Saturday, February 27
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You Idiots Edition
Tech News
- Don't connect critical industrial control systems directly to the internet you idiots. (Ars Technica)
And if you do, don't leave them in programming mode.
And if you do, when you update your résumé, just say you were in a Turkish prison for the past twelve years.
Yes, there is also a nasty vulnerability in the key management used in Logix industrial automation systems, but you have to be doing several things wrong to even get to that point.
- Turns out the water cooling doesn't help. (Tom's Hardware)
Dell gaming systems are infamously noisy.
The Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 offers a water cooling option.
It doesn't help.
Shame, because you can actually buy one, which is not true if you try to buy the individual parts.
- The Sabrent Rocket Q4 4TB is the fastest 4TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 drive on the market. (Serve the Home)
Also the cheapest.
Yes, you guessed it. But despite using QLC flash, it's not actually bad.
- I wonder what happens if you simply add yeast to pancake batter, put it in a cake tin, and leave it to rise before baking?
I'll find out tomorrow.
The gluten-free bread I like has been out of stock for months, which is why I've been experimenting with making my own. There are lesser alternatives - lesser than the brand I like, that is; still clearly superior to anything I've managed to produce thus far.
At least chicken nuggets are available again. There is one gluten-free brand available at one store, and it's been missing for weeks. I was going to try making my own but the stuff I needed for that was also out of stock.
I did find out, though, why gluten-free chicken nuggets are better than regular ones - in that they have more chicken and less coating than the regular kind.
It's cheaper that way. Pound for pound, the chicken costs less than the gluten-free coating, whether it's batter or breadcrumbs.
- YouTube is a pile of crap.
Yes, they shadowbanned Kiara, who has over 800,000 subscribers now, while she was in the middle of moving back home from Japan to Australia wink. They took down Suisei's remonetisation celebration stream due to a copyright strike, after leaving her demonetised for a month without ever saying why. Suisei has 780,000 subscribers.
They also did this:
Viva Frei has 350,00 subscribers.
They also shadowbanned and demonetised Hardware Unboxed due to "suspicious activity" on their account. What suspicious activity? They didn't say. How can this be resolved? They didn't say.
Hardware Unboxed has 750,000 subscribers.
If you have a small YouTube channel you had better (a) back everything up and (b) hope the algorithm never notices you, because if it does, you are screwed.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:26 PM
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Posted by: Phil Fraering at Sunday, February 28 2021 12:39 AM (Clxcy)
[1] I realize that's a wide-open thing but someone with a lot of videos can probably make estimates that might be reasonable.
Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, February 28 2021 08:46 AM (eqaFC)
Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, February 28 2021 09:23 AM (4i7w0)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 28 2021 10:26 AM (PiXy!)
Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, February 28 2021 12:08 PM (ZlYZd)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 28 2021 02:28 PM (PiXy!)
Or more like, they do, right? It's not like they're going to shadowban Biden or let the algorithm kick NASA off due to a copyright strike. If they did something like that, you'd imagine heads would roll. And we don't see these things happening to those kinds of users, so presumably there's some sort of process that prevents it from happening in those cases, but which doesn't work for a Hololive vtuber. So... why? What's causing this problem?
Is Youtube just dumb? Dunno if I buy that. I'd expect that if that was the explanation, then even the biggest of the big names would be getting zapped periodically, but we don't see that happening.
I see two possibilities. One is that there is such a mechanism, but YT's idea of who's big and important enough to go to the important-people-do-not-screw-with-them team is calibrated pretty high. They deal with a lot of media companies, plenty of whom clear hundreds of millions, billions a year; it's not mysterious if they reserve that kind of treatment for CBS instead of Cover. And if that's the case, it makes sense that they wouldn't talk about the details; even Youtube-kun has enough class to know not to say "we'd take better care of you but you're far too unimportant!"
Possible aside: in this respect, "a million subscribers" may just not be that big a deal. Especially for streamers, that's a lot of served video compared to how many ads YT gets to run. It'd make sense that YT is responsive to its actual customers - i.e. the people who buy ads - and much less so for its actual users, who are after all the product.
Alternate explanation: YT has a stovepipe for people/companies that aren't subject to the algorithm's whims, but the metric for who gets on that list is unrelated to "how much revenue are they worth to YT". Could be as simple as "who's likely to have enough lawyers to throw at us if we piss them off?" Or they might use another metric. Or it might just be fully-manual, not metric driven at all.
