Ademonera
1d ago
If you believe your time is worth money, it might be worth the tradeoff to not have to bother. My main thing is I use iOS where you can’t get vanced YouTube apk or whatever. Until recently, my whole family was under a premium plan until they started gating location of family organizer.
I use YouTube 100x more than HBO Max or anything else. I feel the current price point is worth not hassling with VPNs / ad blockers and knowing I’ll never see an ad on any device.
Ademonera
2d ago
They’re getting progressively more aggressive on this front, though. It’s a cat and mouse game, so you may be right. Lately it sounds like they’ve been doing backend delays that force the duration of the ad to complete before you can view the video.
For those that just want to use the iOS app or use their TV’s built in app, it’s easier to stomach the $25 dollars a month. But I know a lot of people that won’t out of principle.
Ademonera
2d ago
That’s a fair assessment. It used to be their bread and butter, but they smartly repositioned. I still contend it doesn’t look good for them to have lost this generation’s console war, the smartphone OS war, and seem to be resting on their laurels with Windows. It shows a lack of vision and inability to execute. There are still a billion some odd Windows users.
Personally I was hopeful that the TPM gating for Windows 11 was the start of more forceful control over hardware so they could do a massive change for Windows 12 that would move on from legacy components. But I understand that’s not what their customers want. It’s just too bad that Windows is in such a bad state.
I still really feel like the lack of developer interest in windows is a major problem. Apple may not have the sway to enforce a 30% commission on apps like they do on iOS, but their guidance for making macOS apps is generally followed. Their developer community cares enough to follow their design guidelines and put polish into their apps. I don’t see the same for windows apps - there’s no vision or optimism about where the platform is going. Compatibility with old hardware means you’re going to see a lot of apps with windows XP/vista UI if developers aren’t passionate about the platform.
Ademonera
2d ago
So because YouTube is an essential subscription on the internet if you want to avoid being bombarded by nonstop ads, I use YouTube Music as my primary streaming app to avoid paying for another service. I’ve been beta testing their YouTube Labs ‘AI Hosts’ feature. I’ve been noticing a distinct lean towards the kinds of things.
It is comfortable summarizing a musician or a song. It will go on about an artist’s queer journey or struggles with mental health or how a song is meant to represent the Iraq War. It will also go into a Latino accent when playing songs or artists whose names sound like they’re from Central America, though the host is a milquetoast man.
I’ve been trying an experiment where I play traditional conservative, usually country, songs to see what it says about them. I’ve been trying old Johnny Cash, that Rich Men North of Richmond song, and old Dixie songs. Haven’t been able to get the host to comment on any of these. I was just thinking about how this should work if released out of beta.
It’s pretty hard to provoke the host to talk about certain songs. Sometimes it will describe the last track or the upcoming track - or the song / artist from either in general. Not easy to predict when it will jump in between songs.
I could be wrong, but it seems odd to let an AI talk about music with left leaning undertones but (possibly..) not do the same for right wing music because it’s not as ‘safe’. But then again, there is some left leaning extremist music à la ‘Punch a Nazi’ - should YouTube not allow their host to talk about real underground punk band origins or Dixie songs?
Seems contentious and risky to let your AI potentially talk about music or musicians with extremist undertones. But what about like Kanye? What should it say about his antisemitism? Should his name just blacklisted from mention by an AI host?
Music is the one place where there is little to no appetite for outright censorship - it is very bad PR to gatekeep music, in most cases. In Kanye’s case, you might get removed from official playlists, but they’re not going to prevent people from listening to your music.
My reply won’t be culture war focused BUT it is truly insane how poorly Microsoft has handled windows.
Consider that Apple has undergone a major architecture change and is a year out from fully phasing out Intel processors. This came with HUGE performance enhancements that make everything feel much snappier, not to mention battery life on mobile. One of the major notes on M1 was that it is ready the moment your MacBook lid opens. I’m sure a ton of work went into rearchitecting and rethinking core components to get there.
It’s shocking how performant and smooth macOS is. The beach ball is rarely, if ever, seen. They’ve had 2 major redesigns, which never feel half baked. They had enough sway over their developer community to get most of them to make Rosetta versions of apps that run better on ARM. But even fully emulated software runs better than it did on intel.
