Since the beginning of Youtube, it has always struck my as reeking of such desperation to keep you hooked. Just the idea that you're watching a video, and there is simultaneously a list of 10 OTHER videos right next to the view. Most have become so numbed to that, but if you step back you should find it just such a sign of desperation to hook you (is the best way I can put it).

Before a video is even over, they have to plaster the video window with MORE VIDEOS. "Here try this, what about this other thing, here have you considered this?"

My mind is always "I haven't even digested this one video and you're already PUSHING MORE!"

When my kids are over my shoulder on YouTube I'm constantly zooming in w/ Mac zoom to obscure the other videos, the other spam, etc.

Just learn to absorb and soak in one thing. And digest it for a moment.

It's all so obnoxious and it's now the norm.

FWIW, I only ever login in a fresh private window.

As the other guy said, it's like having a drug dealer wait outside your house and try to push you some smack. This must be illegal, the fact that it's not illegal must be illegal.

I can sympathize a bit with YouTube trying to boost engagement to increase ad views, like, love it or hate it, thats the game they have to play hosting and serving petabytes of video.

But all of that shit should disappear the moment I start paying for it out of pocket. Like, I'm already paying, getting me to watch more videos costs them more money that it would to leave me the fuck alone!

First I will say that clearly all these attention hooks must work or they wouldn't keep doing them but, for me, it just doesn't match how I use YT.

Specifically, I am almost always going to YT with the intention of watching something specific. It could be because I need to solve a problem (eg installing a smoke detector). I also for some reason use it to play music despite having Spotify. I honestly don't know why.

But I almost never go to YT to look for something to watch. I do sometimes watch a related video after I'm done but this wouldn't happen more than 10-15% of the time. I think I'm in the minority here as people seem to go on YT and just keep chaining videos.

But I find YT's interface to be a confusing mess of "me too" products that are half-assed and various likely fiefdoms that force UX onto things that don't make sense.

For example, YT's Live streams are, well, ass. The player is terrible. The UX is terrible. And you still have that right panel showing related videos. But watching Live videos is a vastly different UX than watching VODs. So why is it there? I suspect because whatever team owns that recommendation panel has a lot of power. And it probably drives metrics still so it's still there.

And bringing this back to YT Shorts. Ugh, I too would like to never see them. It's a "me too" Tiktok. And it's worse. Tiktok's UI/UX is just a step above Shorts (and Reels). And I spend 98% of my Tiktok time on my fyp.

But yes the "please watch another video" UI is everywhere. The end of a video, your home page, the right panel and in-video prompts/

Try moving the spotlight search box. I swear you have to use tweezers to find the razor thing edge.

It seems that the Spotlight Search box (from CMD + Space) can be moved by clicking anywhere on it and dragging.

I think you can just click anywhere within it and click and drag it

Did anyone catch the recent development in the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping story?

For days it was explained that, while she had a Nest doorbell camera (which was stolen by the kidnapper) it was sadly useless because Nancy wasn’t paying for cloud storage. Just live video and notifications.

Well what do know happened today? The video of the kidnapper was magically produced by Google. I guess, even when you don’t pay for storage, they’re… you know…. Recording and saving the video anyway.

No one’s really bothered to point this out as they’re all just so excited that the video has turned up.

Turns out you're not buying the storage and compute required to store your video. Google can afford that regardless of whether you pay.

They're licensing your own video back to you.

Do they just store everything? How long is that sustainable?

Google doorbell cameras send clips to the cloud. They're accessible to users for 3 hours for free, and a month or two if you pay. While they become unavailable to users after 3 hours, it's unlikely that they're deleted immediately—partly for operational reasons (easier to clear out many clips periodically in a batch process, rather than individual clips one by one exactly when they expire), and partly because Google keeps a lot of data around for a short period (a week or two) to be able to debug systems. Even when data is requested to be deleted, it's often possible to recover it from off-site backups or soft-deleted data stores for a while. Google ensures that all user data is actually, irrecoverably deleted within 2 months after a deletion request (see https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention).

It has been pointed out in another HN comment thread, but ... surveillors gonna surveil, that's how they make money and accumulate power.

This is precisely why I’ve always lived physics, as used to something like “geography or history”.

For the reason you just stated.

> Things came out slowly. Albums. Games. Software. That slowness gave them weight. You lived with them for a while instead of replacing them next week.

This is very true (and should include films as well). When big movies came out they were a big thing. Waiting in long lines for a ticket to a movie was a normal thing. People talked about them weeks and weeks. They were sort of big cultural events.

Exactly. That’s why I’ve always said the driving is a truly AGI requiring activity. It’s not just about sensors and speed limits and feedback loops. It’s about having a true understanding for everything that’s happening around you:

Having an understanding for the density and make up of an obstacle that blew in front of you, because it was just a cardboard box. Seeing how it tumbles lightly through the wind, and forming a complete model of its mass and structure in your mind instantaneously. Recognizing that that flimsy fragment though large will do no damage and doesn’t justify a swerve.

Getting in the mind of a car in front of you, by seeing subtle hints of where the driver is looking down, and recognizing that they’re not fully paying attention. Seeing them sort of inch over because you can tell they want to change lanes, but they’re not quite there yet.

