Yeah, things that weren’t called AI years back are just getting called AI now.

Twitch is live streaming which is what probably makes it a challenge to block ads, and the main draw of twitch is watching live content. I’d imagine it’s easier to view content that isn’t live without ads, and people do repost clips after it’s aired where people haven’t encountered ads in contrast to live viewers.

Then look at television piracy where live viewing will have ads, but pirated content is uploaded with it stripped away. Blocking ads will be something YouTube will have to keep fighting endlessly.

Lineagos run on an old Android phone with Aurora store to install and update play store apps. I just turn on the work profile when I check in and messages then turn it off. And it’s not my main phone either so consequence is that I won’t be instantly available, so ends up being more like email in terms of time it takes me to respond back. But, I am at least available on the preferred ways people want to communicate.

I’ve liked the approach of using pihole for local devices, and then when away using like a local vpn approach to filtering stuff out like personaldnsfilter.

Haven’t really looked into paid options.

First time hearing America described as mostly leftists.

Block tube extension has been great. I found that I didn’t need to block that many channels to start having content show up that isn’t from the big YouTube channels. For example tech and game searches heavily promote big channels and dominate the first several pages of search results, and suppress little ones. But, then block some of them, and suddenly it’s more of the regular small YouTube channels over the YouTube as a business channels.

I guess the crypto stuff along with the ads just made me not at all shocked by this. Not that I think it’s a bad browser, since I’ve had people I tried to explain addons too who found it too confusing so needed an out the box built in solution. But, Firefox continues to be my go to for years and years.

Sometimes you can use it to get access to apps that aren’t whitelisted for your device.

I do Aegis for two factor and KeePass for passwords.

And of course offline backups. I like email aliases too, since it helps identify which sites you signed up for got breeched or is selling your email to get spam.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/#additional-functionality_2

Yeah, if this can be done remotely then all smartphones by design are very insecure devices that shouldn’t be trusted to doing card transactions or entrusting with password management and two factor authentication…

I wish they would go into more detail on the how of remote activation is made. Is it a law saying it is okay to do if it becomes possible? Is this through an exploit that was found and requires physical access to the device to initiate, or is it just a setting present on all phones by default.

I started using freetube on the desktop. It’s like newpipe with how you have local subscriptions and feed without an account. I like it a lot.

I’ve still been using it, since it has continued to be reliable. I have Mixplorer too. Should probably try using that too to see how it compares.

Paying for YouTube premium still makes you the product, since you are still being tracked and sold. Hell you could drop over over 2k on a TV, phone, or GPU and still be getting tracked and sold. The old adage of if you aren’t paying you are the product no longer applies. It’s outdated.

I like newpipe on Android. Freetube looks similar. Can I import my newpipe data to freetube and vice versa?

That’s more a benefit for them than you though. I think people are more asking what’s the benefit for users with the know how and willingness to implement what features they want for themselves.

They are already harvesting all our data, so it’s not like they aren’t getting anything out of us. And it’s not like paying them opts users out of being tracked either. So what exactly is the benefit to paying a data harvesting company that isn’t going to stop, and users are what provides them that info they need in the first place. Including their attempts at AI search that will rely on users to train it.

No built in sponsorblock automatically kills it for me.

If they reappear then maybe a comment of “if you see this post it means my deleted comment has been restored” would be a good addition too?

I wish I could just delete my account and be done with it all, but having to hold onto it due to lack of confidence that things will stay deleted and require monitoring on my account from time to time.

When I asked about smart watches on reddit back in the day Garmin was recommended a lot, so they seem to be really solid.