That was one big takeaway from watching the antitrust case. They definitely view these tech giants as having infinite power over technology with little regard for the complexity and scale of what is going on. I am in favor of breaking up some of these giants, but at the same time how can people with no concept of technology legislate it. They could very easily make a policy that is difficult for google to enforce, and completely impossible for a smaller player to even contemplate.

I’m always reminded of the Louis CK bit where a person is introduced to WiFi in an airplane and then is complaining about it not working 15 minutes later.

> how can people with no concept of technology legislate it

Here's how I would counter: What many of these Congresspeople understand is business. And these are technology companies, but ultimately, they're companies using illegal business strategies. Congresswoman Jayapal explained for instance, how Google's ad market is effectively an example of insider trading, because Google controlled the buyer side, seller side, and the exchange itself, drawing on her experience with Wall Street. Technology didn't matter there, but business did.

And more intriguingly, the most common response from the tech CEOs there was "I don't know". If there's one really good case for breaking up big tech, it's that nobody running them understands the details of the operation well enough to be responsible for it. Their business models have bad effects on society that their CEOs don't know about. Their businesses make illegal decisions that their CEOs can't vouch for.

Big tech is a runaway train.

Of course, they do know the answer to those questions but their legal team told them to keep their mouths shut.

> They could very easily make a policy that is difficult for google to enforce, and completely impossible for a smaller player to even contemplate.

You can't fight fire with fire and you can't fight scale with scale. The solution to these problems lies in eliminating the advantages of scale so that operating on a national or international level becomes an expensive liability, but competing on a local market is affordable and practical.

Companies in the US and China, for example, can scale immensely because they have such huge, single markets in which to mature. They pay a one-time cost per entry and then have no real obstacles from expanding to the full capacity of that market.

I don't know much about how the EU works in this regard, but I imagine it's much more difficult for a European company to reach the full European market. Aside from legal obstacles, they have to face barriers from language, culture, history, and other things, I'm sure. It's an ideal setup for a collection of small-scale operations in a healthy market... Or it would be, if US and Chinese companies weren't able to scale so easily and then expand out of their own borders into the EU.

I tend to wonder if there are ways to bring similar barriers to the US. There aren't enough natural barriers, but perhaps we could create artificial barriers that will re-enable competition.

As a consumer I don’t necessarily want competition in say video. I want to be able to go to one place to find a user created video, search once and find all the videos on that topic. I want to learn one UI for that and I want to know that the vast majority of video content will be there. YouTube’s scale grants me, as a consumer, huge advantages. The same goes for content creators.

That doesn’t mean I dont want oversight. I think there may be a role for regulation in the public interest, but blindly chopping YouTube up into a hundred geographically separated chunks would be unbelievably dumb. Is ‘competition’ really going to compensate for the loss of convenience? There have always been competing video upload sites, but people go where the scale is because they like the scale. They want the scale. It has value to them.

The same goes for the App Store. I’m a happy Apple customer. I like the App Store and I think it works well, but I’m not entirely against government scrutiny of how it operates, in principle. Yes I’m concerned Apple could abuse its power, but killing the App Store or mandating by law that Apple has to implement policies that will tear the App Store into bits benefits me how? Will it make it easier for me to find and install Apps? Will it improve their quality? Will fragmented app stores make it easier for developers to connect with customers and earn revenue? I’m not convinced.

> You can't fight fire with fire and you can't fight scale with scale. The solution to these problems lies in eliminating the advantages of scale so that operating on a national or international level becomes an expensive liability, but competing on a local market is affordable and practical.

The problem was never the scale of the company. If YouTube was instead 100 different companies, there would still be a total of 49 years worth of video being uploaded every day which nobody would have the resources to review. Each company would have 1% of the video but also 1% of the revenue and the cost would be just as insurmountable.

I'm not sure why you brought up reviewing the videos. I couldn't find it as I glanced through this thread. If YT was 100 different companies competing against each other, then there would be positive effects as each on tried to out-innovate each other. They wouldn't just be 100 static mini YT's..and if some of them did that they wouldn't make it.

