How can we define what this even means? I don’t think any of the naive initial aims were ever attainable - and the entire impulsive and irresponsible adventure has spiraled down into what looks like impatient and petty spite: smashing the toys because the big baby didn’t get the present he wanted.
> it was a skill issue on the part of the Spotify engineers writing the internal system prompt for their slop DJ
Spotify are currently making a big deal about not writing any code - I attended a webinar this week where one of the slides proudly trumpeted this fact:
“
0 lines of code
Spotify's best engineers have not written a line of code since December.”
A full decade since spotify wrapped was released and we still have the grand unified … menu with a seemingly randomized list of actions that takes hundreds of milliseconds to load depending on network conditions. And buggy jams that desync constantly. And it’s way too easy to accidentally clear the entire queue. I could go on, wonder what the hundreds of PMs are doing?
Bunch of clowns coasting on their moat instead of building an actually good product.
I’m paying over 40 dollars a month for YouTube but it doesn’t allow me to choose almost anything of what I see, despite trying hard to fine-tune my recommendations.
I can’t permanently turn off shorts - and this I find personally insulting. It really feels like encountering a drug dealer outside my house every time I come home, always expecting me to cave and try some of that good smack.
But apart from ignoring me when I say I’m not interested in whole genres of ‘fun’ videos, it also resets the streaming quality to the lowest setting every single day and then hides the quality setting deep inside a menu with several fiddly clicks.
And this isn’t for my benefit of course: I can easily stream 4K video to my screens. It’s to shave a few cents off each stream and max the gouging.
YT is desperate for me to engage with rage bait news, and I’m not biting.
It’s so god damn annoying, regardless of how often I choose to ignore channels or don’t suggest feedback.
All they care about is vote time…give me content I want to view!
Also, in the evenings, my timeline gets weirdly paranoid phobia centric, like deep insecurities people live with that are triggering and keep you up late. It’s so obvious YT is doing this to try and bait me into watching these deeply emotional and personal content, and again, ignoring it and providing feedback seems to do nothing to my feed. I hate it.
I kept having issues like this, with a different kinds of videos, until I scrubbed my history of any of the kinds of videos I did not want.
If I click on something I thought I would want to watch and it is the kind of video I do not want recommended to me I immediately delete it from my watch history, block the channel, and some times block that profile from viewing my youtube channel.
~2 years ago I never had to delete anything from my watch history and my feed/recommendations were ok, now I have to if I do not want my feed/recommendations to occasionally be flooded with something I do not want.
I watch things from unknown-to-me creators in a private window, then copy the URL over to logged in window if it's any good. Same idea, might be an easier workflow.
Absurd that we have these sorts of workarounds, but of course the view numbers are better if it keeps fishing for just the right kind of clickbait trash that you'll wolf it down endlessly.
I only use YouTube with my watch history set to off. So there is no feed, and I only see updates from channels I actually subscribed to. If I want to see some random crap I go search for it but it’s a clean slate next time I open the app. I have found this method of using YouTube to be extremely useful.
I transitioned to using youtube with just that left sidebar for updates from channels i subscribed to, id watch the 2-3 creators videos maybe, slowly that became 1, now its 0. I still consider watching that final creator, but if i do its gonna be because i went to youtube and wanted to type that channel into the search bar, not because of a notification.
Everyone seems to act like youtube is something we need, I just don't really agree. If i want to watch something for entertainment, there are so many amazing shows with deep stories to choose from. If i want to learn, the video medium to me is just straight up garbage. I prefer to read to learn.
Of course there are topics this doesnt totally apply to, but for my purposes, videos are almost always just a way to not only likely repeat the same things you already know for a good chunk of the video, but when you finally find the meat, its still being delivered in a slower way than it could be ingested by reading.
This is the way. I get plenty of feeds, recommendations etc. from others, enough to keep me busy. Follow who I want, and drop in when I see they have something new.
Do not give them the satisfaction. Dont like videos and never comment on anything. The videos are the bait. The comments sections are the trap. Use youtube as a multi-channel TV. Keep it a one-way stream of data. Give them nothing beyond the unavoidable knowledge of what you watch.
I am waiting for the day when they permanently turn off the channels rss feeds. Recently, after years of smooth sailing, they had a couple of outages, first selective, with only about 50% of my feeds effected and yesterday again with 100%, returning 404s. I am concerned given this development and alphabets apparent plan to kill as much interop as possible.
