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190 pointslopkeny12ko240 comments

Do note that this twitter account is posting fake screenshots of product ideas.

Other posts include "Google Meet option to punish interrupters by sending them to meeting jail" "iOS camera lock if you record too much concert footage" and "Spotify feature to lock Christmas music until after Thanksgiving"

Half of Soren Iverson's joke features are depressingly plausible and the other half are completely implausible but more compelling than any real "AI" product I've ever heard of.

> Uber option to let me drive

I'd like this one. I've had quite a few trips where I asked the driver (Grab/Gojek, not Uber) if I could take over, and they pretty much always don't have an issue with it. Would have been nice to get a discount for it.

Wait, what? You've successfully asked a stranger if you can take over driving their vehicle – presumably a vehicle they rely on for their income and one you're not insured for – and they've said yes!?

Yeah, quite a few times. Mostly in Jakarta and Bangkok. Common reasons include:

* Driver is hopelessly lost and stands no chance of getting to the destination

* Driver has no idea how to read a map

* Driver is obviously very inexperienced and can’t handle the chaotic traffic

* Driver is obviously too tired to drive safely (or reach the destination in a reasonable timeframe)

* Driver is too hungry to drive/read map/think at all (common in the afternoon during Ramadan)

* Driver is obviously high on meth or drunk (especially in Indonesia where there are no laws against driving under the influence)

I’m genuinely not sure how you rack up multiples of these without reconsidering use of the service.

I've had a Lyft driver in San Jose, CA, who was not able to navigate a closed freeway onramp. The GPS map told him to turn onto the onramp, but it was closed in real life. So he drove past it, the GPS routed him to make four right turns and come back around to the same onramp. He just kept going in that circle over and over like a robot, coming back around again and again to the same closed onramp. I'm not sure if he expected it to magically open up for him or what.

So I told him to either end the ride or follow my verbal instructions, basically take the side street up to the next freeway onramp. Once he got there, he completed the rest of the ride successfully.

How many times did he pass the onramp?

At least three times. I kind of lost count as I got this growing feeling of simultaneously being irritated and having pity for the guy.

Well the only alternatives are driving yourself everywhere (which kinda sucks in Jakarta), or hiring several full time drivers (which I have done in the past). All of the taxi/ride share services here are unreliable. But if you want to live in a developing country, you really just have to accept the fact that most things are highly dysfunctional and unreliable.

Having lived in Bangkok, I can say there weren’t great alternatives to Grab. Traditional taxis were as bad if not worse in my experience.

Let me guess. You are a white guy in South East Asia.

They have +6 bonus and Advantage to Charisma roll, what can we say?

You just nearly described Turo.

> one you're not insured for

Car insurance usually handles borrowing just fine.

Business insurance for non employees? When geico figures out you are using consumer insurance for business purposes and then letting the customer drive they're not paying out.

> When geico figures out you are using consumer insurance for business purposes

You can end the sentence here. If there already wasn't proper insurance, then switching drivers is not the problem.

Many of these are quite clever! I just wish he had a tumblr so I didn't have to scroll past a lot of unrelated twitter junk.

Some favorites:

- Hinge AR https://twitter.com/soren_iverson/status/1620799382495924226

- Contact name https://twitter.com/soren_iverson/status/1795470976555315429

- Message imbalance https://twitter.com/soren_iverson/status/1800166023829787009

- Uber quiet game https://twitter.com/soren_iverson/status/1799803638161789152

He also uses Instagram and/or Threads.

I also enjoy the Peter Molyneux parody Twitter account, "Peter Molydeux" (@PeterMolydeux), who posts ridiculous Molyneuxesque game ideas. Somebody actually ran a game jam where they implemented a bunch of them!

https://x.com/PeterMolydeux

Play More Than 200 Ridiculous Peter Molydeux Games Right Now

https://kotaku.com/play-more-than-200-ridiculous-peter-molyd...

Ever wanted to play a video game where you and seven friends control the legs of an octopus? How about where you play as a pigeon and fly from building to building, convincing businessmen not to jump to their deaths? How about a game where the "pause" button is your only weapon?

Thanks to last weekend's "What Would Molydeux?" game jam, you can now play those games and hundreds more.

What began as a tossed-off twitter joke exploded into a bit of a global phenomenon as hundreds of game developers worldwide pooled their talents in a nigh-unprecedented embrace of ridiculousness.

[...]

> "Google Meet option to punish interrupters by sending them to meeting jail"

okay but I need that!

Zoom has had it for ages, it's called the waiting room.

I'm particularly fond of the "Amazon option to ask your driver to stay for dinner and a movie" one

"Fake"? That's a disingenuous judgement. They're conceptual art.

Fakeness doesn't degrade art. Art elevates fakeness.

