They have to have a human respond to each and every complaint about that ad. Seems more sensible to automate and flag suspicious ads before the complaints happen.

There are other considerations here though. Google suffers reputational harm if users become victims through their platform. It becomes news, it creates distrust in users, it generates friction with regulators and law enforcement. Users may be trained to be ad averse or install ad blockers. In addition, these ads generate reports which costs time to process even if the complaints are rejected.

At the end of the day these scammers are not high profile advertisers and they’re not valuable. They’re burner accounts that pay cents to deliver their ads. They’re ephemeral, get zapped, reappear and constantly waste time and resources. Given that YouTube can easily transcribe content and watermark it, it makes no sense to me that they wouldn’t put some triggers in, e.g. a new advertiser places an ad that says “Elon Musk”, or “Quantum AI” or other such markers, flag it for review.

I’ve disabled personalised ads on YouTube and I see this sort of shit all the time. I’ve given up reporting them because 90% of the time the report is rejected. I don’t even understand the rationale for rejecting it because it’s an obvious a scam as a scam can be - ai impersonation, fake endorsement, illegal advertising category. It’s a scam YouTube.

I don’t even get why these ads even appear. YouTube has transcription & voice / music recognition capabilities. How hard would it be to flag a suspicious ad and require a human to review it? Or search for duplicates under other burner accounts and zap them at the same time? Or having some kind of randomized audit based on trust where new accounts get reviewed more frequently by experienced reviewers.

Because they are. Groups like PETA, or Just Stop Oil are clowns who hurt their own cause. Performative protesting might win people a participation prize but to everyone else it’s just “look at meeeeee!”. At a certain point it actually becomes toxic to the cause. I know if I wanted to harm environmental campaigning then I’d invent Just Stop Oil.

Meanwhile big business are sending lobbiests in to change politician’s minds, to make arguments that appeal to their rationality, or self-interest. THAT is what environmental campaigners should be doing - lobbying, extoling the benefits of environmental action, changing minds. Getting arrested in front of cameras over and over just becomes pathetic and performative.

No change doesn’t happen by asking nicely, but I think some joined up thinking by these groups would get them further than performative protesting and getting arrested. If you want change then you lobby politicians on the positive benefits of change, and businesses on the potential profits to be had from implementing it.

I think climate activists would just be better off doing what everyone else does - lobbying. Identify politicians who represent areas who would benefit from pollution controls, or green investment or whatever and push the message. Performative acts in front of cameras might feel good but it’s a blunt tool to change policy. Some protestors such as “just stop oil” campaigners are so stupid that they actually help the causes they supposedly oppose.

I think they need to be super explicit to stop the likes of Tesla weaseling out or doing the bare minimum:

• Wipers, speed settings, auto on/off should be on a stalk for front and rear wipers
• Indicators should be on a stalk with
• Hazard lights must be a physical button
• Horn may be on the wheel or a button
• Lights on/off/full beam/dip/auto must be a dial or a stalk
• Demister / heated window must be physical buttons
• Gears must be a physical rocker, lever or dial

And button / dial etc here means an actual push up/down button not some haptic / touch sensitive shit.

Because at the moment Tesla are basically cheaping out of providing physical controls to save money. It doesn’t matter if someone crashes their car fiddling to set the wiper speed because Tesla saved $20 on a stalk and that’s all that matters.

It’s still possible to open it before the car submerges. It’s also possible to open it if you have the wherewithal to wait until the inside is nearly full. That’s providing you know where the damned release lever is. But if you’re panicking and pushing the electronic release and nothing happens then you’re going to die no matter what. Same too if the car is on fire or whatever.

And Tesla, being the helpful sort, also makes it hard to open the doors in an emergency. The front might have manual door release mechanism somewhere - good luck finding it when the car is on fire or sinking. The rear… not so much.

EuroNCAP is changing its testing regime to negatively score manufacturers who remove critical physical controls and it should probably include door handles in that regime.