Meanwhile Windows 11 is like lipstick on a pig. They keep painting over the cruft that’s built up since windows vista, but have never actually rethought how the system works. They literally can’t because so many customers rely on old components they maintain compatibility for. Control panel is still kicking around, window scaling is still broken, etc etc etc. They have no pull over their developer community at all, so they can’t make hard choices that better the OS. Sure, they’re doing cool stuff like WSL and the terminal app. But everything is fundamentally just reskinned aero from 2007 and there’s no sense of vision.
It’s also janky as hell. Windows flash and resize when you click edit mode in Excel, a Microsoft first party app. If you have a filetype you want to open in a program that’s not in the default list, you get sent to file explorer to find the right exe file in program files (still have to see if it’s in x86). Every application install has a wizard and uninstalling an app probably needs a wizard too. No wonder Satya Nadella hates windows.
That’s why these ai features feel so dumb. They’re stuck maintaining support for old enterprise apps and everything is frozen in time as a result. I loath using my windows 11 ai enabled laptop with solid specs. It dies in like 2 hours and can never keep up with me. I wish they’d have made the right choices 10 years ago so I might instead be working with a modern and fluid OS.
Ademonera
6d ago
What if we had a ‘hear the other side’ cwr every few weeks? I want more neoliberals policy wonks in here. Tariffs are on pretty bad footing and nobody’s taken a crack at it. Economic arguments for high immigration etc. Theres been a lot of bad faith posting lately and we’ve been taking the bait.
Ademonera
12d ago
All things considered, I’m not too upset. I think it’s good to have an opposition that’s getting its footing back. It means that all these losers saying Trump is the end of democracy are wrong - Trump’s election motivated a bunch of Canadians to vote in the left and likely here too. It reins him in a bit to know he’s still got to play his cards right to win in 26.
Still feel like the momentum will slow - Momdommy definitely is different and built some enthusiasm for other races. People on twitter right now are like ‘woke is back!!1!’. Still think Trump is going to buck historical trends for midterm elections and keep congress maybe. He’s just so persuasive.
Ademonera
30d ago
I do agree in a certain sense. It seems that young people in general people dislike Israel. And yes there has always been an edgy undercurrent of antisemitism in a lot of radical online right wing spaces like 4chan. The examples you mentioned probably originate from there. For better or worse, people feel more comfortable saying ugly stuff online now (black fatigue, recently saw the phrase ‘crying Lupe’ etc). Not a great time for racial unity. Pretty glad what happened to Kanye - losing your mainstream credibility - is still what you’ll face if you unironically act this way though. I think it’s pretty contained and that leaders will not stand for it becoming anything more than edgy jokes in private group chats. I think your post would have been better received if you argued that it’s a growing issue on both sides.
What concerns me is that it’s outright fashionable to dislike Israel on the left. You have semi mainstream people saying it’s fine to commit violence against ‘the colonizer’, which is pretty easy for nutjobs to generalize to regular Jewish people (as was the case in the examples I mentioned). I see it as pretty insidious to characterize a group that’s historically faced a lot of backlash as a ‘colonizer/oppressor’ some 70 years after millions of them were killed for beliefs about those peoples’ motivations.
And again I’ve seen this grow on the left in the way it just hasn’t on the right. It’s dangerous and real, serious antisemitism is not dead / just stupid jokes elsewhere in the world.
I sound like a stout Israel defender because I am. I had a film teacher in high school show us a movie about a Palestinian getting convinced to bomb a public bus, the underlying message being (much like lefty views on misadventures in the Middle East) that horrific things ultimately result from the colonizer’s actions. A lot of parallels to Oct 7th (which, don’t forget, was truly celebrated in a way that right wing people pretended 9/11 was).
Ademonera
1mo ago
This is really bad faith. You just can’t pretend like this is a massive problem on the right when in the last six months, there have been multiple left‑aligned incidents that are as bad or worse.
