Seems like a lot of the early LTT crew were chaffing a bit under the LTT contract for a variety of reasons and opted to leave and start their own channels. I hope most of them succeed because honestly I always liked the other hosts on LTT far more than Linus who usually came off as more comic relief than actual tech news. As the old technical crew left I’ve found myself watching Linus Drop Tips very rarely.

Fully expecting chip makers to just manufacture a bunch of cheap garbage here that eventually ends up in a landfill in order to avoid the tariffs on their expensive chips. With a 100% tariff and prices per-chip in the $300+ range if they can make a chip for less than $300 even if they immediately chuck it in the garbage they’re saving money. Imagine a whole tray of cheap 500nm chips that are full of defects because they were made with wafers that failed QA. They manufacture them, document that they exist, dump them in a bin in a warehouse, then just throw the bin away in a year as unsold inventory and write it off as a business loss.

Reported view counts are also important for sponsorships as sponsored video payouts are often tied to hitting specific view counts, and even getting sponsorships and their rates are also typically conditional on view counts. So yes, even though it doesn’t directly impact ad revenue it still directly impacts total channel revenue for anyone that accepts sponsorships.

All that said, Google caused this entire mess by bundling their view counting in with their telemetry. If they just reported the raw download stats for the streams instead of trying to determine every last detail of who is watching the video (for all that juicy advertising data) this problem wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

Basically Youtube instead of counting views via actual requests for the videos instead uses a separate call that essentially says “hey, someone watched this video”. All the ad blockers rather than use a hard coded list of URLs to block which would quickly go stale instead use one of a couple different 3rd party lists the most popular of which is EasyList. EasyList decided to block the URL that youtube uses to register views on the principal that it was a privacy violation because it not only registers “hey someone watched this” but also captures exactly who watched it which allows Google to track your viewing habits.

Literally the only reason old school gamers play on CRTs is because old games were designed for the blurry low resolution displays they provided and so look kind of bad on modern crisp displays. You could just smear vasoline on a modern LCD and get roughly the same effect, but using a CRT is less messy.

It’s also utter garbage. We abandoned CRTs because they sucked. They’re heavy, waste tons of space, guzzle power, and have terrible resolution. Even the best CRT ever made is absolutely destroyed by the worst of modern LCDs. The only advantage you could possibly come up with is that in an emergency you could beat someone to death with a CRT. Well, that and the resolution was so garbage they had a natural form of antialiasing, but that’s a really optimistic way of saying they were blurry as shit.

This is such a strange concept. Like fundamentally a subscription is just a mechanism to allow a viewer to easily keep track of new content on a channel. By viewing the channels contents you’re engaging in 100% of the interaction you should be expected to have with a subscribed channel. If Google really wanted to address the problem of old subscriptions people are ignoring they should just prompt people to unsubscribe to channels that they haven’t watched any videos from in a long time. Instead they’re fucking with view counts because that saves them money. The whole thing is fishy, but Google has always treated being inscrutable and capricious as if those were virtues.

Same, but it depends on the goal. If the goal is to have an excuse not to pay creators while still cashing paychecks from advertisers it seems like a pretty smart move. A dick move certainly, but seems to be working exactly as intended.

The problem is that there aren’t any really viable alternatives. YouTube has three major advantages and all three are necessary. First and most critically it has a viable business model (that is it has a way to earn money to pay creators). It’s a shitty business model, but it is viable which already puts it ahead of most services that are coasting on VC funds and hoping they’ll trip over a business model before they go bankrupt. Second it has the infrastructure and capital to actually serve content. Running a video streaming service is the single largest bandwidth consumer you could possibly come up with and that means considerable network infrastructure costs, to say nothing of the storage demands. Third it has network effect going for it. Nobody is going to watch videos on your platform if there’s only a couple dozen of them total. The sheer size and scope of YouTube means no matter what you’re looking for you can find something to watch. It’s a one stop shop for AV content.

Every single competitor to YouTube has failed on one of those points, usually the first one, rarely the second. The last service I saw come close to hitting all three was Vimeo, but it flamed out not even a decade after it launched. Twitch.tv is struggling to make their accounting work and isn’t even a direct competitor because they’re pushing hard for live streams as opposed to pre-recorded videos. Alternatives like PeerTube have no business model and will never attract creators or a mainstream audience. Paid hosting platforms like Floatplane are replacements for traditional video streaming services like Amazon Video or Netflix not really platforms where just anybody can set up a channel and start posting videos.

To paraphrase a famous saying, YouTube is the worst public video streaming service except for every other one. Until someone comes along and figures out how to make enough money to reliably pay creators and has enough capital to actually serve that content reliably and in high quality YouTube isn’t going anywhere.

It seems like YouTube is doing something where they don’t consider views to be actual “views” anymore. I saw one creator reporting that you only get credit as a view if you also leave a comment on the video because I guess Google thinks this will somehow hamper bots? Sounds like a bunch of bullshit no matter how you look at it. Personally I think Google is just trying to avoid paying creators so they’re only crediting them for a fraction of the views they get, but you just know they’re charging those advertisers for every single view whether they’re paying the creators or not.

He’s a CEO that’s practically the job description under late stage capitalism. That and being an amoral piece of shit that would happily grind up children if there were no consequences and it would earn them 1% more profit.

