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>so we arent being taken andvantage of

For the last time...that's not how trade works! People who say this in this context mean well, but are committing the exact same category error/misunderstanding of economics that Trump and his supporters are.


It is 100% how trade works. Free trade for both sides = good for both sides. Lopsided deals where one side gets the free flow of trade but the other side gets protectionism = exploitative.

What is the category error here? Where is the misunderstanding?

If you really believed what you wrote, why do you think trade deals exist in the first place? What function do you think they serve?


I'd guess that they're saying is, the point of trade, from a country's perspective, is to get imports. Exports are what you give up to obtain them (comparative advantage). So, when the US puts tariffs on Canadian goods, the main people who eat that cost are American consumers and firms buying those goods...basically, it's a tax Americans pay to Americans. Canada loses some export markets, however, the US isn't "extracting" anything...both sides just get less of a mutually beneficial thing.... So, In that faming, "one side gets free trade, the other gets protectionism" is in theory, a situation where the protectionist country is mostly shooting itself in the foot, not beating its partner. By the same theory, retaliating by taxing your own citizens purchases of American goods doesn't undo the damage... it adds to it. Also fwiw, a trade deal isn't a swap of comparative advantages, it's a bundling where each side concedes in sectors it can politically afford to lose in, inorder to win in sectors it cares more about. For example Canada protects dairy and gives ground on autos.


> I'd guess that they're saying is, the point of trade, from a country's perspective, is to get imports.

I'm not sure why you would think that. It is not what I said and not what i believe.


I'm saying: that is what the person you responded to, savanaly, is using as the basis of their reply. I'm not saying that is what you said or believe.


>If you really believed what you wrote, why do you think trade deals exist in the first place? What function do you think they serve?

In an ideal world, we would have free trade between nations and no trade deals. In the real world, for various reasons, we have trade barriers. But those who wish to see more trade can fight fire with fire by carving out exceptions to trade barriers in the form of trade deals and making trade more free in that way. It's all political horse trading, none of it creates new economic value that wouldn't be there in a free trade regime.

But the important thing to note is that both imports and exports are good for your country; think of them both as technologies that convert between products at a favorable exchange rate. [0] Just because another country dampens the effectiveness of this technology in one way, why would you then respond by throwing out the technology altogether?

[0] Think I was first exposed to this idea of thinking of trade as a technology in that way by https://tradef20.classes.ryansafner.com/readings/Krugman-199..., section II/


> But the important thing to note is that both imports and exports are good for your country

Of course. I think that goes without saying.

>Just because another country dampens the effectiveness of this technology in one way

Because the costs created don't apply equally to the parties.

To put another way - peace is a technology that brings prosperity. If someone decides to shoot at you, why would you dampen this technology by shooting back? The global amount of prosperity will decline by responding in kind.


Protectionism is harmful to both sides though, not just the one being "protected". If Thailand can more efficiently produce socks, and Canada can more efficiently produce lumber, it doesn't make sense to "protect" the Canadian sock industry. It just makes socks more expensive for Canadians. Let those Canadian sock workers go produce lumber instead.


Complete tangent, but my impression is that one glass of wine per day is "fine", but you're still statistically better off in a non-trivial way by going down to zero. Not counting the benefits of course.... :)


To continue to take us off topic, there is actually pretty limited evidence that this is true.

It is true that wine doesn't do anyone any good (unless you count it making people more social or something). But the effects of one glass a night is indistinguishable from zero. There are definitely statistically significant morbidity effects at 3.

I've been shocked reading public health proclamations that "anything above zero" is bad, and then reading the actual underlying paper they refer to, which clearly states exactly the opposite finding. I think it is an extension of the public policy belief that the public cannot be trusted with moderation, and so therefore must be communicated to in absolutes, and nobody will read the underlying paper anyway.


Most modern research I have seen says there is no safe levels of alcohol where you will get no negative effects on your body. 7 glasses of wine per week isn’t that low. Is it worse than sometimes eating crap food? Maybe not. But it isn’t without risks.


Like I said on another topic: for the average man on earth, you're probably right, the carcinogenic effect of alcohol is smaller than eating red meat.

