There are a lot of small issues with the integrated apps, the most recent one being the search in Apple Music failing if I type in more than one word. Another issue I’ve experienced that if I plug my USB sound card in I will have to restart any app that is capable of audio playback or they will play the audio too slowly. This bug wasn’t there before 14.6 so I don’t think it’s an issue with my hardware.

In all fairness I’ve had some other bugs that have subseqently been fixed, but it has sometimes taken years and it’s frustrating when the whole mantra used to be “it just works”. Then again, maybe it never “just worked” and I’ve just forgotten about how buggy and bad it was in the past.

This is what I get for using Apple products for many years. The qualirty of my brain has gotten worse.

I hope they spend the entire week detailing all the bugs in macOS they intend to fix. It feel like the stability and overall qualirt has gotten real bad over the years.

Well, yeah. Isn’t the whole point of these foolish office mandates to get people to quit? That way they can reduce their workforce without the cost and negative press of another round of layoffs.

Unsolicited or not, this is good avice. Thank you!

To be honest with you, the algorithm is pretty good. I’m a pretty active user of “not interested” and “don’t recommend this channel” so the algorithm generally shows me stuff I already like or things I may be interested in.

What I find frustrating is that there are so many extra UI blocks shoved in between regular videos. Featured current events, rentable movies, playable games, and the fucking shorts I don’t give a shit about. Since I mainly watch on mobile I also can’t just remove those sections and even when I dismiss them, YouTube decides to shove them in my face again and again.

I just want to be left alone to watch my nerdy stuff :(

Based on what the YouTube frontpage looks like when I’m not logged in I can guarantee that I will have zero interest in anything that gets hyped up on a leaderboard. But YouTube will of course malform its UI so it can constantly shove it into my face like it does with shorts.

That’s a very astute observation and it made me wonder if piracy was partly to blame for the death of the B-tier game (at least on PC). In my younger pre-Steam days me and my friends would pirate 9/10 of the games we played (if not more). Games like CoD/Fifa/Sims would get enough sales from regular folks, but who the heck was going to take a chance on something like Will Rock or Scrapland? I would often check out games at my local store and then go home to torrent them, meaning they lost out on sales from the kinds of weirdos who the games were made for.

I watch a stupid amount of YouTube so I pay for YouTube Premium. I wish that meant I could have premium features like disabling shorts, disabling those annoying themed sections that keep popping up (right now it’s the olympic games), a search function that actually searches for what I want instead of shoving more suggested videos in my face, and changing every “not now” button into “don’t ever ask again”.

Despite the fact that I’m a voracious consumer of YoutTube videos and a long-time paying customer, I have to accept that I am not the target audience. They want passive users who endlessly watch whatever gets put in front of them so that they never leave the app. If there was a respectful alternative that worked well with iOS and AppleTV I’d gladly pay for that instead.

Maybe you can get the same experience at a place llike AniList or Kitsu?

I’ve been a macOS user for over a decade and I am never going back to Windows. That being said, Apple does have iCloud (their version of OneDrive) which is tightly integrated into the OS and they’re not shy about asking you to pay for more storage. They also want you to log in with an Apple ID when you first start your computer and I don’t know how easy it is to use a local account.

It’s not the same as Windows in terms of aggressive ads and upsells, but Apple aren’t innocent in wanting more of your money. If you want true freedom you have to pay with your time and energy and run Linux.

I use this rule: accounts.google.com/gsi/* Is yours similar?

That’s a very valid point, albeit incredibly disappointing. Mechanisms to block tracking should be built into the operating system, but I also realise that it would probably be impossible to accurately implement.

“Ask app not to track” is accurate to what you’re choosing, I just hate that we’ve gotten to this point.

I loathe the wording that’s been normalised around tracking. The options for the upcoming dialog are “Allow” or “Ask app not to track”.

Why the fuck do I need to ask, as if the app is free to deny my humble request not to be spied upon? The whole tracking industry is awash with weasel words and vagueness in an effort to have us make ill-informed decisions.

Fucking parasites.

I remember feeling liberated when streaming became big. Dealing with potential fake files, low quality, or having something stuck on 95% with no seeders was something I wasn’t going to miss when I ditched piracy for Netflix… then the streaming wars began and here I come crawling back.

I also pay for Kagi and I’m super happy with that decision. I do wish they’d stop putting so much AI cruft into their search engine, but at least I can disable it.