Comment by nunez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nunez | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, but compression is lossy.

The hour long video on a thing that covered most of the bases and edge cases gets cut down into a 30 minute (likely 15 minute) YT video with important information missing.

The 15 min YouTube video turns into two 30 second TikToks that speed run through 70% of what you need to know, sure, but is the 30% they didn't cover (or know about!) actually important? Who knows!

Example: I was cleaning our jacuzzi bath tub the other day. The previous owners had never cleaned it, so black gunk came out of the jets.

A YouTube video (that was actually a TikTok!) suggested unscrewing the jet nozzles (amongst other things), which she demonstrated as a really simple "just unscrew them" sort of deal.

As it happens, not every jet nozzle is meant to be removed! And not every jet nozzle should be removed! Also, it is really hard to get replacement nozzles after you crack one because it was affixed to the housing!

Yeah. I got myself a songwriting course and it's certainly not compressed, more like 20 - 30 hours in total length. And those guys do a lot of, let's call it, meandering in the topics. Like, one of the basic topics was time signature and time signature notation. And the basics are somewhat simple indeed, but after a minute or two, there's a detour into why german Volksmusik is different about on- and off-beats, and later on there was a detour into irish music and shanteys. This very much reminds me of some of the more advanced university classes - very much stringent about a topic, but entirely ready to look at the flowers left and right.

And while it makes it longer, I find it helps my retention. For one, I have to allocate 40 minutes to an hour for a course part - and that's enough time to make it a conscious decision. And it helps to put new information into context much better, which very much helps retention. Heck, even something like a cat crashing into a keyboard helps remembering things, haha.

Yeah, I have the same experience with retention. The extra time spent on the detours helps to contextualise the theory. To expand on your flowers analogy, looking at the flowers helps to remember the path better.

> The hour long video on a thing that covered most of the bases and edge cases gets cut down

... and you've already forgotten about the book with actual in depth info.

40% of which is word count filler, and another 50% of which is irrelevant to your purpose.

Well I was thinking of actual dense technical books not for dummies spam.

If there are any left.

As for irrelevant... you should still skim it. So you know where to look when it becomes relevant next year.

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