I suspect it's because they don't want you to focus on the past, only the present. Or maybe it's because it would either highlight how irrelevant the change is, or how annoying the new one is.
I have an extra suggestion: Maybe some keyboard key mapping, like up/down for switching the channel. I'm imagining having this perma-running in a small PC connected to a TV and the small wireless remotes have mappings for the arrow keys and up/down for channel would be perfect for that. (maybe other mappings as well)
I'd echo the sentiment that this is amazing, and that a TV guide would be awesome.
I'd also suggest maybe adding the channel names (like the comment you posted here) to the app itself (although i think it's cool when it's unnamed and you get the old-school feeling of channels just being numbers).
Also, I'd love to have permalinks for the channels. Not for the individual videos themselves, but just a link that when sharing would bring somebody else to the same channel you're watching right now.
Another thing, although probably outside your control, is that I use a Firefox extension called "SoundFixer" that I use to force the youtube audio to mono (since a lot of channels are annoying to me using headphones, they pan the audio sources too hard left/right and it's super distracting), but it doesn't seem to work on this website, probably because of the way they're embedded. I don't know if this can be changed somehow, or have a mode to force mono audio (which would be also oldschool like old TVs with one speaker only!). It's probably too niche and hard to do though.
Also I don't seem to find any volume control except mute?
Before Netflix, there was Blockbuster. If we’re old enough, we remember going there and wandering through the aisles, trying to find something we would commit to. It was just as hard as picking something to watch today. There’s something incredibly important about not having the option and just going with the flow, which I think a lot of people won’t admit they like but actually do. It’s something truly missing from today’s society.
Actually, now that I think about it, I believe this is why TikTok succeeds so well, along with all the doom scrolling—it’s exactly like this. You don’t know what you’re going to get next. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t, and that’s okay. You’re just flipping through it.
> There’s something incredibly important about not having the option and just going with the flow, which I think a lot of people won’t admit they like but actually do.
Personally, I hate it. I can easily get glued to it and watch any random junk. And because it keeps going ad infinitum, I lost track of time and kept wasting my time, even if I was angry at how bad the program was.
With the internet, I always have to make a choice regarding what to watch next, and for every thing I pick the runtime is clearly visible. It helps me make conscious choices and figure out when to stop.
> It’s something truly missing from today’s society.
That feels like a stretch. TV still exists. And it’s mostly garbage.
It’s an odd “in between” between classic TV and YouTube itself.
If you want to watch “the most likely thing you would want to watch” (NFL, Olympics main feed), YouTubeTV is great.
But as soon as you want to find something off the top few recommendations, it gets much harder. Compare that to regular TV, when I could just remember 27 is Discovery Channel and get there instantly.
The answer is pretty obvious. They don't want people remembering the content producers. Same reason they've worked so hard to kill the subscription feed on YouTube. They want you to rely on their recommendation engine.
Their TV choices are confounding. I don’t know about other platforms, but the YouTube app on Apple TV is the most useless thing I’ve ever tried. Search is abysmal.
Interesting, This is apparently a TikTok-like scroller for youtube channel content, which they should have done natively many years ago...
I suspect they never did this because they never wanted to make YouTube compete directly with cable TV. YouTube content is displayed in a drab click-click UI because they want users to not scroll deeper for the content that isn't sponsored (paid) all the way to the front pages.
The UI of YouTube hasn't changed in essence for ages, it's still page based with only a few (shrinking) trending lists.
I think the reason they do that is because it allows them to control what is prominently displayed across YouTube -- The same concept is used across most social apps, where there are few features for discovering new content. The pages display embarrassing low view metrics on non-sponsored accounts, even when they may have really great content, it's really a backwards way of controlling what trends, and subsequently what makes money for the platform and sponsored creators.
