this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 255 points 1 month ago (27 children)

Twitter is not a utility. We really need to stop treating techbro services like utilities. If we feel they actually are utilities, the government can step in and make that claim and the appropriate changes.

[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You would be shocked to know how many people use TikTok as a search engine

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I'm not on tiktok, but I'll admit to using YouTube as a search engine a lot. Also googling something and immediately hitting the video tab before reading any of the results.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 month ago (3 children)

You video guys work different.

[–] Chocrates 27 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I must be a dinosaur because for most things I am looking up I want concise textual information. I'll look for videos to explain larger complicated concepts

[–] Rolando 11 points 1 month ago

If it's something like taking apart hardware, videos are great because there are a lot of little details that it's hard to capture in even a picture.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Sure, video has it's place. I was just wondering that some people get their info primarily from video. Guess it's something with abstraction vs. imagination.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

I only find videos useful if I’m trying to figure out something that’s procedural. Seeing the procedures and steps done in front of me helps me grasp the concept much faster than text.

For just information though, text is golden and video is a waste of time.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

i hate it, but i just cant find decent written resulta anymore outside of reddit and such

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Depends on field. Some ~~meth~~ math and programming stuff exists only in PDF. Try find videos on Bounding Interval Hierarchy. At least there are decent videos on BSP trees

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

PDFs break my brain. It's 2024. Unless you truly intend for something to be primarily and only read in print why use PDF? And I know everybody is able to host HTML because usually everyone is grabbing these PDFs from a webpage.

Edit: down voters, convince me on valid uses of PDFs for things that aren't meant to be printed. At least list some. I'm aware this is an extreme opinion. It's one I've thought about a lot, but I just can't think of any. For things that are meant to be printed then I agree they're the best. Everything else I think HTML is better for because it can be resized arbitrarily and isn't bound to a specific layout. Also copying text from PDFs is bonkers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Unless you want to force readers into reading in browser, you should use PDF.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

If it's not something I expect people to read in a print format I'm absolutely willing to do that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

That's how I use Bing. 😻

[–] stellargmite 1 points 1 month ago

I liken using groogle for finding factual information to using the yellowpages for doing the same. YT isn't much better but it suffers many of the conflicts of interest traditional media outlets also had, depending on the corporation. In this case the almighty algorithm is the conflict of interest, though there are clever content creators out there making some good stuff, they’ll always be beholden to the owners of the platform and the true customers - the advertisers. As an advertising platform which can direct punters to actual long form content directly supported by watchers via patreon or similar, I understand why it is used : the sheer numbers using it.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] lightnegative 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Why? All it's going to do is output some words that have a statistical correlation to your input words

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Well, that is mostly what I need and it summarises the search results as well.

Of course, you have to apply your critical thinking skills, but you gotta do that always everywhere. Normal humans talk as much trash as LLMs do, in my experience.

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