But if you are overweight or a preclinical obese, any amount of alcohol put you closer to clinical obesity.


i don't agree, i think you are just describing a measurement problem, we have a clear mechanistic understanding of why 'anything above zero' would be bad, and are able to measure this in sufficiently large populations for larger drinkers. the effect size is smaller and thus unmeasurable above the noise floor for one glass a night, but the mechanistic story is clear.


Simple mechanistic explanations in biology are often wrong. For example, oxidative stress does not have a linear no-threshold harm.

For alcohol, almost every big study has shown either no discernible effects going from zero to 1 drink per day, or actual slight benefits going from 0 to 1 that then reverse when increasing beyond that. There is not strong consensus which of these is true, but there's definitely no real evidence that 1 drink per day is harmful as measured by all-cause mortality.

See GBD 2020 in the Lancet (which showed a slight J-curve), Wood in the Lancet 2018 (optimally low risk at 100g ethanol per week, or ~1 drink per day), Zhao in Jama (no discernible negative effects at 1 drink per day, no benefits either, no J-curve), and the latest National Acadamies review showing lowest all-cause mortality at about 1 drink per day (so, a J-curve).

Alcoholism has tons of negative effects. But these seem to start at around 2 drinks per day and rise rapidly from there.


I think there is a big difference in mechanisms between non-linearity and non-monotonicity, but I don't have bandwidth to reply in more detail.


isn't one glass a night already lack of moderation? by drinking a glass a night, or even weekly such as every friday night you're creating habit and dependency.


It works very differently for different people, I think. Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. Others, like me, metabolize it very fast and that makes it quite a bit more addictive. Risk factors like ADHD increase this.

All that said, no one I've ever met said a glass of wine on Friday nights isn't "drinking in moderation". I think the medical establishment is quite well aligned on this. One source is the CDC, which defines moderate drinking to be roughly an order of magnitude more alcohol consumption than "one drink every Friday night."

https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/about-alcohol-use/moderate-alcoh...


> Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction.

This is the opposite of how it works, ethanol is the active ingredient for all of the fun parts of drinking, the metabolite, acetaldehyde, is the cause of all of the unfun parts (nausea, headache, flushing).

A significant percentage of East Asians have one or both of a superactive alcohol dehydrogenase (which converts ethanol to acetaldehyde) and a defective aldehyde dehydrogenase (which converts acetaldehyde to acetic acid), and they have significantly lower rates of alcoholism.


My doctor indicated it was more of a risk for me because my liver worked quickly, but your mention of acetyldehyde I know to be correct. I need to better understand this, thanks for the correction.


    > Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. Others, like me, metabolize it very fast and that makes it quite a bit more addictive.
I never heard this theory before, but on the surface, it sounds reasonable. Is there any published literature about it?

One thing to keep in mind when discussing "drinking in moderation": I think people will surprised to learn that each country has their own (often, very different) idea of what it means. For example, healthy alcohol consumption levels are persistently higher from UK public health sources, compared to the United States (mostly CDC). My sense (that I cannot prove): If your median alcohol consumption is higher than global average, your national health agency will have higher values for "drinking in moderation". I would love to see a comparison of wealthy (primarily) Judeo-Christian countries and their recommended limits.


There's something to what I wrote, but I'm realizing I don't understand it as well as I thought.

As for what moderate is: I can absolutely believe it'cultural. I was intending to post from a US/EU perspective, as that's what I'm most familiar with, but your explanation makes sense.


Everything in moderation, especially moderation.


According to the best longitudinal study from the WHO There is no safe level of alcohol consumption (1). Every molecule of alcohol is measurably bad for you physically

People want to conflate their personal desires and perceived social benefits with health benefits because mental health and physical health have overlaps

However they need to be separate to actually make a claim about alcohol as there are millions of people in functional communities that reject alcohol and have non of the negative effects

(1) https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...


> According to the best longitudinal study from the WHO There is no safe level of alcohol consumption

This would be a misquote, but you didn't use quotes. The WHO said that they "can't identify" a safe level of alcohol consumption and that there are no studies that would indicate a safe level of alcohol consumption.

> The new WHO statement clarifies: currently available evidence cannot indicate the existence of a threshold at which the carcinogenic effects of alcohol “switch on” and start to manifest in the human body.

