I no longer bother with trying to submit feedback of any kind because the “not interested in this” button appears to do absolutely nothing. The only thing that removed a channel from my recommendations and search results was clearing my cookies. The dozens of attempts to remove the content using feedback mechanisms had no effect whatsoever.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

I use a custom filter in uBlock Origin to hide the recommended sidebar in YouTube (all except the video of what’s next). Even so, there will occasionally be a video in search results with a topic that might be interesting from a channel I don’t normally watch.

I’ve learned to right click and open the link in a private browsing window so that my search results (and that one remaining sidebar thumbnail) do not become poisoned by that one channel/topic.

It’s insane that clicking on one video makes YouTube think that I’m now obsessed with that channel. And, it’s going to fixate on that for the next few weeks.

That's another thing I'm tired of: manually managing the algorithm. Using private windows, on top of downvoting and hiding stuff I only wanted to see once.

I like the "idea" of the algorithm, something that finds cool stuff for me. In practice it's just one more thing I have to keep a mental model of.

As a non-French speaker, I had assumed a native speaker would suspect that this was another instance of English taking something from French and mangling it into something worse.

I feel like Craigslist squandered its effective monopoly with online classifieds.

While I do not think that the company needed to modernize the site’s UI, it baffles me that their anti-spam tools are so rudimentary. Most searches yield irrelevant keyword-bombed results, and, such results tend to be nearly identical listings.

I had yearned for a viable Craigslist alternative for years. Sadly, Facebook Marketplace won. I don’t feel comfortable searching for anything due to the fact that Facebook will inevitably use my queries to further profile me.

It wouldn't have helped. In Australia we have Gumtree which has a UI that is just as modern as Facebook but it was still crushed. No one can compete in a space that lives on network effect.

They can, but they won’t. Microsoft is run by the most cutthroat sycophants you could possibly imagine. That money you mentioned is going to those aforementioned sycophants and shareholders.

>“The humanities are what tells you whether to build a bomb or a bridge etc.”

This sounds good, but I suspect this is only applicable on a surface level due to the fact that the decision making will involve an extensive amount of stem-based analysis.

Agreed that stem is a tool.

Tools help accomplish goals. Tools do not set goals.

I was going to make a joke about the aliens returning and presenting us with a bunch of birds.

But that got me thinking, if an intelligence goes around collecting species, how would they keep their specimen populations from evolving? How could they possibly keep so many specimens alive over the eons?

Perhaps their strategy would be to take a vast amount of genetic samples and preserve those species as data. Rather than abduct dozens of T-Rexes for some zoo exhibit, they take the genomes from tens of thousands of T-Rexes and make a population snapshot. After they depart from Earth they could clone or create as many as they want, as needed.

You may just be joking, but such a thing would be a crime against humanity.

Sounds like a forced sustainability measure to me. Nothing wrong if we're made into herbivores, except maybe the non-human herbivore populations running rampant and competing.

The competition is worse with the actual situation : cows are herbivore, pig are omnivores but fed plant-only. Chicken and fishes aren’t relevant for Alpha-gal syndrome but they’re also mostly fed by plants (and other fishes) anyway.

It may be counter intuitive at first but a vegetal diet needs less plants in total than an omnivore one.

I remember being blown away seeing one of those tape-deck to aux cable players for the first time. Plugging my late 2000’s era iPod into my early 90’s car was magical.

In my part of the United States, the state government authorized the construction of toll roads with an agreement that those roads would eventually be handed over to the state government once the projects have been paid off.

That being said, the toll roads keep expanding so that they can continue to be operated by the private company that built them.

This is an arrangement the state government is quite happy with, because they do not have to budget for the maintenance of those roads and they are able to collect taxes on the revenue collected by the toll authority. Converting those toll roads would cause a spike in expenditures and a drop in tax revenue.

Therefore, there is a perverse incentive on both sides to keep the toll roads from being converted into public ones.

I have no idea if this sort of thing was prevalent in the past, especially in the UK. But I wanted to chime in about why several toll roads that were supposed to be paid off thirty years ago are still going strong. I suspect that 500+ years ago “build toll road, hand toll road to the public” was a lot more straightforward.