TootSweet

Yesterday, I started watching a video on YouTube but closed out of my browser (Firefox) only a few minutes into the video.

I've got my Firefox set to delete all cookies, history, form data, etc on every close. (Pretty much everything but bookmarks.) The image on this post is a screenshot of my relevant settings.

Today, after having exited my browser and fully shut down my computer for a while, I remembered the video and decided to continue watching it.

In Firefox, I searched for the video (I used the search term "gnu taler" -- something worth looking into especially for folks interested in this particular Lemmy community by the way). In the search results, the video I was searching for showed the red bar at the bottom indicating I'd watched only the first few minutes of it.

Which seems weird given that I'd cleared all my browser data since I watched the first few minutes.

So I did some experimentation. I closed my browser completely again and opened it back up, searched in YouTube, and it still had the indicator. I updated to the latest version of Firefox in the Arch package repository. Same indicator. I tried the same in Chromium (which I've also got set to delete all browser data on close). Still the indicator. I installed Tor Browser Bundle (specifically torbrowser-launcher on Arch Linux), changed none of the default settings at all, and searched in YouTube. The indicator is present. In Tor Browser Bundle.

W

T

F

?

Anybody have any idea how that's possible?

My only guesses are:

• That search is so niche as to be literally unique (which if true makes me sad -- I really hope GNU Taler takes off and becomes widespread) and YouTube is using that to identify me.
• YouTube doesn't know where I left off at all. Not even my browser knows (because if it was my browser keeping track, it wouldn't persist between browsers). It's something else on my system that my browsers depend on or tap into.

The only other pieces of relevant info I can think to share:

• There's another video (also about GNU Taler) that I watched all the way through the same day that I started the video this post is about. It doesn't show any indicator.
• I tried searching on my phone's browser. No indicator. But then I'm not sure my phone ever shows indicators. I haven't tried this on any other devices on my network or anything.
• I still haven't watched the video in question. Heh.

Thanks in advance for any insight you might have.

Edit: Sorry for neglecting to mention previously that at no point during any of the above did I log in to YouTube. And the "Sign in" button was visible at the top of the page indicating I wasn't logged in. Since multiple people asked, I figured I should edit my OP with that info.

Edit2: Two more things to mention. I think some folks are thinking I copied the link and pasted it between browsers during the above test or something? The only reason the timestamp is included in the link I posted above is because when I copied it into this post, I didn't think to remove the timestamp. But I didn't do anything like copying the link from the search results in one browser and then paste the link into TBB or anything. In each separate browser, immediately after opening the browser, I went to YouTube (by typing "youtube.com" into the address bar) and put "gnu taler" into the search bar and hit enter. And in each browser, YouTube somehow remembered where I'd left off in a whole different browser -- with a different IP address in the case of the switch from Chromium to TBB. And no urls were copied between browsers in any of the above.

The other thing to mention. Changing my search term to the full title of the video ("Building an Open Source Payment System - Sebastian Javier Marchano, Taler System" sans quotes) gives the relevant video as the top search result, but no "left off" indicator. And I'm in the Firefox in which I first noticed it had remembered.

Oh, actually, one more thing to mention. After posting this, I continued watching. I'm probably about 3/4 done with it now. But I closed my browser again before completing it, reopened my browser, and searched "gnu taler". It gives the indicator, but the position of the indicator is roughly (possibly exactly) where it was when I first noticed it had remembered. Not where I left off after watching to roughly the 3/4 mark.

Edit3: Wow! Ok. I'm 99% sure folks smarter than me have hit upon what's going on here. Thanks in particular to Tony N and Chozo for the right answer. It looks like YouTube has a feature where, depending on your search terms, it may automatically skip you a certain ways into the video. (Like "oh, you searched for 'gnu taler'? Well, in this video result, this bit in the middle is the part that's relevant to your search terms, so we'll just start you such-and-such-many seconds into the video.") The red bar doesn't mean "you've watched this" at all. And YouTube isn't "remembering me" between browsers. It's just consistently (as long as I use the specific search terms "gnu taler") suggesting that I start that video 273 seconds in rather than from the beginning. And anyone who searches that exact search term should get similar results... unless they're on mobile for some weird reason? That paired with the coincidence that I'm pretty sure I just happened to have stopped the video yesterday right about at the same place where YouTube recommends you start had me very confused. Whatever the case, I'm satisfied this must be the right answer. Thanks again, ya'll!