I could see why you would say that from this:

> “We cannot talk about a so-called safe level of alcohol use. It doesn’t matter how much you drink – the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage. The only thing that we can say for sure is that the more you drink, the more harmful it is – or, in other words, the less you drink, the safer it is,” explains Dr Carina Ferreira-Borges,

But that seems to be a mixture of some language difficulty and some intentional hyperbole.


>The WHO said that they "can't identify" a safe level of alcohol consumption and that there are no studies that would indicate a safe level of alcohol consumption.

How do you not then clonclude that there IS a safe amount such that you would then consume it.

What about this study would make anyone who is not an alcohol drinker become one?

The only answer here that is actually logical is that

you accept that there are risks to drinking alcohol, and that those risks are less important to you than whatever social personal benefit that you personally get out of it


That's not a study from the WHO, it's a public statement they published in Lancet. It's an opinion piece.

Moreover, the WHO never changed their stance when later big studies showed that the "lowest risk" level is not actually at zero drinks.

The timeline was this:

- In 2018, a study was published in the Lancet that was the Global Burden of Disease analysis. They claimed the modeled minimum risk exposure was zero drinks. But the magnitude effects were extremely small: moving from zero to one drink a day pushed the incidence rate of alcohol-associated health effects from 914 per 100,000 people to 918 per 100,000 people. This was the basis of the "no safe level."

- Four years later, an updated Global Burden of Disease analysis, also published in the Lancet, actually reversed course on this. After controlling for more factors, they found risk was actually slightly J-shaped, and for 40+ year olds the theoretical minimum risk was about 0.5 drinks per day. The WHO ignored this updated study when they wrote their opinion piece in 2023.

- Another big study with ~600k participants published in 2018 in the Lancet shows lowest total risk consumption levels at 1 drink per day, with mortality rising above that level. The WHO also ignored this.

- The JAMA study in 2023, with >4 million participants, showed no benefit to low-volume drinking, and also no increase in harms from low volume (1 drink daily) drinking. Again, the WHO ignored it.

Several other studies have shown either no discernible risk change between zero and 1 drink per day, or lowest possible risk at 1 drink per day.

But the WHO and much of the public health policy community ignores almost all of the actual credible science on this because it does not fit with their ideology. It's a huge problem with public health policy: the actual scientists and statisticians are doing great work, but if it's not what the policy people want to hear, they discard it and keep repeating their mantra.


> Several other studies have shown either no discernible risk change between zero and 1 drink per day, or lowest possible risk at 1 drink per day.

So in the end results are in all practical implementation of this science is exactly the same: Even one drink of alcohol is the threshold


>I think things like web search should probably be run on a different sandboxed AI whose task is to write a summary that is then ingested by the main agent, similar to how existing sandboxing already works, but this would diminish the usefulness quite a bit.

It also wouldn't work. You would simply mindjack the outer AI and have it mindjack the inner AI in turn with its summary. Nesting AIs can't fix the malicious input problem.


Just pass that through a third llm.


Correct, that has been prophesied by scripture:

"Thou shalt have three layers of LLMs, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt have, and the number of the counting of the LLM layers shall be three."


Four is right out


> Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy LLM of Antioch towards thy task, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.


You have always been able to pick between voices of many kinds though? Do you find them all sultry? From the British woman to the 17th century pirate soundalike?


If there was a voice that stripped away all the affectation I would be more likely to use it. It pretending to be human is extremely off-putting for me.


tell it "speak like a robot without affectation or emotion" in your custom instructions



Comparing almonds to elections might be my new favorite way of saying "comparing apples to oranges".


A decade or so ago I participated in a (data-centric) hackathon having to do with water shortages in California. The acknowledged problem was data, or lack thereof. Most of the groups whistled past the graveyard and presented woulda-coulda "if we had the data / we can get the data by" proposals / findings.

We kept looking for the pony for most of the day. We found some pony exhaust, but we didn't find the pony. The rest of the group presented a plan for future research. I chose to give the minority report: based on the information we were able to obtain, California could solve its water shortage if every household ate 16 less almonds a day; an almond taking roughly one gallon of water to produce.

