That's (almost) incompatible with E2E encryption. You could do it via "social proof" or server-side secure enclaves and pins, but that's about it.

If you turn off history, you get zero videos on your home screen. This is not because the history is needed to generate the suggestions, because the blank home only started a few years ago.

I used to never subscribe to any channels, I just got reasonable feed of suggestions based off of whatever I happened to search for explicitly or if I got there by clicking a link, or by what I chose to click on even if the list starts out totally random, except of course it never was totally random because they still have ip address and other fingerprnting signals.

After they blaked out the home screen and started showing the "you're not logged in, go here to fix this error", I subscribed to a bunch of channels to provide data for generating a feed. They still don't provide any. You can take extra clicks (which is agonizing on the Roku since it just doesn't react well and misses button presses all the time) to get to the subscriptions page, which will show recent uploads exactly from those channels and no others.

I also still get several other forms of ads in the form of the embedded/native ads and the irrelevant suggestions that come from youtube's interests instead of my own, like shorts. I also still get ads simply because I don't get to use my own account all the time. When you watch youtube anywhere but your own laptop by yourself, you are at the whims of someone else's account and some other platforms app limitations.

And even on your own machine, I absolutely resent having to tie my viewing history to my identity and have someone else log all of that. So there is reason to intentionally use no account even if you otherwise have no problem paying to support not only the content producers but even the delivery system.

Why can't I disable shorts? There is no amount I can pay to hide all shorts, but I can have it for free i=on a pc with a tampermonkey or ublock script. But that only helps on a pc. I watch mostly on a TV and I have no ability to hack the roku app. Maybe if I switch to a google tv I could use newpipe or something.

Paying for premium does not make youtube good. It does not resolve much of anything. It is not remotely the touche this smarmy comment attempts to suggest.

Paying for premium takes youtube from being like pulling out 10 of your fingernails to only pulling out 8 of your fingernails.

That 2of10 fingernals relief and for the sake of the creators, that's the only reason I still pay for premium.

madness my droogys, the fully unhinged variety popping up like mushrooms, wheeeeee! muckers and zombies olly olly oxen freeeee!, ready or not, here they come. mix in autonomous drones and robots, and well, some days are going to be rough

Out of curiosity, what's the motivation for Bitcoin-Core? Is it comparing mempool txs?

It opens you up to legal risk for knowingly infringing patents. If possible you never should look at a patent.

Also, the privacy and the finding are in direct opposition to each-other, which isn’t always a comfortable system dynamic.

On the one hand, a simple hash of ESSIDs near you, if you take all of them, is highly unlikely to ever match - radio strength varies and you’ll see stuff on the edges of your device pop in and out if you look at radio traces. So you need to limit the list.

However, if you limit the list, to say 3 ESSIDs, you’re well into rainbow table attack territory - if there are 100mm WiFi access points in the world, then you need 100mm^3 hashes - doable - and if you rough geoloc them first so that you’re not hashing out stuff more than a mile away from other APs, you’re down to “very manageable”.

At the same time, the question of “which 3” means that it’s going to be hard to ever get the same list, or at least you’re not in the one 9s territory of loc matching.

To do this without some sort of either trusted server or some sort of group key sharing (and therefore a totally different threat model) you’ll need to get some sort of location-aware hashing together, and I think also you’ll want to be able to get some sort of data from the local APs that’s not easily accessible elsewhere. Not sure what that is off the top of my head, but I bet there’s something in the WPS spec that you could hang off of.

So if you had the ability to be like “my hash puts me somewhere within this square (area) and only those of us here know that the secret salt for this minute is XXX” then I think you’d get back to the original goals of the project.

I bet that’s doable! Looking forward to v2

This guy has a good write up on the topic