I feel like you’re not getting the vision. It would be the same process as subscribing, but money just gets drained from a pool per ad instead of a flat monthly fee. It’s not something you’re seeing a popup for. And it would never cost 5x what an ad costs. It would only ever cost $4 to watch a video without an ad if an advertiser was willing to spend $4 to show you an ad. To put that in perspective, ad impressions are bought in units of cpm which stands for cost per mille which is the amount they pay for one thousand impressions. That would be $4,000 cpm. That’s absolutely insane. That’s orders of magnitude more than what it is today. Nobody is ever going to spend that much to show you an ad unless it’s some crazy profitable, super targeted, ultra niche campaign.

The whole point of this thought exercise is to explore what companies make in a month from ads versus what they charge for a month of ad free service. People bid for your attention. I think I should be able to bid for it myself instead of paying some opaque, flat rate per month.

You wouldn’t prompt them every time. And it would be no more difficult than serving the ads which are also charging every time they’re shown.

Not necessarily, like if it was YouTube you’d just deposit money and maybe set a maximum amount of money you’re willing to bid. Honestly most standard banner ads are from Google too, so they could handle that. For streaming services you’d need to set it up for each individually, but that’s no different from setting up billing for each of them. They wouldn’t need to talk to each other.

And I was pretty specific about PiHole over AdGuard’s public DNS. And to be honest, the person you originally replied to was as well.

But what does a pihole (which is DNS blocking) do that AdGuard’s free public DNS (which is DNS blocking) doesn’t? Of course uBlock Origin alongside them is better, but what’s a pihole specifically doing?

I’ve said this a few times in various places, but I’m really surprised we aren’t allowed to bid for ad space for ourselves to not show an ad the way advertisers do for ads. Obviously a flat monthly rate is simpler, nobody is denying that, but just from a purely “free market” perspective (which shareholders love to say they want while using the government to crush opposition) why can’t I pay slightly more than whatever small amount of money someone is paying to show me an ad to not see the ad?

Realistically I don’t think we’ll ever see that because it’s a fairly complicated. I don’t have any hard data, but I can’t imagine that the majority of users using something like YouTube Premium are getting a “good deal.” Sure, some folks probably watch all day every day and they get the better end of the deal, but I’d bet for a lot of folks YouTube makes more money off charging the subscription than they would showing the ads. Which is sort of an odd scenario we’ve gotten ourselves into (but amazing if you’re a company that serves ads).

There is pacman + aur and then there is flatpak.

This is sort of like asking “which fruit juice do you use, an acme apple juicer or a blamco orange juicer.” If I need a flatpak, I use flatpak. Sometimes things only have flatpaks and aren’t on the AUR.

If it’s on both, nowadays I typically prefer the non-flatpak version, but that’s just sort of vibe based, I don’t really have a good reason. I think I ran into a few (very minor) problems with flatpaks (that were probably easy to fix) that I didn’t have with the non-flatpak version and that skewed me in that direction.

People need to stop reading books from before 2000 and only read books with Kindle’s unlimited plan! Think of the shareholders!

Maybe only the one on the right is a screen so you can diagnose things, but the rest are paper?

They’re pushing hard for them in Georgia. I get a lot of ads on YouTube about how Georgia Power has recently locked in a rate for three years. (I believe they’re ignoring that it shot up a lot prior to this, but I might be mistaken.) It’s so weird seeing ad campaigns that are targeting businesses instead of individuals (or at least individuals working for businesses).

Holy moly indeed. Wow. 🫪

:O

Carpenter bees are so cool. I love them. They don’t ever dart at me either. Usually just other carpenter bees. My recollection is the males have white dots in their heads and don’t have stingers at all, and they’re the ones that typically guard the best (by hovering around).

I could’ve sworn that I saw a headline recently that gcc isn’t deterministic. But maybe that was some really weird edge case or a bug.

What show?

Cheese

Outlook and now Pulse!

Because it’s what I’m using and I’m a victim of the availability hueristic.

I do like it though. I didn’t try Endeavor OS but figure it’s similar.

Loxodons (Elephant species) have two arms but can use their trunk to make a grapple attack.