For the uninitiated, afaik, some feedreaders can auto discover the rss url when you add the channels url. Otherwise you have to manually search the channel page source for 'RSS' or 'channel_id='.
And for those that want to get the feed URL, this little Python snippet can get the feed URL from a channel's page, either from the channel's URL itself or a video or playlist page:
I just use two browsers. On one my recommendations are truly well curated but I can’t watch a single out of place video or my feed is corrupted. The other browser is for brain rot time and it’s the Wild West.
I used to have an account for my kids. I thought I would be smart by seeding the history with educational content. I clicked on a lot of videos, let them play etc. I was there when my kids would watch videos - and slowly but surely YouTube started recommending junk AI generated videos.
It is my opinion their algorithms are tuned to push this kind of engagement no matter what.
To me history is useful to continue watching or find videos I’ve already seen. Turning it off will remove a feature I actually need. They force us to see their horrible “for you” content in exchange - so shameful.
YouTube is social media first, even if it also happens to be a repository of useful content. Social media does not want you to navigate with agency. They want to choose what you see because it lets them keep you on the platform longer, which is the entire goal.
No, that's like calling Amazon a social media platform.
YouTube is a content delivery platform that has social media features. You can tell because if you shut off all the comments, people still visit the site in droves. But if you shut off the videos and left the comments then nobody would visit the site at all.
Now, it's possible that YouTube doesn't realize that, but I think they're just unwilling to make any changes at all if it doesn't give them any competitive advantages.
You should see me or my wife sometimes scrolling down this nine miles long single column list on the Roku to find a particular channel. It's in there, it just could be anywhere in there...
They didn't happen to post any new videos lately so they aren't on the main subscriptions page of latest videos, you have to go to the menu on the left to the list of all subscribed channels and just arrow down forever, back up, down again... Why in the ever loving world isn't that list at least alphabetical?
Oh and why is the list nine miles long anyway? Self-inflicted problem subscribing to so many channels you can't possibly be watching...
Well I've always had history turned off, and a few years ago YT blanked out the home screen if you have history turned off. Ever since then I have a blank home screen with just a message saying to go into settings to correct the error that I have history turned off.
I never used to subscribe to any channels, but then when they blanked out the home screen you have no other way to get any kind of feed. So only after they did that, I subscribed to a bunch of channels so that at least the subscriptions page would have some kind of feed.
This still doesn't give you anything related, just exactly the subscribed channels. If you want any kind of variety and quantity you have to keep subscribing to more and more channels so that the subscriptions page can almost sorta provide something like the old home page before they blanked it.
I complain, but I gotta say one thing, this way I NEVER see Mr.Beast or SsssniperWolf or anything like those any more. So, maybe it's better this way.
Why are you still paying for Youtube? I run uBlock and haven't seen ads in years, don't see any cellphone format crap now thanks to this list, and VacuumTube on my TV defaults to 4K.
That's very short-sighted though. The money is forcing everyone (users and creators) to stay on YouTube, no matter how big of a cut they take or how much crap they throw at us as users.
almost all creators have some other way to get paid by viewers, and they'll take a good chunk more than 55%, why give google a dime. Not to mention its more direct support for the creators you actually care about, and an absurd higher amount than a subscription would ever benefit that individual.
Look at it the other way round, Google takes nearly half of their income, where they're putting a huge amount of time and energy into creating content while Google's contribution is hosting the data on a server. It also reinforces the YouTube hostage situation where content creators can't afford to leave the abusive relationship because they'll lose most of the income that Google isn't already taking off them.
uBlock Origin updates its lists automatically. If you want to spend $6, just donate to uBlock instead and never see an ad again on 99% of the Internet.
I pay for plenty of goods and services. Just not YouTube. As others have noted, YouTube premium makes ads go away, but none of the other engagement baiting and user disrespecting anti-patterns. As far as I'm concerned, Google is in adversarial relationship with its users, whether your paying or not.
I currently pay for YouTube premium but I'm strongly considering stopping again. For me it's a combination of prices creeping up (small part) and the worsening UX and engagement-bait (big part). It's the same reason I dropped Spotify a few years ago.
i dropped spotify because i saw how terrible the non paid version of spotify is between payments, and was offended at how much i felt they used my library to hold me hostage.
Im not interested in being held hostage to pay a company xx$ a month for literally my entire life. At least when a netflix subscription is over, its not crafting up ways to torture its users into feeling obligated to resubscribe. Not that i like the streaming video services much either...