• Western University (May 2025) – A WhatsApp group of pro‑Palestinian students contained Hitler memes, calls for “taking action against the Yahoodis (Jews),” and videos praising Hamas. The university refused to investigate despite clear antisemitic intent.
• Colorado attack (June 2025) – Egyptian guy attacked pro‑Israel demonstrators in Boulder with a makeshift flamethrower while shouting “Free Palestine.” He told the fbi he wanted to “kill all Zionists”.
• D.C. shooting (May 2025) – Guy shot and killed two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum, yelled “Free Palestine,” and later told police he did it “for Palestine.” The indictment noted he had posted “Death to Israel” online.
Add to that several other campus incidents: the University of Washington’s “Super UW” statement that called the Oct 7 Hamas massacre a heroic victory and the UC Berkeley protest where demonstrators chanting “Long live the intifada” forced police to evacuate a Jewish event.
Trump has made elite progressive universities take account for their indifference to antisemitism btw, because it’s very popular on the left to be anti Israel / seem super compassionate by being pro Palestine. I agree with another poster that even if your examples are real, they sure aren't affecting the stance of the biggest people on the right. Honestly I feel that there are probably foreign influence ops trying to grow antisemitism in both parties - but at least be honest that there is a bigger problem on the left.
Frankly, it seems like the left will have a harder time sidelining their antisemitic supporters. Do you think Ilhan Omar is a friend to the Jewish people?
Ademonera
1mo ago
I’ll say this much. Someone I knew who was active in young republican circles met the current president far before his rise to power
Ademonera
1mo ago
I try to only do it here when someone is making bad faith arguments but it can be cathartic to downvote someone. In highly insular communities, any wrongthink is quickly teleported to the shadow realm.
Moderating is a whole other topic but it’s essential to quality discussion. The less pervasive and more focused on agreed upon rules, the better.
Ademonera
1mo ago
Remember when we were all so concerned about suicides at Foxconn in china 15 years ago? Apple helped china become even more proficient at manufacturing because they gave them the best regulatory deals possible.
It’s curious to me that we lost our edge with goods but became way better with services. Maybe that’s the ideal state if your citizens are mostly knowledge workers, but China is a huge adversary and we willingly let them usurp our chemical and commodities manufacturing strengths.
Ademonera
1mo ago
I 100% agree. Just thinking the connection is there for left wing extremists to cling onto in the same way some right wing lunatic might justify their actions through X belief system.
In popular movies, anticolonialist writing, and Hasan streams, progressives are told violence against an oppressor is de facto justified and moral. And it’s easier to think of someone like Charlie Kirk as an oppressor if you think he’s spreading ‘hate’.
That’s the key part of this I think. Crazy people on the left think they’re on the right side of history and that ends justify the means. I think it is a good basic explanation for why the Charlie Kirk shooting happened, most likely.
Ademonera
1mo ago
Returning to the “right-wing violence is more common than left-wing violence” topic, I’ve been paying attention to how it’s covered in mainstream tech-adjacent media. I’ve been reading Ars Technica for years — I loved John Siracusa’s old macOS deep dives — but the tone of their reporting has shifted. A lot of it feels like “heckin science!” coverage: snarky debunkings of RFK Jr., endless FCC drama framed as “look at the dumb Republicans.” Earlier this year, they had weeks of coverage about a Texas measles outbreak, written with the same undertone. I visit Ars because I love technology and will always have a bone to pick with vox-owned The Verge becoming yet another HuffPost 10 years ago (I remember when it was called This is My Next, a blog run by Engadget editors who left after a Verizon takeover).
What surprised me was their decision to wade into the Charlie Kirk assassination. While it’s syndicated from another publication, it is not a technology story. The study they cited was already making the rounds, but the comment section is so obnoxiously hard-left. According to media bias trackers, Ars is still rated “highly credible” and “nonpartisan.”
Yet the style itself has gotten more sneering. I’d really urge you to look at the comment section of this article. Very, very ingroupy, more so than Reddit even. https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/09/right-wing-political-violence-is-more-frequent-deadly-than-left-wing-violence/
With the Kirk shooting, the unwillingness to look inward is striking. No one on the left seems interested in the object-level reading of what happened. There’s some truth to the idea that some were more upset about Jimmy Kimmel being fired than about a historic political assassination.