This was on the Netflix login page until pretty recently. I can't be the only one who thought it was unintentionally... suggestive, right?

Please tell me I'm not the only one still obsessed with these things.

Edit: Woah. I am the only one still obsessed with Animutations, aren't I? They're mine! All mine!

Over-the-counter diphenhydramine, for instance, at least in my country, says adults can take "1 to 2 tablets every 4 to 6 hours."

If you decide "my symptoms aren't so bad; I'll just take one" and then two hours later your symptoms are still bad (or worse), is it safe to take a second tab then? And if you do, should you wait until "4 to 6 hours" after taking the first tablet or the second to take an additional tablet? Does it depend on the drug? (Maybe it's fine for diphenhydramine but not for ibuprophen?)

I'd imagine blood levels of any particular drug tend to quickly spike and then exponentially decay back to undetectable levels. If you take two tabs, I'd imagine that graph is just twice as tall. If you wait a couple of hours between tabs, it's got two spikes and the second is a little higher than the first (but not as high as the two-tabs-at-the-same-time spike.)

If the concern is total concentration of drug in the bloodstream at any one point, a second tab a couple hours later is less of a concern than two tabs at the same time. If the concern is total area under the curve, then probably there's no difference between two tabs at the same time and a couple of hours between. If the concern is total time spent with a blood concentration of such-and-such, I could see there being more concern with taking a second tab just a couple of hours after the first.

And maybe there are other effects that I'm not aware of. Maybe if the blood concentration kicks up to two-tabs-at-once levels, the liver kicks into high gear, clearing the drug out quicker, but if you go a couple of hours between tabs, the liver neve kicks into high gear or some such.

And maybe this question hasn't even been well studied and maybe there's not really any good answer. But if there is, I'm curious.

I've got a pretty severe sensitivity to -- of all things -- sugar. (I know, "sugar" isn't very precise, but I'm pretty sure it's either glucose, fructose, or sucrose.) I virtually never eat anything with added sugar or anything with any significant amount of natural sugar. And I've eaten that way for like 20 years now. I'm practically blind to half the produce department (any "sweet" fruits like apples, pears, cherries, grapes, oranges, etc) at the grocery store, let alone the candy isle.

This is a weird one.

I'm running Arch Linux ARM on a Raspberry Pi 4 with Sway if any of that matters. (I've also got fcitx enabled if that helps any.)

The issue I'm running into is that randomly Firefox will freeze while I'm typing. Like, while I've got the address bar or some text area in the page focused and I'm typing something into it. This frequently happens multiple times a day even with the coping strategy I use. (See below.)

It never freezes that I've noticed when I'm doing something other than typing into a text input or textbox or address bar. (I don't recall ever seeing it freeze while I was typing into a password input, but I wouldn't say that's reason to think the issue is limited to not password boxes.)

It will usually freeze in the middle of a word somewhere. I type pretty fast. But it'll freeze for instance 3 letters into a 7 letter word which is the third word I've typed into the box or some such. (Or sometimes it'll freeze on the first letter. Or sometimes it'll freeze two paragraphs in.)

When it freezes, I usually open a shell and ps aux | grep firefox to get the PID of the parent Firefox process and then kill $pid to kill Firefox. I don't usually have to use -9 or anything. But just closing the window (with a super+shift+q) doesn't do the trick.

Mostly how I deal with this is to vi /tmp/t, type a post, and then wl-copy < /tmp/t so I can paste the post into Lemmy or whatever. When typing a url, I usually just risk a freeze since it usually doesn't take a lot of keystrokes to load the url I'm going for. ("lemmy.wo", and then enter to accept the type-ahead suggestion, for instance.) I think basically every keystroke has a small-ish chance of causing a freeze, so something that only takes 10 keystrokes is low-enough risk to go for it. But a post like what I'm posting here would be almost guaranteed to freeze before I finished composing it.

I'm posting here in the Firefox community because I haven't seen this happen with any application other than Firefox. (Though to be fair, I rarely use any graphical applications on this Raspberry Pi other than Firefox, st, and OpenSCAD on this Raspberry Pi 4. I used to use Cura occasionally on this machine occasionally as well. Chromium is way too resource hungry to try to use as a daily driver on a Raspberry Pi 4. I'm not sure I even have it installed right now.) I suppose this could be more of a GTK issue or Sway issue than a Firefox issue, but again it seems like it only happens with Firefox.