IUREO Anti-Ad FAKE EYE Mask - Fake eyes tricks eye-contact ad detect! - Black - 100% Polyester - Cool and comfortable ad-watching mask ad-block eye cover mask never see ads again mask - $2.99 on Temu

I thought this was a clever joke comment, but I googled and this product actually exists. I am stunned.

a few years ago I read an observation that Amazon is basically a hyperwebster for physical goods. If you can name a specific goal and think some product would do it for you, you simply type it into Amazon and by the time you press 'enter' a million monkeys on a million typewriters have already listed it for you. Your eschatrons immanentized in 48 hours or we offer you a $3 digital voucher, guaranteed.

And the "keyboard smashings" school of brand naming only makes this more pointed...

It's like that episode of the Simpsons where Homer is trying to sleep while on the jury, using fake eye glasses.

living la dystopia

Reminds me of the "Please drink a verification can" joke about Xbox's webcam peripheral a while back.

https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/mlfkup/please_dr...

I like this more

https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/fj24w7/sony_...

or Sony's patent on interactive ads — "say McDonalds to end commercial"

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/

Show McDonalds tattoo to end commercial.

Never has a joke been so prophetic

I would be willing to bet money that there are software engineers, maybe even current HN readers in this article, who are hard at work actually trying to build a Please Drink Verification Can like system in reality.

Maybe this is unrelated but I refuse to do facial ID, or any type of facial verification. I don't want my phone, or any device that I am using, to record or analyze my features. Maybe that is nit picking a little but I am uncomfortable with all of it.

There are plenty of ways for anyone to get a picture of my face. In particular, the State has a copy of my photograph, and almost certainly full motion video of me in the DMV getting said license.

I just don't like the fact that my face becomes a password. I'm usually not in a position to _obscure_ my face, so I have no chances to decide if my face should act as a password in any given moment or not.

So, if you hold the phone up to my face, and I look at it, it just unlocks. That's the opposite of "security."

anyone in a position to do that is in position to torture you the old fashioned way.

https://xkcd.com/538/

I don’t know if that is true, nabbing somebody’s phone at a protest and pointing it at them seems like the sort of thing a cop could get away with at a protest for example. It must be illegal, but in the hustle and bustle of the moment, might be hard to catch.

It's not illegal[1] and is the number one reason I don't use biometrics to unlock my phone.

[1] https://www.phonearena.com/news/court-ruling-cops-can-force-...

If you’re talking about someone holding an iPhone to someone’s face, there’s a setting called “attention aware” that verifies your eyes are open and looking at the phone.

Which is unfortunately causing people's alarms to not work and the current recommendation is to deactivate said feature.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0kl4glp547o (bbc news article about it)

Umm, no. That’s an article with random speculation from unnamed people on the internet.

Attention awareness does not stop alarms, and it requires your eyes to be open and looking at the phone.

> Attention awareness does not stop alarms, and it requires your eyes to be open and looking at the phone.

Attention awareness silences/drasticly reduces the volume of alarms, that's how it is designed.

If they have a bug in the attention awareness feature it stands to reason that it could not require your eyes to be open or looking at the device in question at the time.

If you’re in that kind of environment, press the lock button five times in a row (iPhone) to require a password to unlock on the next interaction.

Challenge: surreptitiously press your lock button five times while being accosted or outright assaulted by one or more police officers.

Or, you know, just do it beforehand?

Early in the iOS Face ID cycle I saw this play out with a parent and child where the parent would make a funny face each time the child held the phone up to the parent's face, defeating the biometric.

I think xkcd has never been arrested by the police and had his belongings searched through illegally. There's more to be afraid of than state actors with the ability to kidnap and torture you without being held to account.

Really well said but I'm afraid of it actually

could be worth it

So what? Everyone who posts this xkcd meme is just vouching for the belief that torture works, when available evidence says otherwise; it's not effective on seriously committed people.

https://clcjbooks.rutgers.edu/books/why-torture-doesnt-work-...

What do you object to exactly if the biometric data is on device only?

I’m not sure what is the privacy risk there. The apps that authenticate you don’t have access to biometric data.

The main risk I see is if that data was compromised and made available for something else, but I haven’t seen any breach of that that ended up being useful for anything?

Or maybe I missed something?

I don't trust the device, the maker, the company behind the facial recognition technology, and you. If I give software access to analyzing my face it opens the door to overt and covert acts that further erode my privacy.

But really, I don't need a reason other than I'm uncomfortable with it. I worry about people who are comfortable with it..

If you don't trust the manufacturer, then it doesn't matter whether you turn Face ID off, those sensors are still pointing at your face. Do you physically keep the face ID sensors covered by tape or something? And how do you avoid other people's phones/cameras seeing you?

And if you don't trust the manufacturer, how do you make sure you identified and covered or disabled all of the sensors on the device?

And you don't trust the manufacturer with a scan of your face, but you put a significant amount of communications and positional data and logins through it.

>And how do you avoid other people's phones/cameras seeing you?

You are missing the point.

>those sensors are still pointing at your face

some phones have a popup front camera. The camera is inside the phone. It is obscured and it would be alarming if it pop up on its own accord.

Do you avoid going out in public? Are you never going to step foot in an airport? What is your threat model here? Because it's pretty trivial for anyone to get a 3d scan of your face without you realizing it.