A couple years later the almond industry ran some ads that the "gallon of water" meme was somehow wrong, because other useful products were produced from almond trees besides almonds... so they said. Of course, it could have been a coincidence.

One of my team members (from Montana) shared a quote from Samuel Clemens: "whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over". That hasn't changed with data centers.


But the comparison is of money spent


money spent ON X. Where X is almonds or elections.


Yes but the point of the phrase "apples to oranges" is that they are hard to compare. But if you comparing something they both have and is easily measurable, such as sugar, then yes you should compare apples to oranges!


>One reason the "passion tax" is possible for employers is that there seems to be a degree of labor monopsony for the kind of development done by AAA game studios.

How is the existence of a monopsony necessary or even related to a passion tax existing? Suppose the market were a fully free market with tons of software companies on one side and tons of developers on the other. It would fly in the face of reason, and fairness in my eyes, if all developers were paid the same but some got to work on fun stuff like games and others worked on the scheduling software for the scheduling software for the warehouse robot repairs. So a passion tax seems like something that should exist and not really be decried.


> So a passion tax seems like something that should exist and not really be decried.

To put it the other way, work that is distasteful in some way, should also pay more, but this is missing the point.

I think the point of the unionization is that the monopsony of a small number of AAA game studios gives them excessive market power to reduce compensation and especially to reduce working conditions.

A union can acquiesce to the passion tax and say that top developers at a AAA should make $150k/year (a bit low), while simultaneously saying that that developer should be able to see their children on nights and weekends. The project management that leads to "perma-crunch" is something that ought to be resolved on the employer's side, not by the employees.


From my perspective the main difference between "crunch time" and sadism is the existence of a retrospective you don't need to pay to view.


>how ingenious Japan’s system of zoning is

I'm only barely familiar with it so I ask this in good faith: is it really ingenious or is it just more permissive? My bias/priors are that the simpler and truer statement is: it can't be overstated how beneficial more permissive zoning laws are to a society.


There are other aspects beyond simply being more permissive. I recall reading for example that property transfer tax is remarkably less on bare land, enough so that when travelling in Japan you will regularly notice bare lots for sale, as it is beneficial for the seller to tear down a lot before they sell it. This sort of thing encourages churn of housing, and coupled with liberal zoning, enables an accelerated increase in denser building. Tbh it probably encourages lower construction costs since more people are doing construction.

IMO in this whole conversation, whether discussing any jurisdiction not just japan, impacts of zoning is an over emphasized and tax policy under emphasized (ie. almost never discussed).


Property taxes on land zoned for residential use are 6x more expensive if left bare. That’s why Japan has an akiya plague, because even a dilapidated building will keep taxes down.

I couldn’t find a more general article so here’s an example from a generic small town council.

https://www.city.inagi.tokyo.jp/en/faq/kurashi/1001633/10016...


You're right. I'm not sure how I got mislead or misremembered the dynamic here. I thought there was a specific clear tax benefit but doesn't seem so.

There are tax benefits for new buildings for a limited time so maybe that's what I was thinking about and became confused.


Leaving aside your mistake, you raise a great point. Why are there so many empty lots in central Tokyo for sale? It makes no sense financially! Maybe they assume they can tear-down the existing structure and sell it faster than the tax penalty will hit?


I have a hard time believing that a tax code that incentives destruction in any capacity is a good thing.

If the land is more valuable without a structure the current owner has natural incentive to do that, or someone else has incentive to buy, demolish and re-list.


From what I remember, Japanese zoning allows small shops (there's a size limit) in any residential zone.

That means no car trips when you run out of bread or milk.

Smartest property of that zoning system IMO.


Fwiw that’s what we have in Germany, unless you live in remote places. You always have a Lidl, Aldi, or REWE you can walk or bike to.

No idea what our local zoning laws are


Even the smallest Lidl, Aldi, or REWE are not small shops in the sense meant here.


Not really the same thing. They're much larger already than most stores you'd see in urban Japan.

Think more in terms of small convenience stores ("Spätis" with daily necessities) everywhere. Typical distance to a store is maybe 500-1000m in Germany. In dense areas of Japanese cities it's closer to one store every 100m-200m.

