I’m not clear on how this system works, but I would like to know how it’s supposedly better than Google’s Topics. Especially if, as comments elsewhere in the thread suggest, Mozilla’s solution involves potentially exposing your entire browsing history to someone. Topics doesn’t do that, since it’s entirely handled in your own browser and only sends vague categories. (And even fuzzes them by potentially sending a random category you didn’t actually visit.)

humans are better at vision at the moment

Eh, humans are better at certain kinds of vision—particularly on tasks that deal with non-white people where the AI was trained mostly on white people.

But things where the vision is looking at very fine detail, AI is very good at. Like determining if a patient has a disease based on a retinal scan or other medical imagery.

And I think it’s fair to say that, at least superficially, the problem in this thread seems like it might be more similar to those medical cases where an AI could do a really good job. The problem is that actually, no. There’s no known marker that could determine age with the level of accuracy that would be required for this task.

As an outside observer, UK politicians (even Conservatives) seem to tend to be a bit better at this sort of thing than American or Australian (“the laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia”) politicians. There’s a much stronger tendency for their back benchers to vote against the party line than we have, too, which is great for deliberative democracy.

To be fair, that at least is hypothetically possible. Working out someone’s age exactly purely based on their face is not even possible, so you can argue against it very easily from a purely technical standpoint.

Facial recognition with a database is quite good today, and will only get better. To argue against that you need to start getting into the privacy and ethical arguments.

There is a 0% chance that AI can accurately determine if someone is 18 or not, even with hypothetical futuristic AI technology. Some 20-year-olds look very young. Some 16-year-olds look shockingly old. And nobody changes very significantly between the day of their 18th birthday and the day they were 17 years, 364 days.

that’s actually removed

It’s what now?

What percentage of yt creators are over there?

Of all creators on YT? A tiny fraction. Less than one hundredth of one percent.

Of the creators that I personally watch? Probably about a quarter to a half. Most of my favourite urbanist channels, excellent history and news channels, lots of amazing media criticism from a variety of angles. And some very fun game shows.

Nebula isn’t actually trying to be a general competitor to YouTube. It’s curated to be high quality content creators. To a pretty good extent, you can guarantee that if they’re on Nebula, they’re a good creator—maybe not to your personal taste (there are plenty on there that I have no interest in), but at least good in their niche. All their creators are part owners of it (in a meaningful way, not in a “one share out of a company with millions of shares” kind of way), so they only let in creators that they think they can trust.

And all that, for a price that’s less per year than YouTube Premium is for just 2 months. For me, it’s a no brainer.

Pretty sure its significantly better on privacy policy

Without even reading their privacy policy, this much is pretty obvious. Nebula has a very simple, more traditional business model. You pay them money, they give you product. (Namely, streaming video.) Their business model doesn’t include personal data in any way.

I’m very sympathetic to this viewpoint. If anything, I actually think adblocking is worse than conventional piracy (though nowhere near as bad as actual theft), because with piracy you’re costing the creator nothing and getting their stuff for free. With adblocking you’re getting it free and costing them the fees for bandwidth. It’s a tiny fee on a per-user basis, but it’s real. Not as bad as actual theft though because you’re not depriving them of the ability to sell what they created to someone else.

My problem with YouTube in particular is that they’re just so damn shitty to the people that provide them value. Like Reddit, but not quite as extreme. For years YouTube has been slow to act to demonetise actual bad actors, while good actors constantly get caught up with bullshit abuses of their Content ID (with public domain content being detected, and fair use exemptions to use of copyrighted material being ignored). And more recently, with their demonetisation of marginalised creators simply for talking about their own lived experience.

I used to pay for YouTube Red back when it existed, happily. But for me the last straw came in 2018 when they started screwing over small-time creators by removing longstanding small creators from the partner programme as a lazy overreaction to a few not-longstanding bad actors.

These days, I watch as many creators as I can on Nebula, which I happily pay for, and would have happily paid for a lifetime membership of, if that offer had been available for just 1 week longer than it actually was, despite objectively the lifetime membership probably not being a good deal for the individual user. I’m happy to pay for a good experience, but not for a company that screws over its suppliers so badly.

The problem with Garmin is that they sell hardware, and pretty much only hardware. They’ll deliberately hold back newer features in software in order to entice you to buy more hardware, because that’s how they get their money.

I don’t particularly begrudge them that, because as mentioned, it is their only real revenue stream. But it sure would be nice if they didn’t.

Personally I wouldn’t describe being against right to repair as the same thing as planned obsolescence. It’s a bad behaviour, but a different category of bad.

Planned obsolescence is more things like failing to provide support (software updates—since hardware repairs or replacement type support are legally mandated in civilised countries, so that doesn’t enter the equation) for the reasonable lifetime of the device—which in a smartphone is probably 3–5 years, or in the extreme case designing things to fail after a certain time.

The example a lot of people point to with Apple is the throttling that came out around 2017. But I don’t agree that it’s fair to characterise that as an example of planned obsolescence because in fact, it was something they did to extend the life of the device. Giving users the ability to make a fully informed choice for themselves would be much better, but taking action that they think will have a minimal impact on moment-to-moment UX while extending battery life could hardly be described as planned obsolescence.

And fwiw, I’m writing this from my Android phone. I’m not in the Apple ecosystem myself.

I’m personally of mixed opinions about Garmin.

On the one hand, I think they make the best products. Both their hardware and software as far as fitness tracking features is just brilliant. Not having any subscription is also an absolute must-have for me.

On the other hand, they operate their no-subscription business model by being extremely stingy with software updates. You might get one year of feature updates to your watch or bike computer, and maybe some critical security updates after that. But that’s about it. Apple has a mostly-undeserved reputation for planned obsolescence, but Garmin absolutely lives by that model. Sure, my Forerunner 935 isn’t going to suddenly be able to do digital payments without an NFC chip in there, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t be able to guesstimate my heat adaptation or do the same Body Battery calculations that the device from one year later is capable of using the same wrist heart rate monitor.

I’m also not sure I’d trust them on privacy too much. I trust them not to deliberately send your data to anyone malicious, or even use the data indirectly for non-customer-centric reasons. Their business model is much more like Apple than Google or Facebook in that respect. And that’s certainly a very good thing from a privacy standpoint. But I don’t think they’re a company that takes security very seriously. The rumour is that they probably had to pay the ransom when they were hit by ransomware a year or two ago, because they lacked the technical ability to restore from backups (though we don’t know for sure if that’s what happened). And with lax security comes an enhanced risk of your data being obtained by malicious actors.