all the ad blockers I used to use stop working, and it became an annoying game of cat and mouse that I didn't have time for. Luckily, most of the time I can "skip" the ad in like five seconds, and it gives me a moment to catch up on incoming Slack messages.
The only ad blocker I have used for the past couple of years has been uBlock Origin, more recently combined with SponsorBlock.
There has been two or three instances that I can remember when it did not block YouTube ads correctly for a couple of days. But those were quickly patched and it started to work again.
When has ublock origin browser extension ever stopped working?
On a locked down mobile OS like iOS you can use the Brave browser.
No cat and mouse game.
One day I visited DistroWatch.com. The site deliberately tweaked its images so ad blockers would block some "good" images. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on. The site freely admitted what it was doing. The site's point was: you're looking at my site, which I provide for free, yet you block the thing that lets me pay for the site?
I stopped using ad blockers after that. If a site has content worth paying for, I pay. If it is a horrible ad-infested hole, I don't visit it at all. Otherwise, I load ads.
Which overall means I pay for more things and visit less crap things and just visit less things period. Which is good.
Moreover you don’t even need a 0-day to fall for phishing. All you need is to be a little tired or somehow not paying attention (inb4 “it will never happen to ME, I am too smart for that”)
At $JOB IT actually bundles uBlock in all the browsers available to us, as per CIA (or one of those 3-letter agencies, might've even been the NSA) guidelines it's a very important security tool. I work in banking.
I do that as well. For me it is almost exclusively the case with the news sites.
> If it is a horrible ad-infested hole, I don't visit it at all.
Same.
> Otherwise, I load ads.
There is no "otherwise" for me. I simply do not want to load any kind of ads or "sponsored" content. I see no reason, either moral, ethical or other, to ever do that.
I think that the most fundamental issue with ads and more generally with provider-curated content is that they represent what the advertiser or the provider wants. Not what you want.
Even if the ads are heavily personalized, the advertiser is still the one who is trying to push an idea onto you. Similarly, even if your social media account has a lot of personal information on you, the provider is still the one who is selecting which content will appear in you "feed".
I believe that these practices make people less self-aware of what they actually want. Because they mostly respond to suggestions. They do much less research into what is possible. They just say yes or no to the things they see in their ads or in their "feed". While becoming more and more distant from the reality that is happening outside the provider-managed ads or "feeds".
I think that a safe way out of this is to ignore ads and "feeds" completely. And actively search for the things or content you want. Curate your interests in a way you like. Not in a way advertisers or providers want.
Those numbers are meaningless unless you specify what you get in return.
It is like saying that you pay $30,000 for a car. But the most important question is: For which car?
Also, if the installation services are so expensive, you can always install everything yourself.
Study how to do it, get the tools and materials, and then do it. It would be time-consuming, challenging and perhaps it would carry extra risks. Absolutely.
But it is not rocket science. It can be done. As long as there is a motivation to do it, i.e. a good value you will get out of it in return, it should be a valid approach to consider, in my opinion.
> how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these
Very renewable. Solar panels are mostly glass, silicon and a little bit of metal. And they last ~30 years. Wind turbine blades are made out of fiberglass or similar materials. They may need replacing every ~30 years as well.
Other infrastructure would not need any significant maintenance for even longer.
These kind of power plants, apart from being renewable, have very low running costs. And that is the point.
Of course their production is very variable and therefore they cannot be used as the only power source. So e.g. nuclear power plants are still needed to back them up.
I think it is very rational to build as much power plants that are cheap to run. And back it up with nuclear or other power plants that are expensive to run but which can cover for time when the production of renewables is low.
Mono-crystalline silicon - which is now the dominant technology - is a pretty clean, but thin film PV - which is on the wane - had high heavy metal content. Good news.
> the tool it uses to interface with the database doesn't have those capabilities
Fair enough. It can e.g. use a DB user with read-only privileges or something like that. Or it might sanitize the allowed queries.
But there may still be some way to drop the database or delete all its data which your tool might not be able to guard against. Some indirect deletions made by a trigger or a stored procedure or something like that, for instance.
The point is, your tool might be relatively safe. But I would be cautious when saying that it is "100 %" safe, as you claim.
That being said, I think that your point still stands. Given safe enough interfaces between the LLM and the other parts of the system, one can be fairly sure that the actions performed by the LLM would be safe.
I would imagine that communicating within urban areas might be possible via some kind of a mesh network where e.g. every phone would act as a node that can forward the packets further. Something like that should be possible over WiFi I assume although I am unfamiliar with the existing protocols that would allow that.
There are two main issues with such an application that I can think of:
1. Addressing. How would the nodes know where to send the packet? But I assume there are ways to deal with that which come from the P2P networks like Tor.
2. Edge connectivity. Even if it would be possible to communicate between the regular nodes of the network, those packets would not be able to reach the outside world. So, from abroad or even from the out of town, they would still appear offline. Some kind of edge bridges would probably be necessary to reach connectivity with the outside world.
It works over the HDMI ports on Minis and some Pros, and this monitor is connected to the Mac via HDMI. Source: Me, my M1 Mac mini, and my Samsung Neo G8
Those APIs have already existed. So it is probable that they already had a documentation.
Sanitizing an existing documentation for public release might take notable time and effort if there are 100s of endpoints. But I would assume that is not the case with an API for a speaker.
I am unsure what you are trying to say here. But if you mean to refer to "market distortion", I cannot see how that can be happening.
The reason is that these rules are supposed to be applicable universally to every company in the same way. And as such, they do not create any market distortion in one way or the other. Because everyone has to play by the same rules. Those are as fair market conditions as one can get, in my opinion.
> some might not bother
Why should that be a problem? If someone does not like the regulation in a particular jurisdiction, it is fine. No one is forcing them to operate there.
The main point is the following: If they want to operate, they have to play by the local rules. Just like everyone else.
Why would you even watch a YouTube video with ads?
There are ad blockers, sponsor segment blockers, etc. If you use them, it will block almost every kind of YouTube ad.
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