So in Germany it'd be a 10 minute walk, while in Japan most of your "walk" would be getting downstairs.

The flipside of that is that selection is going to be limited compared to what you'd find in Germany.


I see. What you describe does seem to match what I experienced in NYC, Portugal, and Spain? Small supermarkets everywhere with a bit of a random selection of items


The Żabkas in Poland too, I suppose, at least the smaller ones.


I also wonder how much the pressure filled culture of not standing out has something to do with this. My impression is Japanese are under a lot more pressure to not abuse the permissiveness of the zoning laws.


If a law allows a store up to a certain size, and someone builds a store of that size, has the law been abused?


While size does matter in practical terms when we think of zoning it’s really about noise, smells, pollution etc. So when I say abuse I thinking because of cultural norms and pressure of not standing out there is greater incentive to not disturb others. The argument and question on my end is does this zoning work because folks are pressured to also not stand out. They try to not disturb others.

You will see countless threads on Reddit about bad neighbors in the US. Folks playing loud music, causing disturbances at all hours and will not stop. This applies to zoning as well. If the law allows it, people will do it so there is much more consideration in the US. I don’t know if it’s the right solution but certainly different cultures play a huge role in this.


What do you mean by “abuse”?


I'm not meaning to take a dig at you, but the fact that you (and presumably many others) can genuinely ask that question serves to illustrate the parent's point quite nicely.

To spell it out, "abuse" here means to engage in behavior that is socially undesirable or disruptive or would generally be expected to upset otherwise reasonable neighbors or whatever while nonetheless falling within the bounds of the law. An alarmingly large amount of what goes on in the US falls into that category IMO.


The parent comment is specifically talking about abusing zoning laws. It’s also a very generic term and I’m interested in what would be an abuse of zoning laws specifically.

There are many kinds of zoning laws going as far as to say how tall and how open fences have to be depending on the type of yard the fence encloses. Eg a backyard can have a 7ft high 100% closed fence while a front yard is limited to 4ft and must be 50% open.

How someone can “abuse” sections of the law that can get so wildly specific as to restrict paint color is lost on me.

I don’t buy into the Japanese exceptionalism in such generic terms. Show your work.


The other responder called it out well but to add. Abuse would be anything that disturbs others and out of the norm. Smells, pollution, noise etc. Japanese culture is much more considerate than a lot of western culture because of the social pressure to not standout.

I would imagine this plays a large role in this.


Does this truly play out? I’m sorry but I don’t buy that this is true based on a stereotypical Japanese exceptionalism trope.


You haven’t lived until you have experienced the Japanese Kombini (convenience store).


There's a lot of places to get decent fried chicken, onigiri, and snacks. It's just 7 and I holdings still let's the US 711 suck


A huge amount of residential homes are actually in light industry zoned areas. I learned this surprising fact here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk


> I'm only barely familiar with it so I ask this in good faith: is it really ingenious or is it just more permissive?

Let's start from the glaring problem: The purpose of the US zoning system was institutionalized racism to keep the "undesirables" out rather than anything having to do with development management. Once you realize that, all of the misfeatures (NIMBY, excessive permitting, sclerotic bureaucracy, public participation) make obvious sense.

Practically every zoning system would be better than that.


That's a big part of it. They also do zoning mostly at the federal level, meaning local opposition isn't relevant.


This is a fair question. In short: Permissive. If you want to learn more, talk with any LLM about it. There are a bazillion YouTube videos and blog posts discussing the matter to no end.

Here is a good YouTube video to you started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5pPcV54kiQ


Sometimes permissive zoning laws don’t actually encourage positive urban development outcomes.

Example: Texas

Zoning has to both exist and be well-designed.


Texas zoning isn't nearly as permissive as Japan's. Setbacks are a big added requirement. Minimum parking requirements too though that is changing.

But it would not be legal to build japanese neighbourhoods in Texas.


Texas zoning is only “permissive” relative to other states. Relative to Japan it’s quite restrictive.


I bet you'd see natural market driven concentration around rail stations in Texas too, if they had a useful rail network.


Dallas-Area Rapid Transit (DART) member cities all had to develop 25-year plans for denser development around station sites as a condition of their membership, if that’s what you mean by “natural”.