I don’t know. But most of the time when I don’t like a service, I don’t use it. I know that’s a crazy idea. I find YouTube like everything Google does a piss poor user experience. I’m forced to only use it to watch official AWS videos and those don’t have ads.
No, but SponsorBlock[0] is fantastic for that. I even have it setup on my home server[1] so it skips sponsor segments on my Apple TV, which is where we watch most of our YouTube.
I pay for plenty of other media (music, games, sports, comedy, books) and even do some Patreon for a few podcasts and YT channels, but I refuse to directly support a publishing monopoly that has had an actively user-hostile interface for over a decade.
Yes I know that Google just reported YouTube’s revenue is larger than Netflix’s. But I really don’t find anything interesting on YouTube. Every time I try to find an interesting tutorial on for me AWS, if it isn’t produced by AWS itself, it’s usually subpar and I end up just paying for it on Udemy or using my company paid Pluralsight.
I find plenty of interesting videos, but I needed to slowly craft my following list.
I started with some CS lectures, and conference talks and it was alright, but something I reached for out of necessity.
Once I started watching videos out of curiosity I slowly ended up finding channels around my hobbies that filled my feed with pretty interesting stuff. There's good content out there beyond dense lectures, but also a lot of crap. I built my curated list of channels making videos worth watching and rarely watch something outside of those.
Similarly to music discovery, once you find what you like keep an eye on neighboring artists. I stay curious, but I'm quick to reject.
Also HN commenters: “I don’t want to pay for goods and services”
People became used to getting a thing for free then it slowly enshittified over time into the current blend of grift and bait. They also strongly promote via shorts the very things they discouraged because sex sells. Now they are promoting AI generated bait. As such they deserve any and all vitriol in my opinion. I personally would never pay for that hot mess.
I watch a few popular channels because I can but probably not much longer. Eventually I will just watch the videos people copy over to Rumble until that platform follows the grift patterns of YT. It won't be long.
With the change in culture here, especially in the last 2-3 years, HN might as well be called Reddit News now. So it's not surprising that most people aren't consistent with their principles.
Was HN known for consistency of principles before? I don’t remember that.
Whenever an online community is anthropomorphized as an individual, it looks hypocritical. The only groups that don’t look hypocritical are monocultural backwaters of groupthink, permabans, and self-editing.
I pay mainly because a really like being able to play the videos in iOS pip background mode. I do find it crazy that Apple allows that OS level feature to be paywalled by apps.
I use ReVanced on Android and it allows me to hide shorts. A 'pirated' version of the app offers a much better experience than even the paid option of it.
> We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
Yep. Gabe was right when he said it and he's still right now. Valve knows the product is service. This is why Epic Games Store and Microsoft Store have such a hard time. Good games come and go, but good service is good service.
And now, Valve is pushing to leave Windows, because they see which way the wind blows in Redmond. They don't want to be leashed to Microsoft in 2026 anymore than Microsoft wanted to be leashed to IBM in 1986.
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.
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/
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!
We have such powerful AI tools these days. Every media recommendation service should have a slider you can set to indicate how much you want to be "challenged."
High challenge = CS papers explained
Medium challenge = bridge engineering videos
Low challenge = some guy playing video games for you on YouTube
This is exactly the only reason why I don’t pay for YouTube. Why would I pay money to make it even more addictive, when what I want is to make it less addictive.
Turn off your watch history. It stops all shorts except from your subscriptions.
If they remove this, I will surely be done with YouTube. I was so desperate to disable shorts and ready to be done with the app, but then I learned that disabling watch history pretty much perfectly allows me to use the app how I want to.
> I can’t permanently turn off shorts - and this I find personally insulting. It really feels like encountering a drug dealer outside my house every time I come home, always expecting me to cave and try some of that good smack.
YouTube's hostility is truly remarkable, by far the most egregious that the Subscriptions page in the TV app having a dedicated row for "recommendations" and "shorts" before you can proceed.
Not only I cannot turn off shorts, recently the iOS YouTube app auto plays random short the millisecond I start the app. That is against my user desires in three different ways - and there's no way I can find to stop it.
And Google whines when people install ad-blockers. It's pathetic.
I was willing to watch ads. But then Google introduced NEVER-ENDING ads, when the program is interrupted frequently and will never return unless you herd it along periodically by clicking Skip. Screw you, Google. I'm cooking, with my hands covered with who knows what, and now I can't watch the program.
