OOTL: I’m confused. What is this? I’ve been using Firefox for years and I have no idea what this button is/was or why people would be annoyed by it.

Did it really predict these things? We’ve had data surveillance and algorithmic targeting for a while before Watchdogs. A lot of “prescient” sci-fi is just writing about stuff that’s already happening but which people don’t pay much attention to.

I was thinking about this recently when I had to look at a website without an ad blocker. (Btw, does anyone know an Adblock option that works for iOS Lemmy? Memmy’s browser doesn’t block anything.)

The website was absolutely packed to the brim with ads. Animated, expanding, moving, etc. All competing for your attention. How can ANY of those ads be getting enough attention for it to be worth it?

My adblocking doesn’t work on twitch anymore, so I stopped using it for everything but one streamer I’m subbed to.

I had wildly different experiences with teachers within my own schools growing up. There was legitimately no standard that valued this kind of nuanced exploration of the world. Just a focus on standardized tests. It was almost entirely on the individual teachers to spend more of their time and effort to go any further than that.

I had some great teachers that made everything interesting and taught us more like the classes I eventually had in college, but I definitely have had more that were like this one math teacher I remember who, when I asked about why we had to do a math problem in a specific way we were learning about, answer something along the lines of “because I say so.”

Did I miss something and they dismantled the mass surveillance state, reigned in the police, and stopped funding endless imperialist military ventures while I wasn’t looking?

Maybe my brain just saw it was about Kennedy and something about space and filled in the rest. It’s weird.

At first I ready the title as “Kennedy Space Center” for some reason and I was really confused.

Perhaps more precisely, they’re all about your reaction to problems. A lot of “lots of people deal with these problems, it’s about how you handle it.” But to me, this kind of advice feels wholly detached from the realities of the problems I end up encountering.

The example I go back to (not my only problem, but illustrative of something) is when I was in college, I’d often find myself with unbearable amounts of work. Multiple pieces of homework and projects with different duration and due dates, tests to study for, classes to attend, groups to meet with for projects, etc. With how little time I’d have, it got to the point where I wasn’t sleeping enough, I either missed meals or ate some quick, unhealthy food just to get it over with quickly, what little exercise I got dropped to almost nothing, etc.

This is more work than any reasonable person should be able to handle in a healthy way. And there’s the added pressure that if you don’t keep up with it you’ll fail the class and it’ll make it take that much longer to graduate.

You could say that other people went through the same experiences and turned out fine, but I’d challenge whether or not that’s actually true. Most of the friends and classmates I spoke to in my time there were either just as depressed/stressed/anxious as I was, or were coping with it in ways that were just as unhealthy. Massive amounts of coffee, energy drinks, all nighters, alcohol, and I’m sure a non-zero number of them were on the various focus/productivity drugs people sometimes use for academics/work.

The rate of depression and other psychological problems on campus was really high. Personally in just my friend group, one person I know cried over a particularly bad HW assignment, one was doing self harm, two friends had to go home in the middle of a semester, one of them ended up transferring, and one friend disappeared for a few days during a group project and it turned out he was so stressed he was hiding in a shed on some other part of campus.

And yet the school was woefully understaffed on mental health professionals. All we really got were some platitudes about taking time for ourselves. What time? Did I miss the part where the school made the professors keep a reasonable limit on the work they gave out? Or is there some magical work free time set aside for us? No? Then this is useless “advice” that just shifts the blame onto us.

So what good would it do me to change how I was thinking about all this? Regardless of how I thought about it, I needed to get that work done or suffer the real life economic consequences of failing to do so. If I do get it all done, it comes at the very real cost of the physical strain it puts on my mind and body.

The only real “solution” ended up being me dropping out like halfway through my grad program. I had to completely separate myself from the source of the stress. But of course note how this is a burden that is entirely placed on me and my family. Even if I wasn’t a mental wreck, my job prospects are pretty bad.

How is a therapist supposed to fix any of that?

I’ve been to a few therapists now for my depression/anxiety issues. I’m still not sure what a therapist is even supposed to do. I’ve only ever left sessions miserable and it’s hard to see how it could even turn out differently. They can’t fix any biological factors and they can’t do anything about the environment that contributes to these problems. What the hell is going to get better from paying someone to talk to you for <1hr a week so they can tell you that the problems you have with the world aren’t real.

When I explain to people why I don’t want to keep trying therapists, they always just say something like “oh you just haven’t found the right one.” What? What would be the right one? Why are there right and wrong ones? Aren’t they supposed to be professionals?

…Except you knew it was sarcasm. Hence why you made your comment in the first place. Unless you thought I was earnestly praising Google for making new ads?

Idk, because it’s a joke and I’m not really that invested in the specifics of the latest ad garbage a tech company is pushing? Ads expand to fill all available space. If it can eventually become a video ad, it will. Just give it time. These things never go in the other direction.

I already adblock. For a good reason. The ads only get worse. I’d be surprised if it didn’t turn into that after some time. It’s not an unreasonable assumption.

Oh yeah that too. It’s bad enough when YT does the thing where it pulls up suggested videos when you pause.

Ah yes, because what I want when I tell my computer to stop playing audio and video is for YouTube to play some audio and video of some random thing I didn’t ask for at like 3x the volume of the video I just paused. Thanks google. Such an innovative company!

I’ve tried looking into that but I couldn’t get it working. It didn’t add any subscriptions to my feed. Going to the site now I don’t even seem to be able to click on anything. I just tried disabling my ad blocker and now I can click on stuff, but none of it won’t load any videos. Any idea what’s up with it? I’d love to be able to switch off YT if I can.

One of these countries is the largest military superpower the world has ever seen, has invaded or meddled in countless countries around the world for their resources, and has one of if not the most expansive domestic surveillance system… and the other country is Russia.

Russia has it’s own problems, but they’re not the threat that the US is to the world.

*when was the last time they did it in America?

Yeah. I usually have my system volume sub 20%. Things like videos, system sounds, voice calls, etc all sound reasonable at that volume. It’s just a lot of games that end up way too loud relatively to that.

Agreed. The funny thing is some games go the other way around but still kind of get it wrong: Games where the options are a part of a launcher, so you don’t actually get to experience your changes as you make them. I guess that’s still better than just throwing you into a loud cutscene on startup though.

But seriously. When the game loads, I want the sound to be set to as low as possible, then just give me a slider that plays a sample sound that I can increase until it’s right.