Yeah, but YouTube isn’t as credible. And if it was, I’d still rather read something than spend twice as long watching half the information. Tastes differ

To me YouTube is an untrustworthy platform owned by one of the worse mega corps. But also I just don’t enjoy video as a medium

I dare say books still exist

The people who make decisions at Youtube clearly do not even use their own website or app and there is no way to give feedback either.

Ed Zitron, famously verbose web blog guy, wrote a post about how he thinks most of these big businesses are run by idiots that are out of touch with both the product and the users.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

It’s simple: they neither know nor care what the customer wants, barely know how their businesses function, barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical, because it does an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate.

This is only me describing my personal taste, but:

Almost all video essays and podcasts I would rather just read. It takes half the time. Include pictures, diagrams, and animations if needed. But I can read much faster and retain much better reading than listening to someone talk. Listening at double speed is faster, but can be uncomfortable.

I can imagine some value in some other niches, like you’re saying, but the amount of slop and trash out there is too high for me, and the companies selling it are the worst.

Every time I see some parasocial YouTuber making That Face I just get irritated.

Sometimes I forget people watch YouTube on purpose. Other than music videos and the rare “how do I do this thing in this game?” I just don’t use it

I feel like an alien sometimes. Reading books like some sort of lost time traveler.

Yeah I don’t like ai stuff. And I certainly don’t need AI to group my tabs. I can do that myself just fine.

I was going to say something smug about living in a walkable city so I don’t need to drive, but I still have to deal with idiot drivers being a danger to pedestrians and bikers.

Even when it gets it right, you have to then check it carefully. It feels like a net loss of speed most of the time. Reading and checking someone else’s code is harder than writing your own

The police are not effective at dealing with school shootings.

That’s unusual, I think. Every computer I’ve had that had it on, I was able to turn it off when I went to install Linux.

I don’t think I understand it, then

I think you can reset a bios password by taking the CMOS battery out or something?

If you have physical access you could go into the bios and turn off secure boot

Criminal penalties, “go into their office and cut off their hands”. Tomato, tomato.

Is this a bit? are you demonstrating the meme on purpose?

Feel like ads in cars should be illegal, but the US doesn’t have a government that believes in good things.

Google and Microsoft have competing services, but those companies also suck. I think they’re less popular, but I don’t know much about why.

I’m not aware of any smaller competitors, though some probably exist. It would be a big risk for a company to go with a new provider. There’s a lot of library support for the big players, for one thing. If you want your python application to talk to AWS, the boto library is just right there.

You could run your own hardware somewhere, but that has its own host of problems, if you’ll pardon the pun. I worked somewhere a long time ago that had its own servers in a data center. The place got flooded in a big storm and we were down for a couple days.

I’ve only used Google a couple of times, and by accident. The ebook reader I have seems hard coded to search Google when you ask it to search the web for a word in the book. I intensely dislike the AI slop. I do not want an AI summary of the Wikipedia article. Just take me to the wiki article you dunces!

Are you familiar with AWS? Amazon Web services. Many, many, websites use them and I don’t think there’s a way to tell as a user.

Like, you go to a website and their images are hosted on s3 (an aws service) and their database is on RDS (also AWS), and their whole backend application is using eks or ecs or whatever.

That’s extremely common. Companies don’t run their own hardware anymore very often.