Pamasich

YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus

They've been A/B testing anti-adblock attempts for months or even years now, idk exactly with my sense of time. Sometimes adblocker A doesn't work, sometimes adblocker B doesn't work. Sometimes switching browser makes the same adblocker work, sometimes clearing cookies helps, sometimes its dependent on your account. Different users at the same time report different experiences with different adblockers. Sometimes watching a single non-blocked ad restores adblocker functionality magically for a few days.

What I'm trying to say is, this didn't "just" happen, and it's specifically the author's current experience. I myself use Adblock Plus on Edge and Youtube works perfectly fine currently. This has been happening for a long time, and I'm sure there's uBlock Origin users currently who have the same experience while Adblock Plus works for them. Since that's how it's been the last times I've seen people talk about this, everyone talking about different experiences.

Acceptable Ads is the very reason I'm still using Adblock Plus. What's the problem with it? It's an optional feature, just turn it off and you don't have to deal with it at all.

Time for community git to somehow be federated like lemmy.

Already being worked on for a while. It's called ForgeFed and being developed by Forgejo (the software powering codeberg). It's an extension to the ActivityPub protocol, which is also powering the fediverse.

Update 7/31/25 4:10pm PT: Hours after this article was published, OpenAI said it removed the feature from ChatGPT that allowed users to make their public conversations discoverable by search engines. The company says this was a short-lived experiment that ultimately “introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn’t intend to.”

Interesting, because the checkbox is still there for me. Don't see things having changed at all, maybe they made the fine print more white? But nothing else.

In general, this reminds me of the incognito drama. Iirc people were unhappy that incognito mode didn't prevent Google websites from fingerprinting you. Which... the mode never claimed to do, it explicitly told you it didn't do that.

For chats to be discoverable through search engines, you not only have to explicitly and manually share them, you also have to then opt in to having them appear on search machines via a checkbox.

The main criticism I've seen is that the checkbox's main label only says it makes the chat "discoverable", while the search engines clarification is in the fine print. But I don't really understand how that is unclear. Like, even if they made them discoverable through ChatGPT's website only (so no third party data sharing), Google would still get their hands on them via their crawler. This is just them skipping the middleman, the end result is the same. We'd still hear news about them appearing on Google.

This just seems to me like people clicking a checkbox based on vibes rather than critical thought of what consequences it could have and whether they want them. I don't see what can really be done against people like that.

I don't think OpenAI can be blamed for doing the data sharing, as it's opt-in, nor for the chats ending up on Google at all. If the latter was a valid complaint, it would also be valid to complain to the Lemmy devs about Lemmy posts appearing on Google. And again, I don't think the label complaint has much weight to it either, because if it's discoverable, it gets to Google one way or another.

Plus, you explicitly have to opt into this, for each chat you share individually.

I get that it says "discoverable" at first and the search engines are in the fine print, but search engine crawlers get it anyway if it's discoverable on ChatGPT's website instead. That term is plenty clear imo.

ChatGPT chats are only public when turned into a shareable chat (which is a manually created snapshot of the chat with a link). And they only show up on search machines if you, after sharing, select the opt-in checkbox for having it show up there.

I don't know how duck.ai works, but I assume it doesn't do this.

Switzerland announced a new LLM project which might be of interest here.

Here's a German article on it. If you're okay with a Reddit link, here's a translation.

Some points on it:

• fully open source in its entirety — source code, model weights, and training data will all be publically released.
• licensed under Apache 2.0
• compliant with Swiss data protection laws, copyright law, and the EU AI act
• respects crawler opt-outs on websites

While nothing there explicitly says the data is ethically sourced, we'll be able to tell based on the opensource training data, and I assume copyright law takes care of stuff like books being used (though idk if the AI has a way to determine the license of web content, or if it fully relies on opt-outs there).

Also it's only for AI Windows which requires an AI chip. Considering how anti-AI the fediverse is, I doubt any of the people here would be getting AI Windows in the first place. It's a non-issue for the users here already from the get-go at the requirements.

You're delusional if you think Microsoft's preinstalled crap is at all comparable to what hackers will do with a vulnerable PC.

Also this feature in particular is only for AI PCs which your Win10 PC probably won't upgrade to.

Except they're not fighting the fire here, they're taking away the arsonist's flamethrowser so he can't continue making the fire. Without that flamethrower, the arsonist can't do shit.

Fighting the fire would be petitioning Steam, but the target is the payment processors that pressured Steam on request of Collective Shout.

Why is Fediverse moderation, even more Draconian than Reddit?

No central oversight. Reddit can theoretically remove the worst of the worst, but the same doesn't apply on the fediverse. Not across instances at least. Theoretically that lack of control is why we have defederation, but no one is going to defederate over some mods being extra draconian.

As for why it's even at a similar level to Reddit in the first place, it's because despite the fediverse's superiority complex, moderation on Reddit is organic, and so it is here. It's not like Reddit tells them to be the way they are, moderators choose to be that way. And there's no reason why they would choose to be different on the fediverse.

I think it's worth remembering that people who seek the power of authority aren't usually the best people. I'm not saying this applies to all moderators, but those that become moderators for the power it gives them aren't going to be friends, no matter which platform they're on. It's not like the platform makes them bad, it just enables them by giving them the power.

Why is it so hard to find a non left leaning place on the Internet?

There ARE right wing Lemmy instances. They're just usually defederated by the ones leaning left. There's also /r/conservative on Reddit.

"You know I kind of feel Israel has a right to defend itself ya know?"

This one is definitely a big problem imo. Like, I'm not in the pro-Israel camp, but I think it's clear this side of the fediverse is currently an echo chamber that isn't welcoming to opposing voices, especially on that topic. But also in regards to others like AI.

Reddit is a lot better in that regard. I think there is a point to fighting disinformation and bad faith actors, but that's not reasoning if you then allow one side's disinformation (like the whole "AI is completely useless" narrative which is just factually false, it's being abused for tasks it's wildly unsuited for, but that doesn't make it useless for what it's designed to do) or tolerate complete faith into your side's propaganda.

Imo this is a big barrier to the fediverse currently. I can't in good faith recommend the fediverse to people whom I know to be right-leaning, because I know they're going to have a bad time here.

Even posting a Fox News article in the News areas will get your post removed.....with a ban of course.

I do think a ban is excessive unless you're a repeat offender, but... it makes sense to ban articles from a self-proclaimed entertainment network which only idiots would take as news (Fox News's official position as argued in court, not my opinion) from a News community.