For years one of my best friends growing up didn't have Internet, and my only communication with him was when he would walk to the McDonald's for the Wi-Fi with his PSP. We would chat over MSN.
I recently got a PSP (along with a special cable that I can use to hook it up to my TV); there is a pretty strong aftermarket ecosystem for them.
Apple has done a much better job at maintaining their stuff compared to Google. Even this list is mostly just old hardware that fell out of service.
And even then, I can still sync my 20+ year old firewire ipod with the most recent Apple Music (formally iTunes) on my m4 MacBook with the right converter.
> Google's reCAPTCHA is planning an approach where they use Privacy Pass on Apple hardware, their own approach on Google Mobile Services Android devices and a QR code scanning system to require an iOS or Google certified Android device for Windows and other systems
I wonder if we'll get something similar happening with cloudflare
I think it's more like if you owned a blogspot site, and you're gdpr'ing the list of users who visited your site (given Google logged every single user who visited, and associated that visit specifically with you).
Linkedin is recording every person who visits your profile and keeps that in your user records, and they are already selling it back to you. The argument is that you have a right to that data.
Linkedin is arguing that this data needs to be protected for the privacy of those visiting your profile and the argument is that if they really believed that, they wouldn't sell it back to you, compromising that privacy anyway.
This has been a big issue for me. I currently use RSS exclusively to view the YouTube channels that I'm subscribed to -- currently about 75 channels (and 27 nebula channels) -- and over half of my YouTube feeds are filled with several shorts (sometimes multiple ones by the same creator per day).
Looking for hashtags in the title and marking those videos as read is essentially muscle memory at this point.
I see people are doing scripts or other things to remove shorts from their feeds, but there is a simpler solution. Take your RSS URL of a channel, e.g.:
I went to see a video I'd uploaded to Youtube a while ago and it's now a short. I have no idea how it became a youtube short. Either I grandpa'd it or they upgrade all vertical form video to shorts.
They have been “upgrading” old videos to shorts for more than a year. As far as I know it once started with videos with a runtime of at most 30 seconds.
At some point that was increased to 3 minutes.
I think they do this to square and portrait videos, maybe the check is as simple as “height >= width and duration <= 3 minutes”?
For myself, I've curated my recommendation algorithm down to the point that I don't mind the shorts I get recommended, they're generally from content creators I like anyhow, or content creators that use shorts as their primary medium in ways I'm generally OK with, but the UI is trash. For some reason, I can cast normal videos to my Roku, but if I try to cast a short, it cancels casting, quite explicitly with a popup saying "hey this is going to cancel casting, are you sure?". But the Roku YouTube app is perfectly capable of navigating to a short in the UI and playing it.
And no matter how much I curate the algorithm, the thing that it wants to play next in the Shorts UI is effectively random to me. Not once have I ever seen one that is even a decent recommendation. Maybe I'm hitting some weird edge case because I'm having the opposite problem some people report; Shorts aren't horrifically addictive and I can't stop scrolling, I can't start. The recommendations in my feed are OK but the "next short" is uniformly terrible for me.
That's why I try to prune them down a bit.
I keep up the fight because as a recent article noticed, YouTube is still a unique video service with an astonishing amount of high-quality content from small creators, fascinating math videos, how-to videos, etc. I'm more-or-less winning the fight with the algorithm at the moment and it still often turns up interesting things. But it is a constant fight to keep it from becoming a lowest-common-denominator feed. Goodness help you if someone links you a YouTube video of a cat being stupid or anything political, get that watch out of your History before you forget.
As someone who's been working on an RSS reader for primarily YouTube content (https://serial.tube), it's 99% content quality and content duplication. I did hear of one specific person who does actually watch them, but that was specifically for artists who only post their progress updates over shorts.
The solution I came up with was being able to sort/filter on all content/just videos/just shorts on a per view (folder) basis, so you can opt into them but they are omitted by default. Curious what other people's approaches are
I try to stay far away from shorts in general- YouTube plays them at maximum volume on my desktop and they suck attention , I feel like they're actively harmful.
Though for content that i follow, Almost every one of these shorts end up just being a snippet of a video they already posted, usually being used as a glorified ad for that existing video. It's just a waste of time.
I'm glad they dropped the ban on HN readers[1]. That was my very first impression of Asahi Linux that I ever encountered and it's unfortunately what I think of every time I see it show up here.
Honestly, knowing what I know about marcan, the decision was probably the result of an overwhelming/strong emotional reaction.
Not to just shit all over him or anything, but it really sucks to see someone who is genuinely top-ten-on-earth when it comes to "real hacking" struggle so much with socialisation and mental health.
It is weird to blame the victim for reacting to being harassed by a mob. That is a normal thing to have a reaction to. Perhaps rather than blaming people's social skills and mental health, we should instead blame the culture that normalises harassing people on the internet, even to the point of suicide (as happened in byuu's case). You are basically advocating that it is better for individuals to change to accept a shitty society as a given rather than advocating for society to change to be less shitty.