You might be surprised, look at Dallas. They have a pretty extensive rail network.


Dallas does not have permissive zoning, even in comparison to a city like Seattle.


>YouTube now lets you turn off Shorts

No it doesn't. If you were hoping it would mean you don't see shorts when you visit the Youtube home page, that's not what this is. I just tried the thing mentioned in the article-- set my Shorts time limit to 0 minutes. What it does is make it so if you click a short from somewhere the short plays, but then if you try to swipe to the next one it hits you with the "You reached your short limit". If you then return to the home page you still see Shorts.


It really amazes how how Youtube refuses to let me hide stuff I don't want to see on my homepage. I still long for the ability to tell them to not give me mix playlists, I do not want them, and often they annoy me when the first song is one I'd click on but I don't want to have to pay attention enough to kill it before the next song plays (since you cannot disable play next in playlists...)


It's not a product where you are the user. Your attention is the product being sold to advertisers and the videos are a harvesting/production mechanism.

It is not in the interests of either YT or the advertisers to allow you to opt out of features that are proven to be lucrative for eyeballs.


I’m a Premium subscriber. I don’t see ads, and YouTube added a feature so I can easily skip in-video sponsored sections.

It seems like the incentive for Premium subscribers should be to keep them happy, so they keep paying, and minimize how much they watch, as they’ll be a cheaper user using less bandwidth.

Am I missing something?


> YouTube added a feature so I can easily skip in-video sponsored sections

That feature benefits YouTube, too. Maybe even more than its value as a Premium feature. It makes it so that viewers can skip the ads the creator was paid to make without YouTube getting a cut of the proceeds, pushing down the value of those ads.


It’s crazy to me YouTube is okay with hosting ads they get no cut from in the first place.


Hasn't this always been the case? If a movie or show features product placement, a TV station playing said movie/show doesn't get any of the proceeds from that advertisement, do they?


These are not product placements, it's as if someone wrote a movie or TV episode literally with an ad break.


This is just the pros having more tact than amateurs, and actual writers. I do see some “influencers” that do more of a pure product placement. They just happen to be drinking a specific energy drink in every video where it sits perfectly with the label out. I see some YouTubers trying to get better at integrating the ad into the video, but most of them can’t be bothered to write and record a custom script.

That said, Subway often seemed to get pretty heavy with its product placement. The last season of Chuck had a good amount of this, even what was essentially an ad read right in the middle of an episode by Big Mike. On Community they personified Subway and based a whole episode on him. In the Office they brought in Ryan Howard to say “eat fresh” over and over again, and even called out that it was for Subway to make sure it didn’t go over anyone’s head. Subway was big on sponsoring the last seasons of struggling shows with loyal fanbases, and littering the episodes with Subway product placement to the point where it became a plot point. I remember Zachary Levi (Chuck) tweeting out to ask everyone to go buy some Subway before the finale. It sounded like if Subway saw enough of a spike in buying from the sponsorship, they might fund yet another season.


I know, but I don't see a fundamental difference. If TV networks are happy to pay for a show that also gets advertising revenue from product placement, I don't see why YouTube would not be happy to deliver ads and pay some percent of that to a channel that displays its own ads. Especially given that YouTube has much, much less cost per video than a traditional network, which can only broadcast one program at a time.


This line of argument would make sense if they did allow paying customers who don't see ads to disable these anti-features. They don't.


It's still a fine argument for that case, you've just moved yourself out of it. They still have an incentive to keep you addicted to the service, which is basically the point of Shorts, "so you keep paying us money to satisfy your addiction" instead of the first case's "so you keep watching ads that pay us money to satisfy your addiction"


The thing that is funny about it is at least with the mixes, it does actively make me engage less because there are videos I would click on if they were not being tied into a mix, but because they are I actively choose not to open the video and let the song play.


joke's on them, I have not consciously experienced a youtube advertisement in ten years


YouTube has multiple different products. YouTube as a company do not call your attention a product. There isn't a product team that is in charge of people's attention as a product.


If you have uBlock Origin installed, the subreddit wiki for it has lots of options for blocking stuff on YouTube.

https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube


Believe me, if they tried as hard as FB, an ordinary user wouldn't stand a chance. As it is now, a single uBlock Origin action is enough to make these disappear from my YT page for good, and for all accounts.


