Scrobling used to be huge back in the day of mp3s and last.fm practically invented it.There are also alternative APIs implementing the same idea. Unfortunately for them they never caught up on the age of streaming.

Ubuntu was a fantastic distribution to start early on. Especially in the pre-10.x days there weren't many beginner friendly ones. Your alternatives were Debian with very outdated software, SuSE which was kind of OK, Fedora which was also quite unstable and lacking packages (remember hunting RPMs on the old RPMfusion?) or Ubuntu. At some point I'd outgrown Ubuntu and moved on to greener pastures. Nowadays I'm not sure I'd be recommending Ubuntu to new users, Fedora is quite good and without all the snap store shenanigans. Even Debian installation experience is not too bad and it's not lacking too much in software.

Unfortunately what's going to happen in reality is that any non-standard ad consumption (including non consumption) will be flagged as fraudulent. "We cannot verify your activity, please disable your add-ons to continue".

It literally lists countering ad-blocking as a use case.

Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they're human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.

Yay another Mandrake user! I actually bought the box from a computer store back in 2003. Mandrake was actually a decent effort for a user friendly distribution and the standard installation included tons of software. Getting pppd to connect that serial ISDN modem to the internet for the first time was magical. I've been a Linux user ever since. The other main alternatives at the time were Debian, Slackware both too complicated for a newbie.

Isn't that too complicated for no reason? Just keep them under public control. No need to incentivise anyone, no need to share dividends to anyone.

It's the be-all end-all justification for anything

While I'm not opposed to paying for YouTube (it is a service after all) the only way to do so would be by being logged in to YouTube with whatever black box algorithmic tracking and curation that entails. There is no "proper" way to anonymously access YouTube without ads.

I tried to pay something with Bitcoin instead of debit card a couple of years ago. The transaction took ~4 hours to clear and that's with fees totalling about 40% of the amount. Granted the original amount was like $10 but still way too slow and way too expensive. I understand that technically credit cards are not instant too, but there's an intermediary that guarantees that the amount has been reserved until the bank clears your payment. I wasn't expecting Bitcoin to be instant but 4+ hours is excessive.

That's 2-3 years ago so my experience might be outdated.

Adulthood means being excited for a new mattress!!

My previous house was like that. Top floor flat, western facing, drowned in sunlight 14 hours a day. Nice and bright but during moderately sunny and warm weather it was minimum 28°C all day long.

Never again.

Same problem trying to upload a 17 kB avatar

SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data