It would be better to “git clone” a repo under threat of removal than fork it in Github. That way an entire copy of its history is preserved. It’s possible the forks still exist for now, even if Yuzu removes their official repo, but if Nintendo serves Github the legal paperwork then the forks will get blasted.

That said if someone clones the repo, they probably ought to think twice before putting it back in the cloud without sanitizing / reconstructing the branches & history absent of the bits that got Yuzu into trouble in the first place.

Yuzu gave them the opening to sue though. If they had been more circumspect - “Oh this is to develop homebrew / indie games nudge nudge” then maybe Nintendo wouldn’t have unleashed the lawyers or done so ineffectively. After all it wouldn’t be Yuzu’s fault if some wicked website corrupted their pure intentions by releasing device keys or patches that allowed their emulator run commercial games. But they were more blatant than that.

Also from an empathic perspective, of course Nintendo were going to sue. Yuzu should have known they would since that’s what console platforms do when something interferes with their profits. Yuzu is doubly bad since it interferes with hardware sales and game sales unlike custom firmware / cartridges which only affect game sales.

Of course the genie is already out of the bottle. Yuzu’s source code and binaries were on github for anyone to clone / fork. All the games are out in the wild. The piracy will carry on. I think it’s fair to say the NSP is effectively dead as a platform at this point. If a NSP2 turns up this year, as rumored, then I expect it will have revised anti-piracy measures and potentially a heavy online service aspect to go with it - it’s far easier to detect pirates and wield the banhammer when a device is online.

He’s really gunning for that Hero of Russia medal

I wonder if there shouldn’t be a way of federating duplicate groups after the fact so one doesn’t have to “win”, they just all combine as one.

Well obviously it was a failure and always was going to be a failure. Whereas before there was frictionless trade, travel, employment, living, there is now an ever expanding wall of bullshit and red tape. Getting goods to and from Europe is subject to import duties and delays that just kills trade - why would a Spanish company buy widgets from the UK when a supplier in Germany can supply them faster and reliably without any customs redtape?

It will take the UK years to form other trade deals, none of which will be remotely as favourable as they would get with negotiating power of the entire EU behind them. There have already been noises in the UK press about having to take food from the US which would fail EU standards - bleached chicken, GM crops, growth hormones etc. And that’s because when the US comes to the negotiating table they’re going to bend the UK over and screw them. And China, India and the rest of the world will be lining up for some sloppy seconds.

Acupuncture is quackery too. At the very least it should not be part of any public health service, or insurance policy, and people gullible enough to go for it should have to pay out of their own pocket.

Chiropractors and osteopaths only exist in such large numbers because they bill less to insurers than actual doctors & hospitals. So of course insurers are going to promote these quacks because it’s cheaper than somebody going to an actual physiotherapist for treatment.

There should really be legislation that requires insurers to cover science & evidence based treatments. If someone wants woo it should be at additional expense to them, not part of a standard policy.

I’m on some Disney Plus deal to get 3 months for 99 cents per month. You’d better believe the second the 3 months is up I’m cancelling again. Let’s face it, the platform is kind of dogshit and while there is an occasional good show, most of the new content is dreck. A month a year is sufficient to catch up on anything worth watching.

I live in Ireland and litter is a major issue. Bottles, cans, cups, discarded food, trash dumped in country lanes and worst of all fly tipping. I think a lot of these issues are easy to remedy and while reusable coffee cups are a positive there is a lot more that could be done.

Yup. Ad blockers work on pattern matching rules. Countering them might take some work but it’s not impossible - make the URLs that do the bad shit indistinguishable from the ones that make the video works and likewise html elements. Randomise everything, make the paths to things unpredictable. I’m sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable.

Hamas are absolutely headbanging murderous zealots committing a lot of atrocities right now. But if you herd people up, deprive them of basic liberties, brutalize & kill a bunch of them, and steal their land at gunpoint and then you can hardly act all shocked that a bunch of them are radicalized and go on a rampage. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking what Israel has done to Palestinians or what the United States did to Native Americans. Maybe the lesson to learn here, is don’t do those things. But I expect that Israel will pound Gaza committing its own atrocities as payback and the same thing will happen again in another decade.