Surprisingly, it isn't. You can change the language in your google account and it will take that into account for what to translate and into what language, but you can't turn it off completely.
I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ignore recommendations with german titles. Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german. And recently, they've added auto-translated audio, which is even worse, because now I'm opening an english video and a terrible robotic german voice is talking to me and I manually need to switch to the original source.
It's also not consistent behavior. It's not like all videos on the front page are looking like they're in german. It's just some of them and afaik there's no way to tell.
And you genuinely can't turn it off completely. Incredibly frustrating and I'm just puzzled by the thought-process that lead to this decision. This would be a pretty cool feature if it was consistently applied and freely configurable.
Moreover I could still prefer movies in my native language *but properly dubbed by some voice actors*, not by some random AI that's going to mess up all the context.
Which is insane to me. Silicon Valley is filled to the brim with multi-lingual people. And yet so many decisions that are coming out have no understanding of languages
Even for the monolingual Google employees it's not uncommon for them to travel to other locales, even as part of their job, so they would be on the receiving end of this "experience" too. We've had 2 decades of experience with this being an issue. One would think that they'd incorporate this "edge case" into their design process matrix by now.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if they one day decided that to have an experience of having no user content automatically translated, you have to pay for the privilege. Call it a multilinguality tax.
I'm in France, but my Google, browsers and devices languages are English. So Youtube randomly auto-dubs (and auto-translates the title of) some French videos into English, and some English videos into French. But they're never the same videos depending on the devices or the browsers. However, the automatic subtitles during the preview remain in the original langage.
Do note that when rolling out features like these, they geoblock them, even on a per run basis, so it might be happening a lot throughout the world but it just hasn't reached your country. For an example, mobile YouTube in the US lets me minimize the video and multitask while still seeing a picture-in-picture window and the audio, while as soon as one lands on France that feature gets immediately disabled.
I've heard about different features in different regions, but GP is also in France.
I am also not connected to my account when I browse in Edge (it's my work PC, it also uses a separate IP), so I don't think it's related to the feature being rolled out on a per-account basis.
I'm in France, my devices are set to en-GB, I've watched only English videos (plus the odd French one) yet youtube decides to auto translate audio in German and lately in Spanish.
I'd love to have a robotic german voice. All I get is the clickbait MrBeast TikTok voice. I get a real reaction when I hear it. I try so hard to avoid the current social media content. It's unbearable. The shock is even greater when I do stumble across it.
Youtube is really the only website that is straight up unusable for me without a set of Addons (uBlock, sponsorBlock, Unhook).
> I don't know who thought this was a good user experience
Which youtube decision of recent years ever thought about user experience?
It's all "company bets" and "promotion tracks".
When it was a fight against TikTok you got Shorts that you can't get rid of.
Now you probably have to "show commitment to our AI offerings" or something. So you get autotranslated videos by a team which will get 500k bonuses and will move on in a month
> Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german
Sp you clicked when you wouldn't have, somewhere an engagement graph went a notch up, and someone will get a pat on the back.
This is one of those articles where the comments are really interesting to read through. I see a bunch of comments who don't agree with the exact math, which might be warranted, but it seems at least directionally correct to me. However there's also a bunch of people commenting that this lifestyle isn't viable for some reason or another, that mainly just boils down to a personal preference those commenters don't want to live without.
But having read through most of the objections I still find myself enticed by this. If I mentally place myself in this position I think I could quite happily live a few decades without talking to anyone for weeks or even months at a time.
I'd still have my pets to give me companionship. Load my kindle up with a thousand books I want to read and just work my way through it. Pick up writing as a hobby and spend the rest of the time working at a gas station and fixing up the house and/or grow some food to offset the reduced income.
Healthcare is an issue. Doesn't seem like a viable place to grow old. Once you become too frail for physical work it's probably just time to die, which isn't great.
You might also like a documentary called Alone in the Wilderness, which tells the story of Dick Proenneke, a man who moved to the remote Twin Lakes region of Alaska in 1968 and lived alone in the wilderness for 30 years.
Proenneke built his own log cabin entirely by hand, using only simple tools (many of which he made himself), and filmed his daily life, including hunting, fishing, foraging, and crafting everything from scratch
Man, I don't wanna see someone going to live as a hermit in the woods and shit in the bushes for $400. I've got plenty of examples of people living in mud huts in Africa for much less.
I wanna see how it's possible to live a decent life in civilized conditions (roof over your head, running water and sewage system, electricity, heating) on $400.