The scale of the company prevents meaningful competition, that's the issue, not necessarily that they can't affordably review the 49 years worth of video.

This whole debate originated in some people noticing that there was a lot of wrongthink on the internet and then starting to yell at tech companies for not fixing it. But it turns out that problem is legitimately hard and the tech companies don't have a magic wand, so all their attempts have been ham-fisted disasters that trample all over everything like a frightened elephant.

That problem in particular isn't really one that competition would solve, because it's fundamentally a demand for censorship, and more competition would make censorship harder. Which is maybe a good thing anyway.

And creators would either upload their videos to 100 different services, or users would only be able to find 1% as much content.

That one is the easiest to solve -- separate discovery from hosting. You want to find a video, you go to a search engine. Any search engine you like. They all index all the videos everywhere. Some may even be dedicated to video or make recommendations etc.

The biggest problem there is that all the hosts want you to use their search and do what they can to get in the way of any third party turning them into a dumb pipe. But this is where some kind of P2P service could really have an advantage, because it doesn't have to care about that -- let it be a dumb pipe on purpose and it wins, because there are a thousand companies who would love to be in the video search/discovery business and not have to pay the cost of hosting the videos or worry about a centralized third party host locking them out next week.

So now when I want to find videos on a topic, for many of the videos I’ll get a hundred hits for the same video uploaded to each service. But if the one I want was only uploaded to one device, it’ll be buried in a sea of hundreds of duplicates.

If using a search engine is the ordinary method of discovery then there would be no need to upload the same video to multiple services. Meanwhile if people did that anyway, the search engine would want to figure out how to merge the duplicates.

And let China be the only one with scale advantage?

> I tend to wonder if there are ways to bring similar barriers to the US

The Constitution of the USA prevents states from erecting barriers to inter-state commerce, so I suspect if there were legal barriers, they would have to be at the national level.

There are ways to do the above without specifically restricting inter-state commerce. The CCPA is one example of a state raising the barrier to entry that a business can either comply with or leave the market. I wouldn't exactly call it an ideal situation, but if each individual state created their own version there would certainly be businesses that refuse to do business in certain states rather than dealing with the regulatory headaches.

It seems like adding in these artificial domestic barriers would negatively affect the total stock market in aggregate, by making business less efficient overall. (scale == efficiency).

Therefore, I highly doubt any legislation would ever be passed for this. (even though it may end up being much better for the consumer)

Unfortunately it being an utter stupid or terrible idea is no guarantee to stop a law from being passed. Reality always takes it toll however much they insist that it isn't their fault and nobody could have known exactly what they were warned about happening.

You raise a very interesting point there. I do wonder, however, how having such boundaries in place would affect exchange of information somehow. That's something I can sense in practice by living in a country where a large portion of the population don't speak english, however most of the tech material is made available in english.

I feel like for that to happen a much deeper cultural transformation in how we share information and global inequalities would have to come as well. The reason there's so much content in english is not because it's been constructed solely by authors who speak english natively (albeit probably the most common native language amongst blog authors, etc), but because many authors feel like they have to write it in english in order to speak to a broader, global audience.

>perhaps we could create artificial barriers that will re-enable competition

A fragmented market prevents competition, so I don't understand what you're trying to say. Like with your friendly local cable company.

So much this.

There was a memory etched in my mind of a clueless Congressman questioning the General Counsel of Alphabet/Google in a committee hearing (perhaps during the SOPA fiasco). The congressman said something to the effect of "Google can do anything! They store a copy of the entire internet. Why can't you just identify all of the copyrighted material and not show it without approval?"

I was dumbfounded by how this grown man seemed to think Google basically ran on "tech magic" and how little comprehension he seemed to have for what intellectual property is and how it's registered/identified.

They legislate all walks of life. It is their job to comprehend the abstraction of each issue and seek advice in the right places, not to be knowledgeable in all professions and subjects of interest.

This is why "we've had enough of experts" is such a dangerous mindset.

I'd argue that job is impossible - the most heavily legislated areas are the most dysfunctional -- because they don't understand.