And I realize this is a weird enough issue that it might be pretty difficult to diagnose.

I've tried running Firefox from a terminal emulator and reproducing the issue to see if there's any outut to STDOUT/STDERR when it reproduces the issue, but ther'es no useful output. I thought to try strace-ing Firefox, but strac-ing Firefox gives a veritable Niagara Falls of output when nothing's happening, so it seems pretty untenable to try to comb through that to get anything useful.

Any ideas a) what the issue might possibly be or b) how I might go about trying to get a diagnosis? This has been an issue on this particular machine (and only this particular machine, though I haven't tried Firefox on other Raspberry Pis) for probably over a year now. I've been alternately trying to debug it and just ignoring it. I figured maybe it's finally time to see if anyone else has any ideas.

Thanks in advance!

Is it just me or is passing off things that aren't FOSS as FOSS a much bigger thing lately than it was previously.

Don't get me wrong. I remember Microsoft's "shared source" thing from back in the day. So I know it's not a new thing per se. But it still seems like it's suddenly a bigger problem than it was previously.

LLaMa, the large language model, is billed by Meta as "Open Source", but isn't.

I just learned today about "Grayjay," a video streaming service client app created by Louis Rossmann. Various aticles out there are billing it as "Open Source" or "FOSS". It's not. Grayjay's license doesn't allow commercial redistribution or derivative works. Its source code is available to the general public, but that's far from sufficient to qualify as "Open Source." (That article even claims "GrayJay is an open-source app, which means that users are free to alter it to meet their specific needs," but Grayjay's license grants no license to create modified versions at all.) FUTO, the parent project of Grayjay pledges on its site that "All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open-source or develop a plan to eventually become so." I hope that means that they'll be making Grayjay properly Open Source at some point. (Maybe once it's sufficiently mature/tested?) But I worry that they're just conflating "source available" and "Open Source."

I've also seen some sentiment around that "whatever, doesn't matter if it doesn't match the OSI's definition of Open Source. Source available is just as good and OSI doesn't get a monopoly on the term 'Open Source' anyway and you're being pedantic for refusing to use the term 'Open Source' for this program that won't let you use it commercially or make modifications."

It just makes me nervous. I don't want to see these terms muddied. If that ultimately happens and these terms end up not really being meaningful/helpful, maybe the next best thing is to only speak in terms of concrete license names. We all know the GPL, MIT, BSD, Apache, Mozilla, etc kind of licenses are unambiguously FOSS licenses in the strictest sense of the term. If a piece of software is under something that doesn't have a specific name, then the best we'd be able to do is just read it and see if it matches the OSI definition or Free Software definition.

Until then, I guess I'll keep doing my best to tell folks when something's called FOSS that isn't FOSS. I'm not sure what else to do about this issue, really.

People remember the Didney Worl meme template, right?

This post is somewhat inspired by a recent post in this same community called "Is anyone else having trouble giving up Reddit due to content?"

I imagine "Reddit" will be a common answer. (And it's one of my answers.)

Another of my answers is "Hasbro." First Wizards of the Coast (a Hasbro subsidiary) tried to revoke an irrevokable license and screw over basically all 3rd-party publishers of D&D content, then they sent literal mercinaries to threaten one of their customers over an order mixup that wasn't even the customer's fault. D&D: Honor Among Thieves and the latest Transformers look really good, but those are within the scope of my boycott, so I won't be seeing those any time soon.

Third, Microsoft. (Apple too, but then I've never bought any Apple devices in my life, so it hardly qualifies as a boycott.) Just because of their penchant for using devices I own against me in every way they can imagine. And for really predatory business practices.

One boycott that I've ended was a boycott of Nintendo. I was pissed that they started marketing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (though it didn't have a name at the time) before the WiiU came out, prompting me to be an early adopter of the WiiU, and then when they actually released BotW, they dual-released it on WiiU and Switch. I slightly eased my boycott when the unpatchable Fusee Gilee vulnerability for the first batch of Switches was discovered. I wanted to get one of the ones I could hack and run homebrew on before they came out with a model that lacked the vulnerability.