What product should I buy if I need a smartphone to e.g. pay for parking but I don't want a smartphone that tracks me?

Take it up with your city council, if they're the ones require a smartphone to pay for parking.

But also, you're going to have to be more specific about what tracking you're worried about. Cell towers need to track you to give you service. But the parking app only gets the data you enable with permissions, and the data the city requires you to give the app (e.g. a payment method). So I'm not super clear what tracking you're concerned about?

If you don't use your smartphone for anything but paying for parking, I genuinely don't know what tracking you're concerned about.

Turn off S3 requests, but keep the data.

2 caps: 1 for things that are charged for existing (e.g. S3 storage, RDS, EBS, EC2 instances) and 1 for things that are charged when you use them (e.g. bandwidth, lambda, S3 requests). Fail to create new things (e.g. S3 uploads) when the first cap is met.

Does that mean fail to create rds backups? And that AWS needs to keep your EC2 instance and RDS instance running while you decide if you really want to pay the bill?

Why does it use version 4 instead of version 8? Version 4 implies that it's random bits, but it's actually not random. Version 8 doesn't imply anything about what the bits mean.

I can't answer that, but as long as it's a high entropy algorithm, this seems fair game. You could see it as a seeded PRNG. The whole point of the exercise is to make it look random to the outside. Perhaps v8 stands out too much.

I'm thinking something like a switch on the side to switch between slow, fast, and using the app.

Some way to simulate a slow CPU

Chrome DevTools have that too.

It automatically resizes so even though I have a tall screen, I didn't think to scroll down because it looked like a basic landing page and had links at the top.

You don't need to construct sand by induction. Just notice that snow has the right particle size to be considered sand.

Their email server likely signs their emails using DKIM.

The problem is if one channel only uploads once a month and another channel uploads twice a day, I will see many videos from the frequent upload channels and might miss the infrequent uploads. If it was just a list of channels with their most recent video I'd see a new thumbnail and know to check that channel for any new videos.

I just unsubscribe from the spam channel because they're producing too much noise. I don't need content producers like that in my life, and making it less obvious that they're adding mostly noise is just disguising the problem, not solving it.

Good for you, but that’s not a solution if you have mixed interests, e.g. you want to get daily entertainment content to choose from and content that is deeper than that. You may not need it, but if you can’t do that anyway it’s indistinguishable from coping.

All I'm saying is that this appears to be an extremely niche use case, and OP's line about YouTube not wanting you to find things from channels you love is over the top. They have a very specific requirement that YouTube hadn't addressed, that's very different than YouTube being designed to prevent you from finding subscriptions.

I don’t think so. Youtube is search, explore and usage hostile for many years. Not sure how one can miss that. “Which channels have new videos” is not niche. They even have it (a blue dot), but either fail to sort or intentionally sort channels seemingly randomly. I’ve missed videos from rare channels too due to this “mechanic”.

You could use an RSS reader to subscrib to the video feeds for the channels where you don't want to miss anything. That's how I used to follow channels I care about (currently none) because I don't want to be subjected to YouTube's algorithms or have to check yet another website.