I don't believe that's true. For instance, banking and electricity are highly regulated markets, and rightly so. In this cases, I think it is obviously critical for the government to draw expertise from the right sources

> For instance, banking and electricity are highly regulated markets, and rightly so.

You don't think banking is dysfunctional? Banking is one of the most privacy-invasive industries in existence, the rules are the reason the internet runs on advertising because they make it nigh impossible to make a functioning anonymous micropayments system and companies that try to innovate with e.g. a debit card that keeps your account balance invested in securities get booed off the stage by incumbents who don't want the competition.

It is a matter of "less dysfunctional with regulation" as opposed to not being dysfunctional with regulation unfortunately.

There are a lot of legitimate things to complain about with banking and its regulations but despite the many misconduct scandals in banking they are still better than unregulated parabanks. The scandals haven't been in the form of "and the head ran off with all of the money and nobody can find it or them".

Regulations certainly could be improved in multiple directions but dysfunction is not a binary.

I like this discussion a lot, because I agree that the regulations are pretty dumb, but I can't imagine a world without regulations that yields superior outcomes.

What kinds of improvements would improve the state of banking today that don't also throw the baby out with the bathwater?

The biggest improvement they could make would be to create a class of accounts intended to never have a large enough account balance to be capable of incurring severe losses, and then waive most of the regulations for those accounts. Then you use the regulated accounts for your retirement savings, but keep a hundred bucks in an unregulated one to use for buying stuff on the internet, which could then be completely anonymous and have minimal transaction fees.

And what's to stop me creating thousands of these anonymous unregulated accounts to launder money? There are a lot of aspects to regulating the financial industry that have to account for the many different scenarios involved. The regulations for the finance industry aren't perfect but it is an incredibly difficult balance to strike.

What stops you from doing the same thing with cash and cash businesses? Nothing, why is why AML rules are pointless and should be abandoned because they're doing dramatically more harm than good.

Your examples are probably pretty good for explaining the depth of 2 regulated industries (except PG&E is a black eye for regulatory success), but perhaps they were talking about the breadth of all of the industries that Congress chooses to regulate, which is quite extensive. I'd argue that Congress critters and their staff aren't great at finding those "right sources" with enough consistency.

Piling over your comment regarding YouTube - what is worse? Google owning YouTube and the search engine plus everything else or the fact that YouTube has probably more than 30-40% of the market? One is a problem of monopoly, the second is a problem of choice.

I think for tech, "monopolies" are natural and they stem from the lack of investment needed by the consumer which allows us to choose the best/coolest product at every moment.

For tech it makes more sense to have 1 search engine, 1 social platform, 1 video sharing platform. If cars were easy to change as you wish, I think everyone will gravitate towards a single car brand.

Louis CK bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4

Google does not have an absolute right to operate at their current scale. If legislation around content moderation or consumer protection made their business untenable at its current scale then so be it. Their business will have to change to adapt to the society in which it is a participant.

I see that talking point everywhere about "too much scale/too big" but never have I heard an answer as to how the hell scale can be regulated let alone an answer that shows even a minutae of understanding let alone implementability.

Even my deliberately stupid as possible answers like "Turn away visitors once they get above 200 million connections with a landing screen" and "register Youtubes A-Z with seperate data bins and watch traffic migrate in a daft social experiment" are better answers than any I have seen from users of the talking point.

To potentially reinterpret the GP, it isn't that we need to regulate scale, but that scale doesn't excuse you from being regulated.

Specifically in the case of YT, as an extreme example, if all video available online in a country had to be moderated by a human, YouTube couldn't operate at it's current scale. It doesn't have a right to skip those regulations because of it's scale.

If a company can't scale and still comply with regulations the answer isn't automatically to get rid of the regulations. The inverse is also true, if a society decides that a company operating in a given environment has to adhere to new regulations, being so big those regulations fundamentally affect your business model doesn't excuse the company from complying.

I don't know how these estimates are made or if they are even close to being true, but it always surprises me that there is claimed to be 50x daily emails than daily google searches. I've seen these numbers several times before (never sourced, ironically), and this one always seems weird. People don't even open any websites other way than googling the name, and most people don't send dozens of emails daily. I think the only way you can get 300B daily emails is if you multiply every automatically sent email by the number of recipients.

