DAC_Protogen

Honestly… YouTube Premium is just wasted money. It’s a difficult situation. You can watch YouTube for free and without ads already, by simply using a decent browser like Firefox and installing the uBlock Origin addon to block the ads. (Google is fighting adblockers and anything based on Chrome, so 90% of browsers out there will limit their functionality in the future, btw. Use Firefox or something based on it to keep at least a bit of your privacy and freedom of choice.) And you can even automatically skip the sponsorship messages in videos with Sponsorblock. But if you think you would support the content creators with YouTube Premium, think again. You’re mostly paying Google for their servers / platform. A platform that treats its content creators pretty bad, finds all kinds of ways to not pay them / reasons to demonetize their videos to grab 100% of the ad income and has become more and more privacy invasive and aggressive with ads over the years towards its users. And in terms of music, YouTube doesn’t license every single song individually from the musician. They just pay a royalty towards huge labels and companies like Sony, which in turn keep the absolutely most part of that for themselves instead of paying the artists. Yes, by watching videos for free with adblockers, content creators and YouTube aren’t being paid and in a way you are part of a problem. But consider this: Any subscription based content service like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Premium starts by paying its content creators at least a bit of money, but uses bait & switch tactics to lower that payment per stream more and more over time. Once they have all the creators, music / content and viewers comfortably on board, they start grabbing the money for themselves. It’s a systemic issue with streaming platforms in general and always the short end of the stick for the very people who create the content that makes the platform successful and useful in the first place. And if you feel guilty for cutting off the often self-proclaimed “content creators”… YouTube has mechanisms in place to directly support them (while taking a cut for YouTube), like “super chats” and “super stickers” and most of them these days have a Patreon account for direct monetary support and sponsorships going on. But yes, only those content creators who actually offer quality content will benefit from these things, what about all the others, you may ask. Well, let’s be brutally honest. A whole lot of content offered on YouTube is bullshit. It’s either copying successful people’s video style, low-cost, low effort, low quality beginners stuff, clickbait, disinformation, mentally unhealthy nonsense, copyright infringing stuff, and these days even AI generated crap with no value. If all of that would stop being made because no money is to be made on the platform, we wouldn’t miss out on anything. True quality will always be supported directly by fans and sponsors. And as harsh as it sounds… the rest is obsolete and may fall victim to natural selection. Might even raise the quality of content on the platform overall. Feel free to pay for YouTube Premium, if it makes you feel better. But know that absolutely most of it will only benefit Google. Personally, I don’t have the money to pay like 130 bucks a year just to feel like a good person. And those aggressive ads are bad for mental health and sometimes are a vehicle for malware, aside from the technology behind them absolutely shredding your privacy. I’m having none of that. I’ll watch that stuff with adblockers as long as it works, and if that stops working some day, I’ll spend my time with something better, maybe going outside and touching grass or something.

There already are a few: https://itsfoss.com/immutable-linux-distros/ and Ubuntu seems to work towards an immutable future as well, I think it's where most distros well be in a few years. The transition needs time though.

There, I fixed it.

Here, you deserve internet points for this!

Damn, Roombas are becoming confusingly attractive these days!

It was really weird for me to have some honest talks with my parents once I was well into adulthood. It took me way too long to realize they are people with their own problems to solve and a life and preferences, a personal history and all that. It's weird how you tend to see your parents differently from other people until they deem you old enough to open up.

Fedora Silverblue. But since Fedora aims to include telemetry (although in a reasonable way) by version 40, I'll switch soon to something else. I feel it might be time to give BSD an honest attempt.

If you want a boring, pretty much dead monoculture of a patch of grass, you gotta work for it. ;) I think that real nature, including useful plants for bees and other critters have much more value. Children should play on lush meadows with flowers and interesting insects to discover, instead of a mentally and visually dull organic carpet, that is merely a facade for wannabe-perfection.

Blowing the seeds off of dandelion flowers into the wind :)

Better - I've got it from gog.com on PC ;)

GLaDOS demands to be on the list, or you won't receive cake.

Oh my. I can't upvote this hard enough. Star Wars Episode I: Racer was absolutely amazing!