I can't stand watching videos on something I need information for <right now>. Maybe I'm just terrible at video scrubbing, but give me a long form write up and I can scroll or ctrl+f my way to what I'm looking for very quickly.

I suppose they can't force inject 5-15 second ads though, so maybe folks like us brought this on ourselves.

Videos absolutely suck for transmitting information, compared to text. I estimate that I can read an article about 10x faster than an equivalent video, they aren't even in the same ballpark. It boggles my mind that so many people prefer videos, given how much slower they are. It's enough to make me cynically wonder if people these days are illiterate or something.

More important than that is text lends itself to searching for possibly obscure phrases to narrow down the possible candidates before even having to "consume" any information whereas with video that is challenging and very inefficient (time and energy-wise).

Usually it is already very obscure, being presented with a video link in an debate at all. No thank you very much.

Where I like a video, is for example of a teardown of a device. HowTo videos of practical skills. Watching a professional use his tools.

But even then, I often prefer text with good pictures.

The only thing I’ll say in defense of videos (which I generally don’t like at all) is that when somebody makes a video, it does sort of force them to do the steps. I’ll definitely take a well-written set of instructions over a well-written video usually. But a crappy video might accidentally be better than a crappy set of instructions because the steps that the author didn’t think to include will at least be shown by default if they do it in one take with minimal editing.

>in one take with minimal editing

In my experience this is far more rare than a well written, comprehensive set of instructions.

Even the tiniest youtube channel with 3 digit subscriber numbers recorded on the owners phone will edit out the "boring" bits. At least for any task that takes more than 2-3 minutes. If the task is short enough then yeah, they will often leave in the whole thing.

> I estimate that I can read an article about 10x faster than an equivalent video

Especially due to all the filler b/s that every YT video has these days, be it over sharing their back story, Like and Subscribe! (And ding that bell!), sponsored ad reads, here’s my ten other videos you need to watch, etc etc.

I suspect it's because they can't focus on text - their devices have 2000 notifications distracting them. Video is more easily engaging, they're less likely to switch away.

I daresay thee average user would be a lot better off if they disabled all but a very small handful of notifications.

The average user likely does not know, that even the option exists.

It's getting better. Apple's summarizing multiple notifications coming in 18.1 (you can try this in the beta today) and only highlighting "important" notifications by default. I haven't seen any evidence of them abusing this, either.

Depends on what you need.

I was once able to fix my toilet watching an Indonesian video. I understood approximately zero, but I could still follow that guy's hands.

It is a different story with programming or other abstract/text-based tasks, but when it comes to anything done with hands, I like a video better.

3blue1brown videos on maths are beautiful as well. I wish I had them when I was 18.

Videos can be great where it's the kind of topic where you'd watch the whole video.

Videos are terrible when you need a small amount of information that's embedded in a much longer video.

The second scenario is much more common for me than the first.

>Videos absolutely suck for transmitting information, compared to text.

It depends on the information. For DIY information for example i find it much better to see someone show how to lay brick or frame a wall than to read how it is done.

I'd say that for mechanical topics (construction, car repair, etc.) a video can be very useful. But please, provide a written transcript, since that's at least searchable.

That's fair. Video games are another thing which lend themselves pretty well to video content.

The issue is there is a huge monetizing platform for video, which has minted multimillionaires.

There is no equivalent for that for text, even though Substack is trying.

Discoverability is better for content creators on video platforms then text.

If I wrote an article, what are even my options to share it?

Video you, have YouTube, insti, tiktok etc to get discovered on and people can even find it.

Google has been trialing AI overviews of youtube videos, essentially it opens a gemini chat where gemini has been prompt-stuffed with the whole video.

A 12 minute "Here is my favorite method for unclogging a drain" video becomes a three sentence reply from gemini telling you what it is.

I don't know how google is gonna get this past creators if they fully role it out, as it is a massive shameless backstab, but at the same time it is wonderful for viewers who don't want to trudge through filler video after clickbait headlines.

Wow, it is a backstab! They force creators to make longer videos or they won’t get monitized and then do this. Creators get paid by the watch minutes.

They've been doing that for a while though e.g. a specific (say) 31s segment of a video will come in the search results rather than just a link to a popular video

Text -> video -> text

It's come full circle, just that the wheel now consumes orders of magnitude more power to churn the final text.

I didn't realize how bad this has gotten until I was looking for a GPU undervolting guide

What could be a couple of paragraphs is stretched into a 5-10 minute video; most of which is explaining what it is, and not how to do it

I'm always surprised at how many non-tech people don't know about their browser's ability to search in the page. I've been on multiple calls at work with researchers who have been in the field for more than a decade and they'll read the entire page instead of hitting ctrl-f.

yt-dlp audio only, and stuff that into whisper: video to text in ~30 seconds.