> and most people don't send dozens of emails daily.

What you're missing is that the vast majority of emails aren't sent individually from one person to another; they're sent by programs. In addition to spam, we're talking about stuff like newsletters, promotions, notifications, updates, mailing lists, etc. Looking through my emails now I have an incredible volume of GitHub notifications and various other auto-generated emails. In total I definitely receive hundreds of emails per day.

And I don't actually do that many Google searches per day (maybe only a couple dozen) mainly because I tend to go back to the same websites over and over again, and the browser URL bar autocompletes the name rather than performing a Google search on the name of the site. You really have to go out of your way these days to perform a Google search on the name of a site rather than just go to the site directly.

> In addition to spam, we're talking about stuff like newsletters, promotions, notifications, updates, mailing lists, etc.

Much of that flow could be replaced by RSS-based notifications and the like. E-mail might be justified when you want your stuff to be auto-archived, but perhaps any message you would delete immediately after skimming it should just not be sent in the first place.

A side effect of Moore's Law is that as computing gets more powerful, the things humans do with computing can afford to get sloppier.

Bill Gates famously said "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need on a computer" in the 1980s. We could probably do most of what modern computers do with far less than 32GB of RAM, but that assumes that our software is much more optimized for compact runtime than they are.

We need the 32GB so that slack can use 30 of them.

Yeah, it could, in theory, but it hasn't been, and I doubt it will. So the volume of email continues to be what it is, and thus, is much larger than the volume of Google searches. You've mode-switched from descriptivist to proscriptivist.

probably includes spam emails too

One the one hand it's sad that it'll be impossible, practically and perhaps even physically, to archive all of Youtube should Google ever decide to axe it, on the other hand even though I'm fanatically a datahoarder, the thought of archiving youtube just seems... exhausting? Pointless? Haha I'm not sure.

Then again just imagine how fantastically useful 40 years worth of video a day could be to a historian 200 years from now. I think the most important technology going forward will be analysis and indexing software, to make searching videos like this possible. Ted Chiang wrote a short story about that, where you could search like "that time I got in a fight with my wife about the toilet seat being up," and you'd get a video from the incident.

It's crazy to think that 40 years worth of video can be uploaded daily, and yet that only captures a minuscule amount of everything that goes on in the world in a given day.

Yeah, that’s only a ratio of 14600 days per day. That’s 21 million 1 minute videos a day, which is a tiny slice of the population of the planet giving a brief glimpse.

On any given day approximately 23.37 million years of human experience occurs.

But there's a lot of crossover surely - families that live together we could consider "one" day's worth experience, minus the time they spend apart pooping or whatever.

Yeah that’s an interesting way of slicing it.

When people say “everyone’s different” I’m quite fond of saying things like “well, there’s 7.8 billion of us, surely we’re not all that different?”

There’s ~21,000,000 years of human life lived a day. At 40 years per day uploaded, that’s 0.000002 of the human experience for that day.

It’s interesting to think that YouTube content is only a “two in a million” reflection of human life. Averaged out, that’s about 1 minute per person per year.

Apply a similar comparison to the past and it's humbling to realize just how little we know about history, and how quickly we collectively forget the farther back you go.

Given we are living in 2020, there have to have been efforts or thought-experiments dedicated to archiving YouTube (would love to read about them if they exist). It seems 'almost' impossible like you said, even if we disregard, say channels with less than 100 subscribers (just as an example).

I was at a conference at IBM around 1993 at which a very smart person pointed out that we had reached peak “knowledge”, in the sense that the new explosion of data on the Internet, including the the new “www” meant indexing would soon be impossible. “You’d need to keep a copy of every host”. We all nodded because this seemed pretty obviously true.

It also wasn’t an urgent problem as experiments like http were unlikely to reach broad usage due to critical failures like the one way links.

