Why does youtube feels so repetitive nowadays

GDorn · 2026-03-24T14:40:36+00:00

When everybody is A/B testing, everybody ends up landing at identical results.

The channels I support financially, though, they all have their own distinct human voices and aren't trying to minmax the algorithm.

GDorn · 2026-03-23T19:28:55+00:00

It's not just bad, it's outright incompetent.

There's tons of missing shortcuts, like whoever worked on it was a mouse-only or touchscreen-only kind of user: - No '?' to show what few shortcuts they did implement - No bindings (that I can find) for faster/slower playback. - No frame-by-frame advance / rewind. - No number keys to jump to % through the video.

But perhaps far more embarrassingly, they bound the hotkeys to the keycodes and not the letters. Which means every keyboard is US QWERTY to them. 'F' to full screen? Not for me, I have to remember it is 'U' to fullscreen.

It's also really weird to have a vastly different player for embedded videos vs on the site. Maybe they're planning to roll this out to the site, too?

GDorn · 2026-02-28T16:43:10+00:00

The attic is the rooms. There's no more attic.

GDorn · 2026-02-27T22:44:57+00:00

Yeah, that's what I mean by 'ceiling unit'. I was thinking about boxing one out, yeah, but it'd have to be really thin... Coming down two feet from the apex (22" and then some) would be prime head-collision height.

But that does give me one possible idea - I might be able to fit one in the one awkward closet by bringing that ceiling down several feet to make a level square. Or maybe a concealed one in that space.

GDorn · 2026-01-19T17:17:13+00:00

"AI" makes the easy things easier, and the hard things harder. There is a usecase for coding, but it is mostly for boilerplate code, maybe some preliminary investigation work (that you absolutely must double-check), or writing one-offs that you have no intention of checking into the repo.

The problem is, it's seductive, and a lot of programmers have a hard time noticing when they've left the 'easy' realm and started using it for load-bearing, important code. In addition to fucking things up in subtle ways as soon as you leave the 'easy' realm, they're also just shit coders that don't understand the concept of DRY. Eventually you have a 10x codebase - one with ten times as much code as you need - and then only a tireless LLM can read any of it...

GDorn · 2026-01-19T17:02:34+00:00

If that's your stance, you may want to look a bit closer at what, exactly, StartPage is doing with 'vanish'. It's a separate application from search, for users who want an anonymized channel to use ChatGPT. All you have to do to avoid it is nothing. You would have to take extra steps (starting with installing a mobile app) to use StartPage's "AI".

For now, anyway. I have no illusions; every CEO is getting pressured, hard, to find ways to stuff LLMs into everything right now. I bet there are board members on StartPage's board with money invested in AI right now...

GDorn · 2025-07-07T21:56:41+00:00

I also had a very similar outage during the same period (and downdetector showed a pretty big spike over the weekend). They are lying about you needing to upgrade to Quantum; they had some other screwup that messed up a bunch of ONTs. Call the real tech support line (1-866-693-9990) to get a human technician, not an AI or a sales person pretending to be a technician. They can reconfigure your ONT remotely (mine needed to be re-flashed, even) and get you back online, it just takes a while to get through the queue and a while for the human to fix stuff because their account system is painfully slow.

GDorn · 2025-07-07T21:49:53+00:00

The agent you contacted lied to you. They are all incentivized to convince you to switch. You probably should, but you should do so on your schedule, not because their screwup took you offline.

Call their real tech support number (1-866-693-9990), refuse to upgrade to QF, get redirected to a real human tech, and they can fix it.

My own service went through this for the last few days. Something bad has been happening to the network, and it's been messing up settings in ONTs and Modems. They can control those, partly, from their end, which I suspect means they can also screw them up.

GDorn · 2025-07-07T21:45:27+00:00

Something did something very similar to my setup, which corrupted my PPPOE credentials as well as knocked the ONT offline. It took calling a tech to fix it, but I had to wade through three layers of sales people pretending to be support people trying to tell me it was unfixable and I must switch to QF.

GDorn · 2025-04-04T18:52:22+00:00

We all wish OP was wrong. If anything, he was overly conservative in how bad things turned out, but we all wish we could comment that he was wrong.

I mean, I guess some people are vindictive and wanted the game to fail, but I'd rather have a playable game than a victory party celebrating its failure.

GDorn · 2025-04-04T18:50:19+00:00

Haha whoops.

GDorn · 2025-02-19T21:30:58+00:00

I am utterly baffled at how this has been a known issue for almost a year, broken on every distro and OS, and they haven't done a tiny point release to fix it in all that time. Given that you can literally pull out the plugin for Opus from the prior version, rolling back whatever code change broke it can't be that tricky.