I think a lot of the complaint I see is people want to have 100% of everything they want, within a 10 minute walk, with zero compromise. I.e. they have unreasonable expectations.
I see people come to London from other parts of the world and ask where they can live that is nice and a 5-10 minute walk from the office and I usually laugh in their faces. If you can afford to live that close in central London (even before you think about "nice"), then you don't need to work. Even single car parking spaces in central London cost more than family houses elsewhere in the UK.
When I got my first place it was on the outskirts of London, cost 20x the average UK salary (and for which I obviously took out a huge mortgage for that basically took 75-80% of my salary at the time to pay), and took over an hour on public transport (which was also not cheap - walking is free but probably about 4 hours each way) to get to central London. And this was just in the 2008-era - it's never been cheap (or even reasonable) to own nice property in the center of a large global metropolis like London where you are 10 minutes walk from your office AND transport AND entertainment AND everything else unless you are ultra wealthy.
People need to lower expectations about locality/proximity and affordability before things become viable. This isn't a new problem.
You can go to not quite as extreme levels. There are thousands of small towns all through Appalachia, the Midwest, and the Northeast with a bit of interesting local culture and a low cost of living. Not this low but they also have hospitals and often colleges and other things.
If you are a minority concerned about the culture of red America, the 2016 and 2024 elections both provide excellent county by county color coded maps for you.
Telework is what really unlocks this if you’re a developer.
The Midwest also has many medium sized cities. Not as cheap as small towns but not as expensive as the coastal real estate cost traps. I live in Cincinnati, which has three universities, four Fortune 500 companies, a small startup scene, and over a dozen small neighborhoods with walkable streets (overall you’d want a car but you could get away with not using it every day).
At some point the only economically rational decision is to leave very high cost of living cities. I tell people for cities like SF that it might be good to go there to launch your career but look at it like a college. If by 30 you are not making — for SF I’d say over $300k — then leave. You will never get above real estate in those places unless you are approaching mid six figures.
It also negatively impacts what you can do. Even if you can earn that, it might be with golden handcuffs to a FAANG. Think about that. If you want to start a startup, one that is not lavishly funded enough to pay that, then leave. If you just don’t want to be golden handcuffed to a monster mortgage, leave.
> However there's also a bunch of people commenting that this lifestyle isn't viable for some reason or another, that mainly just boils down to a personal preference those commenters don't want to live without.
Given humans are also just animals that had lifestyles before money and modern society was invented, this doesn't seem like a useful distinction. Either you're talking about your personal preferences you don't want to lice without or money isn't even part of the picture in the first place. Where that line is personally drawn is just as arbitrary to this point at $1 as $1,000,000.
Overall though I agree the article sheds light where we don't normally tend to think. At the same time it crosses points too often to make that those focus of conversation. That is to say it makes a good point with just a little too much PoV twist inserted so people who don't agree will think about that statement instead. E.g. don't complain about not having the home prospects of a boomer because you can live like your great grandparent - which would be something ~40 years prior to the boomer comparison, even for a zoomer (-> driving pushback against the idea owning a house at all is the same as the lifestyle the article laments hearing about -> driving conversation like the above paragraph).
EvilCorp probably has unissued shares. A rising market cap thus gives them a lot of leverage to achieve their goals. They could pay employees, borrow against those shares, raise more capital with a secondary offering, etc.
Also, if EvilCorp is worth $10, I could just buy it and stop all the EvilActions.
I stumbled upon hardcover when I was looking for a book info api and saw that goodreads discontinued theirs. Although it's pretty rough around the edges I've been using it extensively since then.
As far as I understand hardcover was really created because goodreads discontinued their api and the team at hardcover saw how many people relied on it for a myriad of different niche projects.
If hardcover was just a replacement for the goodreads platform, then I'd agree with you. But it's not. It's there for the api, with the platform around it intended as a way to ensure free access of the api for everyone.
And from that pov choosing GraphQL makes a lot of sense imo. You can't anticipate all the cool and different things people might want to do with it, so they chose the most flexible api spec they could.
On the other hand, I'm not sure if a complete rails rewrite was the right choice. The App was slow and sluggish beforehand, with frequent ui glitches and it still has those same issues. Their dev blog claims significant performance increases, but as a user I haven't noticed a big difference.
Sticking with next.js, but moving to a selfhosted instance and then iteratively working on performance improvements would've been (imho) the better way forward. I see no reason why next.js somehow fundamentally couldn't do what they're trying to do, but rails can. Especially with just 30k users (which tbc is a great achievement, just not impressive from a technical standpoint).