Also the implication behind saying right wing violence is more frequent than left wing violence is that the right wing needs to get its house in order too. But I’m sure not seeing many on the left besides Gavin Newsom (cynically, probably) try to tell lefties that real fascism isn’t imminent (which, if it were true, would justify resistance, partisan violence). Joe Biden famously ramped up scrutiny of far right extremists based on the Charlottesville march. Would you not expect some authoritarianism if the shoe was on the other foot?
Trump’s been pretty tepid, especially considering he had an attempt on his life and less than a year later, a supporter of his is gunned down. If violence escalates (and based on the violence only over the last year, that is likely to happen), what do they expect him to do? What would a democrat president do? Would it be any less ‘fascistic’? We’re literally dealing with high profile, public murders and assassinations. Pretty scary and there are much more authoritarian ways Trump could have taken this.
We’ve had pretty authoritarian presidents before. Not a huge deal and not historic. Nobody is going to cross the rubicon. We’ve had presidents in living memory round up ethnicities and put them into camps for monitoring. Trump is, in reality, a lib that gets spooked and backs off on anything whenever the market looks bad. He probably does have some tyrant tendencies but he’s still an elected official who won his way into office. Ultimately the left needs to come to terms with their rhetoric blowing things out of proportion.
Do you remember the net neutrality war of the 2010s? Ajit Pai got bomb threats because people were so convinced it was the end of the world to deregulate isps or something stupid like that. Thats why suddenly jumping to free speech arguments and this right wing violence study feels more like an attempt to rile people up than earnest reporting on the context around the violence that just happened.
Psychologically, it feels like the left is struggling with wanting to be the side “on the right side of history,” and at the same time, knowing their rhetoric and zealotry may be feeding into radicalism.
Ademonera
2mo ago
When will media stop being Trump-brained? There’s going to be a solid 10 years of media tainted by this need to relate everything to the current moment. I’m sure that people in the arts feel they’re speaking their truth to the masses by making overt and illusion-breaking analogies and references to real life, but it’s a turn off for me. I think the public moving more conservative will solve for this since movies and tv shows do have to be sold, after all. But still.
I’m sure there a good lessons to learn from putting Trump-like figures (or your caricature of him) in your media, but I’ll probably get more compelling things out of watching him. We’re gonna have 50 years of people recalling the Trump era and the history of his time. Why be so hasty? Just make the thing without it
Ademonera
2mo ago
There is tons of evidence of premeditation and careful planning put into this. No post hoc justification for Charlie mentioning the issue for which he was apparently killed. Maybe the person heard it and timed it I guess, but this comes some two weeks after a similar belief system mass shooting in recent memory (and a third a few months ago). I agree that transgender rights are centered around the issue - but it’s become clear that there is some loose association between transgender supportive online groups and radical left politics. Doesn’t really matter how he talked about the issue either - the implication is that people against this issue are putting themselves in danger of future violence by speaking their minds.
This forum has a certain leaning to it - moving off reddit naturally attracts more dissident and people here lean relatively rightward (ignoring lineage of SSC first etc).
Reddit is the most mainstream network and can get towards radical politics, but it’s usually attention seeking and inauthentic (North Korea stans etc). X pretty similar.
Discord, 4chan, probably telegram - these are places where small groups of people are communicating radical ideas in a more personal forum. It’s what the classified info poster used as well. I think it’s more inviting to total ideological capture and feeling ‘rewarded’ by those you know for dedicating yourself to the cause.
The ‘terminally online’ behavior others are mentioning here has been a reoccurrence with people that have committed mass violence this year (don’t forget that there have been HISTORIC level of political violence over the last year). I would bet that there is a significant effort going into threat assessments and online surveillance into continued violence from online communities with radical trans acceptance politics, among other groups
Ademonera
2mo ago
I’m not so sure. I noticed that once the guy had walked off the train, people were moving a lot faster. One guy runs over and says oh my god. I’m reluctant to judge bystanders but it is sad that nobody jumped to her aid immediately. Clearly it took some time to set in exactly what he had done
Ademonera
2mo ago
I saw that line too and I don’t deny it complicates things. It could point to racial animus, or it could just be the ravings of someone severely mentally ill who latched onto the most obvious descriptor in the moment. Either way it’s very distasteful to see people scoff this off like a manufactured right wing story when a refugee was brutally murdered on a train.