No but I think the point being made is that people that have been clinging to Win 10 as a refuge from the crapfest that Win 11 is are going to start running into significant problems soon. Increasingly you’re not going to be able to get software for Windows 10. A lot of people are opting to migrate to Linux rather than going from Win 10 to Win 11, and as the holdouts on 10 are increasingly corned some amount of them will make the same decision.

Ah cool, thanks for looking all that up. I knew Proton pre-dated Steam Deck, I just wasn’t sure exactly where in the timeline it fit between the original Steam Machine launch and the release of the Steam Deck.

It’s kind of a shame that Steam Machine failed, but in many ways it was a little too ahead of its time and its failure brought us to the Steam Deck which is a much more sensible approach.

Ultimately none of this would have existed without Wine and ironically the Microsoft app store (or whatever they’re calling it these days). The threat of MS getting a stranglehold on program distribution on Windows the way Apple does on OS X and iOS was enough to spur Valve into putting significant effort into making Linux a viable gaming platform, something we’re all benefitting from greatly.

People seem to be downplaying somewhat how significant an achievement this is for Linux. The thing is, for most programs you can find alternatives because the point isn’t the program it’s what you do with it. People don’t use Photoshop because they enjoy Photoshop, they do it because they want to create something, which means if you can create that same thing using a different program then you don’t need Photoshop. On the other hand games are an experience. The point is the game. Sure you can play a different game, but that’s not an Apples to Apples thing as the experience however similar isn’t the same. That means games are uniquely placed as a roadblock for migrating away from a platform, something consoles with their exclusive releases have known for a long time. Giving people the option to play the exact same game under Linux as they can under Windows is massive because there really isn’t any other way to solve that problem.

Couple technical nitpicks.

First it’s debatable if Proton existed long before Steam Deck. I’m not sure the exact timeline but I think it was created as part of the Steam Box effort which wasn’t all that long ago. On the other hand though Wine which Proton is built on top of most certainly has existed for a very long time before either the Steam Deck or even Proton (I have fond memories of LAN gaming with it back when Diablo 2 was new).

Second Proton doesn’t enable ARM (at least by itself) so that claim is a little misleading. There is a project to realtime translate x86 instructions into ARM but that project (Box86) although it fulfills a similar role and could be used in conjunction with Proton isn’t actually Proton. Using Proton by itself will not enable you to play x86/Windows games on ARM.

Lastly Proton is kind of irrelevant to the whole Linux vs BSD thing. Technically what enables that is that both implement POSIX standards plus use mostly the same libraries, frameworks (like Vulkan), and applications. Yes running Proton on BSD will let you game on BSD but that isn’t really a result of Proton doing the work so much as it’s a side effect of the fact you can run Proton on BSD in the first place. Additionally while there are technical and philosophical reasons why the distinction between Linux and BSD is important, practically speaking they’re the same thing these days. OpenBSD isn’t that much more different from a Linux distro as one Linux distro is from another.

Yes, but actually no. In the strictest sense that is true in that it isn’t “officially” settled typically for a day or two. However, the reason why businesses are willing to accept credit card transactions is that there’s a soft approval that happens pretty much instantly and weeds out nearly every non-fraud instance of non-payment. Once that soft approval comes back (which remember happens within a second or two) the retailer can be confident that the card is tied to a valid account, that has a large enough balance to cover the transaction, and barring fraud dispute it will go through and they’ll get paid. If something were to go wrong in that process there’s also banks and the CC processor that the business could go after in court to get their money.

In contrast crypto takes several minutes to go through if not significantly longer, and if something goes wrong in that process there’s no legal recourse of any kind. If a business were to allow product to leave their store prior to that minute+ approval process and it fails, they’re screwed, they just have to eat that cost.

Look into the Privacy app (kind of a terrible name honestly). It’s effectively a Paypal type system but one that issues CC numbers for each vendor or transaction and allows you to easily audit and manage them. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than Paypal.

The fundamental flaw with all current crypto is that it’s far too volatile to use as a currency. The only reasonable use for it at the moment is as a high risk commodity which is the vast overwhelming majority of what we see. Any so called “currency” that regularly sees price swings of multiple percentage points in a day isn’t actually a currency and is unsuitable to be used as one.

Adding to this is the problem of transaction times. Actual payment systems typically have transaction times of less than a second, occasionally a second or two. Bitcoin in contrast can take multiple minutes, sometimes hours or even days to confirm a transaction. There’s no way for Valve to accept and then immediately convert Crypto to USD. The process would inherently involve at least two transactions, one to transfer the crypto to Valves wallet, then a second to transfer from Valves wallet to the exchanges wallet, and only then could Valve attempt to sell that crypto. The financial uncertainty involved in all of that is entirely unacceptable for a business.

At this moment there is only one potentially viable way of approaching this and it’s government regulation of some kind. Either government needs to regulate that payment processors get no say in the contents of customers business, or else they need to regulate the adoption of a neutral digital payment system. One possible example of what that could look like would be the GNU Taler system which might eventually become a payment system in Switzerland but isn’t yet.

Get the LibRedirect extension. It can send you to alternate mirrors of the same info not just for reddit but a bunch of other corporate data harvesting operations pretending to be websites.

In terms of the open source community Microsoft has been significantly less sketchy than usual for about a decade now. For those of us that are old enough to remember the halloween files it’s hard to let go of that paranoia, particularly with the sketchy shit MS has been doing with their proprietary stuff lately, but near as I can tell they’ve been above board on their open source stuff.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say blindly trust them at this point, but I wouldn’t just assume with no evidence at all that there has to be something nefarious going on either.