I'm genuinely unfamiliar of the harassment campaign that HN launched against him.
(I am familiar with some comments debating the validity of Byuu/Near's gender identity, and marcan's extremely strong reaction to that, but no actual harassment campaigns)
This is not a dichotomy. It's not healthy to take random online comments to heart so much. It's also bad to make such ridiculous comments. Both can be true at the same time.
This diminishes what "random online comments" are. They aren't just text on a screen. They represent words that another human being has said about you. Often, words that will convince other human beings, who may take different actions or view you differently because of what they've been told, which will in turn spread virally and alter how thousands and thousands of humans see you and act towards you.
Humans are a social species. It is easy to say "just don't be social bro". When you are actually the victim of this behaviour, it is much less easy to shrug off. Having a bunch of people hate you and say horrible things about you hurts. That's not abnormal. That is perfectly normal. Is it good for your health? No, in the same way that somebody smoking next to me is not good for my health, but it's not my fault the person next to me is smoking. The blame rests with them. To some extent, yes, stepping away from the smoker is a short-term fix, although often an unpleasant one that impacts your quality of life in other ways (what if the restaraunt you like is full of smokers, what if the airport is full of smokers, etc). In the same way society eventually changed to discourage smoking around other people, we really, really need to change the culture around the internet, to recognise that the internet is actually a social environment, that there are real people on both sides of the screen. "Go touch grass" implies that the internet is not the real world, but it very much is, with real consequences, even if you can't see the other person.
I agree it would be much better if online culture improved, and I don’t think anyone would argue against that. The difficulty is that change at that scale tends to be slow and unpredictable, on the order of decades, so you can't rely on it in the short term.
Because of that I think there’s value in focusing on what individuals can control, like setting boundaries, disengaging when things get overwhelming, or stepping away from spaces that become unhealthy.
That doesn’t mean the behavior is acceptable, or that people should just tolerate it. It’s more about acknowledging that, while broader change is important, taking steps to protect yourself is the only immediate and reliable option.
> The belief that this will happen is also a malicious fairy tale to tell to people.
Cultural change is possible. It is not something that will happen, no. But it is something that can happen, if enough people choose to make it happen. Making it happen starts by pointing this out and not blaming the people on the wrong end of this behaviour.
This kind of thinking reminds me of my truly most loathed thought-terminating cliche of all time, "life's not fair", as a justification for supporting some horribly unfair status quo. True, life isn't fair, but humanity has collectively spent an unbelievable amount of effort doing all kinds of things to make it slightly more fair, one step at a time. We can make it more fair. That's what we do as humans. We bend the world to our collective will.
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seems the comment I was responding to was completely rewritten while I was writing this. oh well.
You are derailing this discussion by keep moving it to: "This is what the world should be like", and no one is disagreeing with that here. This is not what anything I said is about.
The very first comment I replied to was insulting the victim's social skills and mental stability. This is the exact opposite of what is needed to reach "what the world should be like". Positive progress is not inevitable. It does not happen by some fate of the universe, where if we just wait things will naturally improve and life will get better. When positive progress does happen, it happens by humans consciously choosing to act in ways that make the world a better place rather than in ways that do not.
>The very first comment I replied to was insulting the victim's social skills and mental stability.
Dude, the very first comment you responded to was itself a response to someone who suggested that the frankly unhinged HN "ban" was a decision that was "not taken lightly".
They literally stuck a comment into the site banner suggesting that HN comments critical of Asahi or their devs was part of a Kiwi Farms targeted harassment campaign trying to take advantage of HN's SEO.
I don't know why you're continually upholding this fantasy, referring to marcan as a "victim", or pretending that somehow the problems of the world would all magically be solved if everyone only said positive things about other people all the time (communities like this 100% dysfunctional), but it's fucking strange and naive.
It was not a ban or anything that could even possibly be misconstrued as one. People are talking about an overreaction, but the real overreaction is here on HN. This had literally nothing to do with the topic of Asahi Linux's progress report, but somebody intentionally dredged up a year-old subject with an outright deceptive and extremely hyperbolic framing for the sole purpose of shitstirring.
> pretending that somehow the problems of the world would all magically be solved if everyone only said positive things about other people all the time (communities like this 100% dysfunctional)
This is not even remotely what I said. The issue at hand is people mobbing to personally attack and harass individuals. Earnest criticism is one thing, but there is absolutely nothing constructive or productive being accomplished by the way people are behaving on this subject.
> It was not a ban or anything that could even possibly be misconstrued as one.
That is correct. It was just a rant, really, and even then not even a long one.
> This is not even remotely what I said.
