Andreas (except that stupid train mission).

Yeah. Robertson plus an impact drill is some of the most fun screwing around one can do that doesn’t involve OP’s mom.

Right, the party that controls none of the pieces of the Federal government is definitely the one responsible for what’s happening in the Federal government. 🙄

all it does is impair readability

It also provides a marginally fun experience for the few of us who like learning new glyphs. I am one of those people and I enjoy that guy’s posts. I’m not saying you have to, I’m just saying your experience isn’t representative of everyone’s. Neither is mine, obviously.

(I taught myself to read Aurebesh and have it loaded on my ereader so I can read with a different alphabet for fun. I’m well aware I’m not representative of the greater population in this regard. 😅)

I think they’re just meant to be funny.

Now I’m not an expert in Islamic fashion, but I’m pretty sure she doesn’t wear a burqa. She wears a hijab. They are different.

I didn’t realize WWII happened twenty years before the US Civil War! You learn something new every day.