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YouTube, the jewel of the internet

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Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#471
post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing you’re missing is that it generally doesn’t matter how much YouTube a kid watches. Parents stress out too much over doing everything exactly right when it probably doesn’t matter that much. Kids are pretty resilient and hard to screw up. Most kids grow up to be average adults with average jobs doing average things. No amount of Smarter Everyday is likely to change that. And if they do grow up to be an astro…

> And if they do grow up to be an astronaut or whatever, Smarter Everyday shouldn’t get all the credit, it’s more luck of the draw. I'm not sure an astronaut is the best profession to get your point across here. The resume of an astronaut is normally off the charts. They put in an absolute fuck ton of work, it's definitely not luck of the draw.

From a stat I saw it's something like 10 astronaut candidates selected from a pool of around 18,000 applicants. So really doing a fuck ton of work doesn't give you a very good chance to become an astronaut because hardly anybody becomes an astronaut. That's 17,990 people with off the charts resumes who go home disappointed.

My point was that generally there's no parenting method that produces a specific outcome very consistently. Kids are generally going to end up how they're going to end up no matter how many Baby Beethoven CDs you make them listen to. It's just easy to fool ourselves into thinking that "this method works" because we don't see the million other people who end up the same way as a result of a different method.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#472
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many decent youtubers who have clickbaity thumbnails. Unfortunately it probably makes such a large money difference that they compromise. E.g. LinusTechTips.

I see LinusTechTips recommended so often and I just don't get it. Everything I've seen from him has been clickbait, or surface level looks at technology, it never has any more depth than a technology enthusiast magazine. I guess that's fine if you're a technology enthusiast, but I find it weird how he gets so much air time even in a community like this which is populated by actual professionals.

Most people here are 'technology enthusiasts', are they not? I for one am a software engineer and definitely not a hardware professional. I might not be able to even build a PC on my own.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#473

My kid is 9 - YouTube is her search engine. All my efforts to explain that is what Google is for have failed. Every time I use Google she laughs at me and calls me old :)

Doesn't that make her slower? Youtube has better quality results most of the time, but it takes so long to watch the video and get to the information I want... I always start with a google search for that reason.

Yea I am always wondering the same thing but what I am searching for normally is instant answers to questions while I am finding she is searching is more like “how do I…?” it is all fascinating to me…

Her older friends use TikTok in lieu of YT which might be “best of both worlds” but I am not ready to let her use TikTok

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#474
post #468
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Price of a free press I'm not sure FB, YT, HN, Reddit, etc. are press. Can one publish local legal notices through them? > History shows that the people who suppress free speech are never the good guys To be fair, there are no good guys in history. Realpolitick or ideology are the only two options I'm aware of, and not for lack of thought though perhaps due to lack of imagination. We could argue that there is conte…

> To be fair, there are no good guys in history. Disagree strongly. On balance the American framers (Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Mason, Jefferson, et. al) were amazingly good for the world, far better than Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc.

I appreciate your opinion even if I do not agree.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do have some admiration for the algorithm - but I also wish that refreshing the home page would show me some more of the many thousands of videos that I'd likely find interesting, rather than the same 20 just in a different order.

It's very well hidden, but if you scroll to the end of the filter tags there's a button to show "New For You", which shows a screen full of new recommendations each time you refresh. Sometimes I'll roll the dice a few times with that page and find really interesting stuff.

This is great. Thanks for the tip. I'm a YouTuber and didn't even know about this.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#476
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still just empty claims - just like the YouTube videos make. To me, if I'm your interviewer, it looks like you've internalized the fundamental anti-lesson. You can't distinguish BS from accurate knowledge, and you don't even understand that. The BS may get you by on HN but not in a serious workplace. I'm not paying you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for that. Every other objection still applies - including…

There are literally full courses for AWS DevOps qualifications, Network Administration and the like, with hundreds of comments underneath them saying, “thanks, I passed my AWS cert today because of this course”, “thanks, I got a job because of this course”, “thanks, I got a promotion because of this course”. Here is but one example of many: https://youtu.be/SOTamWNgDKc There are thousands of interviews with people wh…

>Because if the person can demonstrate that they can do the job, then they can do the job.

This is exactly right, but "I watched some YT videos" is not equivalent to demonstrating ability, which I think is the OP's point.

If you can learn something from watching videos, and then prove that you've mastered it by actually demonstrating your skill, then great! But if your resume just says "I watched some videos and have zero professional experience", that doesn't count for anything.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#478
post #81

I'm going to go against the grain here and say my YouTube algorithm is great. Signing out of YouTube and viewing the default home page is a reminder of the horrors that lie beyond, but my little corner of it is a bit too good. There was a period of time semi-recently when the algorithm was better than my heuristics, too. I had associated too-good thumbnails with overproduced shallow clickbait videos churned out by co…

I am... OK with the Youtube algorithm. I find that it is pretty good at this point at not giving me stuff I find awful. However, I think it has lost a lot of ground in helping me find newer, more obscure topics that I'd also find interesting, compared to where it was 5-6 years ago. Overall I think Youtube IS a jewel of the Internet. The amount of astoundingly interesting, informative, entertaining, educational, insig…

Why would they be unprofitable? They have a range of steps before that. Heck there are github repos that let you use youtube as free(terabytes) storage, by encoding data as noisy video. I think first step before "bankrupcy" would be to remove all videos that have 0 views in 24 months (which is most of their library).

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't that make her slower? Youtube has better quality results most of the time, but it takes so long to watch the video and get to the information I want... I always start with a google search for that reason.

Yea I am always wondering the same thing but what I am searching for normally is instant answers to questions while I am finding she is searching is more like “how do I…?” it is all fascinating to me… Her older friends use TikTok in lieu of YT which might be “best of both worlds” but I am not ready to let her use TikTok

Interesting. If she wants to know "how do I" stuff, then I guess chatgpt will be a huge success for her generation!

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#480
post #9

I agree with the author. I just cancelled Spotify and got YouTube Premium and it was an absolutely brilliant decision. Pretty soon I’m going to cancel Netflix and Prime too and just take out the odd month subscription to a streaming service if there’s something I really want to watch. I’m probably better off watching some informative documentary on YT than I am watching Netflix anyway and if I want entertainment, the…

> they had a youth where they could spend their entire time learning literally everything there is to know about their passion for free I have children between the ages of 9 and 26. You know what they are passionate about? Minecraft, Mr Beast, Travel vlogs, mommy vlogs, “reality” videos, etc. I’ve tried to introduce them to science, space, programming, history, math, finance, nature, etc. content and they don’t want…

When I was a kid, my parents hated that I was passionate about "cheap mindless video games".

Guess who's become a successful software engineer and happy human as a result?

Don't dismiss what your kids are into because you don't understand it. Their peers will, and their peers will give them money for it.

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