4 ms·

Right... and instead of writing down the main point, the author isn't doing any kind of favor to the internet by making his/her stand over the course of a 69 mi

Right... and instead of writing down the main point, the author isn't doing any kind of favor to the internet by making his/her stand over the course of a 69 minutes long podcast. Nice.

tayo42 3y ago
The other day I came across soemthing seemingly unquie and interesting but it was a long YouTube video. I started wondering how many novel things I'll no longer be able to check out becasue everyone is defaulting to videos and audio. Interesting ideas will have a filter based on who has free time. Though maybe there is another side that no interesting ideas are actually being shared through video. I started playing skyrim for the first time. When I have to search online for help it's so refreshing to get helpful content. No videos and minimal blogspam. Even just forum posts with helpful info.
- merth 3y ago
  there are AI summary plugins that summarize youtube videos for you. instead of watching 1 hour video, you can get the summary in 15 seconds. this one I use but there are plenty of others as well https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-summary-with-chat/nmmicjeknamkfloonkhhcjmomieiodli https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-summary-wit...
  - singleshot_ 3y ago
    1) a smart person writes something 2) a grifter makes that written product into a YouTube video optimized for slurping up advertising money 3) a grifter makes an AI summary for slurping up… well I guess I don’t really understand the business model but it does not seem like an improvement. Why not just read the book and pay the author?
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      because time isn't fungible, and 99% of books, esp. about factual-ish stuff, can usually be boiled down to a few bulletpoints. most books don't require that much nuance, nor "the experience" of reading it
      - singleshot_ 3y ago
        An interesting thing about fungibility is that _something is fungible to the extent that one treats it as fungible_. Yes, dollar bills are generally fungible but I might pay more for one with a serial number with lots of zeroes — it’s good for liar’s poker. I might devalue a dollar bill that you just blew your nose on. That aside, I’m still not convinced I know what you mean when you say time is not fungible. I think what you might mean is that time is precious and not to be wasted, but I’m not sure what this has to do with fungibility. Regardless, I think I agree with your main point which is that most written works are low-content repetitive trash. Let’s stipulate that I’m only talking about buying and reading rich, innovative, and/or elucidating works of nonfiction. They all require a great deal of nuance, I assure you.
- MisterTea 3y ago
  Is there a search engine for video and podcast content? What if the information I'm looking for is a 30 second blurb in a video or podcast that isn't part of the main subject or keywords? Its lost. If it were text it could be indexed very easily.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    To be fair, things do seem to quickly be moving in this direction. With the rise of language model driven speech to text, and visual to text, this is probably a few years out at most.
- gessha 3y ago
  I use Matter(iOS) for reading and annotating articles. It has the capability to load transcripts of videos and podcasts so you can read them as text. It's pretty neat.
briantakita 3y ago
Wow...Voices fit for print. At least they got to express themselves.
jabroni_salad 3y ago
This and the most recent hbomberguy video (4 hrs about plagiarism) is a perfect microcosm of the issue, actually: The population at large does not want to read, they want to be read to. You can spend a year and some change writing a book and it will die in obscurity, then some youtuber will read your book word for word into a camera in a weekend and make millions of dollars. A text article that takes 20 minutes to read will make all of $30 in ad revenue. A podcast episode will have a $300 sponsor spot at the front and back. A youtube video can make tens of thousands of dollars in that runtime. If you publish to a paywalled site, hold on, dont you know that information needs to be free? Here's an archive link. You can browse a website for some tech product and learn absolutely nothing about it. They aren't capable of describing it in text, and most of their customers aren't able to read anyways. Contact us so we can read the written script at you. I'm in IT consulting.... every new batch of noobs has someone who tries to do everything in chat and email. If you start booking meetings and making phone calls, you will be three times as productive. Your tasks will not be [pending customer] EVER, all your deadlines will be clean, the clients will praise your communications, and you'll get promoted at your year 1 review instead of year 2. support your favorite writers, friends.
- sneed_chucker 3y ago
  It's all very frustrating if you're a very pragmatic and detail oriented person, but I guess it makes sense. Humans have only been reading and writing for about 6000 years (and mass literacy has only existed for a few hundred years). Compare that to a 200k+ year evolutionary history of verbal and face-to-face communication. So maybe it's understandable if most people prefer the latter.
  - micah94 3y ago
    I never thought about it like that... And to think, I learned this by...reading.
- taylodl 3y ago
  Shouldn't there be reading avatars that do this? Do those not exist? Seems like there's a huge market being missed - in both designing avatars with accents, inflections, and personalities, and the writers being able to make money by providing those avatars - which they themselves may have created - content to read. EDIT: has anyone looked into doing something like this?
MarkLowenstein 3y ago
Whatever you don't pay for in money, you pay for in your time. I was pointed to this phenomenon by the book Suburban Nation thirty years ago, and it continues to explain so much.
- freediver 3y ago
  More recently (last 20 years) with your data and attention too.
- Gud 3y ago
  I've heard this expression many times before, still doesn't make any sense to me. I vastly prefer my setup based around FreeBSD I've used for the last 20+ years, than the corporate hell that is Windows. Not much has changed over the years - I still use rc.conf and pf.conf to configure my system. Things are still where I expect them to be. XFCE is still the same, thunderbird hasn't changed much. Vim is exactly how it was. And the initial learning curve wasn't even that steep. Meanwhile, Windows is just getting worse and worse and worse for each year. So in that case, I am paying both with my time wasted and with money(though someone elses).
  - MarkLowenstein 3y ago
    Interesting contrast. No question that Windows wastes a lot of one's time. Probably most people guess that Linux will waste more of their time, because they may not be able to learn easily enough what you've learned about how to configure it and keep it running smoothly. They may suspect that even if they put in a little time, they will nonetheless make fatal mistakes or be left with a system they must replace with Windows after all. So their perception or misperception of the time cost they will pay causes them to choose Windows, and maybe a lot of them are wrong in the long term.
    - wrycoder 3y ago
      Free BSD is a lot more orderly than Linux. It’s easier to learn and it doesn’t change as much over time.
    - 3y ago
sebastianconcpt 3y ago
Being honest? After hearing her for ~60 seconds I came back here with that impression hoping to find a TL;DR. But I don't take away any merit to the thesis, she might still be right even the case was not ideally presented.

