I’m interested in the alternative YouTube front ends like Pinchflat and Glance mentioned here. Ideally I’d avoid scrolling the YouTube homepage while still giving views and likes/subscribed to the creators I watch, because it helps support them (to what degree exactly I’m not sure but it seems like the right thing to do). I do find the archiving/downloading case meaningful as well, since a few yt vids that I enjoyed have been taken down over the years.
But.. reducing mindless scrolling while still giving me a way to follow content I care about seems good.
Does anyone have experience with using these? Are there alternate tools which are better than the ones listed here?
> But.. reducing mindless scrolling while still giving me a way to follow content I care about seems good.
My solution [1] to this was to create a static site that is built by a Github Actions workflow that runs every hour. The script just pulls RSS feeds I have listed in a .js file, and uses that to build the site [2]. The result is I'm more deliberate in what videos I watch, and I discover new creators organically (a friend recommends one, or I find them while doing a search).
For "favoriting" videos, I just add them to a folder in Firefox bookmarks manager.
My newest "feature" is a "Picks from your subscriptions" thing that uses an external Deno service [3] to grab a random video from one of my random subscriptions. This helps me discover old videos from my subscriptions I may have never seen.
I use pinchflat mostly for archiving channels that occasionally take videos down. It technically has an inbuilt video player, but that's more for "debugging". The intended non-archival usecase is have the download folder picked up by your Plex or Jellyfin and watch it there.
Of course that deprives you from interaction with the actual youtube content. But for support, $1/month on the creator's patreon goes further, and for engagement you can join the creator's discord. The only thing you are really missing out on is feeding the youtube algorithm.
I'm interested in trying this out and started to go through the login flow for youtube, for some reason it opens in a tab within the Grayjay app which then means I can't use Google's passkey auth, and something is even preventing me from copy/pasting my Google password in from my password manager (it's too long for me to want to type out just to try the app.)
Gentle feedback to open the auth flow in the default browser, might make things easier.
I was lucky to meet this giraffe and its creator in 2016. It’s quite impressive and clearly a labor of love. Has strong home garage hacker vibes. The creator was excited to show us around and answered any technical questions we had.
One aspect which stood out was that the head and other parts had touch sensitive “pet” detector cells each of which consisted a short, inch wide plastic flap connected at its base to some internal circuitry and held out from the base at a slight angle to resemble a sort of robotic fur equivalent. When you brushed your hand on them, the giraffe reacted and either nuzzled its head a bit, made some sounds, etc
Anyway I only briefly browsed the site so I’m not sure if he goes into more detail there. It’s cool to see this blast from the past and I wonder what the creator is up to nowadays.
To a local observer yes, but to someone moving at a different speed no! FloatHeadPhysics does a good job explaining some of this https://youtu.be/OpOER8Eec2A
Only if you disregard observers in different frames of reference interacting with each other, which you shouldn't when you need high precision and it comes to projects spanning Earth, Earth orbit, and the Moon.
GPS wouldn't work without accounting for relativity, for example.
Yeah, I guess I don't see what's funny about that statement.
Unlike "sometimes a second is longer than a second" (not literally true but it makes some sense in the context of relativity), this one just seems like a tautology to me.
Yeah, it might not be funny, but the tautology draws attention to the fact that there is no privileged frame of reference.
In other words, the only thing we can say without qualification is that a second is just a second in the same frame of reference. All other statements must be heavily qualified.
Even things like "A's second is longer than B's" are only valid in some frames of reference and not others.
This is actually the guy that finally helped me break through into understanding (at least a little what's going on). Specifically about how the movement through space lengthens distances between objects (including atoms) and causes information (including light) to travel further, along the hypotenuse of a triangle, "in order to do stuff".
"Doing stuff" includes observing things because of the light travel distance, but also biological processes, which involve eg. electrons moving from one atom to another.
I didn't watched the linked video here (more relevant perhaps), but this was the one for me: https://youtu.be/Vitf8YaVXhc
I read somewhere that Evangelion has similar cultural impact with the Japanese as Star Wars does in the US. In that way naming this app NERV is similar to the US’s “Star Wars” strategic defense initiative…
Except there was a law suit in that case because nobody bothered to get the rights from Lucasfilm
The government didn't call it Star Wars, they called it SDI. Some lobbyists used that term and they were the ones that Lucasfilm tried to sue.
The lawsuit was dismissed, btw.
> On November 26, 1985, the suit was dismissed by Judge Gerhard Gesell of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, on the grounds that the lobbyists' use of the mark in a noncommercial and non-trade context fell outside the jurisdiction of trademark law. [1]
GP never said the government named it that. Besides which, "Star Wars" was not a term used only by lobbyists, even if they coined it. It's a very common name for that program among the general public.
Arguably Gundam is more equivalent to Star Wars - similar initial release timeframe (late 1970's), aimed at a wide audience, lots of toy and video game deals, many different stories with continuity, etc.
Gundam has definitely wider reach, including governmental recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_impact_of_Gundam#Gove... (the whole page is interesting read) but Neon Genesis Evangelion also had huge impact on cultural scene of japan from what I have read, and by now it has similarly been deeply embedded in ways other works didn't.
