I'm now several years out of a career as a web designer and running my own retail business on Shopify and so while I've always had a background in working with devs and having a vague idea of how to plan and spec something, my previous job was design and writing HTML and CSS and I always wanted to be able to make small tools or little fun projects for me but the other parts of the project - the js, caching, api integration etc were always beyond my skillset.
While I wouldn't say execution is necessarily "cheap" for everything, ChatGPT and Gemini helped me build out a little Spotify playlist generator [1] recently that scans my top 100 artists in the last 12 months then generate a playlist based on their bottom 50% of songs in terms of popularity with an option for 1 or 2 songs per artist.
Sadly the Spotify API limits will never allow me to offer it to more than 25 people at a time but I get so bored of their algorithm playing me the same top songs from artists it's a fun way for me to explore "lesser lights" and something I'd have absolutely never have been able to build before, let alone spin up in a couple of evenings.
It's quite liberating as a non-dev suddenly having these new tools available that's for sure.
I don't really see how this isn't just content theft at this point. Pointing at "inspiration sites" and just rewording their content feels pretty scummy at best.
At what point are content creators and publishers going to be paid for or given the option to block AI scraping tools using their material so blatantly to generate income for other companies and publishers?
> Pointing at "inspiration sites" and just rewording their content
Sounds like Reddit, minus the AI part. Any time someone might be on the verge of an original thought there it gets shot down with something akin to "[citation needed]", followed by strong social pressure for the user to stop participating if they can't manage just rewording "inspiration sites".
To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money.
Sometimes when I've forgotten to log in and see what it's like without, it's amazing anyone can watch videos on there. Like a lot of people I've generally been OK to watch ads in exchange for free content but it seems over the years instead of ads getting better and/or more relevant to my interests (even broadly), they're getting much worse.
I assume this is the result of companies just accepting ££ for anything rather than having more quality control?
As the old saying goes, good ideas shouldn't require force. If they have a "no-brainer" offering, no need to strong-arm people into using it, right?
I get it that they are not a charity and can monetize or paywall their platforms as seen fit, but there's something just sad about the model where you build a customer-friendly and open platform, then progressively crapify it once you capture a niche and eliminate most alternatives, and then start penalizing users for trying to work around that.
In Google/YouTube's defense, this mentality is why we can't have nice things. You think it's cheap to host the content YouTube does? Paying for premium to remove ads is a way of saying "Thank you for providing me this service, instead of displaying me irrelevant ads, just take my money"
It's also worth noting that creators get paid more for YT Premium views than ad-based views. YouTube, for all its problems, has far better revenue-sharing than pretty much any other "user generate content" platform.
>You think it's cheap to host the content YouTube does?
These discussions always include bad-faith arguments about offsetting costs.
The purpose of ads on websites like YouTube is not just to offset costs, it is to maximize profits. The distinction is important; it means Google doesn't stop showing you ads once they've paid their bills, so please stop framing it this way. They will show you as many ads as they can before it starts to hurt their bottom line. They are not serving videos to be nice.
This is what we want, though, right? The alternatives would be a paywall, or charge per view. (Or, I guess, pay to "own", like a Kindle ebook, but seems like a mismatch for most of their content.)
By this logic, buying e-books from Amazon is the worst value I can think of, because I can get them effortlessly from libgen and other "sources", and a single book can cost as much as the whole year of YouTube premium.
If you truly believe this (which I don't agree with), at least you're consistent. But I feel "adblock good, piracy bad" is a double standard that many people hold.
Practically, I think adblocker is even slightly worse than piracy. At least when you download a cracked game via a torrent, you don't cost Steam any money.
Except ad-blocker is literally just stealing bandwidth. Just because it's legal (under the current law), it doesn't mean it's morally right. Why should Youtube or any hosting service serves a user when they refuses to view the ads? YouTube is not a public service.
Yes, this is why YouTube should just refuse to serve you and other adblocker users. This way it can no longer steal your time, and it's the only fair solution.
It is morally right, not because it is legal, but because I was never asked to make a market transaction for the content. By your reasoning, it would be theft to close your eyes during a TV commercial. I completely reject your line of reasoning.
HN has become somewhere I visit daily just because of that interesting variety and well moderated content. I'm far from a smart hacker and as a former web designer turned seller of Japanese knives, I just enjoy reading varied and interesting content even if I often don't understand it.
It's the discussion below that I particularly enjoy even though I'm very much a lurker, the strong moderation and quality community feel adds massively to some complicated (for me) topics.
This is me also - in fact I generally come to the comments before I read the article and likely only read 1 in 4 articles - mainly enjoying the debate and insights here over the articles.
It is one of the sites and start and end my day with - if I find myself using the site more than that I know I'm either bored or stressed and try to do something about it.
> Stop eating carbs about 2 months before. I did this and went from a 2:06 to 1:58 with minimal training. My body carried several kg less weight and felt like it could consume its own fat energy more efficiently and I didn’t get the 2/3 slump.
You would likely get the same results and time drop just by running consistent training mileage for 2 months instead of a big diet change like this.
This must be the ultimate HN reader video fodder, popped up in my feed the other day too. Interesting watching people like this who just decide they want to be away from everything.
This is the problem with so many companies these days in terms of not being able to get hold of anyone and just getting thrown into a loop of bot replies and semi-relevant faq pages.
I run a small business in UK and have had a few issues in the past where I've been unable to get any sort of resolution through regular channels and I've actually contacted my local MP and asked them to help intervene or at least reach a person in authority who could own the problem.
I may not agree with his actual political party but as a local MP he is good with small businesses and uses the clout of his office and name. Obviously YMMV on this depending on your MP but desperate times etc.
The goal with this design (same for Netflix etc) is not to show you the results you want to see in the most efficient format, it's to push what they want you to see.
It's even more apparent on Netflix where the UI has got progressively worse over the years to the point it's basically unusable to discover stuff you actually want to see - I mean, large rows of "you watched this already, here it is again".
While I wouldn't say execution is necessarily "cheap" for everything, ChatGPT and Gemini helped me build out a little Spotify playlist generator [1] recently that scans my top 100 artists in the last 12 months then generate a playlist based on their bottom 50% of songs in terms of popularity with an option for 1 or 2 songs per artist.
Sadly the Spotify API limits will never allow me to offer it to more than 25 people at a time but I get so bored of their algorithm playing me the same top songs from artists it's a fun way for me to explore "lesser lights" and something I'd have absolutely never have been able to build before, let alone spin up in a couple of evenings.
It's quite liberating as a non-dev suddenly having these new tools available that's for sure.
[1] https://github.com/welcomebrand/Spotify-Lesser-Lights