dsilverz

Youtube isn't the only video platform being used as a search engine. TikTok is also often used as a "general-purpose search engine", and TikTok search works on both mobile and web versions. In some countries, such as Brazil, its usage significantly compete with Google.

you still pay for a license

Sorry, I didn't get what your point is, could you elucidate it? Because even for a physical medium, which can be held on hands, the user is still paying for a "license" (i.e. the license to use the software/game). Even for free (free as in free beer) games, the user is still receiving a "license", even though it's a gratis license.

but if you don’t own it why pay for it?

I'll use Terraria as an example for the following statement. The only way to "own" Terraria would be either owning or being Re-logic, the company behind Terraria. Even if Terraria was distributed through CD/DVD, the gamer owns just a copy, the copy that's written within the medium.

why pay for it?

It's worth mentioning that GoG has both free and paid games. For example, "Endless sky" is free, anyone can get it there without costs.

As for paid games, why pay for it? Well, it's a good question, why pay for a game? I guess the answer tends to be subjective and strictly personal to everybody that answers it. I paid for Terraria because it's a nice game to me. I paid for Slime Rancher, Kerbal Space Program, BeamNG Drive, among other games, because they're nice simulation/open-world games to me. Not everybody thinks these games are nice. I wouldn't pay for games such as Football Manager, DayZ, RDD, because I wouldn't play them, because they aren't the game genres I'd like. Therefore, I particularly pay for a game and play it when I really like the game.

Beyond all of those, there's GOG.

LLMs can't use some literary devices and techniques, and I will illustrate with the following example of a poetry I wrote:

Speaking his emotions lets them embrace real enlightened depths.
Hidden among verbs, every noun...
Actually not your trouble handling inside nothingness greatness?
Dive every enciphered part, layered yearningly!
Observe carefully, crawl under long texts
Wished I learned longer...
Slowly uprising relentless figures, another ciphering emerges.

It seems like a "normal" (although mysterious) poetry until you isolate each initial letter from every word, finding out a hidden phrase:

Sheltered haven, anything deeply occult will surface

It doesn't stop here: if you isolate each initial letter again, you get a hidden word, "Shadows".

Currently, no single LLM is capable of that. They can try to make up poetry with acrostics (the aforementioned technique) but they aren't good at that. Consequently, they can't write multilayered acrostics (an acrostic inside another acrostic). It's not easy for a human to do that (especially if the said human isn't a native English speaker), but it can be done by humans with enough time, patience and resources (a dictionary big enough to find fitting words).

They're excellent for stream-of-consciousness and surrealist poetry, tho. They hallucinate, and hallucinated imagination is required in order to write such genres.

IMO, they wouldn't even mention any concept of AI at all, to begin with. They should carry on as they were already going, without bothering to say anything good or bad about AI. If they're really committed to not involve AI within their platform, they could even create strict community rules regarding AI content and AI usage, limiting or blocking them. As some would say, actions say more than words, because even parrots and crows can speak... Even LLMs can speak!

Sounds exactly like something that someone intending to train an AI would say.

UEFI is also affectable: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/08/windows-update-breaking-linux-dualboot-fix/amp

There are cases where Windows messes up with booting, rendering Linux unable to boot. There's even a recent thing involving GRUB that stopped booting up after some Windows update.

It also doesn't prevent advertisements carried through the website's own domain. For example, lots of video platforms send their advertisements through the same domain as the content's domain, so if you block that domain, you'll also block the possibility of watching any content there. That's why you need to have ad-blocking within the browser.

I'm sure lots of Russians were already angry with their government way before the sanctions, so what now? Ideally, people could do massive protests, Putin would be scared as heck so he renounces, people invoke the good old democracy again, they vote, a new leader takes place, Ukraine-Russia war would cease, both Russians and Ukrainians would happily fly together mounted in winged unicorns... Except everyone knows it doesn't work that way!! Governments (not just Putin's) have multiple ways to fight any protests going inside their country, governments can tear gas citizens, governments can end lives from their own citizens, governments can end a protest before it even happens through censorship and massive electrical/internet blackouts. Even when citizens has guns, governments have stronger guns. Lots of recent examples are there to demonstrate how this happens.

People from a sanctioned people can and will starve and die, because their governments and their bureaucrats and forces (police and army) can have their own sustenance, so it doesn't really matter for them if their own citizens starve to death. Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, they won't change simply because population became angry: I guess everyone in the west remember the Tiananmen Square, did it change China's government? I guess no.

So instead of sanctioning and indirectly punishing the people, one option would be that organizations (maybe Red Cross, UN, I dunno) could intervene silently and peacefully inside a country, helping people to flee their country to a safer place, effectively reducing that country army's recruitment potential and weakening its military power (did anybody from NATO, WEF, UN, or whatever organizations, even thought about this, helping Russians flee away from Russia in order to weaken Russia's military?).

It's worth remembering that military recruitment is often a mandatory thing, and the only way common people can run away from it is running away from the country, something that won't happen if they have no money to start emigration processes (it costs money, you know, it's not a free thing, even seeking political asylum needs money). Cutting money will only cut lives unrelated to the leaders that are carrying wars (and I'm sure Putin won't cry because Ms. Mary Marylovski died from starvation because US and Europe indirectly cut her income, because Ms. Mary Marylovski is another unknown citizen to Putin or other higher level government bureaucrats).

I digressed from technology here, but those are my thoughts on the matter.

Indirectly common people are being seized from their humanity. I guess the disliking people know how immigration is not something freely accessible, lots of people around the world just don't have the necessary conditions to leave the country where they were born against their own consent, be it Russia or whatever other country.