I mention this not to mock your “‘almost’ impossible” statement but to point out that you’re in good company

From an indexing/search perspective it's already impossible to find some of the more obscure videos I saw in 2013 because of the relentless crap flood of "things sort of like what you searched for that are newer."

Well that and the growing penchant for revising history by destroying dissent, blacking out unpleasant thoughts and facts, and the onslaught of ridiculous copyright strikes against fair use content.

I constantly have trouble trying to find "that one tweet" from yesterday, a much less intimidating problem.

Twitter has notoriously flaky search in my experience; it is clearly geared towards discovering new content and not towards finding content you engaged with previously. This misses the point often, as more and more people use Twitter as a sort of social note taking tool.

I think this is one area where general purpose search engines are failing users currently. We should be able to tell Google "that one tweet from yesterday" and have it return something meaningful to us. Of course I understand that this is hard and becoming harder as social media companies hold on to their walled gardens, but clearly (to me anyway) the status quo is to the detriment of the user.

Doesn’t that suggest a market need for another search engine for this purpose?

Meta-search? Searching the search engine..I like it.

Metasearch engines are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasearch_engine

Here's a nice one with many public instances you can try: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

use the "before:YYYY-MM-dd" search parameter

... which you can combine with after:YYYY-MM-dd

It's not impossible. It's merely a matter of resources and will. Google not only has to store all that video they also need to transmit it over and over again. An archivist would only have to write to store the video. If humanity makes it to the year 3000 we're going to be pretty disappointed that all that video was lost due to a lack of foresight.

I bet the number of times the typical youtube upload is watched is zero. I think YouTube itself already fills the archival, non-transmitting role here.

Average views per video is around 10k. I don't know what the mode (most frequent number of views) is, but I'm almost certain it's not zero, since the uploader checking if the video uploaded correctly already counts as a view.

Anyway, for archival purposes you don't need to save the plethora of formats Youtube keeps at hand for each video, you just need one size in one codec, and it probably doesn't have to be 4K or 8K, which probably reduces the storage requirements by one order of magnitude or so.

I'm the highly downvoted parent that said this is possible.

It's only 45 years of video per day. That is very, very possible to save. That's roughly 600 terabytes of storage space a day. Which means that per month you're generating a long term storage bill that is about $18k more per month.

So after a decade of operation your monthly bill is about $2.1m which is far, far, far cheaper than what we spend on plenty of things. Like I said above: This is not impossible. In fact, I bet the NSA is probably already doing it. At least for public videos. This truly is peanuts.

Is the average as relevant as some other statistical measure that I'm not knowledgeable enough to know about? For example if the vast majority of views are on 10% of the videos, the other 90% could be stored on less expensive hardware that has less bandwidth maybe?

edit: for example the average net worth of an American is 76,000$ but toss a couple billionaires in the mix, whose net worth is larger by such an enormous factor, that the "average" is misleading

You’re thinking of the median (the value that ends up in the middle after sorting), which is indeed more useful in such cases.

(Of course, boiling a wide distribution of values down to a single value, no matter by which process, is fraught with problems.)

Well, to show the video to the person who uploaded it you don't need to reencode it or push it to the edge or any of that. And I see no reason to believe that most videos are even watched by their creators.

We get time travel by 2034 so no issues - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

There is nothing impossible about it. We barely scratched the surface of data storage mechanisms. All it takes is another few breakthroughs and we likely can store all of Youtube of all times in a block the size of an ice cube.

What makes you so confident? SSD tech is experiencing scaling challenges¹. IIRC DNA’s supposed to be incredibly dense and last long, but too expensive for much more than wedding photos². Do you have a more promising emerging tech in mind?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393293

2: I think I heard this use case predicted on some NPR thing I can't find, but this one https://www.npr.org/2013/01/24/170082404/shall-i-encode-thee... says “Agilent waived the cost of DNA synthesis for this project, but the researchers estimate it would normally cost about $12,400 per megabyte.

"It's an unthinkably large amount of money ... at the moment," Goldman says.”

>$12,400 per megabyte

I believe the first hard drive cost about $100K/MB in today's money.

