Thanks, France is a great country which had lot of successes and the myth of the white flag is very boring. It does stand on its own.

That said, I very much doubt France (I'm French, like you it seems) will have a significant role to play in AI. It has not been a country looking towards innovation in a positive light for at least 40 if not 50 years. We were by far the elite in nuclear capabilities with both military use and an insane civilian usage but then the greens came in and we killed our ace. Minitel was the last time we actually tried to do something relevant on the tech/communication side. When everyone is heralding Doctolib as a technological prowess, you know everything you have to know about our tech. (if you don't know, it's a 6B$ company making google calendar for doctors, I'm not exaggerating) It's a great service but if this is the peak of what you can do... And it's not because French people are not capable, (I'm actually regularly surprised at the number of French people in tpotw) it's because the wealth and investments they can reach by going to the US can't even be compared. Even the BPI (national investment bank) does not try, it's mostly giving money to people with contacts from business schools.

Also, the current political landscape refusing to make any concession on our social model and trying to tax everyone more and more every day instead of cutting spending just does not cut it to be innovative. And it's fine to decide to go another way honestly, France has many other good things to do and sell but France being a significant part of AI in the next 10 years looks unlikely to me.

I do love using warm colors, I did not look into making it even more natural, I'll definitely look into that!

For now I have mostly limited myself to lights and motion sensors for them but it's been great. My place had very little sockets so it became very troubling to switch them on several times a day (light was weird in my place), moving everything to voice control made it a breeze. It allows me to control the exact amount of light I want for different times of the day, love that too. I've used it for years now to wake me up because I'm easily woken up by lights. Instead of putting sounds, the light starts very dim and grows every minute. I'm waking up much more easily and in a better state than with any alarm.

I think the practice here is to post your full post and if interesting enough, people will end up going to your substack.

Interesting, this makes me think about AI is not Software.

I agree with the premise that the general public understands software can have massive impact due to bugs, most may know that "Software vulnerabilities are caused by mistakes in the code" but beyond there, I'm not so sure. I'm a non-technical (I have a very basic understanding of Python) and most people I know have almost no idea of how computing works.

I would still lean towards something like "Therefore, a successful "Quit YouTube" video would indeed not be promoted in the medium and long term by YouTube but not because it's not good for ads but because it is stopping the user's future interactions that have a chance of being monetized in any manner of ways, including superlikes, memberships, ads, etc"

I think that's a fair assessment, I did not want to make it look like YouTube was a non profit haha, mostly that they have found that by sacrificing some money on the short term, they make sure they're earning a ton on the long term.

They are not really in control of what becomes viral or not. Of course, I'm sure they can push or ban one specific video but how could they be aware that a video is going to buzz about leaving YouTube? There's just too much content and some parts of the ecosystem are completely oblivious to mega hits videos (like videos with 10s or sometimes even 100s of millions of views, are simply never showed to some spectators). My point is that it's the algorithm deciding at scale and not YouTube. In its current state I also believe it would likely push it at first but then the video would plummet if it worked and could even be negative for the creator long term. Of course there's also the possibility that people watch videos but never follow through with them however good they are to making people act. (that's actually the base behavior lol, watching content has become a drug nowadays)

As for "make sure the viewer is satisfied with time spent on YouTube" I'm not sure how they measure that? It could be anything from survey results, to a predicted score based on certain behaviors. If they were really sneaky, they could use time spent watching as a proxy metric for satisfaction.

You're not far away from what they do! Through the years they have tried several ways to measure what's good, first with click through rate and % of video watch, then moving more towards total watch time (which is when longer videos started becoming the norm) and more recently towards watch time in session. (meaning the best behavior is people coming to YouTube for your video and then watching other videos after that) If you come to YouTube to watch a single video, the watch time better be very significant or it will be negative for the content you watched because they would rather have you longer on the platform.

About two years ago they have started saying that they were aiming for viewer satisfaction which is indeed pretty hard to describe but a mix of the different type of watch times is likely already good, to which they indeed add regular viewer polls to ask how you felt about recommandations and videos.

Nowadays, it's obviously become a mix of many different signals, with different values given to each. Contrary to popular belief, likes and comments are pretty much worthless to the algorithm. (although likes may have gotten a tiny bit of value back)

There is growing competition (even in long form videos which is much harder to setup than short form for a platform) so despite them being pretty much a monopoly, I don't think they are going for a full profit strategy. I think the AI debacle will keep Google in a competitive mind for sometime. On the other hand, when you're already so profitable, it may be a viable strategy to leave some money on the table in order to remain a de facto monopoly by making any competitor bleed money.

Also, from what I gathered, the shorts algorithm is very much different from the normal videos because the people watching short form and long have very different usage of the platform. Not sure if there's something different in how YouTube makes it work though, might just be because of audience behavior.

I'm not that surprised because this seems to have been the human state for pretty much all of humanity until the 20th century in the west? In places in which you do not have to wage war or fight (in the literal sense) to make your condition better, it seems to become normal for the schadenfreude to decrease?

In France at least it was seen as a terrible incident and I don't know many people who rejoiced, although I have heard more about it in the last decade from some groups.

Click here to create a Petrov Day event for the frontpage map.

no link?