I don't really see YouTube as an alternative to books. Where video shines is in shorter instructional practical stuff. Sure, if I want to understand the underlying mechanism of something then I'll read-up on it but usually I don't need that kind of knowledge. I just want to watch someone do the task I'm about to do.
For anything IT related I usually dislike video guides as they're so slow to get to the point. But that's because I work in IT and don't need to be told that messing around with a disk partition could cause problems with my computer. With non-IT tasks I'm happy to be treated as a moron because I don't have anywhere near as much experience.
When you say "Use an awful lot less data" - is that still an issue most of the time? That's depressing.
> When you say "Use an awful lot less data" - is that still an issue most of the time? That's depressing.
I don't see a particular point in pulling down a few hundred megabytes that contains radically less actual useful content than a megabyte or two of compressed text and images. HN is particularly nice on that front, as the pages are tiny and gzip down to a rounding error (this reply page is a whopping 15kb of transfer). They don't load half a Windows 95 worth of tracking Javascript either.
Up until fairly recently, I had two rural WISP connections that mostly didn't meet rated speeds during the day, were borderline unusable during the evening (that Netflix can stream video tolerably on a lossy 1-2Mbit connection is quite impressive, the few times we tried it), and despite that have been working remotely full time on those connections.
I'd signed up for the Starlink beta some months back, and we have that as our secondary connection now (it's still exceedingly erratic - I'll go from 5Mbit to 150Mbit and back over the course of a minute and then it'll break my connections as there's no satellite overhead - but this is the point of a beta, and it's better than the 5/1 that mostly delivered about 3/0.5). I like it, but the power consumption on the dish is quite obscene. It idles a hair under 100W, and consumes 2.2kWh/day, per my measurements. I hope that improves over time.
It's not that I can't transfer a lot of data, it's just that I prefer not to when I can avoid it. And, there are, often enough, times when it simply won't work. Not a big deal, we live out here willingly, but, yes, it's still a thing. I keep a cheap cell plan too, because I just don't need to be streaming content on my phone.
> I don't see a particular point in pulling down a few hundred megabytes that contains radically less actual useful content than a megabyte or two of compressed text and images.
For everything from waspkeeping to bookbinding, there's nothing else that can come close to the same semantic bandwidth as video does.
I've spent far more than half an hour reading blog posts on bookbinding, and still had to work out almost all the details for myself in terms of how to actually do it - not that I haven't found useful information in those posts! One linked here not long ago clued me in to a couple of tools I'd never yet heard of, and that in particular has been incredibly useful - because of it, I'm a lot closer to producing perfect-bound books indistinguishable in quality from those made professionally. But half an hour spent watching Adventures in Bookbinding - actively watching, skimming and reviewing where necessary, not just passively staring - has served me better in terms of the sheer mechanical doing of making books than all the blogs I've read put together. IT is one thing - I'm a software engineer, I get what you're saying - but when it comes to work you do with your hands, there really is no substitute for the chance to watch over the shoulder of someone who's mastered the skill.
(I don't actually keep wasps, although I've given it serious thought - the problem is that you really need to habituate them to your presence starting with the foundress's emergence from diapause, and I don't have any way to know where polistid foundresses spend their winters. But I'd never even imagined doing it before I found videos made by people who do it, and have done it for years. There's something of worth in that, too.)
For anything IT related I usually dislike video guides as they're so slow to get to the point. But that's because I work in IT and don't need to be told that messing around with a disk partition could cause problems with my computer. With non-IT tasks I'm happy to be treated as a moron because I don't have anywhere near as much experience.
When you say "Use an awful lot less data" - is that still an issue most of the time? That's depressing.