General > General Technical Chat
Youtube "how to" videos are mostly useless
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: coppice on March 19, 2024, 10:53:49 am ---If the how to video is how to fix something, they are usually quite valuable. They may not give you a complete way to do a good fix, but boy can they save you time figuring out where all the obscure fixings are, without poking around on the real product so much you break something.
--- End quote ---
That can be true, especially with modern electronics. I used one when replacing a screen on my Hudl tablet.
I still had to actively avoid several pieces of crap.
IanB:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on March 19, 2024, 08:09:16 am ---For example, I still have not found any description for choosing a solution method for partial differential equations other than "try each until one works". I know such a method works, because ask any mathematician, and they'll show you the working method in real time; I just haven't found one who can explain what they based their choice on (except "I've seen this form before").
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Interesting. I would say the answer is one of pattern matching. You could probably train a machine to recognize which solution method to apply given a sufficiently large training set of PDEs. With experience, a human brain could apply the same learning. We tend to call this "intuition", but in reality there is no such thing. Intuition is just a fancy word for "I can guess what to do because I see a pattern in the data."
CatalinaWOW:
I want to double down on one of my prior points. A good textual document is more than enough for almost all of the topics mentioned in this thread. Such a text is difficult to generate for most people, and the number who can do it well is in my opinion declining in this video focussed era. Meanwhile the number who can do an adequate or better job of video content creation is increasing.
This partially changes the discussion from suitability to availability. Trash text content has always existed. Time winnows out the lesser documents. Presumably the same will happen for video.
coppice:
--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on March 19, 2024, 02:50:47 pm ---I want to double down on one of my prior points. A good textual document is more than enough for almost all of the topics mentioned in this thread.
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For repair work the visual aspect of a video is its greatest strength. Most of what I want from those videos is to see how things fit together. For most things its complex. If learning from books was so great, why would people spend a fortune to learn from lectures in colleges? Really smart people learn quickly from book, while less able people gain massively from lectures. However, even the smartest people pick up new things faster with a combination of books and lectures.
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on March 19, 2024, 02:50:47 pm --- Such a text is difficult to generate for most people, and the number who can do it well is in my opinion declining in this video focussed era. Meanwhile the number who can do an adequate or better job of video content creation is increasing.
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I don't think the number of people who can do a good job is diminishing. Instead, the number of people that can do a bad job is increasing.
I think the problem is that the low cost of publishing is the root of the problem. That removes the need for editorial decisions.
--- Quote ---This partially changes the discussion from suitability to availability. Trash text content has always existed. Time winnows out the lesser documents. Presumably the same will happen for video.
--- End quote ---
The problem is that the trash text/video is increasing faster than the good content, so the good content is drowned out.
That's exacerbated by the video medium: it takes me 15s to scan text before ignoring it, but 15 minutes with video. 60:1 is a killer.
When it cost money to publish, a suggestion for an "I opened the box and it looked like the advert" article would have caused howls of laughter.
(Oh hell. That reminds me of the later Jerry Pournelle articles in Byte. :( Damn; now I need to go and practice some relaxation therapy :) )
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