Google is not getting a cut of that sponsorship money. They don't care if it wrecks your deal. They want your ONLY source of income to be Youtube. If you're fully beholden to Youtube, there will be no escape, no way for you to leave and take your viewership with you.
Remember how Youtube used to be a nice cage with lots of air holes and fun toys to occupy you? Light ad enforcement, tools to help you build your viewership etc? People are starting to feel the pinch of those being removed. That cool room is starting to look like what it really is--an industrial cage.
Skip Ahead is only for Premium subscribers. The logic probably being native-ads/sponsorships are in fact ads, and Premium users are paying for an ad-free experience.
It's interesting that I just read an inteview with YouTube CEO (https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-youtube-ceo-n...) who mentioned that YouTube fully intends to start getting a cut out of that sponsorship money ("to align interests better").
> They want your ONLY source of income to be Youtube.
I’m not sure. They want influencers to make profit using their platform, so they want to make them rich. On the viewcount, a skipped sponsor still looks like a view. No sponsor is going to look at the proportion of watching each part of the video, they just care about the view counter.
What Youtube may want, though, is for paying customers to be able to skip ads. “If you pay you should have no ads”.
YouTube doesn't have to defend itself. Read this thread and understand how shitty/entitled it's users are.
Then these adult children go an complain there are no competitors. No shit, you scoff at subscriptions and wear your ad-block like a badge of honor. Who the hell would invest in making a platform for non-paying users?
Strangely enough, I do feel entitled to download data from YouTube using standard protocols on a standard port. It's not like I'm breaking in or anything.
Law enforcement is the US is trained to use (often rapidly) increasing force to compel compliance. They are trained that this is the only way to keep themselves and partners safe.
Working with a client just last month that hired an African engineering group to build a tool for them. What they got delivered was a Next.js train wreck that was so coupled to Vercel's hosting that I couldn't make it run successfully anywhere else. The customer was a non-profit and didn't want to/couldn't afford Vercel's hosting so asked if I could try and make it run and I (naively) thought 'its just javascript, it should run anywhere!' and I took a run at it.
After a week of futzing with it I just threw up my hands and said 'no can do'. I couldn't untangle the spaghetti JS and piles of libraries. 'Compiling' would complete and if you looked at the output it was clearly missing tons of bits but never threw an error. Just tons of weirdness from the toolchain to the deployment platform.
I haven't heard anything about trends, stereotypes, positives, and negatives regarding IT and development in Africa. Following HN's guideline to increase curiosity as topics get more divisive (as this subthread has), and looking for "the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says" I'm going to assume the best:
What's the story here? I assume this group was chosen for a reason and didn't meet expectations.
The non-profit works in Africa and is all about using local resources when at all possible. They knew some people that worked with a group out of Nairobi that talked a good game and they liked the people they met and the non-profit folks are NOT technical, they jumped on it. It's a classic story really--I've been on this side of the table many times before with outsourced work.
If they had brought me in before hand I could have saved them a lot of work by asking the hard questions and reigning in the tech overspend.
They're sweet well meaning people. They're very familiar with the realities of working in Africa, but they always assume people will try and do the right thing at the end of the day.
It was running when they accepted it. However they didn't realize that the group was running the Django/Postgres 'backend' on a managed Digital Ocean instance, then there were two different Vercel 'projects'. It was costing hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month to run for a project that was VERY lightly used.
They paid them on the strength of seeing it working, but then the consulting group basically ghosted when the customer asked to adjust it to run on cheaper hosting (probably because they couldn't), then the site got shut off because the hosting was all in the consulting groups name and they stopped paying it. Digital Ocean nuked the database for non-payment and they lost tons and tons of manual work putting in data.
I felt really bad for them. They're super nice people and I don't think the contractors set out to take advantage of them, it ended up being an bad experience for everyone.
When I read "African engineering group" I felt an instant "ugh" of recognition, based on my experience with software created by external consultants on other continents. My experiences were with groups in Asia and Europe, not Africa, so I think what the poster successfully evoked was the experience of dealing with differences of distance, culture, time zone, and commercial interest (engineers answerable to different management and a different bottom line,) all of which tend to produce inferior software compared to what gets produced for in-house use or sale in the SaaS market.
