Singapore to a tea. Spooky that I had a similar path, Sydney -> HK -> New York -> Singapore. Crescendo-ing up to New York, then off a cliff into a full blow school-like world (but great trains).
Super strange when there are several on the front page, older, with less votes and less comments. To say it’s off topic is a little narrow minded given the current environment
Anecdata- I did this as a 13 year old in the 90s. My old man came upon it after I was repeatedly ending up in hospital in Australia with asthma as a kid. I think there was a presentation in a local scout hall!
I didn’t understand the history at the time - but it stopped me going to hospital, I ended up being able to do a controlled hold (no discomfort) of around 1:30 min and a max hold of just shy of 5 mins.
So for me it had a big impact.
I stopped in my 20s and now I am no where near able to get those numbers.
I appreciate you giving it a shot, then! Our experiences are pretty different; I've almost always found solid working apps from F-Droid, and my main messenger, web browser, podcast app, ebook reader, RSS reader, calendar, tower defense game, and home screen launcher are all from F-Droid. I use the Play Store mostly for Google's own apps (namely Maps and YT Music) and my banking app.
"Enhancer For Youtube" is a firefox extension that disables much of the nonsense in Youtube's UI. I can't use youtube without it anymore. There might be a chrome version? Idk, using chrome with youtube is dumb af tho so probably don't do that.
Using Chromium-based browsers is the only way to play HDR videos, since Mozilla is dragging their feet for years with implementing support for that. I use Firefox for everything except for YouTube because of that.
But if you're in the same boat, at least use something that has an adblocker, like Brave, Vivaldi or Opera.
Auto-repeat is the thing that most mystifies me about shorts. I understand the idea behind auto-play, although I disable it; but who on earth wants to watch the exact thing they just watched by default?
Given the success of TikTok, the answer is apparently, "billions of people", but I just don't get it.
My theory is that it is a way of forcefully grabbing people’s attention.
Without autoplay there is no engagement once the video is over. With autoplay there is the risk someone leaves the player on the background and ignores it. With looping videos people get annoyed and (if they’re like me) close the tab or skip to the next video just to get something different
Ctrl + Right click, Show controls will bring up the classic controls (play, pause, volume, seek, full screen) on Firefox. I'm sure other browsers have something similar. Haven't found a way to turn this on permanently for all videos though :/
YouTube has a lot of really positive educational content. I have learned so much from it. For instance, I was able to learn photography from it. Yes it’s still social media in a way, but the benefits can really outweigh the drawbacks with proper use.
Shorts as a whole are incredibly addictive and have a much lower benefit to drawback ratio. Parents should be able to make this cost/benefit decision for their kids. I wish I could turn them off for myself. I settled on only using YouTube on my laptop because shorts don’t have the same appeal in that context.
If you disable watch history, youtube tries to "punish" you by disabling nearly the non-subscription recommendations and shorts not from your subscriptions and a number of other things.
It really is. I've been using Revanced to patch out the Shorts feature on my phone, works decently well, but I'm technically violating the ToS with that, despite shelling out 15€/month for it. Obnoxious.
maybe there will be another tier of youtube premium in a few years that removes shorts, and people can try to guilt you for blocking them using browser extensions like they do for ad blocking.
The most worrying bit is that politicians are super concerned about "algorithmic content" for kids, like TikTok or Instagram Reels or Snapchat.
Youtube Shorts? Crickets.
It's IMPOSSIBLE to disable it with parental controls and it has the exact same slop as the other vertical video services.
Which kinda sucks because I'm fine with my kids watching horizontal youtube videos by certain creators, but I'd rather not they have access to the infinite pool of shorts unfiltered.
"DuckDB offers robust capabilities for querying data stored partially on S3, particularly when dealing with Parquet files. This is achieved through several optimization techniques:
Predicate Pushdown: When you apply a WHERE clause to filter data, DuckDB can "push down" this filter directly into the Parquet file scan. If the Parquet file contains zonemaps (metadata about value ranges within columns), DuckDB can use this information to skip reading entire sections of the file that do not contain relevant data, significantly reducing the amount of data transferred from S3.
Projection Pushdown: When you select only specific columns in your SELECT statement, DuckDB automatically reads only those required columns from the Parquet file. This means you avoid downloading and processing unnecessary data, leading to faster queries and reduced S3 transfer costs.
HTTP Range Reads: DuckDB leverages HTTP range headers when interacting with S3 (or other object storage supporting range reads). This allows it to fetch only the necessary parts of the Parquet file, such as metadata or specific column chunks, rather than downloading the entire file."
Don’t know if you have seen the work DuckDB is doing on ducklake. Maybe there is an overlap in vision for versioning data across multiple data sources - and similar to SQLite it’s not proprietary and easily drilled down on. I’m sorry, don’t have technical knowledge :/
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