The Sandisk microSD card SDSQXCZ-1T00 rated at 1TB for MSRP of $400 is listed at sdcard.org as physical dimensions of 11 x 15 x 1.0 mm, Approx 0.5g. That is 165 mm^2. If a medium ice cube is 25 x 25 x 32 mm for a volume of 20,000 mm^2 - then today an 'ice cube' could hold 20,000 / 165 = 121 TB with normal off the shelf accessible technology for $48K USD.

Given that ~1 hour of video is uploaded to youtube per second and assuming 5mbit/s for the video data, then you can store under a days worth of youtube videos on that current-day ice cube (it will be full in about ~15 hours worth of uploads (if I didn't miscalculate)).

Don't forget that Google stores probably at least 3 copies of each for redundancy and multiple sizes.

Wouldn't want your only ice cube to melt

But also under aggressive and exotic compression.

I think we give google too much credit by assuming sophisticated moderation _algorithms_.

There's algorithms for sure, but the sophisticated part is the scale at which they run. And by sophisticated I mean it was sophisticated five years ago.

Way before than that. It sounds easy in theory but it was amazing how their platform auto moderated content. People used to go around finding new ways like clipping the video frame and adding unrelated content. Slowing down video, audio etc.

They still do that.

The obfuscation techniques are getting more and more intrusive. Google hasn't won, but they seem to be gaining ground against an enormous number of clever and lively human adversaries. That's impressive.

More than not won I think Google already lost. They wanted to empower individual creators but their automatic moderation algorithms are already at a level where they flag fair use and legal use of user generated content in a way that usually backfires on them with small PR fires within internet communities.

But I guess that's the price to pay to be able to be "friends" with big media.

And it still actually works, the algorithms are sophisticated, but the heavy reliance on them leads to some serious blind spots.

For YouTube moderation, I wonder if they can track bad users for discovering new user created content. Effectively categorize the different sort of content that isn't allowed. When ever content is flagged as being in one of these categories, track the users that viewed it. Keep repeating this until you have users that seem to prefer this sort of rule breaking content.

Then, begin tracking what new content those "bad viewers" view while also identifying new users who follow a similar viewing pattern and categorizing them as bad viewers. Once you get a large enough data set, you can begin to things based on what percentage of bad users view new content. If some new account uploads a few videos and 75%+ of views are from bad users all in the same category of not allowed material, what is the chance the material belongs in that category? And what I'm describing is the version 0.0.0.1 variant. You would also track things like length of view, timing of views, sentiment analysis of any comments made on the video (and potentially of any speech in the video), etc.

With content moderation at scale.. having leeway can allow you to prioritize on trending videos, which removes a large subset of things required to moderate

This is scary to think about given that you need rare earth elements to build those chips powering all those machines. Makes sense why some countries are ensuring to have a supply on this in the long term, feels like the new oil.

Not as scary as the fact that Alphabet pressures local governments to let them drain aquifers to cool the machines¹, and powers them using vast swaths of bulldozed former habitats of endangered desert tortoises and focused beams of light that literally burn alive thousands of birds, including threatened predators².

1: https://www.postandcourier.com/news/google-s-controversial-g...

2: https://www.sbsun.com/2014/08/18/emerging-solar-plants-in-mo...

"Once built, U.S. government biologists found the plant's superheated mirrors were killing birds. In April, biologists working for the state estimated that 3,500 birds died at Ivanpah in the span of a year, many of them burned alive while flying through a part of the solar installment where air temperatures can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit." — https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-tech-solar-projects-fail-t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#B...

Thats just one of their datacenters?! Thats huge!

The aquifer draining article linked is about one in South Carolina, the Ivanpah plant is in California's Mojave Desert, and IIUC is the largest bird incinerator in the world, burning a bird out of the sky every other minute. From the Sun article:

Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.

Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version.

They do seem to have reduced some of the more dramatic deaths by unfocusing the beams when the plant is idle and clearing even more land around it to keep birds away, although there were still thousands of deaths every year afterwards.

This strangely seems like the outcome of a successful dwarf fortress

Plot twist: The beams are pressurized lava.