Right... and instead of writing down the main point, the author isn't doing any kind of favor to the internet by making his/her stand over the course of a 69 minutes long podcast. Nice.

tayo42 3y ago

The other day I came across soemthing seemingly unquie and interesting but it was a long YouTube video. I started wondering how many novel things I'll no longer be able to check out becasue everyone is defaulting to videos and audio. Interesting ideas will have a filter based on who has free time. Though maybe there is another side that no interesting ideas are actually being shared through video. I started playing skyrim for the first time. When I have to search online for help it's so refreshing to get helpful content. No videos and minimal blogspam. Even just forum posts with helpful info.

merth 3y ago
there are AI summary plugins that summarize youtube videos for you. instead of watching 1 hour video, you can get the summary in 15 seconds. this one I use but there are plenty of others as well https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-summary-with-chat/nmmicjeknamkfloonkhhcjmomieiodli https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-summary-wit...
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  1) a smart person writes something 2) a grifter makes that written product into a YouTube video optimized for slurping up advertising money 3) a grifter makes an AI summary for slurping up… well I guess I don’t really understand the business model but it does not seem like an improvement. Why not just read the book and pay the author?
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    because time isn't fungible, and 99% of books, esp. about factual-ish stuff, can usually be boiled down to a few bulletpoints. most books don't require that much nuance, nor "the experience" of reading it
    - singleshot_ 3y ago
      An interesting thing about fungibility is that _something is fungible to the extent that one treats it as fungible_. Yes, dollar bills are generally fungible but I might pay more for one with a serial number with lots of zeroes — it’s good for liar’s poker. I might devalue a dollar bill that you just blew your nose on. That aside, I’m still not convinced I know what you mean when you say time is not fungible. I think what you might mean is that time is precious and not to be wasted, but I’m not sure what this has to do with fungibility. Regardless, I think I agree with your main point which is that most written works are low-content repetitive trash. Let’s stipulate that I’m only talking about buying and reading rich, innovative, and/or elucidating works of nonfiction. They all require a great deal of nuance, I assure you.
MisterTea 3y ago
Is there a search engine for video and podcast content? What if the information I'm looking for is a 30 second blurb in a video or podcast that isn't part of the main subject or keywords? Its lost. If it were text it could be indexed very easily.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  To be fair, things do seem to quickly be moving in this direction. With the rise of language model driven speech to text, and visual to text, this is probably a few years out at most.
gessha 3y ago
I use Matter(iOS) for reading and annotating articles. It has the capability to load transcripts of videos and podcasts so you can read them as text. It's pretty neat.

