> You will not see any ads if you do not use the Google-supplied Javascript video player. However avoiding data collection takes some effort on the part of the user.

I watch most of my YT videos through mpv, which (AFAIK) uses youtube-dl as a backend to get the video stream. Am I still vulnerable to tracking?

What I do is only use the videoplayback URL and reject/divert all the others. This requires having the proxy delete the range parameter in the query string portion. If you observe the traffic when using the YouTube website, there are many HTTP requests for things we do not need if we are not using Google's Javascript player. And there is no need for Cookies and many other HTTP headers if only using the videoplayback URL. Sometimes I may do two downloads: one for the video and one for the audio. YouTube seems to be now using similar/same approach for their user video as Facebook. With some videoplayback URLs pointing to only audio, and some pointing to different screen sizes.

I doubt you are as vulnerable to as much tracking as someone using the YouTube website.

I find youtube-dl breaks quite frequently and so I wrote a simple downloader myself (for non-commercial videos) in a few lines of shell script. I have found it is easier to fix quickly if there are significant changes at YouTube than waiting for the youtube-dl project to release an update.

This is the best comedy routine I've ever seen.

> Because of the curvature of our eyes, we are born with an inverted view. Light and visual info coming into the eye gets refracted upside down onto the retina, over time the brain learns to correctly orient the image. Autistic children presumably never learn to invert the image their retinas project, many probably still see everything upside down.

Excuse me, what the fuck?

> I realize there is a large contingent of HN numskulls who just luuurb to chime in with a list of their "meds," for conditions imaginary and otherwise, whose idea of activity is playing video games while subsisting on a diet of microwave pizza rolls.

First thing I thought of was Ray Kurzweil.

I want to believe this is real.

This is only tangentially related, but I love that first comic. Without knowing when it was published, you wouldn't understand the joke, because that's now the reality for many triple-A releases.

I think the world itself is getting Flanderized.

I feel like this applies to every area of life. What happened to us all?

I encountered this error a few weeks ago while trying to convert a folder of .webp files to .png. God, I love Bash.

> Published by Maciej Radzikowski

This guy was dealt a bad hand by God.