This just sounds like textbook paranoia to me (as in, the actual dictionary definition as an illogical fear that impedes your normal life), because there's nothing reasonable about thinking FaceID is compromised to the point that you have increased your personal safety by not using it.

> illogical fear that impedes your normal life

I don't agree with the premise that disabling bio-metric security impedes a normal life. Nor has OP given me any reason to believe they are afraid of it in the situations you described.

Passwords and pass codes (when managed well) are perfectly normal security tools to use to ensure your privacy on a device you own.

You can’t ensure your privacy on a “device you own” if you don’t trust the device manufacturers.

> Because it's pretty trivial for anyone to get a 3d scan of your face without you realizing it.

Maybe we should do something about this rather than being defeatist and giving up on privacy.

I don't want to upset or scare you, but if you've ever been in a picture that someone else has posted online to any social platform, your face has already been tagged, recognized, and a very thick file exists about you and everything you do, like, know, associate, etc.

>> but if you've ever been in a picture that someone else has posted online to any social platform, your face has already been tagged, recognized, and

And that is a completely different issue. The OP just wants to prevent that type of thing when they can.

If I walked up to several individuals (maybe even you) on the street with a camera and tried to take a close-up, a lot of them would object. I don't think "why not let me take it, it's already online someplace" would be a convincing reason to allow it.

> If I walked up to several individuals (maybe even you) on the street with a camera and tried to take a close-up, a lot of them would object. I don't think "why not let me take it, it's already online someplace" would be a convincing reason to allow it.

In many jurisdictions including where I live in, taking pictures at public places is allowed by law whether or not some other human happens to be in the frame of my picture. It is called "incidental inclusion".

Others can request me to exclude them from my picture but they can only request, they cannot force me to do so. Of course, if someone asked, I am going to be nice to them and try and exclude them from the picture. Others could also try and move a bit this way or that way so that they don't get included in my picture. We live in a society and we can work it out.

In reality though, nobody makes such a request because most people know the law and they know that if they are out there in the public, they could become part of other pictures by incidental inclusion.

"Incidental inclusion" does not cover walking right up to someone and putting a camera in their face. Like, "incidental" is literally in the term.

> "Incidental inclusion" does not cover walking right up to someone and putting a camera in their face. Like, "incidental" is literally in the term.

Correct! I don't see where I implied otherwise!

> on the street with a camera and tried to take a close-up.

I might break your phone. How difficult would it be to sue me and for what purpose?

> > on the street with a camera and tried to take a close-up.

> I might break your phone. How difficult would it be to sue me and for what purpose?

Easily. Damaging someone else's property is not even remotely on the same level as taking a photo of someone? How do I know it wasn't their _job_ to do so?

Honestly if you think that level of escalation is okay I hope to never meet you in person.

And trust me I find people taking photos of me creepy also but it's easier to block my face myself than to smash the person's device and expect to walk away.

Why would I sue you? I'd just press charges for assault

If we agree on the definition on the assault as this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault

Then it is not assault. See? The problems already started. The best you can get after an ardous process is an apology and a reinboursement, the worst would be it coming back at you.

Where I live, they recently declared gazing at a woman "indecently" as a small sexual crime, same as unrequested flirtatious comments to strangers. I have grabbed phones before, but I admit I haven't broken any. YMMV

With how small cameras are these days, you can buy a pinhole camera and tuck it into your shirt and record everything without anyone being the wiser. Face as biometrics doesn't really work. Mother's and daughters and twins have similar enough face shapes to fool FaceID.

Theoretically, those kinds of images lack the necessary detail to qualify as biometric data. If they somehow do, then the whole category becomes invalid for that purpose.

I personally oppose all forms of biometrics for security, as it can neither be invalidated, nor is it safe from physical coercion. I also oppose biometric use for "tracking attention" because it's none of anybody's business but mine.

tracking attention when you're driving is everyone's business. I'd rather you have a camera in your car making sure you're looking at the road, than have to drive next to someone who is on their cellphone and is trusting the self driving feature of their car.

There's a difference between tracking attention locally for driving as you suggest, and doing so for advertising and mobile device security, which is what the conversation was previously about.

While I consider your example valid in a vacuum, it poses a substantial privacy and financial risk in the real world. If a car that tracks attention also phones home, your insurance carrier may raise your rates or cancel your plan for occasional glances away (sneezes, children, etc), regardless of an actual problem on the road. Such measures ought to only exist locally within a car, but I have absolutely no faith that it will be implemented that way given the current data shared along those lines.

I am moving the discussion somewhat but it's not a theoretical. Ford's Blue Cruise system has a camera that looks at the drivers eyes to make sure the driver is watching the road and not texting. It covers a large amount of freeways. it's not as good as Tesla's full self driving but it very much does the job of driving on the freeway in traffic for you.

Or walked through any major city. There's cameras ~everywhere.

Or driven anywhere there are (fucking) Flock cameras...

> If I give software access to analyzing my face

I have the legal right to ‘analyze your face’ if you are out in public. Why do you believe that there’s something special about a highly secured, on device FaceID capture that makes it more dangerous than a guy with a camera across the street?

