They have to have a human respond to each and every complaint about that ad. Seems more sensible to automate and flag suspicious ads before the complaints happen.

There are other considerations here though. Google suffers reputational harm if users become victims through their platform. It becomes news, it creates distrust in users, it generates friction with regulators and law enforcement. Users may be trained to be ad averse or install ad blockers. In addition, these ads generate reports which costs time to process even if the complaints are rejected.

At the end of the day these scammers are not high profile advertisers and they’re not valuable. They’re burner accounts that pay cents to deliver their ads. They’re ephemeral, get zapped, reappear and constantly waste time and resources. Given that YouTube can easily transcribe content and watermark it, it makes no sense to me that they wouldn’t put some triggers in, e.g. a new advertiser places an ad that says “Elon Musk”, or “Quantum AI” or other such markers, flag it for review.

I’ve disabled personalised ads on YouTube and I see this sort of shit all the time. I’ve given up reporting them because 90% of the time the report is rejected. I don’t even understand the rationale for rejecting it because it’s an obvious a scam as a scam can be - ai impersonation, fake endorsement, illegal advertising category. It’s a scam YouTube.

I don’t even get why these ads even appear. YouTube has transcription & voice / music recognition capabilities. How hard would it be to flag a suspicious ad and require a human to review it? Or search for duplicates under other burner accounts and zap them at the same time? Or having some kind of randomized audit based on trust where new accounts get reviewed more frequently by experienced reviewers.

Because they are. Groups like PETA, or Just Stop Oil are clowns who hurt their own cause. Performative protesting might win people a participation prize but to everyone else it’s just “look at meeeeee!”. At a certain point it actually becomes toxic to the cause. I know if I wanted to harm environmental campaigning then I’d invent Just Stop Oil.

Meanwhile big business are sending lobbiests in to change politician’s minds, to make arguments that appeal to their rationality, or self-interest. THAT is what environmental campaigners should be doing - lobbying, extoling the benefits of environmental action, changing minds. Getting arrested in front of cameras over and over just becomes pathetic and performative.

No change doesn’t happen by asking nicely, but I think some joined up thinking by these groups would get them further than performative protesting and getting arrested. If you want change then you lobby politicians on the positive benefits of change, and businesses on the potential profits to be had from implementing it.

I think climate activists would just be better off doing what everyone else does - lobbying. Identify politicians who represent areas who would benefit from pollution controls, or green investment or whatever and push the message. Performative acts in front of cameras might feel good but it’s a blunt tool to change policy. Some protestors such as “just stop oil” campaigners are so stupid that they actually help the causes they supposedly oppose.

I think they need to be super explicit to stop the likes of Tesla weaseling out or doing the bare minimum:

• Wipers, speed settings, auto on/off should be on a stalk for front and rear wipers
• Indicators should be on a stalk with
• Hazard lights must be a physical button
• Horn may be on the wheel or a button
• Lights on/off/full beam/dip/auto must be a dial or a stalk
• Demister / heated window must be physical buttons
• Gears must be a physical rocker, lever or dial

And button / dial etc here means an actual push up/down button not some haptic / touch sensitive shit.

Because at the moment Tesla are basically cheaping out of providing physical controls to save money. It doesn’t matter if someone crashes their car fiddling to set the wiper speed because Tesla saved $20 on a stalk and that’s all that matters.

It’s still possible to open it before the car submerges. It’s also possible to open it if you have the wherewithal to wait until the inside is nearly full. That’s providing you know where the damned release lever is. But if you’re panicking and pushing the electronic release and nothing happens then you’re going to die no matter what. Same too if the car is on fire or whatever.

And Tesla, being the helpful sort, also makes it hard to open the doors in an emergency. The front might have manual door release mechanism somewhere - good luck finding it when the car is on fire or sinking. The rear… not so much.

EuroNCAP is changing its testing regime to negatively score manufacturers who remove critical physical controls and it should probably include door handles in that regime.

