When I used to be on Windows, I shifted to Process Explorer. It is developed by Microsoft only I guess as part of their Sysinternals suite. I think it retains an older style UI but is significantly more powerful (has/d virus total integration for one).

This isn’t new. Just search for Glance. US/EU users may not have heard of this but entry level smartphones in India have long come bundled with this piece of spam, irrespective of OEM. From Chinese manufacturers to even Samsung/Motorola was guilty of bundling this.

Last I heard of Glance, they had embraced AI (because why not?). Either case, it was nothing more than an ad infested bloatware and whilst possible to toggle on/off (default state was on), removing it was usually tougher (if at all possible via adb, I am not sure of this part).

Glance walked so Nothing could run :p

The web is designed for humans to use, so if Atlas can monitor us - how we book train tickets for example - it can learn how to better navigate these kinds of processes.

That is called malware. Or at the very least, Open AI should be paying the users for basically getting their browsing data for free, not other way around.

Second, I object to it being called a Google killer in the article. It is based on Chromium whose future is basically in Google’s hands right now for all Intents and purposes. The days of multiple Web browsers are gone. We have the same thing in new clothing. Opera ditched it’s rendering engine for Chromium, MS ditched Trident for Chromium.

Currently, there are basically only three real browser engines : Chromium, Gecko which powers Firefox Derivatives and Safari(Blinkit? I am not sure of its exact name). Even if Open AI’s new browser (or Perplexity 's for that matter) takes market by storm, they will remain dependent on Google because the underlying code is. They can’t be truly independent unless they have their separate engine. And if the new Ladybird project shows one thing, it is that shipping a new browser might be easy, but a new rendering engine is very tough.

Whilst the first paragraph I can agree with, the chunk of 10-20% GDP is unsubstantiated with data. As it stands today, the core of scam industry has actually moved away from India towards the porous Myanmar-Cambodia border. Not only is it not well defined due to political reasons, the instability provides a volatile situation. Private mafia like companies operate there.

Sure, Indian folks do work there as well but not out of their own volition. Many have been gotten there through fake promises of high paying jobs only to be let down and with no way to escape. This isn’t a phenomenon restricted to India either. Recently, South Korea summoned the Cambodian Ambassador after its citizens were embezzeled in a similar way in the compounds there.

Feel free to DM.

I wasn’t expecting tommydan from YouTube to be mentioned here :p. Best of all he does, what companies themselves couldn’t do, maintain the original aspect ratio. I remember that Shemaroo restored certain old Hindi films but the original aspect ratio for them was 4:3 whilst the restored ran into 16:9.

In fact, I have been seeing the odd old Hindi film from an unexpected source. The Russian site Ok. I am still not sure if it is a social media site or not since the English UI is not there for me but for all Intents and purposes, it is used to upload videos only. Some guy ended up uploading whole filmography of Rajesh Khanna on the site (much of it mirrored later to Archive.org). Whilst the irony remains that there is probably not a single legal hub to see the lesser known films.

Heck, I was hunting an out of print (like literally unavailable to stream or purchase anywhere short of anyone having the original CD/DVD) 1996 film and the only way was to pirate it (from a single source).

In some cases, piracy becomes an act of media preservation ( cues back to when BBC wiped some Doctor Who episodes in the late sixties and only way few were gotten back was because some folks had gotten audio transcribed or something at home).

From Kinks to Camel to obscure Krautrock stuff like Dissidenten, Out of Focus, Embryo. Ironically I have < 50 Hindi songs in my collection because the era I like the most [50s - 60s], good quality stuff is hard to come by. Like the files even on Soulseek or torrents are so incredibly compressed that it is a pity. The vocals sound so tinny that one wonders that how did the original masters sounded like.

I didn’t knew foobar2000 was available for mobile as well. I only knew it because it was so popular as a lightweight modular player for Windows. I used to be on Strawberry, a Clementine fork on Linux before moving to Deadbeef, which is like Foobar2000 but misses few features.

It is law of diminishing marginal utility. There would be more sonic distinguishness between a 64 kbps and a 128 kbps file, than say when making the same upgrade to 256 kbps. It becomes less and less obvious as one approaches 44.1 kHz/16 bit flac (beyond which it is useless to hoard unless one is mastering the albums themselves).