You see, you think you don't want all those things, but the algorithm knows better. Trust the algorithm!


Search youtube for a thing

> 5 results for your search

> 10 unrelated videos that you've already watched

> An endless stream of unrelated videos


Youtube has added random people's text posts to my subscription feed, and it's pissing me off. They're never anything interesting or entertaining, it's always just gumpf


I so hate the videos YouTube shows me that I wrote a plugin to place a white box over videos called TubeGate [0], which I open-sourced [1]. It does keyword-based filtering so you can tell it to hide "sports", "politics", etc.

[0]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tubegate/aokfpmegea...

[1]: https://github.com/webcoyote/tubegate


Damn, yeah that's what I was hoping for.

Honestly, the only thing really keeping me from watching shorts is the perplexing UX decision to not show the channel name as part of the preview tile. As basic Internet hygiene it just feels real bad to click on a video without the tiniest bit of idea about its provenance. For that reason I never do and have always just wanted to hide Shorts altogether.


I don't watch shorts because of the type of content it encourages - short clickbait content for the attention deficit.

I want long form, well researched, well put together content. These types of content takes a long time to produce, unfortunately, and the youtube algorithm doesn't favour it.


These types of content takes a long time to produce

Unless they're AI slop, of course. Between shorts and AI slop, worthwhile content on YouTube will soon become almost impossible to find...


That's where off-platform, trust worthy sources are important.

Over the years, i've curated a lot of subscriptions on youtube of such long form content (talking about things like Primitive Technology, Smarter Everyday, etc).

It simply sucks that youtube has gutted the UI for subscriptions - the layout is horrible, i can't scan it as they removed the list view, etc. And sometimes subscribed channel's videos don't even show up there - you have to visit the channel page directly to see the new videos.

it's almost as if they want people to rely only on the home page and the recommended videos from their algo.


Honestly I'd sometimes like a checkbox to ignore any results uploaded after, say 2023. Or else to only see 'verified non-AI' content. There is nothing I'd ever search Youtube for where an AI generated video would be an acceptable answer.


I use the control panel for youtube plugin - there is an option that any short plays in the traditional player. It also has lets you customize the thumbnail grid sizes. it is a little over aggressive with its defaults but you can turn them off. it has a lot of options


If TikTok does it that way (I have no idea if it does actually), YouTube obviously has to copy that! If a fishy channel name stops you from clicking on a short, that hurts your engagement, and that's the last thing social media companies want.


Classic "self regulation" of an addictive product. "You look like you might have a problem with self-control, here are tools for managing yourself better" while admitting no fault and continuing with all of the hooks and barbs, design and advertising built to addict as many people as possible.


Real name? No? We'll ask again later


Well played. I don't think many remember this. The product was completely forgettable but the introduction of this user hostile pattern was a turning point.


What was this referencing?



Thank you!


You sure you don't want to add your phone number? I makes verification easier next time you want to upload a video.


I was referring to Google+. I don't know if you mean something else like Facebook, which is no less abusive than Google+ ever was

People seemed to like Google+ but a) nymwars lead to dangerous situations (although no less dangerous than Facebook's graph search) for people that don't want to reveal their real names but also b) the merging of accounts ruined some people's Youtube channels. Zuckerberg is so much of a control freak that I suspect (based on evidence I've vaguely heard, not just my own intuition) links to Google+ used to get deleted. It used to be the case people liked it but they "couldn't get their friends to use it". So yeah - in part, inertia; but also what if you linked it and nobody saw it in the feed?


I know. I was joining in on the joke, I think I just made that one up though. Im pretty sure youtube asks that If you upload a video and don't have a phone number on file


Sorry!


Technically I think it's for parents to regulate their kids.


Yeah, it's pretty broad consensus that the Chinese opium epidemic was really on the parents. 19th century Chinese parents really dropped the ball there, and no further considerations or blame should be placed.


I'm confused why you're bringing up parents and kids. Are you implying only children might have problems with self-control wrt media consumption?


No, I'm implying Google faces liability after that court case and is using this as a fig leaf to blame parents.