This is not true. You can in fact block specific channels. From YouTube support[1]:
> On certain pages, such as your Home and Watch Next pages, find a video from a channel that you don’t want recommended to you.
This is also not true and hasn't been so for years. One can set a preference to "not recommend", but one can not explicitly block any channel.
Depending on your particular "preference constellation's weights" (over which you have no direct control), you can, in fact, be shown videos from that channel again.
And the community posts and polls from random communities you have no interest in and don’t give you the same “don’t show me content from this channel”
this is a filter im using that blocks a channel from showing in the search results. just add a channel name after "title"
www.youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-video-renderer:has(#text.ytd-channel-name:is([title*="add ai slop channel name here"], [title*="more ai slop here"]))
youll have to have to repeat the same name with other filters to also hide them on the homepage or the suggestions sidebar.
freetube is another option that works on desktop and it lets you block a channel by name by adding it in the "distraction free" section of the settings. if youre on android theres also a version of freetube in the f-droid store that works ok enough, even thought the freetube UI is not really designed for mobile
obviously this only gets you so far. at some point there could be more slop than non-slop so it wont be possible to block them all, but so far im finding this useful for the few repeat offenders that keep showing up in the search results*
Youtube is far too significant a video collection to risk losing it. Yes there is insane anounts of garbage and yes their history is getting spottier by the day, but nothing else comes close to all of the good stuff that is still on it.
Google needs to get its shit together and give users power tools. YT hasn't improved materially for many years now. I hope they can snap out of whatever governance dysfunction they're in. Not sure whether increasing financial pressure (above what must, no doubt, build up on its own) is the right answer here. It will probably only lead to more enshittification, and a long, slow death and I'm pretty saddened by that thought.
Youtube could vanish from existence tomorrow and I'd probably just be upset that there isn't a place that might show me a 180p 20 year old video of how to properly clean my old dishwasher. I don't really know what these super high value videos are other than those. I really don't know why they must all exist on this one platform either.
>Youtube is far too significant a video collection to risk losing it.
> Not sure whether increasing financial pressure (above what must, no doubt, build up on its own) is the right answer here.
fantastic, an appeal to personal guilt to fund large corporate money making and national/corporate-soft-power efforts.
an acquired predatory advertiser, the worlds #1 inadequate and neglectful child nanny, and world wide cultural trend-setter is also bad at making money? and they need more? and you say they won't squander it?
I think i'll donate to PBS while aiding YT archival efforts.
This just isn’t true, at all - electricity is regularly out for hundreds or thousands of people in Sweden because of snow. This year was especially bad, where thousands were without any electricity for up to 10 or 12 days, but every year brings the same problems. Just google “elavbrott snö” and you’ll find many current examples - just as one instance:
These measures are bullshit and often just come down to a prevalent societal ‘temperament’ that’s inculcated from birth.
I live and have family in Sweden and the rest of my family is in Spain. The Swedes have immense pride in their country and pretty much only talk about the positives. When the winters are dark, cold, rain has been pouring for fourteen days straight and the last time you saw sun was 4 weeks ago, they say “there’s no bad weather just bad clothes”.
One day I sat with my cousin and some other relatives in the olive grove of his country place in Spain - sun was shining and we’d been eating delicious locally produced food for hours and drinking wine from his vineyard while he yapped on about how everything in Spain is ‘shit’ (una mierda).
And this is why places like Finland are reportedly the ‘happiest’ in the world.
We’ve had about 1 hour of sunlight so far in december where i live in Finland, but it’s fine. It also makes the sun way more enjoyable when it finally shines in the summer.
I’d never want to live in perpetual summer. Seasons brings joy.
> I’d never want to live in perpetual summer. Seasons brings joy
Even this is a typical myth that I often hear from Scandinavians. In fact different parts of Spain (or England or France) have also clearly demarcated seasons.
If you want to experience the joy of Autumn then the crisp, long days of an English Fall are incomparably more distinct than the unrelenting darkness that’s almost indistinguishable from Winter in Scandinavia, for instance.
And when Spring comes to the valleys of the temperate regions of Spain, then the blossom and explosion of wild flowers is miraculous.
But like I said, from preschool onwards Scandinavians are indoctrinated with the belief that they live in the best of all possible worlds, and no amount of actual experience can ever dent that notion.
> Not sure that "crisp" is a word I'd use to describe any part of the UK in autumn - probably more like "soggy" - but that applies to any season!
From the gently self-deprecating nature of your answer I’m guessing you’re British - and this is indeed the whole point of what I’m saying.
