Labels limit us. It's very good to have your own views, your own opinions, independent of groups.

I used to try to fit labels, I was once a Catholic, then I was once an atheist, then I was once an agnostic, then I was once almost an Protestant, then I was once a Luciferian. Nowadays I stopped trying to fit out-of-the-shelf groups/labels and I have my own personal belief system, worshipping Dark Mother Goddess Lilith/Kali/Nuit. There's no "Lilitheism" and even if it was a thing, I wouldn't fit as I have syncretic views and I also consider Dark Mother Goddess as being Devi Kali as well (from Hinduism, although I'm not Hindu), and Nuit as well (from Thelema, although I'm not exactly Thelemite). I could fit the label "syncretic", or "demonolatry", but my views are too multifaceted to fit them.

So, enjoy the belief you have, it's unique.

Sorry, YouTube is not available to systems without a functioning camera

Actually, a fixed camera (on a laptop, for example). Because any webcam connected by cable can be moved, which means the algorithm cannot detect whether you are actually looking at the screen.

blares a loud siren

IIRC, it was a high-pitched sound, like a screeching cicada.

a Black Mirror episode where if you close your eyes, the ad stops playing

And a deafening high-pitched sound started to play, until the character opened his eyes to resume viewing the ads.

Or just... ditch Youtube and de-google the digital life.

I ditched Youtube many months ago. I really try to avoid, at all costs, to access Youtube videos, preferring Odysee, for example.

One of these cowboy hats:

(I want to add some metal spikes around it, making it a metal-goth-country hat)

I guess they have no decentralized CDNs as YouTube does, but... paid streaming services still have their weaknesses (there certainly are tools that fetches content from there because of, e.g: entire Netflix movies/series became torrents without screen recording).

It still lasts because there's no easy way YT can offer their own content without the video being available as a file stream (through CDNs at googlevideos subdomains). If they centralize everything to a single, controlled domain (so to allow things as one-time HTTPS request, better session checking and so on), they'd lost the capability of load balancing allowed by the decentralized nature of CDNs. YouTube downloaders (and, by extension, third-party YT frontends such as Invidious) exploit this CDN aspect to download the videos.

It's common to see Invidious instances momentarily blocked. The blockage can't last forever for two reasons: firstly, IPs (especially IPv4) changes due to how ISPs offer IPv4 addresses through CGNAT, so the instance IPv4 (generally domestic servers) will eventually change (often to a completely different IPv4 range) and YouTube won't know that the new IP is a former "offender". Secondly, as IPv4s works through CGNAT, Google can't keep the bans forever because this IPv4 will be eventually rotated to another client from ISP that's completely unrelated and unaware of how their IPv4 was a former address for a downloader. It's like how Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/Facebook/phone-required services can't really keep a permanent ban for a specific prepaid number (especially on countries like Brazil, where ANATEL allows for phone number rotation when the mobile plan is cancelled), because the number will be potentially owned by another person with nothing to do with the former owner.

So, in summary, Google can either end with YouTube CDNs (ditching their load balancing), or they can try to implement an innovative way to keep load balancing while serving the request one-time only, or they won't be able to do nothing but to perpetually catch themselves drying ice cubes.

yt-dlp is only affected when YT changes their algorithms (breaking yt-dlp data scrapping capabilities) or when it's used frequently with the same IP address (leading to automatic IP blockage). If you're using yt-dlp sporadically, it shouldn't be affected.

There are many factors at play here, some of which including:

• AI content is taking over the Web: with the popularization of LLM tools, there's an increasing number of AI-Generated content across the Web. Even press websites are using them for generating news and opinion articles.
• Old sites/articles are vanishing from existence: for instance, old blogs and personal web pages, which contained a lot of useful information, are being deleted due to factors such as domain expiration, hosting expiration, insufficient web traffic for the host to keep it online, etc. To make things worse, few of these sites were archived with tools such as Internet Archive and Archive Today, meaning that, when they disappear, they really disappear.
• Dominance of Reddit-owned contents and the Reddit issues: Reddit doesn't need introductions, most of the questions and content used to come from Reddit posts and comments. Things such as people (understandably) deleting their Reddit accounts make content to disappear as well.
• SEO bs and marketing spam: Google kept changing "page ranking" algorithms, sorting results according to their own will. "Search Engine Optimization" is a just a facade that led many old sites to practically vanish from search result pages. Advertisement also did harm many sites as well, even the bigger ones.
• Societal, economical and human changes: there were lots of changes upon society and humans by the last 5 years. These worldly factors also influence the digital landscape.

That said, it depends on what you're searching for. If you're searching for knowledge that used to be at old websites, you can use Marginalia to search this specific type of websites (considering that they're still online).

Not exactly related to technology, but I wished for a LLM that could talk with me (and giving me valuable insights) about things like black magick, chaos magick, summoning practices and rituals involving literal "demons" (as in Goetia and demonolatry), as well as very dark poetry and enchants (texts involving very sensible elements symbolically and metaphorically, such as very deep gory goth). These "ethical boundaries" also affects how LLMs can talk about such topics, because LLM deem them as "dangerous topics" (especially Claude, a very sensitive LLM that even refuses to talk about Lilith).

Ah, got it. Thanks for the reply!