Exactly--bad work can be from anywhere. However working with contractors at this kind of distance, through a language barrier, with different societal norms (for example, the US project manager was a woman, and the programmers just completely ignored things she said. If myself or another man was present, they completely changed their tone and would immediately act on things we said. Our project manager was pretty much ignored or steam rolled at every turn) is extremely difficult.
Obviously, but I would imagine that most of the “magic” isn’t in the supplied components, but in the finished product. Otherwise reproduction would be easier.
Just wanted to watch a relatively recent movie yesterday (Antichrist) and the only place that has it is a streaming service called Mooby. Not signing up for a service to watch one movie. Would have gladly paid 4 bucks to watch it, so had to find it in the usual places instead.
You'd have to poke around in the forums. I'm not sure what the best keywords to search with would be. The gist of it is only AT&T ONTs can connect, because it's using certificate fuckery, but there was a guy buying those up for $1 or $5 or something on ebay, jtag-ing the certs off of those, and selling them for $10 each. There were instructions for how to program the sfp module to use those, and when I got mine those modules were only about $50 each (no idea what they're now with the tariff nonsense). You'd need a router that can accept those, I've got a Mikrotik. I think Ubiquiti has a prosumer router with one too that's not too crazy.
At the time (3 years ago-ish), no one had figured out a way to do it with AT&T 5gig service. But for that you'd need something with SFP+ slots, and those are seriously pricey.
https://pon.wiki/ has a few bypasses for AT&T and other fiber ISPs. Unfortunately a lot of the info isn't on the website, but in their Discord server instead.
This is not helpful, funny, or intelligent. It’s a child’s rant about the world.
At the end of the day, the reason more housing isn’t built is that the incentives are greater to not build it. You can build a high rise with shoebox apartments that have to be aggressively managed and make a profit. Or you can build a high rise with half the units, higher reoccurring revenue and less hassle and make 2x the immediate profit.
At the end of the day as long as there is demand for more expensive housing that’s what’s going to get built.
The incentives you're talking about -- they're missing because of NIMBYist overregulation. The whole point of NIMBYism is to use regulation to hamstring the positive incentives in the market. "There's demand for twenty units here but the place is zoned for a single unit." or "There's demand for twenty units but the city demands that if we build a multitenant unit, we have to do a twenty-year environmental survey first".
Do you live in a place with a homeless crisis. Guess what: You're a citizen and you have some agency. Democracy can be a backstop to "pure" (or mis-regulated) market forces. I, for one, enjoy clean drinking water (and also: a good deal from a healthy competitive market).
I really want to see a whole town built in US out of commie block style high rises or Chinese dystopian ant nests, and how quickly it will devolve into a ghetto, because there’s no authoritarian arm to keep it in check.
The typical counterpoint to this NIMBYism isn't, communism, but rather most of Texas (where there's loosening zoning law) or West Virginia (where there's abundant poverty and social problems but also abundant housing).
I think this article really buries the lead—what really allowed him to win was leverage. He says that’s an over beers info, not a blog post. But that’s actually what let him win—not learning from the LLM how to understand his lawyers arguments better.
OP told you what he could in a public forum and left out a few things for private. Its only fair.
The incentives are against you. Lower costs lets defendant fight it out longer with less $$ for lawyer. Law firm isn't spending more hours to earn less. So you gotta have a friend with this skill and a vested interest or do the legwork, which OP suggest AI was for him.
I don't agree AI had a significant part to play here. The leverage, whatever it was isn't likely to be public. Certainly wasn't AI as the title suggests.
This is the reason I think the 'AI' angle of the post is less interesting than how he came to understand the power dynamics and strategy of the situation. Maybe AI helped him reach that point, but it could easily have been a lawyer friend or family member playing that role
Because the point was how he used AI, not the actual leverage.
In my case, I used small claims when a contractor took my money and didn't perform work. The threat of losing a lawsuit was enough to get the money back.
I suspect the plaintiff did something that would allow Tyler to countersue, or otherwise there was some kind of threat of negative publicity / tattle to other customers.
Remember how Youtube used to be a nice cage with lots of air holes and fun toys to occupy you? Light ad enforcement, tools to help you build your viewership etc? People are starting to feel the pinch of those being removed. That cool room is starting to look like what it really is--an industrial cage.