janguv

So mediums with advertising should not be allowed to seek monetary payment? Only mediums without advertising should do so?

Not quite sure how you got to the point you did there. There are different ways to advertise – billboards and TV/radio adverts, e.g., while often odious, are something you can more easily divert your attention from and which are not tracking devices or the product of turning you personally into an item for sale. I dislike them and would prefer a world without them but I don't think their being attached to organisations in and of itself ought to deprive those organisations of income.

I’m not understanding your logic here.

That is apparent.

For me it’s pretty simple. There is a product - would you like to pay for it?

This is called "begging the question" as a response to me – I've called into question exactly both your premise and conclusion, for reasons you've not actually engaged with, and then you've re-asserted them. You have assumed what you've set out to prove.

(1) it is not simply a product (or service – you've changed tune there), for the reasons I've already outlined. Its use and availability is not analogous to something you can pick off the shelf or pay a tradesperson to do for you. (2) therefore, the question of paying for it (and how) demands different kinds of answer. In the country I'm from, e.g., healthcare is a right and not paid for, neither is early-years education up to 18, and so on. Both are "products" or "services" in some sense of the term, but to speak of payment here is complex and the answer doesn't simply carry over from thinking about normal products/services.

I feel that all the scary words you can add to a paragraph about advertising based revenue for digital mediums is just your tool to justify your behavior of sticking it to the man.

This can only be a disingenuous response, surely? Rather than engage with the criticism of the nature of modern internet advertising and how corporations use it to affect people, you'll just summarise it as "scary words".

in the end, you’re leeching off a service you enjoy.

I don't think that's a fair or true statement.

For one thing, the "service" here has risen to a point of ubiquity that it's a de facto public space. Everything is on YouTube – legacy media channels, individual enthusiasts, alternative media outlets, the worlds of tech, fashion, politics, sports – you name it. If you were deprived of all access to it, you would have a qualitatively poorer access of what is going on in society. So it's not equivalent to a traditional service like a trade.

For another, blocking ads is not merely refusal to pay a fee of some kind. Advertisements are cognitively intrusive, designed to affect your willpower and decision-making, used to track and control your behaviour, compromise your digital safety, and turn you into a product for companies to whom you do not give your consent for the opportunity to be exploited. Blocking that system of "payment" is not simply prudent but right, and the choice between paying a monetary fee or being so exploited is not a fair choice at all.

For me, what works perfectly is this setup:

Desktop – Adguard

Android – YouTube ReVanced

Never get adverts ever. The day I'm forced is the day I stop using it altogether.

I'm often the odd one out in thinking this, but I thought The IT Crowd was generic, derivative shite, and I was dismayed that people of the calibre of Chris Morris were involved with it at the time. I cannot make my way through a whole episode.

I used an emoji therefore I am sad he's a bigot and he's a Tory?

No, you've misread the original comment. I said you sound disappointed that Linehan has aligned with the Tories. I used the phrase "a bigot" to refer to GL, because he is; I used the phrase "a collection of bigots" to refer to the Tories, because they are.

Using those phrases in those constructions does not imply anything about what you think or know about the Tories or GL. The phrases are plainly in my voice identifying them by what you can infer I think is factual: their bigotry.

Your sadface emoji generally connotes something like disappointment. So my comment is essentially: oh, you're really disappointed that this guy is aligned with the Tories? Why, when he is a bigot and they are also bigots? Why would you even want him to be aligned with a party you do support?

picking random fights based on your poor reading skills

Irony. Helluva thing.

It is exactly that, yes. But what is weird is that outside of a few permanently online diehard Starmerites, I never come across anybody in any walk of life now who is saying: "what we really need is a Labour government". At this point it's just: not the Tories please, it can't get any worse. This is depressing.

That said, it might be worth looking into Stremio and Debride. I've been seeing that pop up lately and it's mostly torrent based.

Just a correction on this point. With a debrid service, it's not actually torrent-based – not in the sense that at any point you'd be utilising any p2p traffic/mechanisms. It relies on torrenting activity in a different sense, in that what you download is encrypted DDL files from the debrid provider's central cache, whose origin is in torrents. And if there's no files meeting your search query stored already in the cache, but which are available through public trackers, then you'd request the service downloads the torrent to its cache. So at no point are you accessing peers. Worth noting that afaik, this is all for public trackers, not private.

from a single sentence

In both comments, your emojis work wonders.

Lol that is such an Ian Dunt headline. It writes itself.

I didn't know he was a Tory 😔.

You seem disappointed, as though you wanted this bigot not to politically align himself with a collection of bigots.

I'm a bit astonished how often I see this kind of thread, even here. It's like when people complain about FOSS apps charging subscriptions or standalone fees. How many times does it have to be pointed out that piracy as an activity does not define piracy as a movement or a collective?

I'm certain this simplistic "piracy = not paying for stuff" take can only come from a kind of ignorant individualism, one that lacks any structural analysis of why, when, and for what content people turn to piracy (and why, when, etc, they stop).

He would have been better off not talking about harm directly but the ability to cause harm; he actually used that wording in an earlier comment in this chain. (Basically strawmanned himself lol.)

Because as a standalone argument for encryption, it's fairly sound – hey, the ability of somebody to cause harm via encrypted messaging channels is the selfsame ability to do good [/prevent spying/protect privacy, whistleblowers/etc], and since the good outweighs the bad, we have to protect the ability to cause harm (sadly).

The problem is it's still disanalogous – the ability to cause harm via LLM use is not the selfsame ability to do good (or to do otherwise what you want). My LLM's refusing to tell me how to make a bomb has no impact on its ability to tell me how to make a pasta bake.