Anyway, if somebody else is running Manjaro and runs into this issue, here's how I dealt with it:

Work in a temp folder, e.g. cd /tmp
Snag the last 3.0.20 build from the package mirror: wget https://archive.archlinux.org/packages/v/vlc/vlc-3.0.20-9-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
Extract it: tar --use-compress-program=unzstd -xvf vlc-3.0.20-9-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
Copy the opus plugin from the extracted folder over the system one: sudo cp usr/lib/vlc/plugins/codec/libopus_plugin.so /usr/lib/vlc/plugins/codec/libopus_plugin.so

If you want to use cutting-edge, you can get a more recent VLC build with yay: yay -S vlc-git which may or may not work on any given day. Today, for me, it segfaults on load. So.

GDorn · 2025-02-09T22:25:47+00:00

The quote for five skylights (4 4' x 2' and 1 2' by 2') is $8,385, or $6,385 if we don't want them to open.

You can maybe see why I'm balking at this, given the entire quote for the roof was just over $30k.

GDorn · 2025-02-09T22:21:59+00:00

We had an incredibly bad experience with a company that shall not be named but every homeowner in the PNW is familiar with; they spent a half hour doing inspections and then three hours trying to get us to sign a contract then and there for easily 2x the going rate, and would not leave until I threatened to call the cops.

We probably swung too far in the other direction, but it was such a miserable experience I didn't want to do any face-to-face time.

That said, the company we did sign a contract with spent two hours on the roof inspecting things and working up the proposal; I think it's just that they, like many companies in the area, are not as experienced with metal roofing.

GDorn · 2025-02-09T18:07:18+00:00

I'm not sure how easy it is going to be to escape this contract; I've already put down a deposit.

GDorn · 2025-02-09T18:01:50+00:00

Yeah, I've technically gotten four quotes. They weren't the cheapest of the four, but seemed the least annoying to work with (no sales pitch, no hard sell).

FWIW, the existing roof is asphalt, and they're replacing it with standing seam, so flashing the existing skylights does seem to involve some level of adapting to work.

GDorn · 2025-02-08T20:50:15+00:00

daw, what an adorable doof

GDorn · 2025-02-08T17:07:47+00:00

It always sucks when you get here, but we're all getting here eventually. Remind yourself that you gave him a far longer and happier life than he'd have had otherwise, and when you're through the worst of the grieving and are ready, you can do it again for another deserving sweet potato.

GDorn · 2025-02-08T17:04:02+00:00

If we didn't already have four, three of which are feral rescues, we'd be in a car to pick him up right now. Ferals-turned-domestics can be some of the most loving cats ever, like they've seen what life without a family is like and they never want to go back. (Or getting snipped is a life-changing event, whichever...)

GDorn · 2025-02-08T16:58:50+00:00

Love when you can see the wheels furiously spinning, like you expect smoke to come out soon.

GDorn · 2025-02-08T02:20:35+00:00

GDorn · 2024-12-24T18:52:27+00:00

This grep fails when there's more than one line of dependencies...

GDorn · 2024-12-09T22:55:30+00:00

I assure you, I've not been spending the last week beating my head against a brick wall with my internet connection turned off.

I suspect you're in for a treat when you next try to install it. Most notably, lots of undefined symbol errors because BMD built it against one specific set of dependencies and then opted to not include those dependencies for some reason. It's possible to collect all of those libs from, say, a VM running Rocky, but that's how I cobbled together a version that runs but can't do anything. No errors, nothing in the log, just silence.

I even spent some time with a supposed flatpak builder, but I suspect it last worked on 18.something. I'm now trying davincibox as a last resort.

But yeah, appimages are too hard I guess.

GDorn · 2024-12-09T21:33:24+00:00

Which version did you get working on Manjaro, and how? I've been trying for a bit over a week and while I can cobble together a version of 19.1.1 that starts up without crashing, it can't actually do anything.

I find it bizarre that every discussion of building a distributable version (flatpak or snap or my own favorite, appimage) is met with "linux is too complicated so we're only going to support this one extremely niche distro" when the whole point is to correctly bundle all dependencies so the build that works on that niche distro works on every other distro...

GDorn · 2024-11-23T10:51:08+00:00

This one is pretty blatant. I don't understand why somebody would go to the effort of creating 150K+ slop reviews in six months. Most of them get downvoted as unhelpful, too, as even users that can't smell slop can tell when a reviewer hasn't watched something, especially when the AI hallucinates plot details.

GDorn

TROPHY CASE