I like this as an explanation because it helps explain why the Hololive folks have a bad time with it despite having quite a bit of YT-centric revenue; random political commentator or tech video guy might be just another loser as far as YT is concerned, but people pay YT a lot of money for the privilege of paying Yagoo. If the deciding factor isn't "what does this do to our bottom line," but instead based on a judgment call by a mid-level manager somewhere, then the apparent nonsensical nature of YT's behavior makes more sense.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Sunday, February 28 2021 06:58 PM (v29Tn)
Instead, they get treated like whale poop.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 28 2021 11:38 PM (PiXy!)
STEM is partly a cultural artifact, and the PRC's culture appears to have some subtle incompatibilities.
In particular, the people running the 'private' censorship algorithms appear to be seconded from MOSS.
Alphabet's a fully sold out subsidiary of the PRC.
Letting alternate media organs spring up on youtube would dilute the impact of US, Japanese and Indonesian media already compromised by the PRC. Therefore, Hololive is exactly the people they would want to randomly screw with.
Sure, Hololive tries to stay away from politics. They are still non-PRC nationals, independent of PRC internal censorship, and haven't bought into the collective culture that pulls mainstream US media into accepting being PRC spokesmen. So outright shutting down Hololive would just create an alternative that isn't bound to stay away from politics, or provide grounds to litigate against Youtube.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, March 01 2021 01:12 AM (6y7dz)
Indeed. As I recall during the Obama(spit) administration both google/alphabet and apple signed secret agreements with the PRC to be allowed to do business there. A lot of other American media co/s did similarly (ABC/Disney, NBC/Universal to be able to build theme parks . . .) You can fairly easily guess what the practical terms are: y'all turn over whatever we ask for without a fight or we block your network and organ harvest the round-eye Management team that's working out of Bejing.
Posted by: normal at Monday, March 01 2021 01:46 AM (obo9H)
But that's why I like explanation 2 - I can see Youtube putting together a "how important are these guys?" metric that is heavily focused around advertising revenue, and which doesn't really take "direct" revenue into account. "Super chats? What is this, OnlyFans? Gross." So even though there's money going into YT's coffers, if it's doing so via an unusual method, it might well just not register on the decision-makers there... especially if their own financial incentives are tied into ad revenue, right?
I dunno if I like the "it's a PRC conspiracy!" line, simply because of the distribution. I'd expect Coco to be absolutely shit upon if that were the case, but it mostly seems to hit the others. I could see it being YT being generally hostile to any company using the platform as its entire business plan...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Monday, March 01 2021 03:03 AM (v29Tn)
My theory is that they are going after hololive as a business, to limit its growth, because of the possibilities for the future, not to ensure current censorship.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, March 01 2021 04:01 AM (6y7dz)
Their big recent concert wasn't on YouTube and judging from ticket sales grossed around $50 million all by itself.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 01 2021 09:15 AM (PiXy!)
Here at YouTube, we handle eighty-four trillion videos a year, serving everyone from mainstream media to the scum of the earth. So, we realize that, every so often, you can't watch a stream, or for no apparent reason your entire channel gets shadowbanned, or perhaps you get demonetised over something you never did. We don’t care!
Watch this… We just lost Hololive.
You see, this website consists of a multibillion-dollar matrix of space age technology that is so sophisticated even we can’t handle it. But that’s your problem, isn’t it? So, the next time you complain about your channel, why don’t you try using two hand puppets and a cardboard stage? We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re YouTube.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 01 2021 09:36 AM (PiXy!)
But why? Is it purely that they're just that far beyond giving a shit? Is it because they've put too much focus on dealing with internal political issues and have forgotten how to be other than blithering incompetents? Is it because they've unwisely set up incentives in such a way that their management is making decisions that don't line up with the company's interests? Did the kid of one of their execs super-chat Suisei for a thousand bucks using daddy's credit card?
It doesn't feel like it's a specific anti-Hololive thing because the issues they're having are across a bunch of different types of streams. Hololive's just weird in the sense that they have serious revenue (for YT streamers, and it's entirely possible that YT's internal culture precludes taking any of its streamers seriously?)
I actually quite enjoyed the concert. Didn't know it did quite that much in sales! Not bad for a midweek event.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Monday, March 01 2021 11:22 AM (v29Tn)
I just happen to notice it happening to Hololive, conservative/libertarian commentators, and tech channels, because that's what I watch.
As to why... They're definitely incompetent, they're definitely biased, they definitely don't care about independent content creators, but I have no idea how much of this (if anything) stems from conscious decisions, and how much is just self-destructive idiocy.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 01 2021 01:11 PM (PiXy!)
Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, March 02 2021 11:23 PM (6y7dz)
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