I have a DAC paired with Sennheiser IE 600 which is not audiophile level, but ought to be decent enough.

Either case, my point was not about audio quality and whether or not a person can distinguish a flac from say, 320 kbps mp3. Countless threads are made on that and viewpoints presented. My argument was that YouTube Music does not present first, to stream music in high quality and second, even if the quality was indistinguishable, there is no way to manage a library since most of the desktop third party clients remain without login.

Once can stream audio from YouTube via terminal on Linux but problem is all of that is limited to 128 kbps AAC. There is no way to stream proper 256 kbps AAC that YouTube Music Premium provides. One can download such streams via yt-dlp (it needs to be given authorization cookies) but there is currently no way to stream high quality audio from YouTube without using the webpage.

Could you tell me an alternative that allows for third party clients? On Spotify, I can configure a terminal client even on Linux and stream music with very low overhead [contrast with YTMusic with required a permanent browser tab opened]. Yes, local media streaming can do that but there is only so much space at one time on my HDD.

I heard of it. It is shipping in two variants, right? I just hope it makes general availability worldwide and not just a handful of countries (looks at Fairphone).

Pocketcasts really is trying folks towards it’s subscription driven model though I have no qualms with the UI. AntennePod relies on gPodder service to sync but that is slow and clunky sometimes.

There is Podcast Republic as well I think, which is still a one time purchase.

I didn’t even try using YTM as a podcast client. Streaming music players doubling as podcast players always have a hindrance (but at Atleast Amazon Music has some ad free content from Wondery in some regions in case one is a Prime subscriber).

AntennePod is a good FOSS alternative whilst Pocketcasts is a decent cross platform one (but the latter basically is subscription based if one wants desktop and watch playback which is a downer).

Podcasts was good. Lightweight, cross platform and basic. YTM is a sink hole as a podcast alternative.

Apple Podcasts lives on as a far superior alternative whilst Google has left it’s users in the lurch. In an alternate world, Google would still be developing Podcasts not only on mobile but also on Wear OS

Yes, I have 4 add-ons for YouTube only (3 for youtube and one to change UI of YTM, technically a tamper monkey script).

addon to auto select higher quality streams

I meant on their mobile app. On web, there are ways. But on mobile, there is none officially. I have to manually select the 1080p thingy there. Ironically, New pipe has option for custom video stream for both wifi and mobile data.

YouTube conducts so many useless experiments on their app from so called AI assisted summaries to what not, but can’t factor in basic things. Today, I bolted back to Tubular ( Newpipe fork) and the simple UI with only subscriptions is a sight to behold (no shorts, option to hide comments, sponserblock integration and not to mention, no furthur IAPs). If a paying user has to resort to 3rd party alternatives, then the situation is really grim (the only thing YT app officially has is 1080p Premium bit rate but it rarely went there automatically for me).

Google takes always anti user decisions. From small things like shoving in the cast button permanently in the playback UI of YT Music to depriving users of options (no third party clients, second rate Wear OS app, no light mode, no lossless audio, geographical restrictions on tracks(which for those same tracks don’t appear on other music services)) ; it is like Google wants users to pirate.

I paid for YT Premium because I used YT Music and YouTube was just a plus (the official YouTube app is a shill, asking to tip a creator or super thank or join membership. Like no thanks, I already paid once. Not to mention, even simplistic things like choosing a default video quality is impossible in YouTube mobile app. What the heck is Data Saving and High; give me granular controls.)

If Google continues to enshittify even the music service, I will just pirate (I tried Spotify but this post will become another rant if I list it’s shortcomings).

Folks who have heard about the book know that Frankestein was the monster.

Folks who have read the book know that Frankestein created the monster.

Folks who understand the book know that Frankenstein was the real monster.

I moved to weechat. It is terminal only. I had setup some keybindings either ways on hexchat to navigate faster via keyboard between channels / servers and weechat can replicate them (albeit it takes a little time to read documentation in this case). Many folks also are hard on users of irssi but weechat met my simplistic needs.

Not to mention almost any distro will have a packaged version of weechat in its repos.

Not really. The speeds of trains is still a major constriction and Indian Railways is a major laggard vis a vis say, China. Sure, some aspects are advancing (electrification for one, 90%+ tracks are electrified) but high speed rail is still in it’s infancy (still under construction with help from Japan).