I was so confused when I clicked this link. I saw "NERV" and knew it was related to Evangelion. But then reading the website it seems so real and legit. But then they're using the real NERV logo from Eva, even with the "God is in his heaven, all is right with the world" subtext. Which makes seem like it must be some sort of spoof. But who'd set up something like this, in light of the recent disaster, and even publish real apps.
Man... the cognitive dissonance I went through mentally bouncing back and forth for a few minutes. I don't think I've ever experienced anything like that before in my life.
I'm glad all the top comments on HN are about Eva though.
The original Star Wars is a perfect Hero's Journey story told on film. In a vacuum, it's an incredibly inventive and scrappy film.
Evangelion has the benefit of not being owned by Disney, and thus not being milked into oblivion*. If all we had of Star Wars was the original trilogy, and maybe the "Rebuild of Star Wars" aka the sequel trilogy (speaking purely in story terms of soft-rebooting things), it could probably stand toe to toe with Evangelion on prestige. It's just been watered down so much in the last two decades, as opposed to Evangelion which has been fiercely protected by its original creator.
Weird, I didn't think I'd be defending Star Wars in 2024. And I do much much prefer Evangelion.
*I am aware of how badly Evangelion has been milked for merch, but I'm talking exclusively about media appearances in this discussion. There was Evangelion manga, but I can remember there being three series or less for about 20 years (and two of those were gag manga). In terms of visual media outside the main series (anime, EoE, Rebuild films), I'm pretty sure there's just been a smattering of Japanese commercials using Evangelion characters.
Though there are probably at least 10 anime series Americans know about (Pokemon, Naruto, Dragonball-z, Yu-gi-oh, Death Note, Demon Slayer, One Piece, etc.) more often than Eva. Eva is a relatively strange anime in contrast. Is it that Eva is more "Japan"-coded than the other ones, which are more "American"-coded, thus they would have an outsized impact overseas but not comparatively in Japan?
Time and place sort of thing. There could easily be another timeline where Evangelion and Sailor Moon swap places popularity-wise in the US. The demographic for anime on broadcast television in the late '90s and early 2000s, when Evangelion was getting dubbed, just skewed too young for it to really be profitable in any way. If I remember correctly, it only ever had one complete run on Adult Swim, a late night block which really limited its exposure. I don't think End of Evangelion has ever aired on a major broadcast network. (The Rebuild movies did get play on the revived Toonami about a decade ago, though.)
I don't think Evangelion would ever have been a breakout hit, per se, like DBZ, but depending on the circumstances it definitely could have had moderate success.
Isn't Evangelion (in)famous for its use of Western religious and occult symbolism? I don't think it's more "Japan" coded than say Death Note (with Western characters) or One Piece (based loosely on Western pirate lore.)
It's more Japan-coded in that the framing of Christianity and the occult is from a Japanese perspective: it views Christian symbolism via an outsider's lens, as an abstract, esoteric ancient cult (which it is, but not in the common way it's perceived in the West)
Also, Eva is much more, for lack of a better term, adult-themed, thematically complex, and sexually weird than Pokemon, One piece, etc. This certainly would make it less universally popular as a cultural export.
Eva is on some level a parody of Gundam used to explore adult themes of depression, isolation, loneliness, parental conflict, and figuring out your sexual identity. It's more like Akira or Ghost in the Shell than it is like Pokemon or One Piece. For an American analogy, it's like Watchmen vs. Superman. Watchmen is a case of taking the kids entertainment of superhero comics and using it to explore more adult topics.
Read the end of the sentence after the parenthetical: "more often than Eva". I mean that if you asked any random American to name an anime, I'd wager if they knew any they'd know one of those much more often than Eva, it's about relative awareness, not absolute awareness.
And I'm pretty sure at least Pokemon is well entrenched into popular culture. Death Note and One Piece have had Netflix series, also indicated a good amount of penetration in the average market.
Eva was on Cartoon Network in the 2000s (a censored version, but still.) That's where I first watched it. Other shows I watched around that time included Ghost in the Shell SAC, Trigun, some Cowboy Bebop.
I recognize most of the names you mentioned, but haven't watched any of them other than to check if they interest me.
Obviously Pokemon is better known, but other than that it's going to depend a lot on age group.
> The name and logo of "NERV" are used with the explicit permission of khara Inc., the copyright holder of the "Evangelion" series, and Groundworks Corporation, which manages the rights to the series.
Posy!! I can't believe I forgot him on my list! +1
Same with casual navigation! Have I ever worked on or piloted a boat? No. But will I watch little 10min explainer videos about bilge pumps and anchor chains? Definitely.
It’s more that he did something and now doesn’t have to.
It’s false that there’s a morality to wealth and that those who have gained it have inherently added value in line with the wealth they’ve gained. There’s usually a correlation but even then not always.
But.. reducing mindless scrolling while still giving me a way to follow content I care about seems good.
Does anyone have experience with using these? Are there alternate tools which are better than the ones listed here?