I'd say it looks pretty readable on android although I still wouldn't describe it as good. I wouldn't say I feel encouraged to squint. But possibly different antialiasing explains it.
The attention economics are bad more than anything else. LLM articles ask us to put more time into reading it than the LLM put into writing it. Actually committing time to production is the minimum bar which suggests something is worth our time in a world where so much is already vying for our attention.
Yeah but we're not talking about utility, we're talking about content and in this particular case content which basically just boils down to someone's slightly quirky taste in something.
I think as a solo developer there's actually a good argument for increasing code density and coupling (things which in large multi developer projects are seen as spaghetti), as it can help you keep a lot of that code in mental and visual context at one time.
It loses flexibility and readability for others, but you don't usually have enough time to concern yourself with such flexibility if you're working on a project by yourself, and you're not concerned about onboarding other developers and having them understand your code. The upshot is then that as a single person "bad code" is often highly effective code, and "clean code" is expensive code that buys you a lot of stuff you don't need or want.
I say this as a boring enterprise developer who at work is highly concerned with appropriate abstractions etc. imo there's no universally good approach, what is optimal is context dependent. Although there are some core features of code like consistency and strong conventions which are fairly universally helpful, this represents a small fraction of best practices.
This is pretty anti-thetical to most good practices but the older and more experienced I get the more(13 years as a C# dev) I think copy & pasting sections of code is wayyyyyy more appropriate than extracting into a method/class/library or other forms of abstraction.
Everything starts out with good intentions when someone comes along and says “hey you could make that an abstraction” and I just clench my jaw because I’ve seen that happen so much and then that simple clean abstraction eventually ends up being a horrible 1000 line monster that barely anyone understands and no one wants to change.
I agree with everything except for it being anti-thetical to good practice. I have noticed a lot of experienced devs agree with that sentiment.
It has been a pretty common trend for the last few years of people breaking out of the “OOP style programming” and practices they were taught at university. I am not saying avoiding things like over abstraction is new, but I do think there is a newer generation of programmers who have been taught and warned about drawbacks from practices like that.
Similarly, my anecdotal experience tells me more newer game devs are aware of basic memory practices being better than overly complex OOP code. Think flat arrays and simple cache alignment over something abstract and over engineered
100% this. All the abstractions and OOP stuff make you end up with a codebase where half the code doesn’t actually DO anything in the product itself, it just connects to other code! It also becomes impossible to follow the flow of execution because it passes through dozens of files and layers of abstraction.
I think the overtures about things we care about more just provide plausible deniability and that when you dig down, people are more concerned about the risks of challenging the wealthy than they are about such window dressing.
It's been pretty clear for a while that companies who have developed foundation models have essentially unprecedented levels of investment to recoup. For all the talk of faster hardware and more efficient models, that spend hasn't gone away and ultimately that investment needs to get a return somewhere.
Dependency on cloud AI models is, in effect, dependency on VC subsidy. From the user's point of view, this dependency is debt which will either be repaid with interest to a model provider or through the hard work of making themselves independent of such models after having become dependent.
It's got to be said that rewarding people who make content on a regular, frequent schedule seems to A: be a way of coercing a fairly high minimum level of labour out of platformed accounts and B: a good way of flooding feeds with content which is largely devoid of novelty as a handful of prolific accounts dominate what people end up seeing.
You can see this happen in real time if you closely follow some youtube channels. You take someone who is genuinely talented and has some interesting, novel insights. And, maybe a couple of their videos makes it big. And they rightly think they should keep making videos because they have other insights. And they're not wrong.
But over time, something happens. No one has a novel, brilliant insight 1-2 times a week. So once they really turn in and decide to make a serious effort with their channel, the quality of their content suffers. Maybe it's not quite click-bait, but it's less genuine and more formulaic than their original work. A bit more sensational. Videos are reaching for reasons to exist, since the author needs to keep pumping them out.
I wouldn't quite call it corruption, but it's a clear degradation. In principle it's not a novel problem, since people have been writing weekly editorials for a long time. But, there seems to be something about the Youtube format that makes it such that the big channels must always play the game and pump out sub-par content.
> Maybe it's not quite click-bait, but it's less genuine and more formulaic than their original work. A bit more sensational. Videos are reaching for reasons to exist, since the author needs to keep pumping them out.
I've come to accept that this is what many viewers want. They're more interesting in seeing their familiar personalities talk on camera than in the details of what they're doing.
At the risk of downvotes given the audience, this is how I feel whenever I've tried to watch Linus Tech Tips videos. I have some friends who watch every LTT video when it comes out and love the brand, but I can't make it through a single LTT video because there's so little subject matter. The few videos I watched also had some glaring oversights and borderline misinfo. I think the audience for those videos is people who like seeing the LTT crew have fun, do some activities, and talk. The subject matter of the video is secondary for them.
I see a lot of YouTube channels going the same direction: They realize the content they're discussing is secondary to the fact that they're in front of the camera doing something. The cooking channels know that most viewers aren't going to be cooking the dish. The DIY channels know that most viewers don't care about the code or engineering as much as seeing personalities goof around on screen.
I don't think there is anything wrong with this type of content, though. One of my friends says he handles his work better with a constant stream of YouTube videos in the background, so he semi-watches more YouTube than anyone I know. I do appreciate the channels that focus on the content and subject matter instead of becoming content factories, though.
If you want to be profitable, or widely watched, you have to play to the algorithm.
YouTube seems to strongly boost channels that post regular videos in the 10-20 minute range, and actively incentivizes clickbait through AB Testing tools for titles and thumbnails.
There are channels that post irregularly, with long form videos, but they get buried.
Another issue I've seen from some of the more prolific YouTube channels is they slowly become another mouthpiece for "news coverage". The algorithm very much expects you to continue uploading, because everyone is always looking for the newest content; at least before YouTube removed the Trending section. I admit that I only really check my Subscription page at this point, and after going through a subscription purge I only see maybe a half a dozen to a dozen new videos. Its actually been very useful since it encourages me to not get sucked in to watching hours of videos.
However, given my experience during Digg's v4 attempt this past year, I will say being willing to put yourself out there has served as a pseudo-networking activity and I've gotten the chance to speak with several people and now I'm giving talks "out there".
I’m old, but this pattern is old too. You’d see it in car magazines where the regular columnists would rehash their tired old opinions but you’d read it anyway because they had a particular sense of humour or an otherwise engaging style.
It’s hard to create novel content regularly once a month, let alone weekly or daily like some of these YouTube guys are doing
What's curious to me is, why does this not happen to all youtubers? For example, vlogbrothers, 3b1b, numberphile, etc, all seem to continue putting out great educational content and care about producing good wholesome content despite the strong incentives to do otherwise - how does that happen?
I think different topics lend themselves to this better than others. If you're merely teaching about things, then there are endless interesting topics -- and _you're_ not the one coming up with the brilliant insights; you're just doing an excellent job conveying an already-known subject to others. Commenting on the news can work quite well, too. So long as your research and analysis maintains quality, there will be no shortage of noteworthy events to discuss.
reply