Youtube

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Ahhhhh, Youtube. That amazing place on the web, filled with thousands and thousands and millions and millions of videos. That lovely dumpster of tutorials and useful information mixed with strange movie summaries narrated with TTS, AI generated kids videos, compilations of people hurting themselves, and so so so so so so many reaction videos.

Internet used to be text. Hyperlinked text. Fan-made pages about the most random stuff. We used to be webmasters, do you remember?

This is not just another trip down nolstalgia lane. There’s a reason I’m thinking about Youtube right now: We actually have the same stuff in there that we used to have on text. And I’m scared of that. Think about it, we have gone from text videogame guides like this:

to image heavy ones, like this:

and ended up on video walkthroughs, like this:

And don’t get me wrong. Videos can be something amazing. But they are not always the best thing:

With all my love for Technology Connections, take one of his random videos:

It’s a very nice and entertaining video, and you’ll probably learn something from it. But use any application to get a transcription:

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZcH0j7tOrDA

And maybe we can use some AI magic on ChatGPT:

I’m going to copy here the transcript of a Youtube video. I want to extract a summary of this video, written as a regular blog post. Make sure to include the relevant information, but remove all references to the origin being a video: “[Transcription]”

And we get something like this:

In the quest for energy-efficient lighting solutions, manufacturers have often had to tackle challenges associated with traditional technologies. One intriguing example of innovation comes from General Electric (GE), which introduced a unique hybrid light bulb combining both compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) and incandescent technologies.

The bulb, marketed as “bright from the start,” aimed to address the slow warm-up time of traditional CFLs by incorporating an incandescent bulb within the CFL structure. This hybrid design allowed for immediate brightness, overcoming a significant drawback of early CFL technology.

Before the widespread adoption of LED bulbs, CFLs were hailed for their energy efficiency but criticized for their slow start-up times and unattractive appearance, particularly in decorative fixtures. Engineers experimented with various methods to conceal or modify the appearance of CFLs, including integrating them into different bulb shapes and using reflectors to mimic directional lighting.

However, enclosing CFL tubes in decorative fixtures posed challenges, as the sealed environment caused the tubes to run hotter, affecting their performance. Manufacturers devised solutions such as using mercury amalgams to regulate vapor pressure and incorporating temperature compensation mechanisms.

GE’s hybrid light bulb exemplifies one such solution, seamlessly blending the instant brightness of incandescent bulbs with the efficiency of CFLs. The bulb contains a halogen capsule alongside the CFL tube, providing immediate illumination upon startup, before transitioning to full CFL brightness once warmed up.

While GE’s hybrid bulb effectively addressed the slow startup issue, it also highlighted some limitations. For instance, in cold climates, the bulb’s performance could be compromised due to the temperature-sensitive halogen capsule.

Despite its drawbacks, the hybrid bulb represented an innovative approach to bridging the gap between traditional and energy-efficient lighting technologies. However, with the advent of affordable LED bulbs, the need for such hybrid solutions has diminished.

The evolution of lighting technologies showcases the ongoing quest for improvement, often through innovative combinations of old and new technologies. While solutions like GE’s hybrid bulb may have been temporary fixes, they demonstrate the creative problem-solving spirit driving advancements in energy-efficient lighting.

It’s not perfect. And it’s absolutely not as entertaining as watching him speak. But if you wanted to “learn” a bit, it’s as efficient as it gets.

The original video is 27 minutes long, and according to the transcript, 4518 words are spoken. With an average reading speed of 220 wpm, in that time 5940 words could be read. That 31% more. And you could skip lines or jump between paragraphs easily, further increasing your speed.

My biggest concern with video is this: entertainment and knowledge are completely fused together. The information in this video is pretty much stuck in the video. There is not a blogpost, or a real summary anywhere. You kinda have to watch it to learn this. You can’t really read between lines, you don’t have the freedom to chose between being entertained or just satiating your curiosity quickly. You can’t just look for a piece of info that you are interested in and discard the rest. In a video, every click-baity title will waste you between 10 and 30 minutes of your life. Every “mistake” will get you hooked for a long time. How many pages could have been read in that time…

I’m trying to follow more blogs and read more. And I’m afraid, because I feel like I can’t. I feel like my brain is mush, I have grown so used to videos that I have forgotten how to focus. I’m trying my best to be back, but it’s going to take a lot of effort. I wish Internet could go back to enjoying simple text, fan text, honest and humble and plain text. Not for everything, but for more things, at least.

Thank you for reading.

I’m not the first one to think of this. There are many extensions and services that do the same that I manually did. But honestly, it will be very, very sad if these apps become the norm. Wasting time and effort in making videos, only for people to then feed them to AIs to summarize, wasting energy… That’s grim :(

But I guess, at least it opens up the door to recovering and archiving some of this information for the future.