> terrible at video scrubbing

It is partly the form, video, but more so the access method, the network. All networked video sucks at skimming through because the file isn't cached and takes a few milliseconds to several seconds to load the part you jumped to. The interface also doesn't help because usually they lack controls for skipping forwards and backwards and long jumps forwards and backwards.

> I can't stand watching videos on something I need information for <right now>. Maybe I'm just terrible at video scrubbing

Do not worry: in a very short while we'll all have AI tools, running locally, that can summarize videos in textual forms in a split second.

Prompt: "Summarize this vid in five paragraphs. List specs."

It already exists. In a short while we'll all have this at home.

P.S: prompt: "Remove every single ad and submarine content too".

Replacing "downloading 2kb of text on a device with minimal technical specs" with "buying a top-end computer to download hundreds of megabytes of video & shove it into an LLM to mangle and hallucinate the message down into 2kb of text".

Thank god for progress. What would we do without it.

I'm waiting for it to become more convenient, but no joke this is what I've been doing. When I find interesting videos about software development, I'll often use Whisper to create a transcript and then upload it to Claude to summarise, then I can ask it questions about the content as well as explore related topics and ask it for further reading.

Of course, that assumes the AI won't just hallucinate and give you false information. Which is a major problem with current LLMs.

Oh, but they can put blinky video ads all over the page so no matter where you look there are things to distract you.

yeah yeah adblock pihole yes I know.

There must be a market for video information converted to text. It would be completely illegal, of course.

The irony of serving a video, consumed by a robot, to serve a human text, rather than serving the text in the first place.

Well, there's a source if not a market - LLMs.

https://www.proofnews.org/apple-nvidia-anthropic-used-thousa...

Sound like some sort of ADHD symptom where any video longer that a few seconds is perceived as too long, doesn't it?

No, it doesn't even remotely sound like such a thing.

Not really. Video just doesn't lend itself well to searchability (is that a word?). YouTube's "table of contents" feature helps, but only when the video's creator actually uses it. Even if they do provide a ToC, it still doesn't help much if you're trying to find a particular sentence, or brief mention of a particular detail. Perhaps we also need videos with an index, in addition to tables of contents.

Right, but as I see it, there are multiple kinds of videos. Some are made specifically to be a vehicle for ads. You know what I mean, those 10+ minute long videos on simple tricks, where a short clip would suffice. They also usually lack any markers or chapters which makes skipping through them infuriating. I understand the rage here, I hate those with a passion, too.

But some long videos are excellent, well-made and informative.

Perhaps when the OP needs the info right now he may be more stressed and less in control of himself?

I think it's a generational thing. It seems like short-form videos are the only thing majority of people are willing to consume.

I've noticed more success with classifieds that have a video vs ones with a thorough description. I've always made efforts to include all relevant information in a post, and it recently dawned on me (while answering a dumb question) that a lot of people just don't read anymore.

I think that shift can be explained not as any outright consumer preference, but rather as a form of platform/advertiser preference. It's hard for a standalone website to compete with a platform in the best of cases, and better yet, it's relatively easy to make ads lucrative in video perhaps since the format simply lends itself better to being both in your face, yet short enough to get out of the way.

In the very unlikely hypothetical that youtube were to allow other formats such as articles or images, I suspect many publishers would be able to make that work - on that plaform, as opposed to on a standalone website without the traffic attracting algorithm to help crowdsource valuable content for users.

If you look at e.g. GamersNexus, Hardware Unboxed, etc. the videos aren't really short form in that "10:02" way. Like there's plenty of detail, but 30 minutes with 15 minutes of it being looking at graphs is clearly a pretty slow way to do it compared to see they literally just presented the video script in article form and you could choose the graphs and time that matters to you.

Both Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed(Techspot) have Websites where they post all the related images/analysis(in text format) from their respective video content, and more! And so why are you not doing your due diligence before commenting!

Which generation? My parents really like video (boomer/genx line), but I prefer text (millennial). Not sure what the kids these days like, although I do recall some students (gen z) that really wanted videos for setting up basic stuff, like how to download VSCode.

I can see that. Television was the newest thing for the boomers, and was a big deal for early Gen X. Later Gen X and Millenials got the Internet, which in its infancy, was too slow to display anything other than text and crappy graphics. Once video became virtually free to transmit, we started seeing a lot of video-based content saturate the waves again.