Seems like Bright Energy could do more to prevent bird deaths, such as nets or active scarecrows or audio deterrents.

Google wanting to draw 1.5 million gallons/day when the article says that across the state 330 million gallons/day are already drawn, mostly for agriculture, doesn’t seem like “scary pressuring of local government”.

IUUC the 1.5 million is all from a single rapidly disappearing aquifer, while the 333 million is, as you said, the total of all groundwater usage across the entire state. The use also seems totally unnecessary, as to use an example from the article, the NSA's Fort Meade data center uses wastewater.

It sounds like you may hold a common misconception about rare-earth minerals.

IIUC, they're not (extremely) rare in the traditional sense; it's more that it's hard to economically extract them from ore. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element#:~:text=The....

Not worried about them running out (it sounds like you assumed that). I was more worried about geopolitical factors and having a huge online usage (companies want to make money and keep growing) be a forcing function to keep extracting them in a non-sustainable way.

> Not worried about them running out (it sounds like you assumed that).

Sorry, my mistake. The point your were trying to make is very interesting too.

Even harder and even more expensive to extract if you give a damn about the environment.

One of the arguments for thorium-based nuclear power is that we're already digging up tons of thorium as a byproduct of rare earth mining. This is radioactive material that currently we're just dumping.

This is an unpopular opinion here on HN but essentially everything the largest nations have done show that they don't give a damn about the environment at all.

Like my dad said, "when someone shows you who they are, believe them."

your two sentences led to some cognitive dissonance...

yes, institutions like governments can be amoral/immoral on longer timescales (in fact, i'd posit institutions are employed specifically for this purpose), but people rarely exhibit such attributes statically, as your dad's quote alludes. it's at best "believe them in the moment".

rare is the "bad" person; more common is the "bad" institution. expect the best of people (which is not the same as "be naïve").

It doesn't matter if the people are bad or the institution is bad. The end result is the same:

> everything the largest nations have done show that they don't give a damn about the environment at all.

I do expect the best of people. It's just been shown that the "best" a very large group of people can do re: climate change is pretty fucking pathetic.

Good point! Your comment has made me curious about the total lifecycle of the waste products from these processes.

You need rare earth elements to make chips? Name one. And it had better be a rare earth, not something that is just rare and comes from the Earth.

(slight amounts of REEs are used in amplifiers in optical fibers, and also in permanent magnets, but those aren't what you were talking about)

https://semiengineering.com/more-rare-earth-rumblings/#:~:te....

Nowhere does that say that REEs are used in chips.

At least they are recoverable and recyclable, oil not so much.

Are they? If you have a pile of 1,000,000 chips, can you really get any of the elements out at reasonable (by almost any metric) cost?

Commercial chips still use gold bond wires (except flip chips), but that's fairly little. Apart from that it's just copper or aluminium for the metal layers, a bunch of silicon and a bunch of silica dust bound with some epoxy resin. Most of this isn't worth anything to reuse.

Why would it be more difficult than to extract from ore? You can smelt them, that will burn away the plastic, and then you can separate the metals.

I'm honestly having a bit of trouble putting my misgiving into thoughts (which if anything demonstrates I haven't thought this all through), but if you throw together say 10 materials, how likely are you to be able to separate out those 10 materials again? Or will you only be able to separate a couple metals with certain convenient melting points?

I do see what you're saying though. Maybe the easy question is, what actually happens when electronics are recycled today? How much of the original material is retrieved? Maybe I'm just entirely wrong even given the state of the art today?

I only know a bit about this but from what I understand this is similar to how most modern mining works. Many minerals are mined in very low concentrations, which means they then need to be extracted out of the host material. Part of that process often involves multiple steps where the ore is soaked in various chemical solutions, which separate certain materials. It can be a very complicated process involving a lot of toxic chemicals.

The rare earth metals are kinda irritating to separate because they have very similar physical properties, but it obviously can be done. They frequently co-occur in ore deposits for exactly that reason.

Gold is recovered in significant quantities from e-waste[1]

1: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/electronic-devices-source-of-m...

