Victor Villas

Pretty alright, but struggling with ennui a little bit. I don’t know how to live without short-term challenges, and for now I have none.

It has been great! First holiday season away from my family as a newly minted expat, but I’m lucky to have four/five other couples from my home country going through pretty much the same thing, so we’ve been each others support . Me and my partner are positively surprised at how well things have been working (mostly)!

New Kurtzgesagt video, a new opportunity to improve my filter bubble by blocking anyone who starts parroting factoids about their ties with the Gates Foundation 🤭 great day

Morning Show seasons 2 and 3 condensed in a single week

Mine has been working fine, but the instance did lose all my “Mark as watched” videos, and for some reason one specific channel never makes into the Subscriptions panel, but I just have it as a favourite and it ends up almost the same. The instance I was using for Piped is now borked, so I’m hanging onto Invidious for now.

Firefox is just the only decent option. And while at it, use Piped or Invidious while you still can, people!

What a complicated way of getting a building floor reassignment

Holy guacamole, Argentina was at the precipice’s edge and finally decided to take a step forward

Sorry for the comrades who will have to deal with this hell

It’s called a slope chart and it has several benefits compared to bar charts:

• https://datavizproject.com/data-type/slope-chart/
• https://seeingdata.org/taketime/inside-the-chart-slope-graph/
• https://www.storytellingwithdata.com/blog/2020/7/27/what-is-a-slopegraph

I for one think this is much better than using a bar chart for this use case, as the angled arrows make it immediately obvious the information that matters the most here (the rate of change) while still keeping it contextualized (by relative positions). The bar chart version of this would inevitably look more cluttered and would not be more effective in conveying the incredible progress in solar costs.

So really it’s just a polite way of saying “yeah you better be thankful.”

lol that escalated quickly

When I hear “you’re welcome” the only thing I think of is that I’m welcome

We really are social creatures. Went big on Orkut, Facebook, WhatsApp, and of course the current trends are YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. I think the only one that didn’t really take off that much (relatively speaking) was Snapchat.

Even finance apps had way too much social features, looking at you PicPay with the worst timeline feature ever: see people’s payments to each other lmao

Not unpopular with me at all, my wife also prefers regular YouTube because the video quality tends to be better. YouTube just handles variable connection speeds better, and the buffering and quality switching is very smart. I mostly agree, the watching experience is superior.

But YouTube ads are among the highest annoyances of my daily life right now, they simply could not be less relevant for me. Because I’m in NA it’s adamant that I buy an EV or an SUV, a bunch of fast food ads, it’s just too much. I’m willing to spend 20 seconds waiting for Piped to buffer instead of 8 seconds of YouTube ads.

And I’m not really hoping Piped will ever go mainstream, because as you said, if that happens they’re toast. Piped and Invidious have to stay niche to keep flying under the radar - well not really under the radar, YouTube already sent a Cease and Desist to Invidious, but I guess for now they’re not invested in enforcing it yet.

Yes, it’s a client. Well, for better or for worse, no chance that this huge of a user base will move to piped. I don’t understand why it’s not super famous yet, but I guess invidious and piped are simply fringe tech still.

That’s why I said that YouTube would need a major tragedy to get a real hit, real alternatives like Peertube are going to struggle a lot against the network effect. Nebula has a much better shot given the amount of content creators invested on it, and it’s still a long shot.

I’m placing my bets on piped video instead, for now at least. YouTube needs something more tragic, like getting acquired by Elon Musk, before it bleeds for real.

At this point I’m just holding for dear life to piped.video, because illegal front-ends are my only hope to keep watching YouTube.

Yeah, it’s a decent app with less overreach seeping in from Meta compared with Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Still, it makes me uncomfortable that many communities that I value greatly would be out of my reach if it were to stop using it. For now it’s not a problem, but I’m hyper-aware of the danger.

In my case, that but WhatsApp. Can’t live without it, as much as I’d like.

It is. Among literal children, TikTok and YouTube wins because it’s easy to consume without a real social network.

Among teenagers, though, Instagram goes hard.

Since 2014-15, TikTok has arisen; Facebook usage has dropped; Instagram, Snapchat have grown

It is a good comparison, but it goes to show how the framing of individual freedom supremacy warps any discussion about the collective. As soon as you hit “freedom age” magic number, suddenly you can’t hold accountable the powers at play anymore.