AegirLeet (u/AegirLeet)

AegirLeet commented on YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers 9to5google.com/2025/09/16... · Posted by u/iamflimflam1

Workaccount2 · 5 months ago

>Their business model and their belief that there’s an obligation to view ads when consuming content are not our problem.

The problem is that you feel you have an intrinsic right to the content. Like the content is a public good, and youtube shimmied it's way inbetween so it can shove ads in your face.

But that is not what the deal is. The content is made by creators explicity for youtube, and you are the one making a decision to go to youtube to view privately owned content that you have zero right to.

AegirLeet · 5 months ago

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.

AegirLeet commented on The Culture novels as a dystopia boristhebrave.com/2025/09... · Posted by u/ibobev

cplanas · 5 months ago

Not totally related, but I wanted to make a question. Iam sure this post will host quite a lot of Culture fans. With which novel should I start with The Culture? The main two candidates are Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games.

AegirLeet · 5 months ago

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.

AegirLeet commented on Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and How Microserfdom Ate the World (2015) grantland.com/hollywood-p... · Posted by u/Apocryphon

disgruntledphd2 · 10 months ago

OK great, taking what you've said as true, what's your solution?

How will one fund the server costs for newspapers, social networks and search engines?

Note that lots of people won't (or mostly can't) pay, so how does a social network work in this case?

AegirLeet · 10 months ago

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.

AegirLeet commented on Laravel has raised a $57M Series A in partnership with Accel twitter.com/taylorotwell/... · Posted by u/davidgomes

lolinder · a year ago

Yeah, this was my experience with PHP and my understanding has been that Laravel makes it even easier by solving most of the complexity of bootstrapping the application. I'd have been surprised if it were harder!

AegirLeet · a year ago

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.

AegirLeet commented on Celebrating 6 years since Valve announced Steam Play Proton for Linux gamingonlinux.com/2024/08... · Posted by u/freedomben

jack_pp · a year ago

Hearthstone mostly works. Wow doesn't

AegirLeet · a year ago

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

AegirLeet commented on Learn PHP the Right Way github.com/ggelashvili/le... · Posted by u/schlonger0009

LoganDark · 2 years ago

An article is not obsolete just because it's 12 years old. Honestly, in PHP's case, I don't think there's much you can say about it 12 years ago that isn't still true.

AegirLeet · 2 years ago

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

AegirLeet commented on Second factor SMS: Worse than its reputation ccc.de/en/updates/2024/2f... · Posted by u/F30

dools · 2 years ago

A family friend of ours recently fell victim to a phishing attack perpetrated by an attacker who paid for Google Ads for a search term like "BANKNAME login". The site was an immaculate knock off, with a replay attack in the background. She entered her 2fa code from the app on her phone but the interface rejected the code and asked her for another one. In the background, this 2nd code was actually to authorise the addition of a new "pay anyone" payee, and with that her money was gone[0].

I have accounts with 2 banks, one uses SMS 2fa and the other uses an app which generates a token. I had thought that the app was by default a better choice because of the inherent lack of security in SMS as a protcol BUT in the above attack the bank that sends the SMS would have been better because they send a different message when you're doing a transfer to a new payee than when you're logging in.

So really the ideal is not just having an app that generates a token but one that generates a specific type of token depending on what type of transaction you're performing and won't accept, for example, a login token when adding a new payee. I haven't seen any bank with that level of 2fa yet, has anyone else?

I guess perhaps passkeys make this obsolete anyway since it establishes a local physical connection to a piece of hardware.

[0] Ron Howard voice: "she eventually got it back"

AegirLeet · 2 years ago

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.

AegirLeet commented on Blocked by Cloudflare jrhawley.ca/2023/08/07/bl... · Posted by u/jrhawley

adammartinetti · 3 years ago

Thanks for the examples! Would you be able to share browser and extension information with me? If you don't want to share publicly I've dropped my email in this thread.

AegirLeet · 3 years ago

https://pastebin.com/79bBdBhX

AegirLeet commented on Blocked by Cloudflare jrhawley.ca/2023/08/07/bl... · Posted by u/jrhawley

adammartinetti · 3 years ago

Would you be willing to share a rayID you see during one of these looping challenges? I'm the PM for Cloudflare's challenge platform, and we'd love to look into this. RayIDs contain no PII so you can share publicly, or feel free to drop me an email at amartinetti at cloudflare.

We'll also release a reporting mechanism soon, so in the future you can let us know when you see these issues and we can react to them quickly.

AegirLeet · 3 years ago

Here's a handful:

- 7f395b5ddfe43a54

- 7f395ca09bfa3a54

- 7f395d8afaf73a54

- 7f395f075e33690d

- 7f396102afef35fd

AegirLeet commented on Blocked by Cloudflare jrhawley.ca/2023/08/07/bl... · Posted by u/jrhawley

AegirLeet · 3 years ago

I've had the exact same problem for a while. Here are some of the sites I've been unable to access (found by searching for "just a moment" in my browser history):

- https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in

- https://steamdb.info/login/

- https://www.zabbix.com/forum/

- https://casetext.com/

- https://namemc.com/login

- https://spinroot.com/

- https://camelcamelcamel.com/

It's really annoying and Cloudflare is apparently doing nothing to fix it as this has been going on for months if not years. I guess Cloudflare just hates the open web and really wants to enforce Chrome/Chromium/Blink hegemony.