Once the gold has been recovered, are they still able to recover other metals? I don't mean this antagonistically, this is a serious question (in case you know).

Good question, but I don't know the answer - my sense is the bigger problem is the recycling tends to happen at low rates, and often involve nasty pollution/byproducts[1]

1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/02/10bn-pre...

> YouTube where one can't help but ponder about content moderation at this scale being impossible

That's precisely why YouTube cares so much about content moderation. They need to figure out some way to not hemorrhage money with all the hosting, transcode, and CDN costs for low-effort, spammy, and controversial content that cannot be monetized. Their actions taken to address content moderation sent the world into a tailspin as a result, proving Google both understands their scale and cares very little about the way their policies disrupt societies.

In 2018 YouTube went on a deletion/censorship spree in the name of racism, deleting 50mil videos in the process. But it was clear that they only scapegoated racism as the reason, because only 1% of the video they deleted was racist. [0] The reason for this scapegoating was to avoid culpability in the mistaken business model of being the world's largest beer bong for internet video.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/13/youtube-removed-nearly-2-mil...

> In 2018 YouTube went on a deletion/censorship spree in the name of racism, deleting 50mil videos in the process. But it was clear that they only scapegoated racism as the reason, because only 1% of the video they deleted was racist. [0]

Huh? "In the name of racism", but the source in that story is Youtube itself, and they're the ones giving the breakdown of why videos were deleted:

> YouTube says that most of the videos it removed — 79.6 percent — violated its policies on spam, misleading content or scams, while 12.6 percent were removed for nudity or sexual content. Only about 1 percent of channels were removed for promotion of violence, violent extremism, harassment or hateful or abusive content, although videos of that nature have attracted the most scrutiny in the past year.

The source seems to be https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy/removal...

A lot of that low-effort, spammy content could be deleted simply for being, yknow, spammy. Or even for promoting outright scams. Political videos are a rather small niche ultimately, there's a lot on there that's just crap.

YouTube was amazing back in the day but with censorship it has become a mediocre content dumpster fire. I haven’t been interested in anything on trending in a long time.

There’s still a ton of interesting content on YouTube. They have taken down stuff that didn’t deserve to be taken down, but it’s a very small portion of overall content. Other than people who are only interested in watching borderline material, I don’t think it affected the average user much. I can still watch a guy marvel in an endearing Canadian accent as he inspects the manufacturing of a $500 toaster.

And YouTube continued to grow quickly last year, so in the empirical sense it is doing well. The nature of the platform is that it is full of content producers with massive followings. If a small portion of those producers get dinged, they can make a lot of noise, but it doesn’t necessarily amount to much compared to YouTube as a whole.

I think GP's point might have been specific to Trending. Youtube's algo is pretty good at throwing me interesting content from my own subs, but I agree with the GP that the trending list is garbage.

Also, attempting to do broad searches for most news topics simply returns CNN, ABC, etc like clockwork now, and they're not at all the type of content that got Youtube where it is today. It's become more and more MegaCorpTube in recent years.

Like every other startup, they pursued "growth at all costs," got acquired by a business that could eat all the red ink, but now over a decade later, that business is sick of it and looking for the mouth wash. It's just too bad they got pretty much the entire first world addicted to it before they decided to ban anti-war content as "racist" and alternative approaches to medicine as "dangerous."

Why is YouTube so insistent that we not use our own minds to decide for ourselves? Perhaps because they really would find it more preferable if you didn't do any of that thinking for yourself. That's not how advertising works. [0]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/781798-universal-literacy-w...

Pre-acquisition YT was nowhere near as large or popular. Videos used to be tiny resolution, heavily compressed and limited to a few minutes in length. Which is to say, most of their pursuit of "growth at all costs" was well after they were acquired and became part of Google/Alphabet.

That could be because the massive viewership driving the trending videos, e.g. music, make up and dood perfect, seem to be younger than those who might be browsing HN.

I've had the app on my phone for over a decade and I share your sentiment with trending vids, but there is a lot of excellent content that would not exist without youtube. The recommendation algo is pretty good these days.

That might not last, the younger crowd seems to be going for TikTok these days.