I keep NoScript around because there’s been a few times where I clicked a bad link and NoScript blocking JS by default has saved my bacon. Plus, a lot of services like twitch serve ads through separate domains that I can block from running entirely with NoScript–the entire time people were complaining about Twitch trying to bypass adblockers, I never once saw a single ad.
Disgusting piece of craps! All should continue to open eyes, against google. They wont stop!
Spread the word to install firefox based browser, use different frontends to block youtube ads in browser, Invidious and use piped youtube apps on android to block youtbe ads: Newpipe
I’ve downloaded FFmepg in the past, but I’m too dull and non-techy to understand it. I’m bound to royally fuck up anything in command prompt. Is there a setting I can use in Windows to allow me to remove the metadata by right clicking like I can with documents or images?
You can try installing Handbrake, it’s basically a user interface to make using FFmpeg easier. As far as removing all the metadata with a click, I’m not aware of anything that does that.
Honestly though, I think this is a simple enough case that you could figure it out even if you’re non-techy. The basic steps would be:
make a folder somewhere to keep everything in one place
download FFmpeg from here (this is one of the official Windows builds)
extract the 7z file you downloaded, there’s a folder inside called “bin” and inside of that should be three .exe files, one of which is just named “ffmpeg.exe”. Put that .exe into the folder you made earlier
open Notepad, copy/paste the command from my first comment into Notepad, and save it as something like “remove_metadata.bat” to your folder from earlier. In the window where you choose where to save the file, make sure you choose the file type “all files” from the drop down in order to save it as a .bat.
After setting it up, you can just put any .mp4 into the same folder, rename it INPUT.mp4, and run your .bat file by double-clicking it. It should create a new file called OUTPUT.mp4 in the same folder with all of the metadata removed.
I’ll try this, thanks! It’s really surprising though that you can’t just delete the metadata like you can with a normal file. Is there something unusual about mp4 format that disallows this?
I think it’s just that software to edit video streams is inherently more complicated than editing images. Although the metadata shouldn’t be encoded into the streams, so maybe it’s just a case of no one has gotten around to making such a program yet.
Sorry for the late reply, but it looks like somehow Notepad++ got set as the default program to open .bat files. Right click the .bat file, choose “open with”, and you should get an option to open it with command line / cmd.
EDIT: or just change it to .cmd, which should work basically the same way.
Haven’t heard of either one of these, thanks! Musicbrainz Pickard looks pretty intuitive based on the screenshots, and I like that it’s also available for Linux. I’ll try that one first.
I just used it. It was easy enough to edit/remove metadata, which is all I want to do for now. It reminds me a bit of a Windows 95 era app, which is the time period when I became acclimated to Windows software.
Anyway, it took just a few seconds to do what I want to do. I’m still quite baffled why removing/editing metadata in a mp4 is unsupported in Windows. It seems like such a basic thing.
I finally got around to trying it, and I’ve realized that the “open with” option is absent from the right-click menu for some reason. I’m trying to find out why, but so far no luck. I checked the registry key, and it’s intact and should be giving me the option. I hate Windows.
Edit: So after a lot of searching, I discovered that I must have had Notepad++ set up wrong, because I found a registry entry from Notepad++ in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT \ .bat
I didn’t want to just delete the value, so I ended up uninstalling Notepad++ from my PC entirely, and the “open with” option returned, and the registry entry disappeared. Notepad++ is a popular app, so I feel like a lot of the people I found by searching who have the same problem might have this app installed with the registry entry to remove “open with” from the .bat file extension specifically. I knew something was up because I tested other files on my PC, and “open with” was still there. So frustrating, but your solution works now! Thanks!
I totally agree with you about Windows. Even Microsoft’s forums are generally unhelpful if you don’t want to use their OS they way they think you should use it. I’m gradually switching to Linux and will not be using Windows 11. Whatever minor conveniences I may miss out on are worth moving to an OS built with users in mind and with a friendly community of people who are actually helpful.
Yeah, I have to use Microsoft products for work and I’ve stumbled across their forums for issues before. I don’t think it’s ever once been helpful. Solutions on Linux forums are hit and miss, but still much better.
It’s not AI, though. They’re just using buzzwords, because what they described is functionally no different from AFIS. It’s just a poorly written algorithm.
I’m aware, but unfortunately I’m not big enough in the tech industry to create differentiating terms. AI is an extremely broad term ranging from literal if-else statements to LLMs and generative AI. Unfortunately the specifics usually get buried in the term
It's almost like the incessant marketing of standard optimisation algorithms as artificial intelligence has diluted the tech industry with meaningless buzzwords.
AI has been used to refer to all kinds of dynamic programming in the history of computation. Algebraic solvers, edge detection, fuzzy decision systems, player programs for video games and tabletop games. So when you say AI is this or that you are being rather prescriptivist about it.
The problem with AI and ML is more one of it being presented to the public by grifters as a magical one stop solution to almost any problem. What term was used hardly matters, it was the propaganda that carried the term. It would be like saying the name Nike is the reason for the shoe brand’s success and not it’s marketing.
So discredit the grifters, and if you want to destroy the term then look to dilute it by using it to describe even more things. It was never really a useful term to begin with. I’ll leave you with this quote
A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it’s not labelled AI anymore.
In 2018, a man in a baseball cap stole thousands of dollars worth of watches from a store in central Detroit.
The AI was trained on a database of mostly white people The photos of people of colour in the dataset were generally of worse quality, as default camera settings are often not optimised to capture darker skin tones.
Mr Williams’ photo didn’t come up first. In fact, it was the ninth-most-probable match.
Regardless…
Officers drove to Mr Williams’ house and handcuffed him.
They arrested him in front of his five and two-year-old kids…
Ai with bad training data + lazy cops who didn’t learn how to use the tools they were given = this mess
The computer didn’t get it wrong; the computer did exactly what it was programmed to do. Blaming the computer implies that this can be solved by fixing the computer, that it “just wasn’t good enough yet”, when it was the humans who actually did it. It was the humans who were supposed to exercise their judgment that got it wrong. You can’t fix that from the computer.
Ever since we let law enforcement use facial recognition technology, they’ve been arresting people for false positives, sometimes for long periods of time.
it’s not just camera problems and being poorly trained regarding non-whites, but that people actually look too much alike, especially when using the tech on blurry low-res security footage,
I used to work in security camera monitoring and I used to think I don’t understand why insurers will touch some of these companies with an electrified cattle prod.
They will be pretty high value asset companies with valuable stuff on premises that could be stolen, construction equipment, medical equipment, guns, cars, steel copper lead etc. and their security cameras would max out at 720p have a giant spider web on them without fail and would invariably be on some wobbly pole somewhere that was blowing around in the wind causing 300 false positives a minute. We literally used to switch those cameras off.
Why don’t they insist on equipment that didn’t cost the company $4.50 from Walmart?
The only cameras we used to work with that were actually any good were the number plate recognition cameras, but they were specialist and were absolutely useless for anything else other than number plate recognition. But boy did they get you that number plate.
I run Dropbox, since they’re only in cloud storage they can’t really run around and sell data, if found out there would be no reason to stay for their customers. Unlike say Google and Microsoft.
Storj, specifically using RClone and the native Uplink CLI (vs the S3 gateway). Super cheap, P2P, built-in client-side encryption are what keep me on it (and steering clear of the nightmare that is AWS).
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