If you don’t trust them, then your act of not giving “software access” does nothing.

Some folks may find collecting biometric data inherently creepy. I mean, yeah, there's also "what might happen when* it's leaked" but ... I just don't like it. It feels maximally invasive.

* These days, I'd assume when, not if.

You can change a password, you can't change your face. Agreed that we have yet to see the mass-hack based on biometric data that generates the ohshit moment, but from a risk perspective 'it hasn't happened yet' is cold comfort.

> you can't change your face

if you get involved with the wrong/right sort of people, they might do it for you

I would rather change my password. Easier, faster, less painful. And it doesn't affect how others perceive me.

The biometric data is not your password. It's used to unlock a session token. Getting that session token requires a "what you know" password. There's lots of events that invalidate that session token not the least of which on phones is multiple presses on the lock button (on iOS at least).

Yet in many cases it is. I've come across various systems where there is no "what you know" password only a "what you look like" password.

Yup. I guess if you don't do much of this "it's not a password" sounds like "there's no risk".

My own main objection is to biometric data being used as a password, since it is a publicly-viewable, likely-duplicatable password that can never be changed. My second objection is to the possibility of physical injury to me by someone that really wants to steal my credentials.

it is a publicly-viewable, likely-duplicatable password that can never be changed.

Is this true? I mean, you can't really show an iPhone a photo of your face to unlock it, can you? Or are you thinking of a different attack vector?

My second objection is to the possibility of physical injury to me by someone that really wants to steal my credentials.

This possibility exists even if your creds are something you know. It also exists if your creds are something you have, and you happen to have them on your person.

> This possibility exists even if your creds are something you know. It also exists if your creds are something you have, and you happen to have them on your person.

I can hand over my credentials or secrets to a thief without injury to myself, but I can't safely hand myself over, or a piece of me.

> Is this true? I mean, you can't really show an iPhone a photo of your face to unlock it, can you? Or are you thinking of a different attack vector?

If you have the information that the iPhone wants to see, it is possible to create a synthetic face matching that data and hold it up in front of the phone.[1] You could also probably open up the phone and hotwire the sensors to give the hardened processor holding your Face ID data the readings it wants.

Both of these things are super difficult to do, and much further out of reach of your average thief than simply printing out a picture of the person's face, but the point remains that it is theoretically possible.

[1] Bkav Corporation has made masks that can fool Face ID for about $150: https://www.pcmag.com/news/researchers-claim-they-can-dupe-i... https://www.bkav.com/top-new/-/view-content/65202/bkav-s-new...

For what it's worth, you can be beaten with a wrench until you cough up a password also. Obviously there is a difference, but it's worth considering and understanding that.

Or I can cough up my password long before that, but if they need my biometrics, then they'll have to hold on to me personally... or a piece of me.

You are not alone.

And the day some manufacturer's database with 1.8 billion sets of facial data is going to get hacked and exposed, I'll feel pretty smug about it.

Except for the fact that Face ID is completely on device in the secure enclave and not even Apple can access the data stored there soooooo…..

Storing the biometric data securely in the digital enclave only covers half the problem. The other half is in the form of falsifying said biometrics to gain access to a device, or physically forcing the actual person to unlock it against their will. With keys that are only stored in my mind, I have the ability to consciously decide that access should or should not be granted.

Studies have shown that amongst human subjects there's a really strong correlation between an economic agent having a gun pointed by someone else at their heads and conciously making choices that posit a positive utility increase for the ones holding the gun.

Maybe so, but it's still their choice in that instance. Some data is with dying to protect.

So long as Apple can change the software on the device they can get access to the Face ID data, or someone who forces them to do it can.

That's sure cool for Face ID. Now all that's missing is the same level of faith in all the rest.

Who has ~1.8 billion centrally stored faces?

Indian government does. Fortunately not face scans. But pictures, retinal scan and fingerprints.

Some retailers are probably not far off.

Facebook

Does that mean you're ok with Face ID?

most govt implementing face identification is NOT on device.

all the on-device stuff was just to ease the tech literati who probably is still 12 years away from being impacted by the actual tech doing the damage, since those are for the poor and foreigners first

I don’t know for other brands but for FaceID the biometric data literally never leave the device…

"Scan complete. Smug look on face detected."

12.4% antisemite - DANGER

The problem is that the face is critical to “normal” interactions. Thus the ChatGPT demo of using the camera to determine if you are speaking to it (or to someone else) to choose whether to respond.

If talking with AI becomes more mainstream, face detection will (at first) make the experience better.

http://mercadolibre.com force this and I hate it so much.

If you think this way, you should be covering up the camera lenses on all of your devices. It is happening everywhere already.

Like Mark Zuckerburg, I do..

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/22/mark-zuck...

I just use hardware kill switches on my phone and laptop.

If it's on device and the output is hashed I don't see much of a problem with it. I guess the question would be whether you can trust big tech companies / governments not to have some backdoor to the raw data and what your concern would be if they did have that data.

