The hypocrisy that is YouTube just gets worse by the day.

People like Jeff have perfectly good, harmless content flagged and removed for specious reasons while the company continues to profit from scammy ads that promote fake "health hacks", counterfeit electronics goods such as the fake "Sandisk" SSDs being pitched right now, "laser welders" that turn out to be just soldering irons, water-blasters that are nothing of the sort, etc, etc.

I (and thousands of others) have been reporting these ads using the mechanisms built into YouTube and also through @teamyoutube on X but the ads continue to run until the advertiser's spend is exhausted.

Surely, after a while someone must wake up to the fact that if YouTube/Google isn't going to act when these scam ads are reported and simply continues to profit from them then they become an accomplice to fraud and should he charged as such.

I've heard from hundreds of people who've lost money after being duped by these fraudulent ads and even when THEY complain to YouTube with their proof, the ads keep running.

Now there seems to be a lot of bonafide channels being deleted for "scams and misleading practices" without warning. Perhaps YouTube doesn't like the competition whenit comes to scamming -- it wants to retain its crown as "best scammer"?

It's a shame Jeffs video was pulled because I'm encouraging people to set up their own VOD servers and federate into a global network coordinated by independent search engines. This is the only way to dethrone YouTube now that it's clearly become an evil entity.

Yes, I'm sure Nintendo's lawyers have not considered the legality of their business practices in their largest market. *rolls eyes*

Have you taken apart everything in your home to ensure there are no recording devices embedded inside them? Get a grip, bro.

At the risk of invoking the Death of the Author trope, I don't agree with him here (and I note that he leaves that open too, by saying he personally doesn't want to and not excluding others from wanting to)..

Markdown is now a way doing shorthand formatted typing, effectively. What it's original purpose was is interesting, but not a limitation ('make', for example, was not made for software development but for compiling books). I'm computer-centric, not mobile-centric. A way of formatting bullets and tables without having to move my hands off the keyboard is great for me.

Be interested to see how it handles the round trip - can I take an existing note and edit it using Markdown for instance. But overall - can't see this as anything but a good thing.

I use Notes with my Dovecot IMAP server. It works, but sync is oftentimes VERY slow. You can speed it up by going to the calendar app and refreshing the calendars (which is odd, because my calendars are on a totally separate CALDAV server).

It's been like this for many years. I realize I'm in the minority of notes users but reporting the bug doesn't seem to help much either.

What you really want is a dog-like robot with package grippers on its back, and one arm for doorknobs and elevator buttons - something like a Boston Dynamics bot.

Four legs - stable without balancing, so longer battery life.
Low profile - delivery vans could have more than one, in dog-house slots
Can't be mistaken for a human - give it a few cute dog-like mannerisms

The only people who have this kind of stuff are collectors/nostalgia people. They want things to be accurate - that's why go to that trouble.

For a long time I had a Commodore 64 set up ready to go in my rooms, connected to a 1541 snail drive and a C2N cassette. I had a Mac/SE 30 an d a Mac Plus. I had an Atari ST. I enjoyed them all, and I can absolutely appreciate wanting this kind of thing.

For myself I've moved on (played the C64 version of Portal? That was developed on hardware I donated) from physically collecting, although you could argue I've merely transferred the habit to synthesizers instead. But I absolutely recognise and understand the enjoyment people get from this, and it's nice to see this kind of thing being done.

I own a tiny indie studio in Chicagoland and my peers own the some of the huge studios in Chicagoland.

Cinespace is dead right now. It has ONE show active. The other studios are so dead that they're secretly hosting bar mitzvahs and pickleball tournaments for $1500 a day just to pay property taxes.

My studio is surprisingly busy but I'm cheap and cater to non-union folks with otherwise full time jobs.

Heard this so, so many times over the last 35 years. 3GL, 4GL, graphical-style (Powerbuilder etc.), object orientiation...so, so many times.

It's a giant string generator, copying from other people's strings. It's a good giant string generator, but that's what it is - another tool in the box. Most of programming is not just the syntax, it's the ideas. "Doing exactly what you want it to do" - hah, most people absolutely cannot specify exactly what they want a thing to do.

Enjoyable and appropriate reference.

Well, under some conditions an unique movie car *would* be copyrightable. The case where the car is effectively a character is just one of the ways you can argue a car to be copyrightable.

Copyright is supposed to protect original creative expression, not ideas or functional items, which may be protected by *other* forms of intellectual property like trademark or patents. This is because copyright protects *creative expression*. It doesn't protect ideas, or functional items. A car is a functional item, so *normally* it isn't protected. But to the degree a car in your movie has unique expressive elements that are distinct from its function, those elements can be copyrighted.

But the plaintiff still wanted to claim that he owned the design of the car, so his lawyer looked for a precedent that established that cars can sometimes be copyrighted even though they are functional items, and he found the Batmobile case, where the Batmobile was ruled to be a prop that was *also* a character. Because he cited this case, the judge had to rule whether the Batmobile ruling's reasoning applied to this car, and he decided it didn't. The car may be unique and iconic, but that's not enough to make it a character.

I grew up down the street from her house. Went to the first Chuck E Cheese's across the street often.

Civilization didn't collapse due to her house. It wasn't even the first revision of her house (IIRC got leveled in the great SF earthquake) There's a lot of people that look at the Victorian adornments of her house as a sign we had civilization. Compared to the Soviet Bloc style housing we have going in today that has surrounded it, the Winchester house now looks out of place.

All kind of sad really. Town and Country was a beautiful shopping center. The trailer park next door provided low income housing, and the Styufy dome theatres looked straight out of a moonbase. Nothing is allowed to have exposed wood beams or rounded edges anymore.

There, fixed it for you

Did it start and run more than twice in a row? Well then, it's not an Eleanor clone.

Sadly, based on experience I think you are wrong. Employees who screw up are often not fired, or are replaced with employees just as bad.

There's a reason there's a common saying that "You pay peanuts, you get monkeys." It's because it's very common for employers to accept mediocre or even poor work if the employees doing it are cheap enough. I'm not anti AI -- not even generative AI. I think with AI's ability to process and access huge volumes of data, it has tremendous potential in the right hands. But generative AI in particular has an irresistible appeal to a managerial culture that prefers mediocrity when it's cheap enough.

Instead of hiring someone with expensive thinking skills to use AI tools effectively and safely, you can just have your team of monkeys run an AI chat bot. Or you can fire the whole team and be the monkey yourself. The salary savings are concrete and immediate; the quality risks and costs seem more abstract because they haven't happened yet. Now as a manager it's your job to guide the company to a successful future, but remember you're probably mediocre at your job. Most people are.

According to economics, employers stop adding employees when the marginal productivity of the next employee drops to zero. What this means is that AI *should* create an enormous demand for people with advanced intellectual skills. But it won't because managers don't behave like they do in neat abstract economic models. What it will do is eliminate a lot of jobs where management neither desires nor rewards performance, because they don't want anything a human mind can, at this point, uniquely provide.