The full video is miserable to watch—this young woman grasping at her throat, terrified, and then collapsing into a pool of blood. It’s one of the most viscerally awful things I’ve seen online, and it should have been covered as such: a shocking act of violence against someone who came here seeking safety.
Ademonera
2mo ago
That’s not what’s happening here, and framing it that way just muddies the waters. The New York Times isn’t openly cheering murder or calling for race war. What they are doing is applying style guide rules (pronouns, capitalization) without reflection, in ways that overshadow the violence itself.
When they ideological signal while reporting on tragedies, they hand critics easy ammunition. That’s how we end up with Musk’s tweet going viral. It validates the narrative of media bias and feeds this weird anachronism that’s emerged.
If you actually want to stop the slide into complete culture war, the solution isn’t imagining the NYT as genocidal propagandists. You should instead demand they show restraint and focus on the victims (and leave their signaling to op eds and trump bad stories).
Ademonera
2mo ago
Last week I wrote about the NYT’s coverage of the Minneapolis school shooting, where the headline and article repeatedly used “Ms.” and “her” for the shooter, Robin Westman. That may follow their style guide, but in the context of a mass killing, it reads less like neutral reporting and more like ideological signaling. The pronouns end up being the story, while two murdered children fade into the background.
Now there’s the coverage of the truly awful video released of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death on a Charlotte train. There are familiar editorial fingerprints from the ‘style guide’. The NYT capitalizes “Black” but leaves “white” lowercase. Elon Musk pointed this out and it’s getting traction. This is a policy shift the NYT, AP, and others made in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing, with the reasoning that “Black” marks shared cultural identity, while capitalizing “White” risks feeding white-identity politics.
That may be defensible as a policy, but applied in a case where a Black suspect kills a white victim, it lands as bias whether intended or not. The style guide twice now ends up louder than the tragedy itself.
When editorial rules like these are applied without reflection, they pull focus from the human story. It truly makes me upset because these were horrific events. There’s no reason to show off your liberal bona fides at all. Just show compassion for the victims and don’t preemptively build up scaffolding for when it will be used as culture war fuel.
Frankly, I think that articles like this make race relations in America worse. I don’t think that the killing has anything to do with race, at all. It’s about violence in America, which is so insanely out of control. I think cloaking it in platitudes about decreasing crime rate stats also shows how scared of second-order effects news organizations are.
I read a book recently about the history of imprisonment in Texas. It talks about restorative justice and prison labor etc. I don’t know what else you’re supposed to do besides reassure the public that this man (or anyone inflicting evil on others) will never see the light of day again
Ademonera
2mo ago
Hey admins it’d be cool if you fixed ’The Motte needs you!’ Banner to respond to dark mode. Also profile views access to Patreon supporters is broken
Ademonera
2mo ago
The New York Times seems to have gone out of their way to have affirmed the shooter’s pronouns with the title “Suspect Knew Her Target” and calling the suspect Ms. throughout.
I feel like an odd component of the culture war on trans issues is a tacit agreement (Chris Chan, etc) that respecting someone’s gender identity goes out the window once they have done something bad. I’ve seen this in some left-wing spaces, which kinda shows that people are aware that they’re making an active choice to use pronouns - to be nice to the person using them. It seems like the New York Times position is that pronouns are sacrosanct, obviously.
I just imagine how good the writers room felt about themselves doing this - they probably feel like they’re fighting for civil rights in the 60s or throwing bricks or something in the face of public discontent with trans issues.
Ademonera
2mo ago
Thank you for the thoughtful response. Agreed that arguing from the perspective of what you would find compelling makes sense, as it's the only way to find the real weak points.