Here in the UK face ID is pretty common place so I must admit my phone having this data is probably the least of my concerns. For example, one guy I know can't buy his own groceries anymore because he stole some food products from one of our major supermarkets, and since all major supermarkets in the UK have linked facial id systems he's now effectively banned from all supermarkets lmao.

What about fingerprint?

Not OP, but I think the same concerns are present here as well. If anything, I would argue that they're magnified, since fingerprints are unique.

IMO, the issues surrounding biometrics stem from the fact that they define you, in a way that nothing else - not a name, not an address - can.

congrats, grandpa you will not be able to buy a sim card in half the world, and soon in the usa.

Now you can buy esim cards.

why do you think the process will be any different. esim only have the plastic cost for the issuer.

try to buy an africel (usaid sponsored telecom in Africa) without showing up in person for a face scan.

you're all to sheltered and will have no idea what hit you in the near future

Soren is so good at these “doodles” of UI gone wrong. He had one for a zoom call that positions you in the frame based on your real world height.

I've noticed that since the beginning of this year, YouTube has gotten very aggressive with ads, including more and more ads and multiple unskippable ads. And then they treat you like an idiot with a little popup that says "What to learn more about how to get rid of ads?", which just takes you to the YouTube Premium product, which is nothing but a premium for Google. Amazon Prime has also started adding unskippable ads.

> I've noticed that since the beginning of this year

Beginning of this year?

I tried only once watching something on youtube without an ad blocker... some bloodborne speed run i think, it was a little over 1 hour long. That was 2-3 years ago.

It was the first time I was using the youtube app on that tablet, I generally use it for text content.

Youtube decided it should give me 2 ads every 5 ... fucking ... minutes. I think that if it were television, it would have been illegal in my jurisdiction.

I ended up finding it on twitch.tv which I think didn't give me any ads back then.

Well, however bad it was, it has gotten really bad lately. I just close out of videos and YouTube now, which I guess is good. Luckily, more of the niche content and small-time channels (the sort of videos that made YouTube nice back in the day) don't get as many ads, but even those are getting flooded with ads more and more.

I ended up in some experiment I'm sure when it served 3 unskipable 5 min ads every 5 minutes or so

YouTube is unusable without Premium or an ad blocker. I can't imagine that they have many users that doesn't have either.

If YouTube have an issue with adblockers, then that is a problem they brought upon themselves.

Once YouTube Premium (Or Red initially, I guess), was released, it became extraordinarily hard to watch anything with ads in any capacity. When I visit my in-laws, they still have regular cable TV and I cannot believe that I ever used to sit through this much crap.

I was the first person in my friend/family group to do the cord-cutting thing (2012), and so this has been kind of an issue for the last twelve years for me, because whenever I would visit them I'd be stuck with traditional media.

The ads must make considerable money though; Amazon Prime started having them by default unless you pay an extra $3/month, which I will not do, and I won't watch ads, so I've just stopped watching things on Amazon, and I doubt I'm the only one; surely Amazon wouldn't annoy their customers like this unless they were getting considerable money for it.

It makes me a little sad that Blu-rays appear to be getting phased out, especially for TV shows. I'm not opposed to paying for media that I consume, but I really don't want ads or DRM [1], so I'm not sure what my options are but to just consume YouTube and from my existing (quite sizeable) blu-ray collection.

[1] I know Blu-ray has DRM but it's trivial to remove it in a rip so I still consider it DRM-free from a practical perspective.

> YouTube is unusable without Premium or an ad blocker. I can't imagine that they have many users that doesn't have either.

aside from millions of children on tablets, that is

Sure but they are just experiencing the world for the first time and discovering what their “ground state” opinions and preferences will be. Surely exposing them to a deluge of ads can’t be harmful.

And also the millions of adults that DO browse the web without an ad blocker and don't pay for youtube premium. Like we don't have to wonder "aw man surely nobody suffers through this" because ad companies have expressly stated, in reports that must be somewhat accurate or else the SEC comes knocking, that only 1/3 people using their services uses ad blockers.

More people than not are unable or unwilling to block ads, and experience that disgusting web that plenty of us know to be obscene, obnoxious, and probably just not healthy for your brain.

But I bet every worker of google willingly chooses to browse that web without an ad blocker right? Surely they are happy to experience the same world they make their money from right?

> which is nothing but a premium for Google

My understanding is that some of that money goes to creators when I watch their videos without ads.

None of that bothers me. Premium content and access will always be a thing. It's the fact that the producer, the network, and the advertiser are the same entity.

The hour's getting late for being able to easily avoid this sort of bullshit. It's time to gather what you can, save it locally, and then shift to physical media. DVDs, books, etc.

Yea, I've been looking into what to do. I'm tired of subscription fees for one, although Spotify has remained sane. But I absolutely refuse to pay trillion dollar corporations more money, who already steal my data, just to get rid of ads. If they kept them reasonable, it'd be fine. But nearly all of the UX/UI additions are not to make the experience better but to make you click more videos and ads. There are even times that you can't even see the last few seconds of a video because it pops up clickable things that can't be disabled.

