Vlyn

You underestimate how addicted people are to YouTube. There is no alternative to it.

Twitch is streaming focused, the vods absolutely suck. Kick? Same.

What else is there? TikTok? Instagram? Neither of which provide long high quality videos.

After all we are talking about YouTube literally blocking everyone and putting up a banner: $5 a month or you're out of luck. If someone already happily pays $18 a month for Netflix, what is 5 bucks?

Collapse what exactly? It would actually reduce strain on their servers and provide a better experience for paying users. Obviously they won't do it because there's a ton of users who watch ads (think of the average guy who plays YouTube on their phone or TV, with zero adblocking).

The US is only there because Taiwan wants them there. If they have an election and elect a party who is against US involvement they can mostly just kick them out. But right now they are pro US.

Dude, they have their fucking chip factories rigged to self-destruct in case China invades. They don't trust China even a tiny bit, peaceful solution my ass.

Just the way I described, I'm a software developer, it would be easy as hell.

Your browser requests the video, YouTube decides you have to watch an ad. The ad has 15 seconds unskipable. So the easiest thing they could do is not send you video data for 14 seconds (add a spare second for buffering to not piss off users who do watch ads).

Doesn't matter if you call some endpoint, load the ad data, whatever. You're not receiving any video for a while, which would piss people off enough to leave.

I still hold the opinion that they could absolutely block you out. I use uBlock Origin and there was actually a time where I got blocked/warnings every day. Even with upgrading my plugin / refreshing all block lists.

At some point I finally gave in and grabbed YouTube Premium, not because of the ads (I'd rather stop watching than watch with ads), but because I needed their music service (Used Amazon Music before, the app sucked. Music quality was the highest out there though. Also cancelled Prime for a double whammy).

For example the moment an ad gets triggered they could just refuse to send you video data. And if the ad is an unskipable 15 seconds, block playback for 15 seconds. Done. Even if you block this, you get 15 seconds of nothing and will soon be pissed off enough to either start watching ads, buy Premium or leave (no longer costing them bandwidth).

It's not listening to actual words, that's already too complex (you'd have to parse language for that, which those low power chips can't do). It's listening for syllables, Oh-Kay-Goo-Gle or whatever. Depends on the chip and implementation of course, which is also why you get false positives when someone says something similar.

If you add more syllables to that then your phone would activate literally all the time, with tons of false positives.

Seriously, if we had low powered voice recording + voice to text you'd already have instant conversation subtitles on your phone, instant translation and so on. We simply don't have that yet, those features do exist but they are power hungry (so if you do use them say goodbye to your battery life).

Against it, Israel behaves like a Nazi state (and I say that as an Austrian). The whole situation there is ultra fucked though. Like having someone on live TV say they are okay with raping prisoners ("they deserve it"), their only problem with it is that it's not put into law that torturing and raping them is okay.

Israel wants the land for themselves, so they'll only be satisfied by killing or moving everyone away (and they are going at it like absolute bastards).

Palestinians just want to be left alone / get seen as a valid state with rights. And have secured water/food/power.

Here is the problem: Israel has done so much shit, even if they stop immediately, open borders, agree Palestine is its own country with rights, ... there are so many Palestinians out for blood who want revenge. So what will happen? Someone in Hamas lashes out, new terror act, back to square one. Hamas is useful for Israel, receive one terror act, return by bombing half a city block, it's a nice excuse.

Obviously I don't have a solution for it, but stopping to give Israel money/weapons would be a good step.

One is a bug, one is just a lawsuit that went nowhere, one is just an accusation (Google did pay a fine, but for geolocation tracking, not voice), the Amazon one is pretty bad, but again it's not for a phone!!!

Yes, if your phone assistant accidentally activates then your voice might be uploaded without you knowing. That's a fact. But you agreed to that by enabling the voice assistant (it even warns you about this).

If you switch your voice assistant off (I have) then you don't have this issue. What is so difficult to understand here?

The low powered chips really just listen to a few syllables, they can easily have false positives. That's just a technical aspect of it.

At least with my LG TV you can switch that off. It's in general settings "Standby light" :)