I genuinely and deeply miss this aspect of the English character which is totally lacking in Sweden - the websites called “shitLondon” or the insistence that English food is inferior to Italian or French cuisine or this repeated idea that it always rains (it doesn’t). That self-mockery simply doesn’t exist here, apart from when it’s some sort of humble-brag.
I don't see how that makes the measure bullshit. Outlook and expectations are related to happiness. If you want for nothing but have little it's better than a never ending treadmill of more.
Having a culture that produces happier people in worse circumstances doesn't make those people less happy.
Yes, absolutely. How else would you define it? The whole point of happiness is that is a subjective, internal state. If you just want to know if people live in a cold, dark climate you don't need to ask them.
This is a great product, and without meaning to underestimate the value of a ‘makers’ project I really wish it could be manufactured at scale with a metal body and a mount that could take a wider range of lenses.
Anyone currently interested in this breadth of formats would need to spend maybe 20 thousand dollars to buy cameras like the Hasselblad Xpan, the Plaubel Makina 67, and one of the Fujica 690 bodies.
Putting all this into one body is almost miraculous.
Lomo have recently released a nicely featured 35mm film camera[1]. I wish something like the MRF2 could also be produced in this way.
I also am a huge supporter of DIY projects. Also a huge fan of medium-format, film photography.
To that end, if I can help others try medium format film, I want to add that there are plenty of inexpensive used medium-format cameras on eBay. I have purchased perhaps a dozen over the years—none of which even approached US $1000. In case you are not DIY inclined…
(Sadly, Japan has been the best place to order used camera gear but that has become cost prohibitive now for this American.)
Searching just now on eBay for "Yaschica TLR Mint" shows a number of cameras around $300 that are probably excellent (surprise, most are from Japan).
Can't afford a Hasselblad? Try "Bronica Mint" on eBay. Looks like $500 will get you in the game.
Mamiya cameras are built like tanks (and weigh as much). You could do a lot worse: "Mamiya Mint" is going to get you a few great models around $400 or so.
All of these were (are) considered damn fine film cameras.
(Mamiya tend to have interchangeable lenses, as does the Bronica. There are some Wide/Tele adapters for the Yashica, but generally you use them as-is. Most of these cameras are completely manual in operation—the more sought after Yashica though have some light-metering capabilities.)
(The Yashica and some of the Mamiya are TLR, twin-lens reflex—more or less equivalent to a rangefinder? The Bronica and some Mamiya you view through the lens 'TTL'.)
Thank you for not calling film photography "analog" -- I've been at it for 25 years and I'm also an engineer, and I cringe still everytime I hear/read "analog" photography, while there are plenty of accurate adjective that could be used. Like, as you did, "film" or "chemical" or even "Silver" as the french do.
As for medium format, there are hundreds of Folding cameras that are pretty much as good as the obvious massive SLRs people are so keen on. I own and use a dozen of them, some of them absolutely legendary, like Zeiss Ikontas or Super Isolettes or the russian Iskras and Moskvas.
Quite frankly, having owned a few SLRs myself (I only kept a Bronica S2A with a 50mm lens) I more often than not use the folders because, well, for one thing I can literally have 3 in my bag with 3 different films! The good ones are as good or better than the SLRs, and as long as you don't mind a fixed lens, they do the job very well and often as way more character than the "system"'s ones.
I agree with you, but my point was aimed at people who might think that even a couple of thousand dollars would be too much to spend on a film camera, whereas used Xpans (with an unknown electronic lifespan) are commonly selling for in excess of $7k.
Otherwise I fully agree that buying old film cameras is still both the most practical and most fun way to get into the hobby.
My Xpan is now over 25 years old, and I've been doing stuff like this with it for over a decade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIy2_IpEw8c # electronics are still holding strong... for now. They tend to have more mechanical problems than electrical problems in my experience. But yes, I certainly wouldn't spend anything like what they are going for these days.
Albert (the subject of the original article here) is a former colleague and I recently visited him at home where he showed me his studio and the cameras he'd been creating. All very cool stuff.
I inherited a few Mamiyas with broken shutter release, and unfortunately have not been able to find a shop willing to repair: they specifically said “we won’t touch Mamiyas”
I see Fuji GW690 bodies with a 90mm lens on various sites like keh in the $1200 range.
