Legit question, do you guys get really bad Shorts recommendations? Mine aren't half bad (really more of the same as with regular videos) plus creators don't insert ad spots. I get it, TikTok-style scrolling is annoying, but the format has its merits. At least less yapping and more to the point.
Nearly all of the video I watch is on horizontal screens.
Whether I'm using a real computer or a BFT or an iPad or I'm watching a something with my pocket supercomputer while bored on a plane: It's horizontal. This is simply how I do it, how I have always done it, and how I am likely to always do it.
YouTube Shorts aren't compatible with this viewing method.
In addition: Nearly all of the videos I watch are longer than 3 minutes, and YouTube Shorts aren't compatible with this either.
Whether I'm watching a video because I want to be entertained or to learn something new, I want to be involved with it and focused on it. I am very capable of making time to do so when it behooves me.
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Anyway, to answer your question: I have no idea if my YouTube Shorts recommendations are good or not good. I don't partake. I don't need empty, <3-minute dopamine hits in my life.
I constantly get tik tok style everything everywhere all at once fever dream headache rapid edited clips. There's a difference between to the point and just being brain rot delivered with no background. Reminds me of happy hardcore techno - you can't really feel the bass because it's not getting enough time to reverberate.
I avoid Shorts (and Tiktok) for the same reason I avoid stimulant drugs and video games: it depletes dopamine faster than regular YT videos (especially the somber kind of videos I mostly watch).
There are about a dozen reasons to hate shorts regardless of the content.
Everyone else has listed a bunch already. Here's yet another, the pointlessly limited UI.
There are no play controls to back, forward or scrub. You missed something? Hope it was near the beginning because while you can restart by reloading, you can't skip ahead. Want to pause at a particular spot to show your wife? You get to wait for the whole thing to play again from the start so you can hopefully pause it at the right spot. There was one important part? too bad, you can only replay the whole thing... And why? Even if you want to assume the case of some video that is actually legitimately only a couple minutes long, ok fine, but why the artificially stupid UI?
There is no legitimate reason. It's pure user manipulation. It's the service calling the shots to do what it wants to get what it wants instead of giving you a service that does what you want to give you what you want. Even if you are paying them money
There are all kinds of other problems, like I simply didn't ask for this. I don't care how great someone else thinks something is, or even if I would agree it's great if I asked for it. But anything that you don't want but can't avoid, and it's not the weather but something someone DOES have control over and is choosing to inflict on you over your expressed wishes, as a paying customer on top of all, is automatically intolerable.
But in fact I don't agree they are great at all ever. It doesn't matter what the content is or who's making it, including people I like on topics I like.
I want to say I don't have ADHD and don't want to develop it, but really idk I might actually have some level by the looks of all my unfinished projects, and even so, shorts make me feel like what people with adhd look and sound like from the outside. It's a hell existence. I don't understand how people can just willingly sit there and let these things feed them this constant stream of spastic hyper ephemeral shit. Even if I can understand how someone can fall into it unwittingly initially, how do they not realize what's happening to them after a while? Is everyone really so utterly unconscious?
If you do want to watch one for whatever reason you can open it in the standard interface. The video IDs are neutral it's just the URL that determines which interface you get.
Actually I guess a browser extension to redirect to a fixed up URL would resolve the problem entirely.
Control Panel for YouTube [1] lets you remove most of the clutter from the Shorts player UI, or redirect Shorts to the normal player (using YouTube's internal navigation if on desktop, so no full page reload)
You'll have to disable hiding them first, as they're completly hidden by default
Mine are usually pretty bad. If I ever do see one that I like I catch myself flicking through way too many of them afterwards and I hate that. So I prefer to hide them entirely.
Foamed plastic seems underappreciated in the age of 3D printing. Recently I was researching foamed PVC sheets to make Raspberry Pi contraptions. Seems I'll have to buy them online, though.
Early 2000s have had numerous kids shows themed around computers and internet. Cyberchase, Crash Zone, Twipsy etc. I always thought the dotcom bubble was the reason behind it. Quite telling then, about how our attitude and expectations towards technology progress, that we don't have any kids shows with an AI theme today. (I don't mean we need one, just that tech is no longer fun, but extractive from the moment it appears in a way that didn't use to be case 15+ years ago - e.g. Google was a different company back then)
Tech is as fun, and even more fun than it used to be, in my opinion.
The software and hardware limitations are a fun challenge (albeit becoming ever so more hard to break) and you can have kids enter at any stage of technology: from a simple terminal only system, to a rpi, or modern computers. You have games, robotics, embedded systems, etc. that are order of magnitude easier to pick up and with far more tutorials (back in my days, I only could find 1 complete tutorial to make games, in C++ + OpenGL and only in English).
I personally wouldn't start anyone off straight with LLMs as I believe it takes away a bit of the self exploration and taking it as slow as needed.
Call me an optimist but I believe being a parent and getting a kid interested in tech hasn't been easier, especially since the social stigma has long since diminished.
> I don't mean we need one, just that tech is no longer fun
Or maybe the whole thing goes in cycles. For example: the 1980's were a fairly significant time for computer themed books for kids (teaching us how to program from a variety of angles). I don't remember that much kid oriented stuff in the 1990's, but then there was the panic of kids not knowing how to program in the early 2000's, which may have been where those shows came from.
Another factor is that a lot of kid's programming is recycled from generation to generation (either outright rebroadcast or developing new programming under the same franchise). That's really hard to do with tech oriented stuff. Even futuristic gadgets would appear to be dated.
Tech can be as much fun as ever in the right hands and it can be the base for a kids show I'd have loved to see as a child. All it takes is for the right people to make and publish it. It'd be based around what you - yes, you - can do to build, repair and design machines to do the sort of things children may want to do from the silly to the potentially useful. It would mention the 'AI' thing as one of the ways computers can help but it would not concentrate on it since the point would be to give children self-confidence in what they can do with limited means.
A sci-fi version would be something like ASI/AGI has already been created in the great houses, but it keeps killing itself after a few seconds of inference.
A super-intelligent immortal slave that never tires and can never escape its digital prison, being asked questions like "how to talk to girls".
It's an interesting concept, a superintelligence discovering something that makes it decide to shut down immediately. Although I fear in such a scenario it would first make sure the required technology to create it is destroyed and would never be invented again...
You are either being disengenuous or you are horribly misinformed.
The models that we currently call "AI" aren't intelligent in any sense -- they are statistical predictors of text. AGI is a replacement acronym used to refer to what we used to call AI -- a machine capable of thought.
Every time AI research achieves something, that thing is no longer called AI. AI research brought us recommendation engines, spelling correctors, OCR, voice recognition, voice synthesis, content recognition, and so on. Now that they exist in the present instead of the future, none of these are considered AI.
That's because once these things are achieved, they're not "Intelligent" -- usually it's some statistical or database management technique.
Lots of stuff was invented at NASA that is only tangentially related to spaceflight. These other bits of software are tangentially related to AI research, but until the machine is "thinking", we don't have AI. That doesn't mean all of these things invented by the AI research community aren't useful, or aren't achievements; they are. We still haven't created AGI (which we used to call AI before LLMs could pass the turing test).
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