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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • A little ham-fisted, sure, but if you think it’s irrelevant you evidently didn’t take any time to actually think about it (you did also reply instantly, so I’ll take that over you lacking reading comprehension).

    I’ll simplify.

    Digital piracy is illegal copying of unlicenced content.
    Alice creates content.
    Alice licences the content to Bob.
    Bob decides to distribute the content with advertisements from Charlie.
    You download the content.
    Charlie does not pay Bob.
    You did not breach any licences.
    You did not pirate the content.

    And just to further clarify, Alice is the person who made a video, Bob is Youtube, Charlie is an advertiser. Your argument is not an ad is piracy if “the advertisement company [hasn’t] paid the content creator.” The advertiser pays the distribution company, and the relationship between those two companies is irrelevant. The advertiser failing to pay does not retroactively turn you into a pirate.

    The whole argument is pointless in the first place, it’s irrelevant whether or not you consider ad blocking to be technically piracy. A sensible adblock argument would be around the ethics of manipulation versus payment, or security versus whatever it is advertisers want. Arguing semantics doesn’t matter.



  • Dark matter might not even exist, all we know is that gravity-based predictions break down after a certain point. Dark matter is the just the most popular proposed solution where you essentially just add extra undetectable mass until it works. The distant second is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) or some variation of it, which is where you try to tweak the theories to fit observations instead. It has the same problem as dark matter where we keep coming up with better experiments which always fail to find anything.

    There’s a similar problem at the opposite end of the scale spectrum too; quantum mechanics doesn’t play nice with our current understanding of gravity leading to the search for the “theory of everything”. This is why I personally lean towards the idea that it’s our theories that are wrong and not an undetectable mass, but this isn’t my field so my opinion isn’t worth much (especially since a majority actually working in the field lean towards dark matter as far as I can tell).