Shurimal

Vivaldi with uBlock Origin here. A simple refresh of the page makes the popup go away, often for the rest of the session. For me, it's YT without ads as usual. I might need to clear uBlock cache and refresh filter lists to make it work even better. There's also a Tampermonkey script for blocking the popup, but I haven't tried it yet.

As a side note, I've seen a lot of talk about boycotting Youtube. There are 3 things to consider with this:

1. Boycotting YT will give Google exactly what they want, getting rid of the "freeloaders" who don't pay for Premium and block ads.
2. Boycotting YT will hurt small creators who don't see much ad revenue (if any) anyway. Views and likes are what make small creators visible to the algorithm, if these drop off, their reach will diminish.
3. Boycotting YT won't affect big creators with sponsorships, healthy Patreon community, millions of subscribers and views.
   Best way of defiance here is not stopping to use YT, but on the contrary, generating as much traffick to YT as possible while blocking the ads.

That would be a murder, and yes, it's social.

If I can’t afford something, I watch ads

I can't afford to pay 20€ per month--that's more than my whole monthly phone bill with something like 50 or 100 GB of data. Cost of living is high enough as it is.

I also lack the most valuable currency there is in one's life, one that you simply can't get more of. Time. So I block ads, which cost a lot of time, with extreme prejudice.

Ads are also bad for my mental health, they just irritate me, rack up stress and easily swing me into bad mood.

Lastly, I don't give a fuck about costing money to some multi-billion corporation. I don't care about them as much as they don't care about me; the corpos see me just as a resource to exploit as much as possible then move on to another one when there's nothing more to exploit, and I see the corpos exactly the same way. Call it mutual parasitism. Yes, I'm a parasite. And parasites are the most successful lifeforms on Earth.

The Gingerdead Man

The problem with Google's passcodes:

1. I don't use Google account on my phone. In a rare occasion I need to access gmail outside of my home, I just log in via a browser, either on my phone or work computer or wherever.
2. My home PC has no authentication whatsoever. The three physical locks on my apartment's door is the access control. Couldn't lug it around for authentication, anyway.
3. I have no other devices that could be used for this passcode thing, and my phone is usually laying around somewhere, probably shut off with empty battery.

In fact, I have not bothered even with 2FA for google accounts. At this point these are just "garbage collection accounts" for spam and youtube subscriptions/playlists, anyway.

->relativistic kill vehicle.

You see it coming, omae wa mou shindeiru.

Only thing more scary would be triggering a vacuum decay event. But these tend to backfire quite spectacularly.

Your experience really makes me wish I was back in school. I'd love to see teacher's reaction to the character and plot analysis of Peter Watts Rifters series or Blindsight🫠

I think even the plot summary of Killing Star would make them doubt in their, my and the author's sanity—"The book starts with near-total annihilation of the human species and Earth's biosphere by the highly energetic event of multiple relativistic kill vehicles impacting the planet at 0.92 C. And then it gets worse".

Geometrically speaking, if you draw a really, really big triangle between, say three galaxies, the angles of the triangle add to 180° in a flat universe. In a non-flat space, this would not be the case. For example, if you draw a triangle between, say, New York, Berlin and Rio de Janeiro on the surface of the Earth, the three angles between the lines would add to more than 180° since Earth is topologically a sphere and not flat. And if you draw three lines beween three points on a saddle shape like a Pringles chip, you'll find that the angles add up to less than 180°.

Fun fact: topologically speaking, no matter how you fold or bend a sheet of paper, it remains flat. A cilinder is a flat surface with zero curvature!

In that Expanse clip Kamal is leaning around just like I am when in combat or hooning in Elite.

In both cases, neither Kamal nor I feel any extra acceleration, sitting in a comfortable 0 or 1 G constantly. Leaning around is just a human thing. (While Kamal is using attitude thrusters to rotate the ship around, assuming the pilot's station is at or near the ship CoM as would be desireable for a spaceship, he would feel very little acceleration from that)

But in my case, if I were actually pulling these maneuvers in real life, I'd need to be highly trained on a centrifuge, strapped in tightly, wear a G-suit, have some cybernetic enhanchements and still not only moving around in the seat but black out regularly. Ships in Elite can easily pull 20 or 30 G-s, 3 to 4 times more than modern jet fighters can and 30 to 50 times more than any near-future spaceships can. Realistically, with currently viable drive tech (which includes nuclear propulsion schemes from NERVA to nuclear pulse drive) we're talking about 0.1...0.5 G accelerations for spaceships. Torchships could handle maybe 1 or 2 G-s, comparable to what a street-legal sports car can do.

Lem's Eden was one of my favourites as a kid and works on many levels:

• Cool action and adventuring on a mysterious alien planet.
• Plenty of gadgetry of both human and alien origin. Including some of the earliest description of nanotechnology.
• Social commentary about interfering with an another civilization, oppression, totalitarianism and control of information.

Niven's Known Space series, especially short stories like Neutron Star.

Clifford D. Simak has two fabulous stories, They Walked Like Men and The Goblin Reservation which have the perfect mix of action, humour and societal commentary. It's hard to beat the latters main cast consisting of a university professor searching for dragons, a neanterthal man, a girl with a pet sabertooth tiger and a ghost with amnesia. Hilarity is quaranteed to ensue.

These are machines, though, not human beings.

What's the difference? On the most fundamental level it's all the same.