Can you clarify what you're trying to say, then? AFAIK nobody on HN is harassing marcan, Byuu, the Asahi devs or anyone else in that sort of vauge circle. We're making comments about how they might behave or present themselves publicly, and some of the comments are definitely negative - but there is no coordination or intent to belittle or anything of that sort. Just internet bitching.
(and I am open to counterexamples if you're happy to share - have people been emailing marcan personally to say "I'm from HN and you're a piece of shit"? I wouldn't be surprised if people on Kiwi Farms were doing some of that.)
This marcan person had problem with Go, he had problem with Apple fans, he had problems with linux committers, so much he left internet or something. To say everyone but marcan was wrong is just a kind of fanboyism and it hardly helps marcan.
This person liked to dish out as much as next person but display extreme reaction when served.
No it actually wouldn't. As in 15+ years of Hacker News I have not seen the same so clearly it can be so horrible that it regularly leads to such strong reaction, suggesting that for most people this isn't nearly so impactful. And very few things described could actually be called harassment, mostly it was light criticism or maybe a bit trolling.
The guy appears to have a fragile ego. Any criticism and he goes nuclear, as if he was never told "no" as a child. Sure you can have opinions about the best way to moderate comments, but I can't imagine thinking I was special enough to publicly demand how Hacker News should be run. I've worked with people like this, not fun!
Marcan was clearly mentally unwell. He delusionally thought there was some harassment mob after him. After the fallout with Linux kernel devs, the lolipedo accusations, and him being outed as the vtuber Asahi Lina, he arguably did the correct thing: deleted every social media account and abandoned Asahi Linux. I hope he stepped away from screens and spent some time outdoors.
I am not sure how what happened can be considered "being outed", the vtuber's puppeteer was obvious from day one to anyone who was paying any attention at all, it is just that a lot of people decided to uphold the kayfabe. (And I don't blame them, at least before the lkml crashout it was a pretty fun character.)
While there is overlap between vtuber communities and HN, the culture is quite different. When one does come up, it is eternally September on HN. In vtuber communities/culture, the persona of the vtuber is treated as entirely separate from the person behind it, even in cases where it's exceedingly obvious (e.g. someone leaves an agency to work independently).
At the very least, it is rude to disseminate, draw attention to, or even speculate aloud about the identity of the person behind the avatar. Typically it's considered harassment/doxxing (I believe this is because vtubing culture is largely derived from Japanese idol culture, which appears to be structured around dealing with stalkers). That is to say, "upholding the kayfabe" is a bare-minimum of respect.
I could see why people on the Asahi team considered HN to be a host of harassment, considering even a cursory search of HN turns up comments "compiling evidence" about Asahi Lina's identity (including one still-up comment that straight-up links to Kiwi Farms, which is almost certainly done for purpose of harassment). I'm not sure if Hacker News ought to be moderating comments that deconstructs pseudonyms where clear effort has been made to separate it from the person behind them, but I also empathize with not wanting to be linked to accordingly.
I do not understand why people would rather play into the delusions of a clearly mentally unwell individual for months and year on end — when they well know it's bullshit — under the guise of this somehow being in the interests of said individual and/or being fun. This, to me, is the height of selfishness clocked in disingenuous empathy.
The widespread normalisation of this behaviour, and the subsequent ~~thought~~ now real policing around the issue, is a clear mark of a deep societal ill.
I've been a pro member for many years, with about 35k photos uploaded. I am grateful that they have never chased the engagement bait. Some people like to complain about the Pro features but I found them to be absolutely fair and I wanna do everything I can to support this platform.
All of my photos are automatically synced to Flickr via the Auto uploader, and getting things from my camera to Flickr is as simple as transferring the data from the dslr to my phone, and the auto uploader takes care of the rest.
From there I can go through the photos, decide which ones I wanna make public, and organize them into my albums to share with others.
My single complaint with Flickr is simply that they won't provide a markdown embed code that works exactly like HTML embed, but that's pretty low of a complaint.
They have bbcode and html embed, with dynamic width and automatic linking back to the page with alt text, but nothing for markdown.
I can use HTML for my blog but my blog is written and marked down and I would rather just stick to markdown, plus many forums have switched to markdown and won't accept an HTML embed.
My current solution is to convert the following by hand from something like
> My single complaint with Flickr is simply that they won't provide a markdown embed code that works exactly like HTML embed, but that's pretty low of a complaint.
fwiw, a lot of markdown parsers allow some amount of HTML also.
Pasting a html img tag into your markdown documents might work, depending on which parser is used.
I used to receive a catalog every quarter for an audiophile magazine. They sold some very very expensive gold plated toslink cables. The gold planting was supposed to be for superior conductivity.
Toslink is an optical audio format, and a pair of fishing line would've even worked identical quality.
I recently got a PSP (along with a special cable that I can use to hook it up to my TV); there is a pretty strong aftermarket ecosystem for them.
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