Isn't Spotify about to raise its fees again for the second time in about two years? I dropped it a while back after the whole podcast push. Not (solely) because I'm not a fan of the people they chose to fund, but because they penny pinch on music royalties but wanted to shower podcasters with money -- I signed up for music, not podcasts!

Spotify was easy (for me) to replace: I have a huge music collection already. YouTube would be tougher because I mostly rely on it for video clips I wouldn't be able to find elsewhere, except maybe Archive.org.

I returned to buying albums when a few that I loved disappeared off Spotify one day. It's bad enough to pay month after month and never own anything but to go listen to a favorite and find it's gone? Unacceptable.

At my age I'll never average buying more than one album a month anyway, especially since you can usually hear it first on bandcamp or YouTube so it's not a gamble like the old record store days, so it isn't even more expensive

Physical media and one-time payment desktop software are the only enshittification-proof types of digital products left.

I used to love the Google Music app, which did nothing besides play my locally stored music. Then one day I opened it and it had turned into yet another storefront constantly using mobile data to refresh the carousel. Since then, auto-updates have been turned off.

I love being able to reject app updates. Once the app does what I want, updates can only make it worse.

It's so bad, worse than radio/TV.

What would be your preferred funding model?

I'd pay for something if they actually cared about the product. They don't, so I don't. Instead, they're just bullying me and others to pay them. YouTube doesn't make any of the content, and they don't care about the UX except to funnel you into more ads. I'm not going to pay for that experience.

if there's one person carrying for the product for $1 and another selling junk for free that will have intrusive ads as soon as that pesky $1 guy is gone, you'd be using the free one, like everybody else

None. We should have less entertainment. Watching TV is a waste of human potential.

unobstrusive still image ads next to the video when not in full screen.

a credit system where if I let them use one of my devices as part of their torrent nodes, they give me free hours of video each month.

a pay as you go model where I can select how many hours of YouTube I want a month and I can watch that much video.

replacement torrent website with similar functions, webseeds and paid hosting options.

Mine would be a frictionless micropayments mechanism that works across many/most sites, an idea that's as old as the web. Google are supposedly working on something like that but I'm not holding my breath.

I would pay $10-$20 a month for Youtube if they made significant improvements to how they work with creators, how they reward and encourage creators, and how they pay creators.

However, that's not as profitable to Youtube as the current model is, which is to force obscene amounts of advertising that they are auctioning off to whichever scam porn app can afford to buy rights to your child's eyeballs and then tell Million subscriber youtubers who have been on the platform making high quality, reliable content since 2007 that they cannot swear, cannot show body parts that you just saw in an ad, and that it's perfectly fine their videos keep getting content claimed by fly by night groups that don't even own the content they are claiming but it was a system designed to make Viacom not sue Youtube ever again so it's never going to prioritize the creators, you can't show a tank exploding, unless you are specific channels that somehow DO have tacit agreements with Youtube to allow them to show outright murder and death somehow, and youtube will let some stranger take over your channel with one phished credential and let them overnight run it as a scam fake Elon channel, despite google proving quite often that they have had account takeover protections for like a decade.

Talk to creators that have been on youtube since the early days and also have managed to get dedicated account reps. Youtube is horseshit to creators.

They enforce dedication to "the algorithm" which is just shorthand for "if you do not put out a video every couple days that has very high clickthrough rate (ie you better use clickbate thumbnails) then we will straight up stop surfacing your videos to not just new audiences, but the people who are explicitly subscribed to your content and have been for over a decade". Google has a system that is pretty much designed to push you beyond your limits, to burn you out, and replace you with the next 18 year old who has no idea what they are getting themselves into. Oh, and the entire time your comment section will be a spammy, hate filled hellhole and they will do NOTHING about it at all.

Google views content creators as easily replaceable laborers, as a resource to be consumed. Youtube doesn't want customers to pay for access to high quality pieces from talented artists, because it's literally more profitable to them if you as the consumer watch 10X as much slop that is full of ads.

"Oh why don't they go somewhere else then" well since Youtube was bought, google has been basically subsidizing and dumping "Video hosting" into the market, so nobody else can run a viable video hosting platform for Jon Q public. Some creators DID try to go somewhere else, like Facebook Video, which was blatantly lying about viewer numbers and basically caused the premature death of College Humor.

Youtube SUCKS. It's a pimp, not a partner. I won't give them a dime.

I wish I could upvote this 100 times. Alphabet (and the other tech giants) need to be broken up into smol pieces.

Please drink verification can

Just in case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36542487

Next add social shaming. “You got an extended ad because your friend Bob has an ad blocker installed”

Sounds like Bob's friend has means and motive to install an ad blocker.

"Ad blocker?? Sounds great! I'll have to ask Bob how I can get one."

ah, I'll ask Bob to set it up for me!

As usual, Twitter won't allow me to read the corresponding thread. I desperately need for somebody to confirm to me that this is satire. TIA

It is, this guy makes these excellent fake ridiculous product screenshots daily.

