fabio

amoroso, 3 months ago to blogging

"The problem then isn’t a lack of blogs and personal sites or the frequency at which new posts get published, but rather the visibility and discoverability of our sites and our posts in the constant noise of social media chatter."

By @matthiasott

https://buttondown.email/ownyourweb/archive/issue-08

#blogroll #blogging #blogs

fabio, 3 months ago to Youtube

So many interesting insights in this research.

First, the technique used by these researchers to find out the actual number of videos hosted on #YouTube is definitely unorthodox (and inefficient), but it worked. Since Google won’t provide these numbers, and relying on traditional crawling techniques is likely to bring to the surface only videos that enough people have already interacted with, researchers have run an algorithm on a bunch of supercomupters that simply brute forced all the possible combinations of YouTube ID strings, and kept track of the requests that didn’t end up with a 404.

Second, even a conservative estimate of the number of videos on the platform is massive. 14 billion. Or nearly two videos for each human alive. With an unfathomably long tail.

To dig more in detail, videos with 10,000 or more views account for nearly 94% of the site’s traffic overall, but less than 4% of total uploads - a quite extreme version of the 80-20 rule. About 5% of videos have no views at all, almost 75% have no comments, and even more have no likes.

This sheds an interesting light on what YouTube actually is. Not a product that should be monetized at all costs, but a collective memory of basically all the media content that the human race has created in the past two decades. It’s vital infrastructure that should require no entry barriers, and it should be treated as such.

Most of the minutes of videos stored on YouTube’s servers aren’t from MrBeast, Veritasium or Tom Scott. They are from church services, weddings, condo-board meetings, graduation ceremonies, school lectures, and all other things that humans record and want to save on a permanent storage - for themselves, their families, their co-workers, their friends or their classmates. With absolutely no intention of monetization, wider reach, or whatever stinky corporate metrics YouTube PMs are obsessed with.

When you store most of the media content that our whole species created in the past two decades, you have a strong duty of making it accessible to everyone, all the time, with the smallest amount of friction and UX disruption. And that’s exactly the opposite of what Google has been doing lately.

I don’t see a use-case where we should keep publishing to YouTube, unless you are a professional creator with some actual following there. It should never be used for storing things to be shared only with a small circle, and even less as a permanent storage of your memories. Google can’t be trusted, and yet we’ve donated them all of our creations of the past 20 years, thinking that they’ll take care of them forever - remember the “unlimited storage, forever” promise made by GMail back in the day?

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/how-many-videos-youtube-research/677250/

fabio, 3 months ago to random

An applause to #NextCloud for being the first tech company to take a clear stance against identity/exclusionary politics and fascism, and for inviting all other tech companies to join their appeal.

When fascists are back in town, you can't just throw around your generic talk about inclusion and diversity.

You also need to clearly point out who is at risk, what are the risks, and who are the fascists.

Tech shapes our world. So nobody needs tech companies that don't take positions or responsibilities in how they shape it.

https://nextcloud.com/blog/statement-nextcloud-stands-for-an-open-and-free-society/

fabio, 3 months ago to linux

I guess it's again #introduction time, as I've just moved over from @blacklight. So there we go:

• 🇮🇹 geek in his mid-thirties, based in 🇳🇱

• 👔 My job involves solving problem at scale, one line of code at the time, with varying degrees of success.

• ⚙️ My hobbies often involve automating everything around me.

• :linux: #Linux user since 2001. Like many in my age group, I also used to run a forum and a wiki on an old Pentium 1 repurposed as a Slackware-based server under my bed.

• :arch: #Arch Linux and rolling release enthusiast.

• 🛠 Creator and main developer of #Platypush (https://platypush.tech), an open-source, general-purpose platform/framework to automate everything. With hundreds of available integrations, you can think of it as IFTTT+Tasker+SmartThings on steroids, scriptable, and runnable on almost any device. Or maybe like HomeAssistant's more hackish brother.

• 🤖 Machine-learning enthusiast. I have published a book on it https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-6821-6, with simple computer vision exercises that can be run on a #RaspberryPi, and I did some academic research back in time where neural networks were still a green field https://fabiomanganiello.com/#research, and I never stop learning new stuff.

• 🧪️ Physics, chemistry, biology, maths and astronomy enthusiast.

• 🎵 Music addict, decent guitar player, not-so-decent player of many other instruments, and occasional composer/producer of boring music. You can find some of my music here https://my.music.fabiomanganiello.com and here https://open.spotify.com/artist/5H6BJfHec8qLnkm0S2HkxO

• Surf, skate and bike guy.

• 👪 Full-time Dad.

fabio, 3 months ago to apple

The amount of gaslighting in this article is almost outrageous.

The DMA is a regulation that gives customers more choice, that enables competition again in established monopolies that most live out of collected rent, and that opens again the market of app stores, payment methods and apps business models that #Apple has been trying to consolidate and ossify since it came up with the iPhone.

After grasping all the benefits of an absolute monopoly for years, and becoming the most valued company in human history without delivering a single new innovative product in several years, a business like Apple should have the decency of just shutting up and complying.

Instead, they have the guts of coming up with an article like this that talks in terms of new risks the DMA poses to EU users, calls the call for more app stores, business models and payment gateways new avenues for malware, fraud and scams, illicit and harmful content, and other privacy and security threats, and they say that, despite the EU's evil plans of infecting all of its citizen's phones by allowing them to download stuff outside of the App store, Apple will continue to deliver the best, most secure experience possible for EU users.

I'm not sure how much Apple pays its marketing and PR departments for coming up with such obnoxious levels of deceit.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/01/apple-announces-changes-to-ios-safari-and-the-app-store-in-the-european-union/

blacklight, 4 months ago to random

Ok, git.platypush.tech has successfully been migrated from Gitea to Forgejo.

It didn't take long - it is indeed a drop-in replacement, but the systemd configuration packaged with Arch required a bit of tweaking to point to the previous Gitea paths and some permissions changes, only then it's an actual drop-in replacement.

Luckily I've always used git as a username rather than gitea, so that part, after a few changes in the configuration, won't require any more changes.

Tip: never, ever use the default username provided by your code forge (gitlab, gitea, forgejo...). Code forges come and go, and one after the other they are doomed to enshittification. Code repositories, configurations, scripts and documentation are there to stay instead. So never use a username that is tied to your code forge, or you'll have a hard time changing it later.