On Point 1, your proposed solution is interesting. That idea of a negotiated peace is pragmatic. It frames the problem as a failure of mutually assured destruction and suggests restoring it. If people saw that bad behavior was being addressed universally instead of just selectively, they might actually buy into the system again. However, I think the cat is out of the bag now. The decadent 2010s seem to have ruined any chance of this working. The 90s feel like the last time there was a real effort towards a color-blind society where character matters most. Things are too tribal for that to work nowadays. There are literally advanced degrees for studying how persecuted X group is. We get worked up over unfair treatment of our own group and are convinced other groups are getting away with it / getting a better deal, generally speaking.
On point 2, it seems we’re in agreement. These ideas have moved from the comment section to the core of the debate. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I feel it’s harder to make progress when the ‘real’ arguments are more antagonistic than Ken Bone saying we can all get along.
On point three, I completely agree that America has/had a unique "secret sauce" for getting things done. My contention is that it's part of a feedback loop. Our culture of ambition creates opportunities, which attracts the world's top talent. That talent reinforces and evolves the culture, starting new companies, creating new norms, and building towards the next thing.
I’m sure it’s been talked to death here but I had a professor in college who talked about how Japan will likely never have a magnificent growth period again because their reluctance to accept immigrants, combined with their demographic cliff, means they're stuck on the sidelines (in terms of real growth at least). They have a productive culture, but they're starved of new talent.
I visited Guangzhou about 10 years ago and saw the opposite problem. Their immigrant population comes largely from very poor areas in Africa. They're treated like second-class citizens, are watched constantly, and frankly, fit Trump’s language about immigrants more than the hard-working people in America. There’s no real chance for them to work hard, integrate, and have their kids become strong citizens.
That's why I think our system is so special and powerful. We have the culture that Japan lacks the people for and we offer the opportunity that China denies to its immigrants. We have the ability to give people a chance to join our hard-working culture and succeed. When we send signals that they're no longer welcome, I feel we're choosing to break the most powerful engine for prosperity the world has ever known
Ademonera
2mo ago
I've been chewing on an idea and wanted to try a steel-manning exercise.
The premise is this: If we grant that the cultural right is "winning" right now, what's the strongest possible argument that this is leading to some genuinely bad outcomes for the country?
I have a few specific angles in mind. How would you build the strongest case for these ideas?
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A more "gloves-off" approach to online speech is a win for free expression, but its most visible result has been the normalization of unapologetic racism. The core of this argument isn't just that it's unpleasant, but that it's actively corroding social trust and making it harder to have a unified country. Not sure if you’ve seen this too, but I see tons of ‘black fatigue’ and explicitly white nationalist people in my feed and there’s not much I or anybody else can do about it. What does the most persuasive version of this argument look like?
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It seems pretty clear that rhetoric from the top, especially from Trump, has pushed nativist ideas into the open. The strong version of this argument is that this has moved beyond simple policy disagreements (like border security) and has become a real cultural attitude of exclusion. How would you build the case that this isn't just a fringe phenomenon anymore, but a significant and growing force in American life?
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This flows from the last point. For decades, our biggest strategic advantage has been that the smartest, most ambitious people from all over the world wanted to come here. The argument to be steel-manned is that we're actively squandering that. Between the nativist vibe and a chaotic immigration system, we're sending a signal that the best and brightest should maybe look elsewhere. What's the most solid case that we're causing a real "brain drain" that will kneecap us economically and technologically for years to come?
What makes me think about this point is all of the talk about Indian people online. Like them or not, they are STRONG contributors in the workplace. If the rhetoric gets to a point where legal immigrants and contributors to our society feel unwelcome, there could be real brain drain effects that we’ve never experienced before. The Vivek backlash a few months ago also is probably related.
Again, knowing that ideas like these are losing right now, how you would argue them to the best of your ability? I’ll admit I kind of want to hear them outside a setting like X where communities are isolated and you’re mostly preaching to the choir / your ingroup
Yeah imo it’s great. Recommendations are solid and community playlists are really good. There’s a lot of edits that you can only find on YouTube, which is a nice bonus. Never used it for podcasts but I’m sure you can use it for ones that aren’t platform exclusive (and you can probably find a reup on YouTube anyways)
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