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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • There are people that do it tastefully and people that are creative and interesting. If they can’t be interesting and descriptive to some extent then they’re probably not people I want to engage with.

    And honestly, the titles were so bland they were almost snarky, and I never felt they were justified for the creators I watch. They were so laconic they were often barely informative anyway, because the flavour was gone. I think that’s because the people who have a good sense for editorialising aren’t going around writing aggressively literal titles all the time. The dearrow ecosystem is subject to algorithmic selection too, and it selects for boring.



  • I’d say if the copyright holder says you’re not allowed to then you’re not. It’s piracy.

    People will tell you that you’ve already downloaded the data so saving it is fundamentally, technically no different, but that doesn’t matter to the law, it’s still piracy.

    Like yeah, it’s absurd and pointless and anti-consumer and anti-knowledge and unenforceable and unsustainable, but that’s copyright. It’s always been that way.

    Copyright destroys culture and piracy is our ethical duty in the face of that. The only reason to care about it is so you don’t get caught.





  • The problem I have with dearrow is that it’s editorialising and arbitrary. It’s not like removing ads which can be clearly identified and the user can make personal decisions, like no sponsors but self-promo is fine, or whatever.

    No, there is one alternative title and one alternative thumbnail, and that’s it, and often I have serious disagreements with the choices the community makes. There’s a bias towards intervention, so if a title is fine according to me but someone else doesn’t like it, then it gets changed. I found most of my votes were to restore the original title and thumb. Eventually I got tired of it and just uninstalled, and presumably so did other people with the same feeling, so the community continues to skew towards changing every video they encounter.

    Also, the thumbnails and titles that creators choose tells me a lot about them, and I get rid of clickbait by not engaging with creators that do clickbait. Also, sometimes it’s not clickbait, just people being creative. It seems like the whole thing is just an exercise in being the fun police by people that don’t understand the creative process.


  • Genuine answer is that you need to get a feel for when the clutch begins to bite. The rest of it - when to use the brake, handbrake etc, is going to depend on what you’re doing. Learning to feel the clutch is the critical skill.

    The way to learn how to use the clutch is to start on a flat piece of ground with no traffic around, like an empty car park. With the engine running and the brakes off, press the clutch pedal and put the car into 1st gear. Then, slowly release the clutch pedal without using the throttle. Practice this until you can get the car moving without stalling the engine, and you’ll have a feel for it.

    When starting normally you’ll gently press the throttle as you do this. Cars usually idle around 1K RPM, use the throttle to maintain about 2K RPM for a normal take-off.

    Then all the other skills will fall into place. The key objective is that you should have the brake engaged until the moment the clutch engages and is ready to take control, then the brakes should be smoothly & quickly released.

    You can do this with either the handbrake or the foot brake, but if you’re using the foot brake you need to be manipulating the clutch, brake and throttle at the same time.

    That requires pressing both throttle and brake with the right foot, which is a more advanced technique, but very useful for smooth driving in a lot of situations. It’s often called “heel-toe”, but that’s misleading. You don’t use heel & toe, you use the two sides of your foot.




  • Unironically I think it must happen to some extent, and that doesn’t mean every toxic person is an op. It wouldn’t take a lot of manpower to create a toxic environment. Just hassle the devs with annoying questions, suggestions and bad “contributions” until they’re sick of everyone’s shit and start to become toxic themselves. If they’re dealing with all the noise of bad actors, they get overzealous in moderating it, and it’s hard to tell the difference between a troll who’s trying to waste your time, and an honest newbie who doesn’t know what questions to ask or what information to share, so they all get blasted to some extent, and the devs lose any interest in catering to the newbies.

    Edit: actually I remember asking a question on stackoverflow about PuTTY one time, it was answered and I moved on with my life. Then five fucking years later some dickhead shows up in the comments and says, “aw… putty… windows…” So I’m like, “Listen, I don’t care if you think I’m sad for using windows, I don’t use linux because it’s too much work” Then they start lecturing me about how linux is for experts and if I don’t know what I’m doing it’s not for me, and I’m like “Ok? Then leave me alone. This question is five years old, why are you here? Just to hassle a rando because they use windows?” Then a mod bumped the comments into a private chat and off the question page, then this person starts offering to “help” me learn Linux. I told them if I wanted help they’d be the last person I would ask, then blocked them, but the bad taste of that interaction has stayed with me for a long time and I think about it a lot whenever I want to put effort into switching myself over. Was that an op? Being a troll is easy, and it would’ve been maybe 20 minutes of work for whoever was doing it. Like, maybe that was just some kid who thought they were helping further the linux cause by going around windows-shaming people, but maybe not.



  • I tried talking about how absolutely horrendous their behaviour was recently, pointing out how completely unhinged and self-defeating it is, and someone actually literally said that this was a good thing because Linux is hard work and they should keep away people that aren’t experts.

    And first of all, if that’s right it’s an admission that linux will never succeed, and secondly I agree that’s the effect but I think that’s bad actually.

    I honestly think there must be at least some amount of psyops in the community poisoning the discourse for everyone.


  • Honestly it sounds like someone was paid to do something about adblocking and just like… did something. Like if you were tasked with reducing adblocking, and your first and most obvious idea of “reduce the obnoxious ads” was disallowed because enshittification is mandated, you could say no, which most workers won’t do, or you could just do whatever random bullshit feels like it might work because it’s punitive. Or at least it’s a gesture that shows your boss you’re trying.

    Authoritarian systems like capitalist corporations are inherently low-information for exactly this reason. People on the low rungs doing the real work who understand what needs to be done will typically not report problems to their superiors. And when they do, those superiors tend not to listen, because the idea that lower workers know something they don’t threatens their leadership status.

    Also our society’s legal system trains us to believe punitive measures must do something even though they don’t.

    Also I guess another reason they might wind up at this strategy is that straight up telling users that the problem is their adblock is the fastest way to get adblockers to block your countermeasure, so they think they have to be sneaky.



  • I definitely got really awful, unplayably spotty playback that seemed linked to adblock usage. Then I saw an article about it and confirmed I wasn’t going crazy, and that day it stopped happening, so it felt like I was going crazy all over again. It’s like the moment they realised it was going to become a problem and they weren’t as sneaky as they thought, they turned it off. I haven’t had an issue since then.