> In summary, it can be said that sponsoring is a good approach. It is fair and non-discriminating to all users, preserves their privacy, lets creators select their partners themselves, and provides them with a larger share of the revenue. Even though there are some disadvantages, it is more or less beneficial for all sides. [...] Ethical advertising, for example through sponsorship, should therefore not be touched by us. This would turn our key selling proposition from being privacy-friendly to being a gatekeeper for advertising. And this is not what NewPipe ever has been or wants to be. We’ve always stressed that NewPipe’s main goal is to protect the users by maintaining their privacy, not to, e.g., provide features a user would otherwise have to pay for, for free. Regarding SponsorBlock: after a lot of discussion within the team, we decided not to support this system. As stated earlier, we don’t consider advertising in general problematic. It’s the unethical, privacy-invasive systems that are very common today which we consider evil. Sponsorship provides a mostly ethical way of advertising.
> Thus, employing a system to bypass those ads is harmful to those creators.
There's an obvious catch-22 here: either you are maintaining privacy, and the sponsor has no way to know whether their segment was viewed, so you are wasting your life watching an ad to make an inanimate object happy, or they are spying on you to learn whether you watch it.
Either way I fundamentally disagree with them on the idea that push advertising is ethical in the first place, but it's kind of absurd thinking about people feeling good about themselves for watching a recording. Like did you also not fast-forward your VCR through ads in those days and instead dutifully watch attentively lest God know you were naughty? You make sure to read all of the spam in your mail, or inserts in newspapers rather than chucking them in the bin?
> There's an obvious catch-22 here: either you are maintaining privacy, and the sponsor has no way to know whether their segment was viewed
The same way they did in the past, with broadcast radio and television: they base it on audience numbers rather than tracking whether people actually listened or viewed the ad. Besides, isn't one of the major motivators of tracking to avoid fraud? (Which I find ironic, given I don't view advertisers as very ethical in the first place.)
> Either way I fundamentally disagree with them on the idea that push advertising is ethical in the first place
The way I think of it: advertising doesn't have to be unethical, but it incentivizes unethical behaviour.
> Like did you also not fast-forward your VCR through ads in those days and instead dutifully watch attentively lest God know you were naughty?
I would typically walk away to do something else. Same outcome though. That said, I started to turn away from broadcast media in the early to mid-1990's. I forget whether it was due to advertising, but the end result was a lot less exposure to advertising. Which is a good thing IMHO.
I actually think this is 100% the correct move practically, as someone who thinks advertising is unethical. Keeping it out of this popular option while remaining open source allows the original to be clear from "wrongdoing" here and does not put so much pressure on creating an arms race. Then, the fork just adds sponsorblock, and things are ok.
As I see it, it's similar to the situation with FOSS passkey options. Currently the big projects are complying with all of the (increasingly silly, imo) demands of the standards org. If they did not, there would be significantly more pressure for attestation, in which ultimately only Google/Apple/Microsoft-controlled options would be permitted. Complying allows a fork to patch out the user-hostile behavior.
There is no wrongdoing though, except for the people that decide to build machines to waste other's time. Imagine spending your life on that. There's no need to carry water for the people who dedicate their lives to making everyone else's lives a little worse. Like if the wealthy paid people to go around littering (which, in a sense, is basically what mailers/inserts are).
Passkey likewise is a retarded idea with no user empathy, and by going along with their demands, you still push people into monopolistic ecosystems because the only way to use it in practice is with a cloud sync service. There's likewise no need to carry water for it. Anyone advocating for it outside of scenarios where you have an IT department to maintain it is either a fool or a shill.
Also NewPipe is still niche and appeasement isn't going to do anything. They'll end you when they feel like it. c.f. the tightening of the Android software monopoly in general. At some point they're just going to block NewPipe entirely. It's not like Google is thinking "well it's okay if they block our ads as long as they allow in-video sponsors." Nor are they ever going to think "wow maybe we should have some morals; maybe our global surveillance system we've built was a bad idea. I can't believe we didn't realize that!"
Well, that's why I scarequoted it. Morally I agree with you, and for the same reason I will not support LLMs and the companies pushing them. But as it is, the techbros and the adbros will continue to move fast and break things, and nobody will check them, so if some people can divert them into breaking slightly less, it is a small consolation.
But NewPipe clearly circumvents YouTube ads so not sure how they wouldn't have faced pressure otherwise, and it's actually more so that YouTube doesn't care about sponsorship segments as they make no money from it so NewPipe would be even more in the clear if they didn't block YouTube ads but blocked sponsorship segments.
> As stated earlier, we don’t consider advertising in general problematic. It’s the unethical, privacy-invasive systems that are very common today which we consider evil. Sponsorship provides a mostly ethical way of advertising.
