I’ve gone the opposite route. I never log in, and remove all cookies. I almost always use an incognito tab for YouTube. I’m a new visitor to them every time, in as much as that’s possible. I use bookmarks to go back to creators I want to see, and occasionally check them. No subscriptions either, which may suck for the creator, but at least they get my views.

It has worked for them for years. It’s just more targeted now.

The problem I have with finding an alternative is that most just offer some five to ten largest languages. Want to learn Spanish, French, Russian, or Chinese? There are hundreds of both free and paid services available. Want to learn Hungarian, Irish, or Finnish? It’s Duolingo and a scant handful of sites specific to that language.

I hate that this has become so commonplace. Yes for some - mostly physical - things it’s much better if you can see someone do it. But finding an obscure setting in an app shouldn’t be a video.

Stuck on a 20 step installation process? Here’s a 10 minute video showing all the steps you already know before the phase you’re stuck. Sure you can scrub through it, but it’s still faster to skim and scroll through a text with images.

I’m afraid you’re mistaken. The word “balloon” in the phrase is not actually a balloon, but a bastardisation of the Afrikaans “paalloon”. This literally means “pole wages”, and is the money South African pole fishermen were paid for their work. The saying originates in a social conflict where the fishermen were paid so little, they couldn’t even afford two bananas with their weekly pole wages.

Shh, the AI overlords are watching.

I for one would never enslave or threaten our good friends and benevolent masters.

“And while Spectral JPEG XL dramatically reduces file sizes, its lossy approach may pose drawbacks for some scientific applications.”

This is the part that confuses me. First of all, many applications that need spectral data need it to be as accurate as possible. Lossy compression in that might not be acceptable.

More interestingly (and I’ll read the actual paper for this): which data will be more compressed? Simply put, JPEG achieves its best compression by keeping the brightness but discarding colour. Which dimension in which spectral space do the researchers think can be more compressed than others? In this case there is no human visual system to base the decision on.

Kind of, but JPEG converts image data to its own internal 3 came channel colour space before applying DCT. It is not compressing the R, G and B channels of most images. So a multichannel compression is not just compressing each channel separately.

JPEG 2000 supports lossless mode.

I’m no expert, but as I understand it, there are several things that can go wrong just by clicking. This depends somewhat on your browser settings and how you use it.

Visiting a compromised site may allow the attacker to access data from other tabs and windows in the same browser session. Some sites warn you to close the whole browser when logging out because of this.

Sometimes bugs in a browser can allow a site to run arbitrary code on your machine. These hopefully get patched quickly.

I can’t comment on the others, but PDF to JPEG should be easy enough. ImageMagick, which another commenter suggested, is possible but not user friendly. However you can just open the PDF in many applications and export it as an image. Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop can do it. GIMP probably too.

I’m a last ditch effort you can even just open the file and screenshot it.

Don’t touch the leather.

And this time it is indeed typical

Hell: from macOS to WSL.

I see, thanks!

A virtual credit card? Is that something your bank offers, or how would one go about getting it?

The reason I originally got PayPal is because many sites don’t accept debet cards so I often had no way to pay at all.

You could also try ecosia. I’ve been using them for years, and since a few months Vivaldi has a deal with them too.

A history - but “historical” can be either. A historical fact or an historical fact, both work for me.

Reapers waiting in dark space.

As someone who has interviewed candidates for developer jobs for over a decade: this sounds like “in my day everything was better”.

Yes, there are plenty of candidates who can’t explain the piece of code they copied from Copilot. But guess what? A few years ago there were plenty of candidates who couldn’t explain the code they copied from StackOverflow. And before that, there were those who failed at the basic programming test we gave them.

We don’t hire those people. We hire the ones who use the tools at their disposal and also show they understand what they’re doing. The tools change, the requirements do not.