For those who are paywalled https://web.archive.org/web/20240927171841/https://theintercept.com/2024/09/27/google-israel-defense-tech-conference/

I don’t know… maybe it is because I am consuming most of my YT content on desktop and that carries over to my android experience. As a matter of fact I don’t consume shorts on Android and that may be the difference. My feed on desktop is all computer stuff, CBC stuff, occasional Marvel stuff, and ASMR stuff, and half of that I don’t watch.

I really feel sorry for you if that is what your Android Experience is. I would suggest GrayJay or New Pipe to get out of the Algorithm then. I could remember back about 5 years ago when I started getting full episodes as an ad, of absolute religious trash, and I am talking when I reported them the channel was banned in a single report trash, at a time when I, due to illness, that I would listen to while soaking in the tub with a lift to get my sick ass in an out, and they would put 45 minute shows as ads. I would get so angry but its a long ad, so it wasn’t worth me getting out of the bath to skip it, and 15 minutes later of “Kill the HOMO-Sexuals” and “that current bad thing happened because we voted in those godless communists and socialists… why we should just hang them and save the country! A-MEN!!!” and I was using up power on my bath lift to get my sopping wet butt up and report their ass. After the 5th report I temporarily moved to New Pipe and stuck to desktop where I got full episodes as ads but not THOSE episodes.

YouTube can really fuck themselves over when they sell contra-ads on leftist, or any media, and now they are reaping the whirlwind with the ad platform and the search platform in the middle of Antitrust right now.

Used to do tech support for Vivaldi on Reddit before I left. It is a highly configurable chromium based browser that does everything it can to secure and take most of Google out of the browser. It has its own profile system and sync servers before it was enforced, blocks Ads and Tracking outside of the Manifest system, and is highly configurable with its own per profile settings, and has a user editable theming system. It’s adblock system isn’t uBlock level yet but it can use many of the same blocklists and blocks ads on the intake so similar to how uBlock does it now. It has a Mail, RSS, Mastodon Client, and Calendar. It has also done a codebase rewrite of the Chromium engine to optimize its performance. They literally also follow their previous commitments they made during the days of Opera where they have patents, but only to protect themselves and not to restrain others from using them. Back when they were making Opera they and the Mozilla Foundation used to send each other cake at major releases because they were both strong web standards organizations and shared patents at no charge.

And the thing is it is an Iterative release. They have about 50 people, and only 30 are devs. They have browsers on Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android, and Windows. They release more basic versions of the product and grow them then building an in depth product.

So why not go Open Source. Their size. Any company could take their large amounts of work, build on it and release it before they have time to react and it would mean an almost instant loss of control. They are pro-federation, anti crypto, E2EE Sync, and despite what the Brave Employee says on PrivacyTests.org, highly (but not purely) privacy focused browser.

Understanding that the browser is based on an Open Source Browser, and uses Web Standards, and you distribute freely, then why not just be Open Source? Many Open Source Advocates have accepted it as Open Source Adjacent and have even become a release on some less strict Open Source people. So why not? Their CEO answered this that it is basically a function of their size and the large amounts of custom code that they have had to make to the browser. If they went Open Source, which they discussed and tried to find a way they could, but any of the MUCH larger teams could just take their product whole cloth, put a minimal amount of work in and have a better browser and they would be shortly out of business.

For those who are all business is bad, remember that here is a group of people who through several companies and one under attack from Microsoft, managed to survive the original browser wars while supporting Open Source Browsers and Projects. The one bad thing you can say is that they originally planned to go up against Google and Chrome’s Manifest v3, but they couldn’t and couldn’t find co-operation from other Chromium Based browsers once they saw the exact form Manifest v3 was going to take. Outside of that they are working to get their ad block tech up to a near uBlock version, but they won’t just do to uBlock what they fear could be done to themselves if they were Open Source.

TL;DR It is a free browser that has a very friendly set up process so if you want to see the features, download it and install it. If you are on Mobile I will warn you they are still having UX/UI design issues there.

I don’t get allot of that, possibly because I have History turned off and refuse to turn it back on.

• I vastly avoid Right Wing content, and most of what I do encounter is like old school Republican, reeeally old school Republican. They are as pissed at the Right Wing’s take over by the Alt-Right(and worse)
• YouTube has games?!?
• The shorts content I get is mostly computer content and news, some branding because I have entered contests, and that is it. I have seen 1 short that was even approaching jailbaity and it was an add for a coming of age movie.
• It has been literally over a year since I used Google to find a video (well except for a tech support video I keep loosing the link to that I use to help people with installing Windows 11 Locally) and I have been using Startpage which anonymizes Google results.

If you disabling your Ad ID and turning off your history and you still get all that BS I would be looking for an Exit Strategy to.

Food is food. Do what you want to do to your food because you are eating it. Other people aren’t eating it so they don’t get a say. If most people saw what the original pizzas were they wouldn’t recognize them and some wouldn’t like them, including modern Italians.

Tabasco, in my opinion, is just like eating a pizza with peppers or a bunch of pepper flakes on it, or as I sometimes do, ground cayenne pepper.

I find that people who come from the old days of linux will often respond “you have to use terminal”, or “learn the operating system”, or even balk at people saying you can just use the GUI Interface/Desktop Environments. And then when you get help from expirienced users you get allot of terminal commands, which makes people think “I can’t use Linux without learning the terminal first”. In actuality it is just easier to show a person a command and ask for the results than it is to walk a person through getting the same info otherwise.

“OK, which Desktop Environment are you using?”.

“Desktop what?”.

“Which version of OS did you download and install?”.

“Cinnamon.”.

“X or Wayland?”.

“What’s a Wayland?”.

“OK, X. Is your system up to date and which kernel are you running?”.

…and so on. It is faster to just help working in the terminal. The Desktop Environments are fairly far along and most that I have worked with you could get by completely in the Desktop and not touch the terminal.

I would suggest Linux Mint, but for now I would stick to the non latest version of 21.3 as they bit off ALLOT in 22 and while it works for allot of people there are driver bugs they inherited from Ubuntu and have not implemented the fix for yet and allot of other pains in the toukus so if you want a version with the minimum of troubleshooting and stable Desktop Environments I would stick to 21.3 (If I had any sense I would be switching back to it from 22 myself).

If you want another option it would be Ubuntu and its Different Desktop ‘Spins’ to see which you like the most. Some people prefer to start off on Fedora and I am told it has a good DE, or some people recommend PopOS which had its own spin on a DE but they have let development lag on it as they developed their Cosmic Desktop for the Wayland project (the project that is superseding the X.org project for making windows).

Which ever you choose, good luck. I am in the same boat and I am trying to learn what I can before it is too late.

While people who know me would think that it is Bioshock 2 for a ton of issues, but that is mostly because it is automatically compared to Bioshock, ARK: Survival Evolved for its issues but I have 9k hours in it and growing so I can’t say that, or the horribly disappointing Baldur’s Gate after I finally got to play it years after and it kept giving me migraines. No. The worst game I ever played was also one of the most beautiful and beautifully animated arcade games, Dragons Quest. You had to match your movements to certain flashes on the TV and between input lag, multiple inputs reading as rejections, and frequently flaky controls the game was impossible for all but the most rich to get past the first 2 or three prompts. I on occasion saw a player who had pumped a couple of hundred of dollars into the machine to figure out its quirks and know when it was broken and they actually got somewhere. I never did. The same happened for the less successful Space Quest which was the same machine with a new cabinet, broadly speaking.