Considering the fact that the vast majority of YouTube sponsors seem to be some kind of scam or are privacy-invasive themselves, the word “mostly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
They circumvent YouTube ads but draw a line at in video ads? Their stance is inconsistent, not to also mention that lots of sponsorship ads can be unethical (see the outrage over BetterHelp) while normal YouTube ads don't have to be unethical.
Issue further is that sponsorship ads put the onus on the video authors themselves to make a judgement call and put their own reputation somewhat on the line.
Rather it lets them creator-wash half truths and potentially misleading information.
Not that I think youtube or other ad platforms make great decisions on ads one bit either, its all just a very abusable medium.
If that makes you feel better, the guy who vibecoded an app in one sitting will probably have 0 clue on how the code works, the app itself will look like the average claude eyesore and the docs will be unreadable by humans without stimulants
Sadly, not. I trying to work with doctor's offices to improve their productivity with IT support and better structure for workers to work with patients.
You don't want to know how often I heard: "But I saw on Instagram, with AI it can be done cheaper and faster".
The people that would pay me don't care for good docs, eyesore, or if the programmer actually knows how the app works. They care for how fast are you done? And how much does it cost?
And they are probably right. But they are probably also missing that this will translate to worse quality. You know, the classic "you can only pick two among good, cheap and fast"
I wish there was an easy way to configure it to say "target user processes first, specifically java (or these days python)" as in my experience they are always the culprits. Processes owned by system accounts or root should be the last ones killed.
Similarly, in the past I have wished for the ability to exempt a process from the oomkiller. I've run servers where the top memory user was also the server's entire reason for existence, and if that process gets killed the server may as well be down. It would literally have been better for any other process to get killed, but it was always the application process because of the memory usage.
> First off, this is exactly how systemd-oomd is supposed to behave under memory pressure. The documentation is specific on this; systemd-oomd itself says:
> > [...] If the configured limits are exceeded, systemd-oomd will select a cgroup to terminate, and send SIGKILL to all processes in it. [...]
> By having the user@.service template be enrolled in systemd-oomd, Fedora made the cgroup that systemd-oomd would select to be killed be all of your processes (across all of your sessions, if you have more than one). ...
Maybe *Fedora* has fixed or improved in the last 4 years. Or maybe they don't run Fedora.
This is a quirk of the last gpt image model (gpt-image-2). It put this sort of high frequency noise on all of the image especially if it's in a "drawn" style. There is often lots of other tells that this model in particular generated it.
Image models somewhat watermarking the image in a way that's very easily identifiable by a human seems present in all the image models of the big labs, since DALL-E 3 on OpenAI's side and the first nano banana on Google's side. I have no idea what they did to reach this and why they don't try to fix it.
I do AI assisted images for fun and browsing their art I can't see any tell of AI or even tracing on AI; people became paranoid and jump to conclusion without any substance and I find it sad that people who put a lot of time and effort into their craft are getting knee jerks comments like this.
> people became paranoid and jump to conclusion without any substance
Before AI, the only question was who made a particular artwork. Human-created practically a certainty.
When AI-generated art was new, it was all exiting & the process described to boast about AI capabilities or the skills of people deploying AI. But human-created still the default assumption.
Now, AI-generated <anything> is everywhere, and that default assumption of "human-created" is often questioned.
The natural next step is "AI-generated" as default assumption, unless claimed / shown (or even proven) otherwise.
Imho: assumption is the root of all evil. Investigate! Or take an author's word for it unless they're shown to be a liar. But as another commenter noted, it's a kind of tragedy of the commons. Methods to prove you as a human created <artwork> will be a thing.
> I was put off by the overly dramatic presentation. It gets tiring that the author apparently finds this more exciting than I do, and writes like it's enthralling.
That's one of the main tells that AI wrote this. All the stylistic tics that people usually point out combine to make the writing seem more important than it is.
> In summary, it can be said that sponsoring is a good approach. It is fair and non-discriminating to all users, preserves their privacy, lets creators select their partners themselves, and provides them with a larger share of the revenue. Even though there are some disadvantages, it is more or less beneficial for all sides. [...] Ethical advertising, for example through sponsorship, should therefore not be touched by us. This would turn our key selling proposition from being privacy-friendly to being a gatekeeper for advertising. And this is not what NewPipe ever has been or wants to be. We’ve always stressed that NewPipe’s main goal is to protect the users by maintaining their privacy, not to, e.g., provide features a user would otherwise have to pay for, for free. Regarding SponsorBlock: after a lot of discussion within the team, we decided not to support this system. As stated earlier, we don’t consider advertising in general problematic. It’s the unethical, privacy-invasive systems that are very common today which we consider evil. Sponsorship provides a mostly ethical way of advertising.
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