I remember when YouTube changed their monetization scheme and completely killed the entire budding animation space because animation takes you know 10 hours of work for every couple seconds whereas let's plays are almost one to one time to content created you would think this would actually be less efficient for YouTube like they would want to encourage shorter forms of content so that they can show one ad per video and have a higher number of ads per unit of watch time but I guess the perverse incentive here is just that digital storage space is so incredibly cheap and the push in basically every capitalist industry is towards slop over quality without exception.

Half of Youtube videos could either be edited down to 20% of the total length or just be an article. But people don't read articles, we've all been caught in a habitual trap of video content. And the articles that still do exist have all sorts of filler content that usually has to be loaded.

Everything has been inflated in how much data transmission it costs. Emails turn into meetings, text turns into images which turns into video, all with a bunch of hidden analytics, and so on.

The only way you really notice the advances in telecommunications over the past 20 years is when you load a website like Wikipedia in a split second. This is the divergence point where you can imagine a world with a small fraction of the consumption rate of this one, yet which still has a comparable quality of life.

Yeah. All the goddamned time. I’m a fan of history, but I’m too much of a scatterbrain and I did too many drugs to keep all the facts straight. Instead I just remember odd little tidbits while maintaining a fairly standard materialist understanding of events. I bring it up because I think of all the frittering excesses of all those pompous courts of antiquity that modernity likes to scoff at. I think of how people laugh at the soldiers of the Seven Years War standing in costumes in neat little rows instead of taking cover. All the ways we think of our hallowed beliefs vs their silly superstitions. So look at us building more roads for cars and cars for more roads and that time Steve Jobs walked on stage too skinny and Apple stock fell by billions of dollars. Look at us with our cacophonous data centers howling into the night and day. The inverse of if we all do a little we can do a lot remains true: these tiny wastes that make up our personal interactions are made massive by these data centers in our particular moment or the system of capital more abstractly

Edit: it’s 1378 or whatever Brace Belden said

I really can't understand this death drive to throw maximum resources towards ai. Like at best it's a curio, something that can make fun images or be a little personal assistant, but the tech bros are acting like this is the fucking singularity. I guess it's just late capitalism things to try and push back the collapse of the system that's in total zombie mode.

the guy's just super mad that Netflix is going to release all 7 episodes at once, calling it anti community or whatever.

i think they found that does happen? hardly anyone discussed shows that dropped whole seasons and people spend all week speculating on the slow drip shows.

My concern obsession is the waste of financing creators by making people sit through ads.