I have a Hasselblad 500 series camera from the 1980's that my father bought at a pawn shop near a military base. In the early 2000's professionals were dumping tons of medium format gear as they switched to digital cameras so he got a wide and telephoto lens. The problem is I never use them. They are big, heavy, klunky, and slow to operate. I've never liked print film. I used to be able to get 2 hour development of E-6 slide film but now I have to mail it off and wait over a week so I don't bother. I look at digital backs but most of them are for studio setups.
My dad used to have that Hasselblad model a loooong time ago. If you are willing to part with it (for less than the "collector" price these are sold nowadays), you could make a nice Christmas gift for him.
(I am Rhododender on Reddit)
You absolutely do not need to pay $20k for a medium format rangefinder. You can buy a Plaubel Makina for $2k-$3k right now and that's one of the more expensive options.
> Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible…
> Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change.
-1. One of the most famous biggest budget dudes, Stanley Kubrick, using an ultra rare incredibly special f/0.7 he bargained with NASA to get is, to me, an argument not that the past was great with natural lighting & could use it. It's an argument that that was the hardest most difficult costly & inaccessible upper-est echelon of what was possible, that only a couple rare gods of cinema had any access to dark natural lighting.
A focal plane mere inches thick!
Incredibly wild constraints here. It's incredibly fun to read about & folks should!
But everything about the Barry Lyndon story & the extreme effort to make it validates the top post to me. Our modern sensors are just stratospherically better & wildly unconstraining vs the past.
When they stop releasing security patches for that OS version 2 years later, it becomes more risky to connect the thing to a network. Or take in any data from the outside, really, whether it's via Bluetooth, or USB drive.
And then there's 3rd party software that will stop supporting that old OS version, in part because Apple's dev tools make that difficult.
Eventually, Apple's own services will stop supporting that OS - no convenient iCloud support.
Finally, the root CA certs bundled with the OS will become too out of date to use.
I'm planning on putting Linux on my Intel Mac Mini soon. But when a M3+ Mini goes out of support, will we have that option?
I’ve got a 2010 MBP that’s still perfectly suitable, but without OS updates, I can’t get a browser that websites will load cleanly on, can’t use Xcode, bunch of the Apple services the company hooks you on don’t work, etc. Used OpenCore bootloader to extend its life into newer macOSes, but that’s getting hard to keep up with. What a (e)waste.
Hadn't thought of doing that - I'm not a natural Linux person myself and I'm repurposing it for an 11yo. But maybe it's not so different from their school Chromebook for what they need. Just removes some of the nice Apple family features and the apps they'd be inheriting, but that's what I get for not paying the tax with new hardware purchases.
I’ve got a “late 2008” MacBook Pro that connects to sites ok in Firefox. That seems to be the browser that does the best at long-term support for old Macs.
Both those machines will run the latest Ubuntu just fine, and the latest Chrome (or Firefox) on it.
Just copy the LiveCD image onto a USB stick, insert, boot holding down the Option key, and you can try it without actually installing it (i.e. leaving your MacOS untouched).
Sure. But my needs haven't exceeded that RAM. I just want to keep doing the things I was doing for years on it happily, but security updates, broken services and website bloat have intervened.
Just switch to linux and it should just work. There are distros that use very little ram and it stays updated. Noscript can help you block javascript on websites
A 15 year old device can be still as capable as a raspberry pi and those work fine now for modern computing
Depends if you use xcode or not...I still have my macbook 12inch, for work use, it is amazing, but I can't run the latest xcode, making it defunct for some of my uses. It would be fine running xcode weak as it is; i am sure. Liquid glass might have killed it tho.
Patches for old OS versions are unfortunately not 100% covering all security issues. Apple is often arguing that vulns can only be fixed in actively supported versions.
Living in Stockholm I’m so envious of the way the Danes are truly committed to cycle traffic instead of the window-dressing we have here.
This type of practical measure is unthinkable here, where a cyclist often has to stop at traffic lights and press a button to request a green signal - even when car-traffic is at a standstill.
It all leads to more friction and dangerous risk-taking - where cyclists end-up ignoring lights instead - endangering both themselves, pedestrians and even other cyclists.
That's a case of the line must always go up. Except for mortality and down. This affects all modals, cars, bikes, pedestrians, the times to clear the crossing increase, the time during which different directions can move decreases.
How can we define what this even means? I don’t think any of the naive initial aims were ever attainable - and the entire impulsive and irresponsible adventure has spiraled down into what looks like impatient and petty spite: smashing the toys because the big baby didn’t get the present he wanted.
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