briantakita 3y ago

Wow...Voices fit for print. At least they got to express themselves.

jabroni_salad 3y ago

This and the most recent hbomberguy video (4 hrs about plagiarism) is a perfect microcosm of the issue, actually: The population at large does not want to read, they want to be read to. You can spend a year and some change writing a book and it will die in obscurity, then some youtuber will read your book word for word into a camera in a weekend and make millions of dollars. A text article that takes 20 minutes to read will make all of $30 in ad revenue. A podcast episode will have a $300 sponsor spot at the front and back. A youtube video can make tens of thousands of dollars in that runtime. If you publish to a paywalled site, hold on, dont you know that information needs to be free? Here's an archive link. You can browse a website for some tech product and learn absolutely nothing about it. They aren't capable of describing it in text, and most of their customers aren't able to read anyways. Contact us so we can read the written script at you. I'm in IT consulting.... every new batch of noobs has someone who tries to do everything in chat and email. If you start booking meetings and making phone calls, you will be three times as productive. Your tasks will not be [pending customer] EVER, all your deadlines will be clean, the clients will praise your communications, and you'll get promoted at your year 1 review instead of year 2. support your favorite writers, friends.

sneed_chucker 3y ago
It's all very frustrating if you're a very pragmatic and detail oriented person, but I guess it makes sense. Humans have only been reading and writing for about 6000 years (and mass literacy has only existed for a few hundred years). Compare that to a 200k+ year evolutionary history of verbal and face-to-face communication. So maybe it's understandable if most people prefer the latter.
- micah94 3y ago
  I never thought about it like that... And to think, I learned this by...reading.
taylodl 3y ago
Shouldn't there be reading avatars that do this? Do those not exist? Seems like there's a huge market being missed - in both designing avatars with accents, inflections, and personalities, and the writers being able to make money by providing those avatars - which they themselves may have created - content to read. EDIT: has anyone looked into doing something like this?

MarkLowenstein 3y ago

Whatever you don't pay for in money, you pay for in your time. I was pointed to this phenomenon by the book Suburban Nation thirty years ago, and it continues to explain so much.

freediver 3y ago
More recently (last 20 years) with your data and attention too.
Gud 3y ago
I've heard this expression many times before, still doesn't make any sense to me. I vastly prefer my setup based around FreeBSD I've used for the last 20+ years, than the corporate hell that is Windows. Not much has changed over the years - I still use rc.conf and pf.conf to configure my system. Things are still where I expect them to be. XFCE is still the same, thunderbird hasn't changed much. Vim is exactly how it was. And the initial learning curve wasn't even that steep. Meanwhile, Windows is just getting worse and worse and worse for each year. So in that case, I am paying both with my time wasted and with money(though someone elses).
- MarkLowenstein 3y ago
  Interesting contrast. No question that Windows wastes a lot of one's time. Probably most people guess that Linux will waste more of their time, because they may not be able to learn easily enough what you've learned about how to configure it and keep it running smoothly. They may suspect that even if they put in a little time, they will nonetheless make fatal mistakes or be left with a system they must replace with Windows after all. So their perception or misperception of the time cost they will pay causes them to choose Windows, and maybe a lot of them are wrong in the long term.
  - wrycoder 3y ago
    Free BSD is a lot more orderly than Linux. It’s easier to learn and it doesn’t change as much over time.
  - 3y ago

sebastianconcpt 3y ago

Being honest? After hearing her for ~60 seconds I came back here with that impression hoping to find a TL;DR. But I don't take away any merit to the thesis, she might still be right even the case was not ideally presented.