This site is a bit sketchy but mostly works (some bugs):

https://twstalker.com/soren_iverson/status/18012531876027884...

I'm so tired of hearing business people talk about how Elon laid off 80% of engineers at Twitter and "it still works!"

It doesn't work well. X is a buggy mess, and a way worse user experience than Twitter was prior to Elon. For the past several weeks, threads have failed to load whenever I click into a Tweet.

Hiding replies from people not logged in was intentional.

I am logged in, but for the past few weeks, replies won't load and I get an error message on my iPhone. The whole website is much slower too. I'm sure someone will tell me to use the app, but I don't have any intention to do so.

Just delete your account, man.

Until someone decides it's enough and makes a board elsewhere paired with a browser extension that takes the X URL and creates a thread where people can comment disregarding completely the one at X. The same can be made for Youtube for example; want dubbing in a different language, or play a different music that would trigger a copyright claim? All it needs is to sync the video with an external audio source, possibly shared through p2p; also doable by a browser extension.

Problem is that things like "manifest V3" may make this technically impossible (or you'll get a "manifest V4" to address this), and even then, software distribution is now controlled by a handful of gatekeepers who will quickly delete such extensions.

X has replies? I thought they shut that off.

This is designed to encourage you to login

>threads have failed to load whenever I click into a Tweet

To be fair to Musk, it's like that for years.

This featured in one of the early episodes of Black Mirror and is still in the top 3 for how regularly I think about it happening in real life.

Episode was Fifteen Million Merits [1], and might be the most cynical episode of Black Mirror, which is saying something.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

Yeah, the ending of that episode is one of the most depressing out of the entire series (though I haven't watched the last season yet). The fact that even the "fuck you!" becomes commoditized and fake like everything else in the universe kind of upset me upon my first watch.

It's probably my favorite episode of the entire series.

As others have said, this is a dystopian joke which will likely become a thing, eventually.

But, it's a good reminder to review app privacy settings on your device. Stuff like YouTube probably shouldn't have regular access to your camera.

For iPhones/iPads: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-built-in-privacy-...

This is less likely to happen on a device that you control, than on a device that you do not control, but nevertheless depend on.

I mean, would you allow a remote salesperson to use your camera and command you to do silly things?

Then why would you allow an AI to do the same?

job interview stage one, virtual aerobics. Get set...

I know this is fake, but if I ever see this, I'll find out where it came from. Then I'll break the device I see it on. Then I'll go to where it came from, and I'll ask them who told them to do that. Then I'll set the building on fire. Repeat until my demise or incidental coup. I will go full Liam Neeson in Taken over this, and I implore you to pledge the same for the love of everything.

Somewhere (probably California), somewhen (probably already a couple of years ago) there must have been a meeting where a bunch of people (possibly some in suits, some certainly not) discussed the question (in total seriousness) what consequences a feature like this could potentially have.

While - obviously - the majority must have concluded to pass, I can only image that probably one or two could have rooted for it.

It’s funny that HN readers believe that “people in suits” think of features like this. It’s literally just all of you.

To be fair its mostly the consultants who are brought in to figure out how to squeeze more blood from the stone. People in the trenches often aren't given the time to be so imaginative.

can we not give the builders of the Torment Nexus any further ideas?

Truly wonderful that this reads both ways

it's a duck-rabbit and I'm not seeing the other way to read this, mind helping me out?

> can we not give the builders of the Torment Nexus any further ideas?

A - Please refrain from giving the builders of the Torment Nexus any further ideas.

B - Are we able to stop giving the builders of the Torment Nexus any further ideas?

ah thanks, I was definitely thinking in terms of A but my subconscious may have also been running with B.

please upload a picture of ur mum.

Not going to lie… this got me.

Crazy world we live in where something like this seems plausible.

He should patent the idea and block anyone else from attempting this.

Too late. Prior art already exists. Top of my head would be Black Mirror.

Its like Clockwork Orange's Ludovico Technique meets Dune's Test of Humanity.

https://thetiredinsomniac.wordpress.com/2019/03/04/the-horro...

https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Gom_Jabbar

There are multiple startups in this space and Movie Pass threatened this “feature” a couple years ago.

So while a great joke account, the reality may not be far off.

Given the current rabid state of tech, I think we're only a couple of years away from seeing the first real examples of this. The messaging will probably be a bit different, incentivizing continuous eye contact rather than penalizing looking away: "Keep your eyes on to watch just one sponsored content instead of two!" (Which of course, boils down to the exact same thing.)

This might be satire, but I'm genuinely surprised that clicking the ad links is not yet mandatory to keep using services.

Advertisers use click through rate to measure ad effectiveness.

That is the reason they went absolutely crazy when adnauseam was introduced, as it used a different approach: it didn't block ads but loaded them in an invisible way, then "clicked" them randomly so that although the user wasn't pestered by ads, advertisers would get completely bogus click through data.

https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam

Isn't that good for their numbers though? I would imagine there are some advertisers who are buying out their own bots to juice click through rate. Why not? Incentives are high, disincentives are a slap on the wrist if you manage to even prove anything at all.

