AegirLeet

Maybe this is a new strategy to scare people into finally locking down their old, unused AWS accounts. It sure worked for me!

The real hegemony is the Blink hegemony. Google (an advertising company) can pretty much unilaterally dictate web standards. A terrible state of affairs for the web. That's the real issue and using another Chrome reskin is never going to fix it.

At some point, Backblaze just silently stopped backing up my encrypted (VeraCrypt) drives. Just stopped working without any announcement, warning or notification. After lots of troubleshooting and googling I found out that this was intentional from some random reddit thread. I stopped using their backup service after that.

YT decided to build their site on top of the world wide web; a technological foundation that inherently gives users a lot of control. If I decide that I don't want to render some specific HTML element, then I'm not going to render it. If I decide that I don't want to execute some JS, then I'm not going to execute it. That's fundamentally how the WWW functions. So I simply instruct my browser to not display things that annoy me, such as ads. This is "working as intended".

YT didn't have to build their platform on the web. Nobody forced them to. They could avoid all of these issues by setting up a dedicated client application using a custom protocol with ads already baked into the video stream, for example.

I don't feel like I have an intrinsic right to any content on YT. But I do feel like I have an intrinsic right to use the web the way it's supposed to be used. Which, of course, includes simply ignoring any HTML, CSS, JS or other bits that I don't like. I'm free to send whatever HTTP requests I want to YT, YT is free to respond with whatever they want and I'm free to do whatever I want with their responses. That's just how it is.

If YT doesn't like that... again, nobody is forcing them to use the WWW. They are free to use some locked down technology that better fits their specific needs.

Claiming that I am morally obligated to look at ads on YT is like claiming that I'm morally obligated to look at ads in a print magazine. I hold the magazine in my hands. I flip the pages. I guide my eyes towards the things I want to look at and away from the things I don't want to look at. This is not a surprise to anyone, it's just how reading a magazine works. Same thing with YT ads and the WWW.

The upside of starting with Consider Phlebas is that the story doesn't really take place within the Culture. It provides you with an outside perspective. It also sets up some things that are referenced in later books.

The downside is that it's quite a bit different from (and imo a bit worse than) the other books and could mislead you about what the series is like - or even turn you off entirely.

If you're already committed to reading the entire series, I'd start with Consider Phlebas. If you're unsure, start with The Player of Games.

If (under our current economic system) it is impossible to run generally useful services like that without subjecting their users to advertisements, then clearly, there's something wrong with the economic system itself and we should start investigating alternatives.

Deployment is generally pretty easy, but there's still a lot of stuff an all-in-one cloud product could add:

  * Automatic Scaling
  * Additional processes like queue workers, crons, ...
  * Managing rollouts and rollbacks
  * Managed infra (database, cache, ...)
  * Multiple environments
  * Persistent storage
  * Backups
  * Monitoring and health checks
  * Logging and tracing
  * Software updates for the underlying server(s)
  * CDN
  * Failover and redundancy

Just to name a few.

Laravel Cloud is probably going to provide all of that out of the box. I think that could be attractive for a lot of people.

Really? WoW used to work just fine back in the day (~2010). Is that no longer the case?

Almost nothing in that article is true for modern versions of PHP. It's definitely obsolete.

Turns out ads aren't just annoying little acts of psychological terrorism that eat up a lot of bandwidth and computing power, they are also the #1 vector for spreading scams and malware on the web.

In other words: If you're trying to improve your security posture, installing an ad-blocker is one of the best things you can do. If you have less tech-savvy friends and relatives, I would strongly recommend setting up uBlock Origin for them.

Here's a handful:

- 7f395b5ddfe43a54

- 7f395ca09bfa3a54

- 7f395d8afaf73a54

- 7f395f075e33690d

- 7f396102afef35fd

If the current economic system doesn't allow for a web where I can watch cat videos for free without being psychologically terrorized by megacorps, then perhaps the economic system is the problem.

Looks nice, but I can't register because Cloudflare hates Firefox users.

(I was able to register an account using Chrome)