The willingness to be responsible for consequences does factor in. If you round the corner and crash into someone, you probably didn’t intend to, but whether you’ll be an ass about it and yell at the other person or whether you’ll apologise and check they’re alright makes a difference.

In a perfect-information-setting, intent equals result: If I know what my actions will cause and continue to carry them out, the difference between “primary objective” and “accepted side-effect” becomes academic. But in most cases, we don’t have perfect information.

I feel like the intent-approach better accounts for the blind spots and unknowns. I’ll try to construct two examples to illustrate my reeasoning. Consider them moral dilemmas, as in: arguing around them “out of the box” misses the point.

Ex. 1:
A person is trying to dislodge a stone from their shoe, and in doing so leans on a transformator box to shake it out. You see them leaning on a trafo and shaking and suspect that they might be under electric shock, so you try to save them by grabbing a nearby piece of wood and knocking them away from the box. They lose balance, fall over and get a concussion.
Are you to blame for their concussion, because you knocked them over without need, despite your (misplaced) intention to save them?

Ex. 2:
You try to kill someone by shooting them with a handgun. The bullet misses all critical organs, they’re rushed to a hospital and in the process of scanning for bullet fragments to remove, a cancer in the earliest stages is discovered and subsequently removed. The rest of the treatment goes without complications and they make a speedy and full recovery.
Does that make you their saviour, despite your intent to kill them?

In both cases, missing information and unpredictable variables are at play. In the first, you didn’t know they weren’t actually in danger and couldn’t predict they’d get hurt so badly. In the second, you probably didn’t know about the tumor and couldn’t predict that your shot would fail to kill them. In both cases, I’d argue that it’s your intent that matters for moral judgement, while the outcome is due to (bad) “luck” in the sense of “circumstances beyond human control coinciding”. You aren’t responsible for the concussion, nor are you to credit with saving that life.

So if YouTube provided an RSS feed for its channels, all videos would be podcasts because they can be processed as audio-only and are distributed via RSS?

I was responding to the “Look, they’re all nice people” defense you quoted, not contradicting you. I agree with you in principle.

I don’t consider “misguided” a valid defence.

My view of morality is largely centered on intent, so “I thought it would be a good thing” is a valid defence (though there is also a degree of responsibility to check assumptions; if you never made any effort to check if it actually is a good thing, that’s negligence)

So it’s hard to be good when your salary depends on you being bad.

…and by extension, when your livelihood depends on you being bad, yes. Not everyone’s livelihood depends on their salary, but for many people it does. If it’s hard to find a job that can pay the bills, I don’t fault people for the human reflex of justifying bad things to yourself in the name of survival.

(But if they do have a choice and choose to enrich themselves at the expense of others, they’re obviously pricks - just saying this might not apply to all the devs involved here).

You can be a great person and still write garbage software. Whether you’re just doing it because you need money or whether you’re misguided and think it’s actually good, that doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person (and remember: It’s hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it).

Doesn’t make the software less garbage.

What exactly makes a podcast then?

Probably because there are no sanctions against them that his government is cracking down on? I don’t think he wants to get involved in politics so much as stay out of prison.

I mean, if you asked me something like that about our system’s sales, I’d have an answer for you in a few minutes. But then, I’m BI and not Accounting, so I’m probably more proficient at pulling aggregated data straight from the archive DB.

I mean, your counterexample is already the epitome of exploitation, so I’m not sure citing it would exonerate Paradox here :D

I mean, your counterexample is already the epitome of exploitation, so I’m not sure citing it would exonerate Paradox here :D

Yeah, you’re right. I got hit on a sore spot, responded impulsively and was a dick about it.

Sorry I was trying to match the level of insulting tone of your reply, I guess I went too mean.

Eh, I’d be a hypocrite to point fingers for that. All good.

Technology Connections actually has great CC and Transcripts as I believe Alec adds them directly after proofing an as aired script after his final edit.

I don’t know this specific creator, or many YT tech creators really, since YT isn’t really my main haunt (I’ve tried to explaing that elsewhere, but it boils down to “I rarely have the mental ability to sit and watch them”) and I genuinely prefer articles.

The video having good CC doesn’t solve most of my problems, unfortunately. It’s a good thing to have, don’t get me wrong, just doesn’t help me a whole lot.

it’s about a crappy ‘news’ site generating a two paragraph summary of a YouTube video and screencaping images from said video in order to generate ad revenue with minimal effort and dubious ethics

I’ll grant the dubious ethics point. That subtext didn’t parse for me. My focus was on the fact that the article, being a textual medium, is more useful to me.

I’m mostly upset at the prevalence of video content and the tendency to push people away from text, like “This guy has a great video” is a useful response to “I’m looking for an article”. This topic set me off, but my frustration is independent of the specific context. I’ve had it happen often enough to make it a sore spot, but that isn’t strictly the original comment’s fault.