What would be the incentive for an advertiser to spend money on bots to juice the click-through rate of their ads? More ad-clicks mean more money spent on ad networks, and bots are notoriously stingy customers, all the more so if they are your own.

To fool the client into thinking the ad spend does anything

Yeah, but they can force the click and use conversion rate to measure the effectiveness of the ad campaign

Advertisers would not measure click through rate now if conversion could be measured always.

I highly recommend Soren's tweet feed. His ideas are often so close to "yup, this will be in the app sooner than later" or "creepy but great" that I was fooled a few times thinking this was an actual feature of an app/site

I'old enough to just stop using anything that tries to do this.

But I feel bad for next generations.

The problem is that so much of our popular culture and social fabric has now been consumed and locked within such a disgusting business model.

10 years later: please maintain eye contact with this government approved news broadcast to receive approval for purchasing cricket meal with your CBDC currency.

We're not yet there, but wearing hijab/niqaab/burqa or whaterver it's called, including by men, seems the only way forward.

This is a joke of course... but it won't be one day.

It may be a joke now, but someone will probably implement it.

Has anyone proposed this to YC yet? It's about the right size for a YC startup.

Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. You are going to watch the spots.

Black Mirror did that a few years back I think - 20 Million merits, or whatever it was called.

First thing which I do with almost all my devices - put black insulation tape on the webcam.

First encountered this idea in an old Black Mirror episode: https://youtu.be/Fj8-r30sSn0?si=FKr4OUTezm6YACqQ

Seems like something there’d be a lot of resistance to, but on the other hand inevitable. Is there a site to place bets on when certain levels of enshitification will be reached? (Only half joking.)

That was a thing in a Black Mirror episode, I'm pretty sure

MCDONALD'S!

For those unaware, OP is referring to Sony patent US8246454B2 which describes a system in which people can skip ads by e.g. shouting out the brand name of the ad.

https://i.imgur.com/OPbRxhK.png

I love (hate) that the figure in the illustration stands up with his arms raised. I wonder what the artist was thinking...

I have always felt uneasy about that too. I think it’s because the next (and final) panel looks exactly like the first. It’s the implication that you’ll have to do something so over the top as getting up, raising your arms, and shouting a brand name, then resuming what you were doing as it that were completely normal.

You have to show exuberance when demonstrating your brand loyalty, otherwise you’re not loyal enough to pass the ad. You’ll need to watch the entire reeducation, I mean ad, in that case.

It was the next day brothers, and I truly had done my best morning and afternoon to play it their way and sit like a horrorshow cooperative malchick in the chair of torture while they flashed nasty bits of ultraviolence on the screen.

Very few Americans have much familiarity with Russian language at all.

When this was written during Soviet times, and the Hollywood movie made, it was far fewer, so mostly people did not get the connection whatsoever.

If you ask a Russian how they are doing, if they are doing well they respond positively with a word that sounds just like "horrorshow".

No differently than they did under the Tzars, Lenin and Stalin.

Everything behind the "iron curtain" always been completely horrorshow, as much as it could be.

This is interesting, and makes me wonder how they translated "horrorshow" in the Russian edition of the book. The Wikipedia entry on Nadsat touches on its translation briefly at the end of the Description section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat#Description

It's definitely coming though

That would be really creepy..

some people don't get the 'humour' behind the fake ad

black mirror s01e02

Google be like 'dont steal our ideas'

Love it!

They could require you to smile, you know?

Entire Black Mirror episode on this.

Is this real? Joke?

Asking because this similar idea has been popping up in last few weeks, and wondering if someone is really trying to do it.

It’s a joke, the author’s account is essentially a string of ideas like this. Most are more ridiculous than this.

"In Soviet Russia, ad watches you."

i very much like this

*Capitalist America

Unrelated, but what's the best way to read a thread when somebody posts a twitter link like this? I've never really used Twitter but it seems like there's no way to tell if there are any relevant replies or anything more than just this one image unless you login.

I used to use threadreaderapp but now it seems like they are asking for a login too :/

I just move on to something else. Twitter's not worth the time/hassle.

1000%. If you have something worth saying, say it somewhere other than X, so that people can read it without a hassle.

Even if you could see the replies they would almost all be off-topic attempts by paid "verified accounts" to take advantage of the eyeballs on the popular post they are replying to.

Twitter replies to any post that is semi-popular have been a worthless jumble of engagement bait for about a year now.

  Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.

   Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com

Not to single out twitter because a lot of web sites simply appear as a blank page.

The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

But if you must:

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

At the moment, this worked for me:

https://xcancel.com/soren_iverson/status/1801253187602788424...

nitter was awesome but since x, i just ignore the twitter void ... https://nitter.cz/

As that site states, public Nitter instances are no longer viable.

Some Nitter instances remain. I don't know how.

Replies clarify it's satire.

This is satire. Twitter does not show replies to people who are not logged in.

"For nearly a year, Soren has been making unhinged interfaces daily." https://canyouimagine.lol/

For now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com