I never understand the obsession with video. It's the first thing my kids reach for when searching for information about something and it's always painfully slow and inefficient.

Does 5 minutes of side by side videos of GPUs playing a game at 120fps, encoded as a 60fps video, really help anyone?

Or CPUs really. Die shrinks just aren't giving the advantages they once used to.

You can see this in the fact that RISC-V and ARM architectures have caught up with x86 performance even though x86 has had a decade long head start and billions more invested in development.

We are quickly approaching a weird space. Barring some major innovations, you are likely to see that 10 year old equipment remains competitive with brand new products in terms of performance.

ARM has gotten very good, and is definitely competitive with mid-range x86 while offering better performance-per-watt, but it is still not competitive with high-end x86.

Depends on the task and what you're measuring.

My M1 (standard) CPU is definitely faster than my Ryzen 7700x on some tasks, and it blows it away on perf/watt.

Those are both mid-range CPUs in standard consumer configurations, and I agree ARM does very well in that segment, and it does even better in the low-power/mobile/embedded segment where x86 is practically non-existent (recent gaming handhelds notwithstanding).

However, high-end workstations, compute-focused servers, and supercomputers, which use extremely expensive and power-hungry x86 chips, are a different segment, one to which ARM currently has no direct answer (and some might argue it shouldn't have one because such wasteful things shouldn't exist). This segment once had a number of competitive RISC players, like POWER and SPARC, so I don't think it's unobtainable for ARM.

What are you talking about there are arm supercomputers.

There's at least 2 in the top 10, and the fugaku was the fastest in the world for a couple of years between 2020 and 2022.

You're absolutely right, I missed that entirely. The vast majority of the TOP500 is still x86 but it's already losing ground to ARM. There's still some POWER systems on the list too.

> You can see this in the fact that RISC-V and ARM architectures have caught up with x86 performance

Concerning RISC-V having caught up with x86 performance: dream on ... :-(

this was pretty impressive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41364549

That might've been a result of Intel having the best leading-edge fabs until 2018 or so. It was hard to judge different ISAs before then.

Yeah I keep looking into upgrading my 12 year old PC, but for like £1500 I can get one 10x faster (multithreaded) and only about 4x faster single core. I mean, that's a decent boost but it feels very disappointing for 12 years of progress.

What do die shrinks have to do with ISA performance? Also, there are no RISC-V CPUs available that match the latest X86 or ARM CPUs. Even then, the ISA chosen doesn't have much to do with the performance of CPUs (at least, when comparing major ISAs like X86, ARM and RISC-V).

Smaller nodes (generally) translate to lower power consumption, more transistor density, and faster transistor switching speeds.

It allows for an architecture to deepen pipelines, add registers, add cache, and pull off tricks like SMT.

> the ISA chosen doesn't have much to do with the performance of CPUs

That's somewhat my point, the limiting factor for ISA performance is the physics surrounding the transistors.

First it was written reviews, then it was youtube videos, soon it will be short fast paced TikTok clips.

DC Rainmaker (sports gadgets reviews) has a nice compromise of having product video reviews on Youtube, but also even more in-depth reviews with all the tables and charts on his website. I used to read his written reviews, now I mostly skim his videos.

The ridiculously high prices of GPUs have really taken the fun out of hardware for me. I used to follow hardware developments closely, but now I upgrade much less often so that also stopped.

I agree but it's a little deceptive. For example I have a 4070 right now and I paid $600 for it. That's good money but it is more than likely far more than most people actually need.

If you watch or read reviews, you'd think only people in poverty use 4070s. I play competitive games and everything else I want to do with this card without issues and even with gas left in the tank.

They crank up settings in reviews to ultra settings and then try to make it look like if you don't have a $1200 GPU that you have trash. Reality is that these GPUs are overkill and in many games medium settings look nearly identical to ultra. I swear GPU manufacturers pay to have ultra settings available, with their nearly imperceptible improvements. The option is mostly there as far as I can tell, simply to upsell GPUs.

> yet you can see by the number of YouTube views what people are using

Doesn't help that Google search results spam videos they make money from in a carousel at the top of almost every query.

Interestingly Gamers Nexus is using the YouTube video & merch money to fund an (ad-free!) written article site: https://gamersnexus.net/

It never seems to rank in search results, though, so it's easy to forget it exists... But it makes a lot of sense. The charts & script is already created anyway for the video, just edit it a bit to fit written form better and you're basically done

The speed at which it loads without all the ad, tracking, and analytics bullshit is amazing. Especially on mobile.

Also, I never saw half an ad on anandtech, or never noticed..

Which is what I liked about it, but possibly doomed them.