> The feature was expanded in January to give parents some control over how long their kids spend scrolling through Shorts,


My parents are retired. How exactly do they come into play?

I'm actively avoiding Shorts, Reels, and whatever else with those mechanics precisely because they pull you in and snap an hour is gone with nothing of value to show for it. It's so totally different from regular long form videos.

We regulate addictive substances too, even for adults and without relying on parents. The amount of productivity and quality of life lost to these platforms must be staggering in aggregation.


Correct, based on the text when you change the setting mentions that.

> scrolling is paused but you may still see individual Shorts

It prevents doomscrolling, not what you see in your feed or homepage.


dammit. I got so excited about that headline.

now I'm just angry again.


Ditto


Swipe. Not a problem with mouse control and generally full computer, seems like even such a dumb move as swiping can become addictive and be done subconsiously. Never understood why people complain here so much about shorts since they never go beyond the one video played that I opened myself I guess that explains it.

Tablets/touchscreens/phones are not the best way to experience online stuff, rather the worst. ublock origin in firefox makes internet usable in other dimension for me, since I am allergic to ads but thats another story


I actually set the time limit to 0 minutes , then I restarted the app in iOS and right now I do not see any shorts. Let’s see how long it would take for them to reappear again


The nuclear option is to disallow it to store your watch history. You get only a search bar and your subscriptions.

I switched to this. It is less fun, but also less of a timewaste.


"Shorts" is the #1 reason I switched to the SmartTube app on my Chromecast.

No more Shorts.

It also has other great features that are well beyond what the Youtube app lets you do to customize the expernience.

And then I realized, it also blocks all the ads. I was a Youtube subscriber, but they alienated me with their "Shorts", so I switched apps, and then I cancelled my subscription.

Most of big tech is too big. It's ridiculous how bad these monoliths have gotten.


Yep i use skipvids.com to avoid shorts. I found myself endlessly scrolling like a junky


Yep, SmartTube is great.


Note that you don't need YouTube's permission to remove shorts from the homepage; there's a Firefox extension for that.


Argh. I was really excited for this. I'm a YouTube Premium user, and I get a lot of value from YouTube, but I can't get rid of the nicotine-tastic home feed and shorts. I go to YouTube for useful (especially, long-form) stuff, and get sucked into garbage.

On desktop you can manage this with extensions. Not so much on mobile.

Profound product misalignment.


If you want to completely eschew shorts, consider adding https://www.youtube.com/shorts to your adblocker blocklist, and maybe use an extension like Stylus to hide the "Shorts" links on YT pages.

I would rather keep the ability to see a short if I need it.


ROFL because there is no danger that I'm going to spend any time watching shorts. If they put some limit on other videos now that might be relevant... but shorts are just taking up real estate on the screen which could be filled with content I might engagement. I want to say it is like picking their shareholder's pockets except nobody profits from the existence of shorts in any way.


An ad blocker handles this use case just fine, however. It's easy to create a rule to remove the div containing shorts. Also works on many Use AI buttons.


It turns out, the tiger can't change its shorts


Youtube would be cooked if there was an alternative that actually eorked (incentives for people uploading, spread well etc).


I think this might be even worse, psychologically.

You’ve added a “forbidden fruit” element to the Shorts.


It’s still working for me tho. Could it be a different app version?


In my case, once I set the limit to 0 minutes and refreshed the home tab I don't see Shorts recommendations at all. There is still a Shorts tab at the bottom that tells me I have no remaining time (and allows me to trivially override it, sigh). But otherwise this seems to have cleaned up the "feed" that I see in the app of anything Shorts related (for now, at least).


weird how its 0 to 15, and no in between.

I went in hoping to set it to 5 minutes. I don't see that as a problem. However, suddenly losing 15 minutes, yeah that's an issue


Wow, WTF. What an inept implementation.


Same.They just did the minimum to look like they care about restricting addiction practices but in reality still continuing with business as usual


My shorts are on.


Not just insider knowledge. Being more willing to put in hard work than anyone else, being better at synthesizing public knowledge, or maintaining a more clear and unemotional outlook all can also lead you to superior outcomes.


Exception that proves the rule, IMO.


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