HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ sonofgod

TL;DR: It has a disk in the D because Toshiba had developed a logo for a disk based technology and just reused it, and then it became a standards-symbol so everyone kinda needed to use it.

Seriously that video is overly long.

⬐ PhasmaFelis

My most annoying First World Problem is when I google for how to do something that should take three paragraphs at most, and all the results are 5-minute-plus YouTube videos. It's a pain in the ass.

I think I recall reading that it's something to do with YouTube's algorithm? Videos of a certain minimum length, from channels that post with a minimum frequency, are more likely to be surfaced?

Edit: Why downvotes? What on earth is controversial about this?

⬐ zamadatix

The crux of it is YouTube rewards creators for showing more ads. Being quick and to the point doesn't help that cause and so if the creator isn't going to be rewarded for a 30 second video why put the work into making a video when 3 pictures and a paragraph of text would communicate the same thing.

⬐ speedo

Dude, if you seek brevity, the preferred mode of consumption is often found at wikipedia.org.

YouTube videos are a format produced with entertainment value in mind, for those with 5 to 10 minutes to burn.

Videos below the two minute mark are barely worth YouTube’s JS payload, nevermind the video buffer.

If you want 30 second videos, you need to go cruise for WEBM files on your favorite image board, and expect to find a cache of interesting GIF images along the way, but try to contain your frustration at the lack of audio.

(btw: Above 20 minutes, and honestly, I still find optical discs preferrable to streaming services for a number of practical reasons, but most importantly: physical transmission of a tangible object for any large corpus data will always beat electromagnetic broadcast over a shared medium. #mytwocents)

⬐ PhasmaFelis

Absolutely, Wikipedia is my go-to for general information. Wikipedia doesn't answer questions like "how do I disable web searching in Windows 10 search," though. It used to be that googling simple technical questions would return a concise blog/forum post, but it's increasingly likely that all the top results will be videos.

⬐ dylan604

Google promoting videos hosted on a Google owned site that can earn them more money in ad sales over other relevant sites? Say it ain’t so!

After removing my tounge from cheek, this is an extremely annoying daily thing I have to deal with as well. I do searches expecting to quickly scan for the answer I need, but get results where the same text information has been converted to a video format. I can’t copy/paste text from a video.

⬐ josho

I fully expect that in the next few years google will come out with some new innovation to convert these youtube videos into transcribed web pages complete with relevant photos taken from the video. Of course this will put video revenue at risk so will have to wait until some form of premium content business model takes off--maybe that already exists with youtube premium.

⬐ kilo_bravo_3

The top result for "how do I disable web searching in Windows 10 search," in Google is a snippet with step-by-step instructions on how to do that.

Duckduckgo, too.

https://i.imgur.com/0fv9ZuD.png

If you are seeing video links in Google it may be because you have favored those results in the past and big-G is showing you more of those because it thinks that you prefer them.

⬐ PhasmaFelis

That was a random example of a technical question, since it seemed like people didn't understand what kind of info I was searching for. I don't recall offhand any of the questions that I couldn't find non-video results for.

⬐ gsich

Train yourself for 1.75x (or higher) speed.

⬐ gumby

high speed + captions helps. I wish they would simply embed the captions on the page so I could skip the video but that would reduce those sweet sweet ad views.

(of course YT caption quality is notoriously poor, but TBF it's a hard problem. And often you can get the gist of the message quickly, which is frequently all you want anyway).

⬐ zamadatix

For those who haven't tried: document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 3.14 or an extension if you want to go faster than 2x. You can just up arrow on your next session.

Getting to 3x consistently can be a hard barrier to break for some talking patterns like this guy's where he has periods of very slow speech and long breaks followed by periods of quick pace explanation with details but the payoff is relatively high.

I was inspired to give higher speeds a shot when I read a post by a blind user describing how many use >500 WPM text to speech (which sounds completely indecipherable at first) to navigate computer interfaces quickly.

⬐ JadeNB

> For those who haven't tried: document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 3.14 or an extension if you want to go faster than 2x. You can just up arrow on your next session.

Or the even easier: youtuble-dl plus VLC, with a slider for playback speed.

⬐ naikrovek

VLC can open YouTube natively. Open network stream, paste YouTube URL, click "Play"

⬐ gumby

Is there any way to suppress image and video results in normal google searches? There's always an "image" and "video" specific search option if I want those. Or a way to say "text only"?

⬐ wingerlang

It's likely stretched to be juuuust above 10 minutes so that it can be (better?) monetized. I've more or less stopped watching videos of that length due to this.

⬐ mrguyorama

My understanding is that the creator is funded mostly through patreon and this is simply a passion

⬐ canthonytucci

So happy to see Technology Connections here, one of my absolute favorite YouTube channels and one that I have learned a lot from.

This one on "how analog tv works" I thought was especially good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX649lnKAU0

⬐ ddingus

I love his work.

Yes, he has done a couple videos on analog video.

I also love analog video. I wish he would do one on analog HDTV and cover things like component.

In my own projects, I prefer component video. Unlike RGB, it can be used for a single wire, monochrome signal, complete with sync up to 1080p (on most sets with 1080i as a fallback).

Easy, light on resources and capable.

Anyway, I am a fan.

⬐ None

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