As a young film student my Prof asked me whether I wanted to go to a talk to which he was invited. It was on the genres shown in German public television.
There the summary of the discussion was: Our core demographic are 60 to 70 year olds which is why we only make shows that appeal to 60-70 year olds and our core audience watches TV while doing household chores, so it needs to be simple to follow, so they can do household chores while watching.
I told them that to me this sounds a lot like circular logic, where they justify the things they are doing with the outcomes that produced. It is obvious there are other markets targeting different audiences (e.g. the likes of Netflix have been explicitly mentioned) and these markets are growing based on the way demographics shift.
A bit like a drug dealer that says he can't do honest work since all his customers are drug addicts, they are using the status quo as an excuse to persist the status quo.
The real way to think about these things is to consider them feedback loops. If all your content targets a specific demographic of course you're gonna have more audience members of that demographic, which again leads you to make more content for said demographic, which leads to more audience members of that demographic which... Until you hit some systemic limit, e.g. you have saturated the market or it turns out your content isn't that appealing to begin with in comparison to other stuff.
That means if you want to be strategic about this you need to give incentives to creators to produce stuff for audiences you don't already have. Even better: you need to become a partner these creators can and want to trust in.
These are the levers YouTube needs to pull if they want to stay a relevant platform that people enjoy spending their time on.
I have used many things to generate print documents and layouted PDFs:
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe InDesign
- Markdown with and without custom themes
- Markdown compiled to .idml to integrate into InDesign
- HTML and CSS
- LATeX
Typst is so far one of the most enjoyable ways of programmatically generating layouted stuff I ever used.
The only thing missing is a good Desktop editor that allows dumb users to double-click a .typ file and see/edit the file instead of having to setup VSCode, plugins etc.
A government ideally is a representation of the democratically chosen will of the people. If it is not, work towards making it so. IMO wherever someone says "the government" we should mentally substitute "we all, collectively".
But a specific type of person appears to labour under the illusion that somehow we can get by without we all collectively steering our direction and choosing people who do what needs to be done without commercial interest. Their idea is that instead of choosing people who do it, we just make them compete for who can squeeze the most profit out of dealing with a problem and "somehow" that leads to a better result. When you press them for the details on that part of the mechanism, you will usually get crickets.
Interestingly, the people who try to separate themselves from "the government" also seem to be the kind of people who want to "spread our model of democracy to the rest of the world".
How they can even reconcile being such a great democracy that the world needs to ~copy~ be force-fed with having an adversary government I don't know. The cognitive dissonance is so great that it's hard to fathom.
It's all such a self-defeating ideology, they think the government isn't doing a good enough job, so they lobby to make it impossible for them to do a good job and then pretend that it proves their point.
> IMO wherever someone says "the government" we should mentally substitute "we all, collectively".
No, we should substitute "unaccountable bureaucrats". The people who enter and leave power from elections are not the source of the daily frustrations people have with government, it's the rest.
Same way anyone else got their job, but that's beside the point. The point is that accountability in government is significantly lower than in private industry, and this is a big source of the problems.
If this is in fact an issue where you life, then you should consider stopping to elect politicians that allow bureaucrats to be unaccountable. Or stop believing politicians who rave on about how bureaucrats are unaccountable while they themselves have the power to shape systems where that would not be the case.
Yes? With sufficient pedantic spirit anything can be argued against. This is what you're doing. So to give a counter-example: You drive with three friends in a car. You ask them: "Do we all want to go to MC Donald's?"
Explain how it is wrong and why it would be. If it is always wrong it follows it has to be wrong here too. The answer is that the meaning of "we all" is context dependent and that friend of yours that argues that we all somehow includes people in the whole city is an oddball that doesn't pick up the context within the words have been said.
We can all go around and make each others day worse with deliberate pedantry by ignoring the context of words, but that is basically just a waste of human energy. If you disagree with the fundamental point I made, argue against it based on the merits of the idea instead of arguing semantics.
A rental managment system for university workshops that rent out equipment. Since I have been doing this for 5 years I know all the realworld edge cases and what I have is already better than most competitors.
I decided to tell the LLM to not generate any CSS for a web frontend I am working on. It is just not worth the hassle and doing it myself is actually a way to think about usability and design in a valuable way, that flows back into how I want the whole service to be structured.
The design coming out of a LLM may be okay if you have nothing to do with design and can't program CSS, I just see a deeply inconsistent mess.
I am convinced well designed software has to be thought out from the user perspective. And if I am the one to commandeer a LLM, designing myself is part of thinking about what I want.
Well I think it is even more complex. If you're a plumber in a rotten system of pipes the whole company depends on, you can fix issues day in and day out, without speaking a word and they will notice everything is a bit unreliable and thus you do a bad job. You could do the exact same work, but make a big thing about every major fix, warn people a week ahead, give them the feeling the company depends on it and then do the exact same work and tell them how you fixed it. Suddenly you did a good job, despite you literally doing the exact same thing with your hands.
The difference is how it was communicated. Most non-Tech/non-infrastructure-people got no clue about these things. If they know you're battling the demons of plumbing on their behalf they will thank you, if you're the weird guy that has smeared dirt in the face and is seen once a week while the plumbing fails ever so often, guess what.
That means even if the problems and their fixes remain the same, the communication around them really matters. Tech people can be extremely bad with this. And if we're talking IT it is really the plumbing that holds the company together.
"This is what my regular customers pay me. If I hired one of my friends or relatives I see it as my duty to pay them at least what they are worth, this is the way you raised me."
I believe this to be true btw. If someone is really your friend, you want them to do well and that means you pay what they usually get or you don't bother them and get someone else.
I agree. I have never taken a discount from a friend or family member for work that they do for a living. It never made sense to me how anyone would want to underpay someone in their family or close circle of friends. I do however, go out of my way to make sure that they are charging what they are really worth.
There the summary of the discussion was: Our core demographic are 60 to 70 year olds which is why we only make shows that appeal to 60-70 year olds and our core audience watches TV while doing household chores, so it needs to be simple to follow, so they can do household chores while watching.
I told them that to me this sounds a lot like circular logic, where they justify the things they are doing with the outcomes that produced. It is obvious there are other markets targeting different audiences (e.g. the likes of Netflix have been explicitly mentioned) and these markets are growing based on the way demographics shift.
A bit like a drug dealer that says he can't do honest work since all his customers are drug addicts, they are using the status quo as an excuse to persist the status quo.
The real way to think about these things is to consider them feedback loops. If all your content targets a specific demographic of course you're gonna have more audience members of that demographic, which again leads you to make more content for said demographic, which leads to more audience members of that demographic which... Until you hit some systemic limit, e.g. you have saturated the market or it turns out your content isn't that appealing to begin with in comparison to other stuff.
That means if you want to be strategic about this you need to give incentives to creators to produce stuff for audiences you don't already have. Even better: you need to become a partner these creators can and want to trust in.
These are the levers YouTube needs to pull if they want to stay a relevant platform that people enjoy spending their time on.
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