Thanks for the comments! You hit on a lot of why our app is structured the way it is. I agree too, we could've put those investments into Next.js rather than migrating to Rails. The difference was with Rails I could envision what the endpoint looked like (codebase, costs, caching, dev env, deployment, hosting options, etc). If we were to invest that time Next.js, some of those answers were (and still are) unclear. Agree we could still get there, it just wouldn't be as clear a path.
That's a fair argument.
And to be clear (because my original comment might read as negative), I do like hardcover a lot. It might not work sometimes, but I still use it to track all my reading, because the ui is charming, because it has a good, open api and because it's very clearly made by people who really like reading.
Wishing you all the success you can get!
Very disappointing. I do not understand how people earnestly defend the successionist view as a good future, but I thought he might at least give some interesting arguments.
This talk isn't that. There are no substantive arguments for why we should embrace this future and his representation of the opposite side isn't in good faith either, instead he chose to present straw-man versions of them.
He concludes with "A successful succession offers [...] the best hope for a long-term future for humanity.
How this can possibly be true when ai succession necessarily includes replacement eludes me. He does mention transhumanism on a slide, but it seems extremely unlikely that he's actually talking about that and the whole succession spiel is just unfortunate wording.
I'm not trying to be edgy or misanthropic but I don't understand why would you attach emotional value to the abstract concept of existence of humanity over next millennia. Isn't it the same kind of extrapolation of kin selection instincts far into the domain of values as for example favouring your race over others?
How is AI going to make its own chips and energy? The supply chain for AI hardware is long an fragile. AGI will have an interest in maintaining peace for this reason.
And why would it replace us, our thoughts are like food for AI. Our bodies are very efficient and mobile, biology will certainly be an option for AGI at some point.
Robotics is a software problem now, see the Tesla, Figure or Unitree humanoid bots. An AI can be totally embodied and humans will have little or no value as labor at all.
> How is AI going to make its own chips and energy?
Pay naive humans take care of those things while it has to, then disassemble the atoms in their human bodies into raw materials for robots/datacenters once that is no longer necessary
I know that having parents who cared about my education (and were in a position to actively participate in it) was a privilege and not a given, but where are the parents in this situation? Do we just accept that an 11 year-old watches squid game, has unrestricted access to chatgpt and does all their school work without any oversight at all? Clearly this kid is not receiving the guidance it needs. Or any guidance really.
Unrestricted access to the internet might occur much earlier than 11 in the life of a child, at age 2 many children are given tablets with youtube videos or videogames, it's all a slow transition from there.
The tablet doesn't work so you let them watch youtube on the PC
They find some games on the PC
They get bored of the games of the PC so they pirate some cool games
They get sophisticated in removing DRM so they install linux
They become programmers or influencers.
It's the pipeline that we know of, but there's probably a lot of pipelines into influencers, gamblers, onlyfans models, brainrot consumers, etc...
My parents cared but they just weren't educated enough themselves to offer any good advice.
I would say I basically received no guidance my entire childhood on anything important. Not because my parents were delinquents but they simply had nothing to offer.
If was in middle school, there is no way my parents would be able to police the use of chatGPT. They wouldn't think it is good or bad, they would just not understand what is going on.
I have thought about that many times. It is unimaginable to have received good advice growing up and not have to figure out everything for myself, fixing all these mistakes. What an advantage.
What kind of guidance does 11 year old need for homework? Me and my siblings were doing all of it independently pretty much from the start, parents were only involved if there was some tough nut that we needed help with.
I think o1 will keep them going for a while. You don’t need to be economical to keep investors interested as long as the tech progresses, and if their new test-time compute scaling holds true for another magnitude or two they can just crank up the processing time to impress people whenever they need to raise more money.
In addition, with the rollout of their realtime api we’re going to see a whole bunch of customer service focused products crop up, further demonstrating how this can generate value right now.
So I really don’t think they’re running out of steam at all.
I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ignore recommendations with german titles. Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german. And recently, they've added auto-translated audio, which is even worse, because now I'm opening an english video and a terrible robotic german voice is talking to me and I manually need to switch to the original source.
It's also not consistent behavior. It's not like all videos on the front page are looking like they're in german. It's just some of them and afaik there's no way to tell.
And you genuinely can't turn it off completely. Incredibly frustrating and I'm just puzzled by the thought-process that lead to this decision. This would be a pretty cool feature if it was consistently applied and freely configurable.