I worked in IBM for a bit before Notes and it was even worse. Everyone was given terminal software that connected to some mainframe to read email. The terminal didn’t even refresh so if you wanted to see if you had gotten email you had to refresh it manually. Fortunately I was only a contractor at the time so didn’t get much email although I did get one from an employee apologizing for cheating on me, and a followup saying the message was meant for someone else lol

I think JIRA is okay. I’ve used MUCH worst bug reporting software. The worst thing I can say about JIRA is that it is designed to implement scrum and IMO scrum is cargo cult programming.

The best that can be said of Sharepoint, is it could be worse, you could be using Notes.

I’ve been in the industry some time but here are some of my most hated software I’ve been forced to use:

• IBM Clearcase. Absolutely the worst dogshit source control system ever to exist. Complex, fragile, arcane, slow, network intensive. The company had to employ people fulltime on each of its sites whose only job was creating branches and mirroring repos on other sites. The operational & licensing costs of running it must be insane. Some defenders might claim “but it’s so powerful!” or “look how we can create fancy layered views” as if that excuses it for being terrible in the most basic ways. Fixing it must have been intractable because IBM Clearcase eventually produced a faster remote client that talked to a proxy of the view running on a server somewhere. More expense and complexity.

• IBM/Lotus Notes & Domino. Another complex, arcane, slow, unintuitive, frustrating product by IBM (though owned by HCL now). Originally a content management system with an email / calendar with its own terminology and workflows completely divorced from any other email / calendar system in existence. Various iterations attempted to rework the front end to appear more user friendly but it was illusory - click button or two and you were confronted with dialogs that hadn’t changed in 30 years.

• Internet Explorer. I’ve worked in company after company that had some really awful in-house expenses system or clock-in/clock-out or some enterprise junk that NEEDED Internet Explorer and no other browser would do because it was so badly written that it couldn’t render properly or it used an ActiveX control.

• HP/Microfocus ALM. Another over-engineered, arcane, unintuitive piece of enterprise software. This time for tracking bugs, features, testing etc. Complicated and slow, heavily dependent on Internet Explorer and other deprecated Microsoft tech.

• Trend antivirus. Almost every corporate antivirus is bad but this one has been the bane of my existence. I write code which does stuff like encryption and compression/decompression and this piece of shit would constantly trigger warnings and delete binaries I was trying to build and develop. When it wasn’t interfering with my work, it would just be constantly hogging CPU and slowing down disk activity.

• Enterprise software in general. This crap is sold like Kirby vacuum cleaners - a pushy salesman convinces a clueless CTO to buy junk that can seemingly do everything and a sign contract for $$$. And then this stuff is there FOREVER. Management will ignore complaints and the obvious shortcomings of the system because its paid for and the sunk cost fallacy kicks in.

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I do fear that as federation grows, then so too will potentially the same threats that happen on centralised social media. The fediverse is going to have a lot of vulnerable servers who won’t moderate or detect trolls & bots and over time the issue could become extremely onerous.

All large news orgs and NGOs need to do the same - federate their server which becomes the source of truth, and then mirror the content over other social media which is not federated. This may or may not include Twitter. I imagine that over time having news and reporting across social media will diminish any advantage Twitter possesses and then news orgs / NGOs might decide if they want their content on a platform like Twitter that cannot be bothered with things like stamping out bots, trolls, inauthentic actors, or supporting a free and fair press.

He’s really gunning for that Hero of Russia medal

Lots of countries have a variant of these crazies. e.g. Freemen of the Land in the UK, Ireland & commonwealth, Reichsburger in Germany. It all boils down to the same thing - very, very stupid people think they can steal property, dodge taxes or get out of legal trouble with pseudo legal incantations based on misinterpretation of obscure treaties or defunct laws. And naturally what happens is they miraculously transform minor infractions into massive fines and actual prison time. Very, very stupid people and occasionally very dangerous.

The best thing about sovereign citizens is they’re the only ones not in on the joke.

I wonder if there shouldn’t be a way of federating duplicate groups after the fact so one doesn’t have to “win”, they just all combine as one.