If you’re so interested in the subject and want to learn more about the subject why not look for one, or even just ask?

It’s not a deep interest so much as a passing “stumble across something interesting”, so I wouldn’t necessarily seek out content on the topic. But if I were offered an essily digestible format, I’d be curious enough to consume it.

I agree that it would be better not to post cheap ripoffs, but they fill a market gap that I’m the audience for. The solution isn’t to complain about the moochers filling the gap, but to fill the gap yourself. I’m not defending sloppy AI text specifically, but the concept of converting content to a different medium.

If the content creators don’t want to cater to those who prefer that other medium - perfectly fine, that’s their prerogative. But to then complain if someone else adapts your content to a medium you didn’t want to, that’s what rubs me the wrong way.

Also, you’re a dingus.

Fair enough. My phrasing was harsh and born of a frustration that I didn’t really convey.

In my experience, YT would still end up loading a section of the video along with previews of suggestion. Maybe that has changed.

If it can make accurate transcriptions, sure. I’d enjoy the option of sending a link to an autotranscriber and get a conveniently readable version out of it.

And a good day to you too. Not sure why you felt the need to be insulting, but anyway.

A transcript of the video

Would you happen to have one handy? Or are these autogenerated these days. Are they better than the autogenerated CCs?

Also there’s a source listed in the description, guess what it is? An article.

Yeah, which would require me to click on YT in the first place, which is already what I want to avoid due to a limited mobile data plan and YT being a wonderful drain on that.

I’m just trying to push the point that “just watch the original video instead” isn’t as great a solution for everyone as some people make it out to be.

No, it’s about me not being able to arbitrarily sit down and watch a video due to various issues like attention span, hearing issues*, limited mobile data and being at work, where an article or summary is much easier and faster to read and can be interrupted at a moment’s notice unlike a video which I’ll have to pause, scrub back through if I missed a detail and wait for it to get to the right point, and I can more easily search for stuff.

My point is that there seems to be a habit of dismissing the value of textual summaries in favour of “just watch the video” in much of the online world, where I’ll be looking for a quick explanation and get presented with some video instead. Some people don’t do so well with videos so it’s not “just” watching the video.

There are advantages to text that I hate seeing people ignore.

(Besides, how would you know I’m incapable rather than just unwilling; or why would you assume either in the first place instead of considering inability?)

* That issue applies to voice messages and phone calls too. While videos occasionally have good CC, I haven’t found them to be reliable or ubiquitous enough. Additionally, they present the speech in fragments and usually are just as hard to search through. Either way, videos are a “sometimes” thing for me.

EDIT: That was an undeservedly harsh phrasing. The matter touched a nerve, but that’s not OPs fault. I’ll clarify, but leave the original comment at the end for transparency.

I’m not a fan of videos and much prefer having texts to read. I find them more comfortable to process, interrupt, resume, search for a specific section and consume while not on WiFi (due to a limited data plan, which YT tends to eat through).

Both professionally and privately, I have been frustrated by the number of tutorials and guides that are presented as videos where articles would work well enough. They seem to be more popular too, to the point that useful articles are buried deeper in the results.

I like textual summaries of interesting videos, because I’m curious, but often not enough to warrant clicking a YouTube link. I understand people’s frustration with AI ripoffs stealing content, but if the original content creator doesn’t cater to a textual medium, then someone else steps into that gap, I don’t feel like it’s so much ripping off as adapting to a different medium.

If the original creator offered a textual summary, and someone stole that to sell it as their own, I’d share the frustration. But if they didn’t, you can’t really steal what never existed.

Not that I’m a fan of AI slop specifically, but it’s better than nothing. If I can’t have a human one, I’d rather have an AI transcription than be excluded.

Sorry about my rudeness. This is a sore spot, but being snarky doesn’t help anyone.

Original comment below

Does someone have a content description so I can read instead of having to watch it?

Oh wait, here’s an article, nevermind.

I’ve had to grapple with pipewire. My old pulseaudio config didn’t seem to work and I wanted to migrate to the pw config file format anyway, but I found the pw docs to be highly opaque. You get a thousand solutions for commands online, or tools you can do it visually in, but to apply that config you need to start the tool…

I’m a noob, granted, but there seemed to be a lot of assumed common knowledge that I just don’t have. And if I don’t even know what I’m missing, it’s hard to google for it.

edit: not for sexual purposes

That’s clever, I like it

One big supermarket chain here has an app where you get a few cents bonus discount on already discounted items with the app coupon. The in-store announcement praises it as the first place of some insitute’s supermarket app ranking. Even if that institute were legit, the ranking fair and the spot well-deserved, I always felt like that’s a competition with no winners.

Particularly since some companies have made their websites intentionally shit so that you’d be encouraged to use the app instead. I noticed that with out local flavour of door dash, where the website got slower and clunkier and generally more shit right around the same time that the “Use our app!” banners got more obnoxious.