If real choice was allowed on most of these platforms, we'd see literally endless (new) options for interesting new content on a wider variety of topics from creators none of us know, but right now, with shrinking choice, we only see manufactured and heavily co-opted content creators like Mr. Beast, Kai Cenat, Joe Budden, Pewdie Pie, (etc)-- they are usually sanitized, coached, & trained personalities picked based on who sponsors them and based on what makes the most ad profit for the platform. Most of that content seems to be very rigged and fake to me, as they clearly have staff working out of view. I find most of that manufactured (Picked YouTube Influencer) content to be drab and over-scripted... I can't stand watching it on & off YouTube personally.
Interesting channel scroller... The way it plays content also seems to look far more lively than watching YouTube on the regular site for some reason. I'd love to easily see the option to customize what is displayed based on the YouTube channels I already follow, and links back to subscribe to channel content I like while watching. A feed for specifically music-related content (by genre maybe) would be highly useful.
YouTube TV was equal parts awesome and horrifying for the Olympics. It had plenty of great content, including a solid amount of 4k
It also had the worst search UX I have ever experienced.
Most importantly, recording an event did not guarantee you got the whole thing! There were numerous events I was watching from my ‘library’ that did not include the final 10-30 min of action. WTH? Did you really record based on time stamps alone? What year is this?!
>Another thing, although probably outside your control, is that I use a Firefox extension called "SoundFixer" that I use to force the youtube audio to mono
In windows you can also go to "Ease of access audio settings" and click "Turn on mono audio". Useful for games which have positional audio which gets annoying (sf6 training room for example).
> since a lot of channels are annoying to me using headphones, they pan the audio sources too hard left/right and it's super distracting
I find this interesting. Are you oversensitive? I've never even considered that this could be an issue. Do you experience the same problem with other things like music and games?
Not the parent, but with similar view on panned audio. If it's music where it's done on purpose, no problem. But talking with audio in one ear? I'm out. Not sure why exactly, but it's very jarring.
For me, it's one of the worst audio quality issues a video can have.
If you have mpv+yt-dlp set up you can fix this with an audio filter to mix to mono.
mpv --audio-channels=mono 'urlhere'
Somewhat related, I've used
--vf=lavfi="hflip"
to fix videos which are annoyingly mirrored to avoid copyright. You could also bind these options to keys in mpv to use on the fly. Some videos will only mirror some parts of their footage.
Lets me rotate the video. I sometimes also just open a web image in mpv and rotate it like that to avoid tilting my head.
I also have these binds for unbalanced audio, mainly used with 5.1 audio to sound better on headphones or stereo speakers, and the \ bind one seems to make normal stuff slightly louder also, so sometimes I hit it when I don't wanna turn up my speaker knob for one video.
\ af toggle lavfi=[dynaudnorm=f=100]
| af toggle lavfi=loudnorm
I have carla running at all times and put all of my system audio through various loopback devices (browser, voice conferencing, and music/system) and then apply varying degrees of compression to them (no surprise sounds, hard limiting to hear quiet people, and bypass -- respectively).
Of course everything goes through an extra limiter at the end to avoid clipping.
I also send the voice conferencing input and output through RNNoise, so I can avoid emitting terrible sounds and avoid hearing them as well.
People also seem to like me better when I cut my mids a little bit, but additional research is required.
The reason for this is that I can change browsers (or games or voice apps) and they all think I'm just using a normal mic and headset, but it's actually like 10 LSP plugins and various routing.
Still doesn't feel that complicated when you do a little bit at a time.
i love your spirit and it's interesting to read how you handle your sound, but it's almost comical to see someone describe using 10 freaking plugins to handle sound as 'not super complicated' :D
As someone with minor but noticeable hearing issues, the reason it's so jarring is because our brain's audio processing center depends on both ears for understanding human speech.
If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side. Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over.
>> Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over.
That's when you discover you can lip read to a certain degree. There is way more to it than that. Speech is only one of the sets of cues we use when discoursing. Hand gestures, body posture, facial expressions and more are all involved too.
I'm somewhat deaf in both ears, worse in one and always have been. I have had tinnitus since birth. My deafness does not affect all frequencies equally. Thankfully its mostly the high frequencies that have gone a bit dark and the tinnitus may be largely to blame.