Or in this case, perhaps hearing the sounds of children playing, recognizing that it’s 3:20 PM, and that school is out, other cars, double parked as you mentioned, all screaming instantly to a human driver to be extremely cautious and kids could be jumping out from anywhere.

Slightly off topic, but it's endlessly funny to me watching people set the bar for AGI so high that only a small percentage of humans count as AGI.

humans aren't even a general intelligence at these requirements.

How many human drivers do you think would pass the bar you're setting?

IMO, the bar should be that the technology is a significant improvement over the average performance of human drivers (which I don't think is that hard), not necessarily perfect.

> How many human drivers do you think would pass the bar you're setting?

How many humans drivers would pass it, and what proportion of the time? Even the best drivers do not constantly maintain peak vigilance, because they are human.

> IMO, the bar should be that the technology is a significant improvement over the average performance of human drivers (which I don't think is that hard), not necessarily perfect.

In practice, this isn't reasonable, because "hey we're slightly better than a population that includes the drunks, the inattentive, and the infirm" is not going to win public trust. And, of course, a system that is barely better than average humans might worsen safety, if it ends up replacing driving by those who would normally drive especially safe.

I think "better than the average performance of a 75th or 90th percentile human driver" might be a good way to look at things.

It's going to be a weird thing, because odds are the distribution of accidents that do happen won't look much like human ones. It will have superhuman saves (like that scooter one), but it will also crash in situations that we can't really picture humans doing.

I'm reminded of airbags; even first generation airbags made things much safer overall, but they occasionally decapitated a short person or child in a 5MPH parking lot fender bender. This was hard for the public to stomach, and if it's your kid who is internally decapitated by the airbag in a small accident, I don't think you'll really accept "it's safer on average to have an airbag!"

The parent comment said the bar should be "significant improvement" over the average performance of human drivers.

Then you said, "this isn't reasonable", and the bar shouldn't be "slightly better" or "barely better". It should be at least better than the 75th percentile driver.

It sounds like you either misread the parent comment or you're phrasing your response as disagreement despite proposing roughly the same thing as the parent comment.

All depends on what you read as "significant improvement".

A 20% lower fatal crash rate compared to the average might be a significant improvement-- from a public health standpoint, this is huge if you could reduce traffic deaths by 20%.

But if you don't get the worst drivers to replace their driving with autonomous, that "20% less than average" might actually make things worse. That's my point. The bar has to be pretty dang high to be sure that you will actually make things better.

> In practice, this isn't reasonable, because "hey we're slightly better than a population that includes the drunks, the inattentive, and the infirm" is not going to win public trust.

Sadly, you're right, but as rational people, we can acknowledge that it should. I care about reducing injuries and deaths, and the %tile of human performance needed for that is probably something like 30%ile. It's definitely well below 75%ile.

The counterpoint, though:

> > And, of course, a system that is barely better than average humans might worsen safety, if it ends up replacing driving by those who would normally drive especially safe.

It's only if you get the habitually drunk (a group that is overall impoverished), the very old, etc, to ride Waymo that you reap this benefit. And they're probably not early adopters.

Uber and Lyft were supported by police departments because they reduced drunk driving. Drunk driving isn't just impoverished alcoholics. People go to bars and parts and get drunk all the time.

You also solve for people texting (or otherwise using their phones) while driving, which is pretty common among young, tech-adopting people.

> Drunk driving isn't just impoverished alcoholics. People go to bars and parts and get drunk all the time

Yes, but the drivers who are 5th percentile drivers who cause a huge share of the most severe accidents are "special" in various ways. Most of them are probably not autonomy early adopters.

The guy who decided to drive on the wrong side of a double yellow on a windy mountain road and hit our family car in a probable suicide attempt was not going to replace that trip with Waymo.

The bar is very high because humans expect machines to be perfect. As for the expectation of other humans, "pobody's nerfect!"

It’s laughable to think that anyone in psychology has a “technical” definition of anything really. It is entirely possible that our brain works in a very, very similar way. We really have no idea. Focus focusing on the difference between meat and silicon is fruitless. The analogies between how a human learn, learns, and how an AI learns, are too significant to ignore.

Human humans have some instinctive desire to think themselves elevated. I am convinced that my internal thoughts are just a phenomenon, and the notion of “I choose to think a given thought. “ is preposterous in an of itself. Where exactly is this lofty perch from which I am controlling i?

What's with with the doubling?

I’m just how exactly does my credit card company know how much I paid for shampoo?

Your retailer knows exactly how much you paid for shampoo. In most cases, they know it was exactly you who bought it. Data sharing agreements through direct or third parties complete the picture for both sides, retailer and card issuer.

Whatever they sell them for is the value.

But shouldn’t there have been an evolutionary advantage for such a thing to develop?

Not necessarily for the individual.

Some trees have mechanisms, for instance, where they die quickly but signal other trees if exposed to certain issues, allowing the other trees to put up a better defense.

Ants and other insects sometimes do the same thing.

Essentially a ‘jumps on the grenade’ gene.