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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Companies wonder why people use adblockers; this is my experience trying to read this article on mobile without an adblocker:

    Picture of the outside of the building.

    Three paragraphs, each composed of a single sentence.

    Ad.

    Two paragraphs, each composed of a single sentence.

    Ad.

    A teaser block trying to get me read another article on their site.

    Ad.

    A stock photo of a public bathroom with mirrors.

    A teaser trying to get me to follow them on Google News.

    A single sentence with eight words.

    Ad.

    Another sentence, which is a quote from a school admin.

    Ad.

    Two paragraphs, each consisting of one sentence each.

    Teaser block trying to get me to read more articles on their site.

    A stock photo of some social media platform logos.

    A trending block with links to more articles on their garbage site.

    Two more paragraphs, each consisting of one sentence each.

    A distracting carrousel of images that are links to more articles on their site.

    Two more paragraphs, one of which actually has two sentences!

    Links to their social media.

    Is that the end of the article? I think so, but I’ve missed things before, so better keep scrolling a bit just in case.

    Related articles section.

    Ad.

    Ad that looks like a link to another article.

    Ad that looks like a link to another article.

    Ad that looks like a link to another article.

    Link to another article.

    Ad.

    Comments section.

    Editors pick section of articles.

    Ad.

    Ad.

    Okay, pretty sure I’ve read the entire article now, but let’s keep scrolling to see how far this bullshit goes.

    Ad that looks like a link to another article.

    Ad that looks like a link to another article.

    Link to another article.

    And then the following pattern SIX times:

    Ad.

    Link to another article.

    Link to another article.

    Link to another article.

    Ad that looks like a link to another article.

    FINALLY a whole bunch of links to other articles, some of which are promoted by Taboola, whatever the fuck that is.

    And the entire time there was a red popup for “breaking news” taking up 1/5 of the screen.

    For those keeping track at home, the article was a total of fourteen sentences, one photo of the school, and two stock photos. And no photo of a bathroom without mirrors.







  • Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but surely you aren’t grouping this guy with the likes of Veritasium, Smarter Every Day, Steve Mould, or Cody’s Lab (just to name a few)? “Content creators” is a pretty broad brush.

    Edit: I think I understand now. The quotes are air quotes; you don’t mean all content creators, but ones that create garbage content, like reaction videos, malicious pranks on strangers, etc., and call themselves “content creators”, right? If that’s what you meant, then sorry for my initial assumption!

    For anyone looking for good YT channels, here are some more of my favorite actual content creators: Simone Giertz, Steve Wallis, Matthias Wandel, and Vice Grip Garage.




  • Drivers Tend To Kill Pedestrians At Night. Thermal Imaging May Help.

    Thermal imaging will definitely help spot those dirty walkers so I won’t miss as many. Those bastards can blend in sometimes and some of them are deceptively quick. The little ones especially are tough to take out. Of course, sometimes those guys just run right in front of you which are easy points but it takes the sport out of it.

    Anyway, it’s about time someone put the right tools in the hands of us hunters. I can’t wait to have an evening cruise with my lights off and really get a good stalk on, you know?




  • encode ads as part of the video file

    I suspect that an AI could be trained to be able to recognize ads, or at least the most annoying, ads.

    Also, a community driven project, like SponsorBlock, where users identify ads to build up a database could be created.

    These are just a couple of ideas to defeat embedded ads, and I’m not a genius programmer by any means. This is just another front in a war that has been going on since at least the 90’s and as long as blocking ads is less annoying than watching them, we’re winning.







  • Thanks for the sources; however, the National Library of Medicine is using data from 1993 and the other doesn’t specify by how much the violations rates are increasing or what the rates even are and the link to the underlying data appears to be dead.

    edit: I had time to look into this further and it appears that it was very common to fudge the paper logbook, but as of 2017 they’re required to use electronic logbook devices (ELD’s), so that is no longer possible. Yes, sleep deprivation due to violating the hours of service regulations was definitely a thing in the past, but I can’t find any data that indicates that it still is.