Anyway, your senses are all linked up and your brain is rather good at making connections to try and make up for deficiencies in some areas by co-opting other bits. I have minor lip reading skills to augment my hearing. I can't help it! I also swivel somewhat to try and deploy my better ear as the situation allows. One must try and maintain decorum and not look too weird 8)
"If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side. Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over."
This sounds like personal experience. I don't know how old you are but give it time ...
"If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side."
This is personal experience, but it is the personal experience of my specialist telling me. [1] is some less anecdotal information on the subject. My use of the term "game over" was specifically for audible speech interpretation.
Lip reading is indeed something I'll probably need to get better at into my mid-30s and beyond as things continue to degrade. My hearing loss is low-frequency-first (Meniere's Disease [2]).
I was diagnosed with "glue ear" as a young child, which I don't think any doctor admits to these days! I had two lots of grommet related operations which involved inserting tiny plastic hollow cylinders into my eustachian tubes, to try and widen them. After a couple of years they were removed by a doctor with a sort of hooked probe. So two lots of treatment spanning around six years. That was in the seventies.
I remember being put into a sound proof booth and wearing headphones and being played pure tones from a generator and being told to press a button when I heard the tones. With hindsight, tinnitus would have played merry hell with those tests, especially at the frequencies they seemed to concentrate on. Yes, my memory is fine!
Did the treatment help? Probably not. I recall what the sounds of tinnitus were as a very young child and they are same now.
Since around aged 45 (I'm 53 now) I have experienced brief spinning/dizzy spells. I find them quite easy to counter. I first noticed them whilst wearing skis which was a bit disconcerting.
Having read up on your link to "Meniere's Disease" - that's probably what I ... have, for want of a better word. However, the dizzy spells for me are transitory and not certainly not minutes or hours.
I gave up smoking around six years ago after 30 odd years tabbing. That probably doesn't help either.
My point is that your faculties are very complicated and the science is somewhat lacking. Putting a name to a basket of symptoms may not even be helpful in our case. I am a (was) a really good swimmer but diving below around two metres deep used to really hurt unless I gently worked down and popped my ears.
In the end I think I have mild symptoms compared to many but I don't have many people to compare notes with. What becomes normal over years and decades hides a lot of things.
Based on my personal experience, you will automatically get better at lip reading or deducing what is going on via body language etc. I also have to wear glasses ...
Anyway, I wish you all the best and hope you find a way to live with whatever conditions you have. We have a surprisingly impressive array of sensors and back end processing gear. The eyes are amazing in being able to scan a scene with a tiny aperture and the brain to stitch together a very accurate scenario of what is where and doing what. Touch and all the rest are available, all the time. The next time you catch a ball, pick up a pen, kiss the missus/husband or whatever, remind yourself of how amazing that is, and you are.
There's a small YouTube creator who has uploaded videos with the narration hard panned. I told him about it in the comments, he went "hmm that's weird", then uploaded more videos with the same issue.
I totally agree, I will not watch a video with any issues like these.
However, I also hate knowing that I'm hearing mono audio where stereo could be used. 99% of the videos I watch don't have panning issues, so to just turn off ALL stereo seems like such overkill to me...
In the real world you almost never hear something on one ear but not the other. Even if something is on your left, your right ear still hears it (differences in timing and volume inform your brain on the sound source location). Exception being if it's something really quiet right next to one ear, but that's relatively rare.
So when things are mixed "improperly" (it's subjective), it's very distracting to me. I don't need to force mono everywhere, but it's very common in amateurish channels, and surprisingly also in movies and TV shows. Big productions tend to mix assuming you'll play on speakers (where it's fine to have something playing on just one channel/speaker, since both your ears will hear it), but when it mixes down to stereo and you listen on headphones, it's soooo common for them to pan something 100% to one channel when the source is supposed to be on that side. Like, somebody speaking to the left of the camera, and it comes 100% on the left channel and 0% on the right one. It's so unnatural and annoying to me.
