A nuclear option that's worked extremely well for me is going into Youtube's settings and disabling history.
I no longer am even able to see shorts, they don't get suggested to me.
However, this is an extreme nuclear option and also disables the entire 'Home' and for-you type content. You can search and watch videos, but it flips it so it is 100% intention driven. Which means discoverability and browsing is non-existent. You're still able to see your existing subscriptions but that's it.
It's REALLY helped me disconnect from the addictive dopamine of the infinite, short type formats. YMMV
This is exactly what I’ve done for my Google settings after feeling more and more upset with what the Youtube homepage was showing me. Not so much in that it was necessarily contrary to what I may have wanted to watch, but more-so me thinking “My god.. is this what I’ve become?”
I now much prefer to open Youtube (quasi)tabula rasa. I still have subscriptions set up so I can follow “vetted” accounts, but for other things I now rely on that intentionality.
The one minor bummer is that Youtube won’t remember your spot in a video, say if you’re watching in your phone and want to continue on your desktop (or vice-versa). Not the biggest hassle to manually check the time and sync it up, though.
Yea - the not remembering a spot in a video IS a slight inconvenience, but for me it's a small price to pay in order to not get sucked into HOURS thrown away chasing the next 'hit' of dopamine from shorts.
I think this is the best way of using Youtube if you're trying to avoid brain rot and doomscrolling. This way helped me alot and gives you full control over what you consume.
For an older Internet user, it feels baffling that returning a website to a state where it shows you what you search for, and what you subscribe to, is considered an extreme nuclear option.
I'm also an older Internet user, but I assumed that it was a nuclear option to so dramatically change the expected behavior that without warning people they would be quite shocked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have been happy with the serendipity of YouTube’s algorithm generally. I followed an external link to a YouTube video about an exotic piano, and played a few related videos afterwards. These were videos about other unusual musical instruments, such as very high-pitched and very low-pitched wind instruments. And somehow that was part of a process leading to Japanese metal bands.
Dopamine-driven behavior in ourselves is certainly to be watched for.
I DO miss the discoverability. I really do. But my self control for watching shorts ends up being incredibly self sabotaging. I truly wish I could permanently disable shorts in some way. I wish I could use my DNS to block shorts, but alas they're not distinct.
I've been making music now for 8 months and have absolutely fallen in love with it. I'd love to write music for a game, what kind of game are you creating?
Sounds like you’re ahead of me then! The game I’m working on off & on is a 32v32 moba. I want the gameplay of Heroes of the Storm but with the match size of a battlefield server.
I wish I could dedicate myself full time to the effort (and in fact I’m working with my financial planner to figure out a plan) but this is a side project that is prioritized behind a few things. I wouldn’t feel too comfortable collaborating right now since I would be unpredictable. I’ll keep you in mind for when that changes though!
I was banned as well, out of the blue suddenly and without warning. I believe it was because I was either doing something like what OP was doing AND/OR using the allowed limits to their fullest extent.
It completely blew me away and I felt suddenly so betrayed. I was paying $200/mo to fully utilize a service they offered and then without warning I apparently did something wrong and had no recourse. No one to ask, no one to talk to.
My advice is to be extremely wary of Anthropic. They paint themselves as the underdog/good guys, but they are just as faceless as the rest of them.
Oh, and have a backup workflow. Find / test / use other LLMs and providers. Don't become dependent on a single provider.
That sounds benign but I'm guessing all of that was in a 24/7 loop and probably running in parallel a bunch of times.
It's like the "unlimited Gmail storage" that's now stuck at 15GB since 2012, despite the cost of storage probably going down probably 20x since 2012.
Companies launch products with deceptive marketing and features they can't possibly support and then when they get called on their bluff, they have to fall back to realistic terms and conditions.
Oh, and have a backup workflow. Find / test / use other LLMs and providers. Don't become dependent on a single provider.
I have pro subscriptions to all three major providers, and have been planning to drop one eventually. Anthropic may end up making the decision for me, it sounds like, even though (or perhaps because) I've been using Claude CLI more than the others lately.
What I'd really like to do is put a machine in the back room that can do 100 tts or more with the latest, greatest Deepseek or Kimi model at full native quantization. That's the only way to avoid being held hostage by the big 3 labs and their captive government, which I'm guessing will react to the next big Chinese model release by prohibiting its deployment by any US hosting providers.
Unfortunately it will cost about $200K to do this locally. The smart money says (but doesn't act like) the "AI bubble" will pop soon. If the bubble pops, that hardware will be worth 20 cents on the dollar if I'm lucky, making such an investment seem reckless. And if the bubble doesn't pop, then it will probably cost $400K next year.
I'm hoping that advances in MoE and other improvements in LLMs will translate to allowing self-hosting to cover a good chunk of developer needs, with extending out to providers when it needs more horsepower.
In effect like traditional on-prem services that have cloud services to handle peak loads...
The tech is still relatively new and there's bound to be changes that can enable this -- just like how we went from 8088 to 386 (six years later). That was a ground breaking change and while Moore's law may be dead I expect the cost to drop significantly over time.
10 tps, maybe, given the Spark's hobbled memory bandwidth. That's too slow, though. That thread is all about training, which is more compute-intensive.
A couple of DGX Stations are more likely to work well for what I have in mind. But at this point, I'd be pleasantly surprised if those ever ship. If they do, they will be more like $200K each than $100K.
this is just wrong, I have several 3x x20 accounts running full tilt hitting limits every week I did get few accounts banned, but that's because my proxy was leaking nginx headers.
I am finding the same thing! I used to use a window management tool long ago called something like Zooom (it lets you press hotkeys and it 'picks up' your window and you can easily move it around). I fell in love with it like 20 years ago, but it was barely maintained. Someone then created a similar app called Hummingbird - which was great, but it had some issues and again maintainability wasn't great.
So I decided to vibecode an app for myself and wouldn't you know? It took me a few hours and it's INCREDIBLE! No more relying on someone else to maintain something, I can simply build my own solutions, whenever I want!
Nice man, good for you. I was feeling burned out as well, but LLMs have allowed me to focus on solving and creating rather than the low level issues that constantly were the focus.
I'm really proud of this - vibe coded the hell out of it with Claude, but I love how I was able to step out of the annoying and nit picking css and browser incompatibilities I've dealt with for the last 20 years and just do the art direction and push the limits of what's possible.
I just wanted to say, thanks for saying this. I actually have been writing music and using Distrokid to publish to the normal streaming services (Spotify/Apple Music) and your comment actually pushed me to sign up for and put music on Bandcamp.
Replying to myself for anyone that sees this... but I just have to say - within a day of posting, someone purchased my entire discography! I'm so blown away!
So validating to know someone enjoyed my work enough to buy it.
Thank you to everyone who's taken a listen, and thank you to the person that bought it!
Zeek Interactive is a small and highly focused group of talented people. We’ve been building great software and solving problems for clients since 1995, and we’ve been focused on the web from day one. As the web has grown and changed, our skills have expanded to match.
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I no longer am even able to see shorts, they don't get suggested to me.
However, this is an extreme nuclear option and also disables the entire 'Home' and for-you type content. You can search and watch videos, but it flips it so it is 100% intention driven. Which means discoverability and browsing is non-existent. You're still able to see your existing subscriptions but that's it.
It's REALLY helped me disconnect from the addictive dopamine of the infinite, short type formats. YMMV
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