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Comment YouTube Audio Quality - Bad Production (Score 1) 100

It's just that the entire YouTube is appallingly bad.

A lot of the audio production in individual videos is really bad. This isn't anything to do with YouTube per se, not their compression algorithms or other features. A lot of YouTubers have absolutely no concept of microphone placement, of using audio compression, of reducing background noise. All of which are things which will drastically affect audio quality and the ability of a speech-to-text model to create subtitles.

It would be nice if YouTube would normalize all the uploaded videos to one set standard. Note I'm not suggesting that they compress the videos as that might change the intended presentation of professional audio productions. I just mean peak-finding normalization which could be implemented losslessly and without breaking existing video links.

Having said that, when I look at my own channel - and I am not claiming to have great audio; I have a host which would destroy a lavalier microphone in mere seconds. YouTube's subtitling is really good. It automatically switches between English and French and Hebrew, and even with a fair bit of background noise (welding, grinding, cooking, crowd noise, music) it generally gets the text correct. So I don't know what the original complaint is, except that it's not perfect. Well, guess what, neither is human hearing. How about that famous Jimi Hendrix line, "Excuse me while I kiss this guy."

Comment Dumped Grok over this (Score -1) 72

Grok was constantly say it was doing something that it had ZERO ability to, and I kept calling it out and it kept apologizing and then immediately doing it again.

As a guy who spend 5 figures a year on Ai, the last thing I want is that. I know Claude and ChatGPT also do it, but Grok was doing it CONSTANTLY.

Submission + - Has Slashdot Become More Ads Than "News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters"? 2

FictionPimp writes: Load Slashdot's front page today without an ad blocker and count what you see before scrolling.

Above the fold, there are 6 distinct ad placements: a full-width Retool banner just below the navigation, a MongoDB Atlas inline banner styled to look like a site notice sitting directly above the first story, two sidebar ad units (one for a game dev course bundle, one for business software comparison), a "Sponsored Content" slot beginning to appear at the bottom edge, and a sticky MongoDB footer bar fixed to the bottom of the screen. MongoDB alone holds two simultaneous placements on the same page load. The ratio is 6 ads to 2 stories before you even scroll.

Slashdot has carried the tagline "News for nerds, stuff that matters" since Rob Malda was running the site out of a college dorm in 1997. It is now owned by Slashdot Media, the same parent as SourceForge, and the nav bar includes a "Thought Leadership" section, which is industry parlance for paid editorial content.

None of this is unique to Slashdot. Display advertising is how independent tech publications survive. But there is a meaningful difference between ads that share a page with content and ads that outnumber and surround the content, with some of them actively designed to look like part of the editorial feed.

The question for the Slashdot community: at what point does the original promise of the site, a curated community-moderated signal in a noisy web, get buried under the noise it was supposed to filter? Should the site be rebranded: "Ads for Nerds, News if we can fit it in"?

Comment REGULATION: the world's worst thing ever (Score -1) 77

Regulators should be afraid of weaponized Ai. So should censors. So should monopolists.

All of the things the State has done in the past 500 years has been corrupt and bureaucratic and caused harm. All. Not most, but all.

All of the people who supported it, from monopolists to lobbyists to activists caused harm.

Ai is undoing it all. Not piece by piece but all at once.

I, for one, can't wait to see folks zapped for restraining voluntary behavior.

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