> Big productions tend to mix assuming you'll play on speakers (where it's fine to have something playing on just one channel/speaker, since both your ears will hear it), but when it mixes down to stereo and you listen on headphones, it's soooo common for them to pan something 100% to one channel when the source is supposed to be on that side.
I find this genuinely baffling; I lived for nearly a decade as a bachelor in a basement apartment where I had a big TV setup, but out of respect for my upstairs landlord listened to nearly everything on wireless stereo headphones, and I can’t recall ever experiencing this.
Me neither, I also only use my headphones. I've only had to use mono mode on amateur youtube videos where one of the audio channels is just missing. It has never been an issue on big productions.
>In the real world you almost never hear something on one ear but not the other. Even if something is on your left, your right ear still hears it
Exactly, and this highlights the big difference between using headphones and using speakers. When you listen to some stereophonic music with one of the instruments panned completely to one side, through speakers that sound will only play from that side, however the sound will bounce around your room and you'll hear it in both ears, and the difference will tell you where it's coming from. But when you listen through headphones, you don't get this effect, and it sounds weird. With modern computing devices, it shouldn't be that hard to run the music through a filter that mixes the two channels when using headphones to avoid this problem. I wouldn't want to mix them to mono (that sounds bad too), but just a slight reduction of the stereo separation would be good.
Is it really possible that there's no driver that is capable of doing this in Windows? Did you look into this?
I wouldn't know because I consider all those effect libraries, mixers and presets ("Concert Hall" - who would ever want that?) that usually come with the audio chipset driver suite as bloatware and try to get rid of them, or at least never touch them - but it would surprise me if there weren't anything that affects the amount of stereo separation...?
I haven't looked into it, no (and certainly not on Windows!). It wouldn't surprise me at all if there's already readily available software that does exactly this. Even my phone has a bunch of options for altering the sound, including something called "DTS:X 3D Surround".
He was an active HN user and a writer, he had a very active blog for many years, and he and his wife had been documenting their struggles during his disease; some of those articles were voted high here and had a lot of discussion around them. So in the microcosm of HN, it's relevant news.
Yes. He was an academic who wrote about writing, authored two inconsequential novels, and was very open about his cancer. Many people here interacted with him or his work, but there’s no shame if you didn’t. A black bar on HN means people asked for it, it’s not a new entry on life’s high score table that needs to be rigorously justified.
I've been reading your writings for a few months and I can assure you that you're on a lot of strangers' minds, passively making positive change in other people. I wish all the best to you and your family.
That's so cool! I can imagine it kind of feels like when you have a wheel that you can turn with your fingers and it kind of "snaps" into place at regular intervals, like your body rotation is snapping into a cardinal direction.
Have you thought about trying something similar using Android? Taking the compass and doing small short vibration blips, you can also pair them with sound and light for testing or reinforcing it. Although I can imagine that the compass is not very accurate and the vibration control on Android is probably all over the place in terms of consistency between devices. But being able to have it as something compact that you probably already carry around could make it real-life useful.
I can imagine it being an assistance when it's in your pocket and it passively keeps feeding you the blips, you could use the proximity detection to make it only do that when in your pocket, for instance.
Am I the only one a bit weirded out by a headline that's basically "X said Y" where Y is in quotes, but it turns out that X is not a well-defined entity, and Y wasn't actually said by anybody? Regardless of the content of the article, it just doesn't seem like a good look. And I donate to the EFF! It's just... weird to me.
I don't think this is an unlucky mistake, it's bad processes inside the company. Any other person in the same situation would have gotten the same result. It's not like somebody accidentally gave him the wrong thing, they have two variations of the same product silently being treated as the same, with pin incompatibilities.
I'm not knowledgeable about that specific subgenre, but if you're going to be more or less following the traditional rules of older graphic adventures, I think there are plugins for Unity/Godot that automate most of the common stuff and you can focus on the art and game logic, dialogue, etc. So instead of trying to learn how to develop games, try to look for specific tools to develop graphic adventures, you might find that part of the boring hard work is avoidable!
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