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> 10 years ago I was in a meeting with them where they said they couldn't implement something because they wouldn't be able to use it for 5 years... They still haven't implemented it.

I call that trailer park logic:

They say: "Why go to college? That will take four years and I need a job now!"

Then four years later, while still in a dead end job: "Why go to college? That will take four years and I need a job now!"

It's a trap, but that doesn't mean it's escapable if you do need a job now.

It's the type of trap that only works if you agree to allow it to work. You might call it Sunk Opportunity Cost Assumption, mostly fits.

The trap will work if you are near destitute.

Right, that's the point though - at some point, getting out of that circumstance is the best available move, meaning walking away - dropping everything and just walking away, somewhere different, is going to be better than staying where you're at and continuing to struggle. Bankruptcy, homelessness in big cities, addictions, abusive relationships, there are all sorts of contexts where people get stuck, and they feel compelled to stay and struggle and try to battle through whatever those challenges are. They feel like they have a duty to battle out the hardest, most impossible struggles where nobody reasonable in the entire world would expect them to have to overcome.

Sometimes the best available move is physically escaping, just getting up and walking away and continuing until you find anything better than where you were at. For some weird reason, that move feels like giving up to people, until they actually do it and it works. This move is sometimes appropriate for jobs, relationships, addictions, violent circumstances, toxic social groups, politics, and so on.

If you've got next to nothing, then you have almost nothing to lose, and that can be a profound amount of freedom if it's seized. It's not always the right move, but sometimes the only winning move is not to play. Go find a better game.

So profound. I'm keeping it to use later :)

It's not profound. It's literally just the age old <group of of people> <thing> combination but with a couple extra words to seem high brow and the group it casts shade upon is picked to confirm certain biases.

People who live in trailer parks are poorer and have lower educational attainment than other groups. It's not a bias to acknowledge this or to reference it.

It's also not unreasonable to believe that the two things are linked.

You could've called it hoodrat logic, their educational and financial success is on the same order.

Why not call it woman logic? They are famous for strictly using long term planning and cold logic to plan their lives to the point they even joke about it.

You could've subbed in just about any nationality.

But you chose trailer park because the point was to pick a group of people that a bunch of other educated white collar people (I think the trailer park people would use the term "coastal elites" for this group, lol) like feeling better than, hence why the other groups wouldn't do.

If you wanted to make if harmless you could've chose any manner of public personality (politicians are gold mines for peddling short sighted stuff, plenty of examples to choose from) to name it after.

> But you chose trailer park because the point was to pick a group of people that a bunch of other educated white collar people (I think the trailer park people would use the term "coastal elites" for this group, lol) like feeling better than, hence why the other groups wouldn't do.

I started calling it that when I lived in the trailer park.

> If you wanted to make if harmless

It's already harmless. The people who live in trailer parks don't need your protection, and acknowledging that most of them don't want to be there isn't hurting anyone at all.

> and acknowledging that most of them don't want to be there isn't hurting anyone at all.

You're not acknowledging that they don't want to be there. You're assigning them a lack of long-term planning and ability to reason about how to achieve the best outcome for life. You're calling them "stupid" without using the word.

The comparison didn't include someone who chooses to take night classes at a junior college with hopes of transferring credits to another institution for an accredited degree, for example. No, they're too hopeless to find a third way. Having a background living in a trailer park in no way absolves you of dumping on people who still do in that comment.

I realize that I'm being hyperbolic to make a point and that life isn't simple when living in poverty. But I've been destitute as well, and I don't blame people who have trouble overcoming the same.

> You're not acknowledging that they don't want to be there.

I told you what I meant. You're trying to tell me that it's not what I meant. As the the guy who said it i can tell you that you are wrong about my intent.

> You're calling them "stupid" without using the word.

I'm willing to own that it's Blunt language that might hurt feelings if you really want it to, but that wasn't the intent. I refuse to walk on eggshells because someone somewhere in the world might find some meaning i never intended if they really look for it.

As a human being sometimes I can't accurately communicate my full intent to everyone. However, as a normal human being you also have he obligation to try to see the best version of others peoples words before assuming the worst version.

Maybe we both failed a little here.

Going to college usually means you work the same job after college, just with a lot more debt.

That logic is also how established tech companies allow startups with disruptive technology to eat their lunch. Of course it can sometimes take decades for that disruptive innovation to appear.

> They say: "Why go to college? That will take four years and I need a job now!"

This is more like: "Why implement it? That won't be seen for five years and I need a promotion now!"

> And because it takes so long for an old Cobalt version to go out of support, they don't invest in implementing new features

What new features?

The only "new features" Youtube implements is shoving shorts down your throat and taking five seconds to show video times on thumbnails despite the fact that the data is already there.

There's nothing Youtube requires from "new features" that can't be implemented in a browser tech from 15 years ago.

Also, Youtube the site doesn't have to deal with Cobalt-the-TV-app just like it doesn't have to deal with YouTube-the-mobile-app

New codecs at least, I would assume?

No, SABR and UMP were implemented recently. That did come on the tail of dropping some older TV (presumably Cobalt) clients though.

Video encodings themselves are separate the client always selects the most favorable one from the available set (e. G., vp9 over av1 when hw decode for av1 is not present)

And thanks to these old endpoints that can’t be changed yt-dlp is able to function

I'd be a bit more careful with making statements like that here. "The walls have ears."

It's not like Youtube's engineers can't just. Download yt-dlp and see how it works

It's not proprietary

The yt-dlp devs also talk about this openly, in GitHub issues and elsewhere. I think there have been multiple front page stories about how yt-dlp works here on HN over the last few years.

When a video is loaded on a Cobalt browser, why can't they redirect to something like youtube.com/cobalt/player/123456

This way they could keep an old html/css/js implementation running alongside the upgraded one.

I thought the whole thing was a different app at youtube.com/tv

They do. But the Cobalt version is still used on new TVs and to view new videos with new features, so it can't just be a time capsule.

Then everybody would just try to use that instead of the now common frontend.

>The YouTube team doesn't have the resources to implement many web APIs

Annual revenue is a few dozen billions.

So what's the problem, here?

> So what's the problem, here?

Minimizing developer pain is not a business objective.

The irony, when you consider who pushes that "many web APIs"...

But the use case is just to serve videos right? I know that new things will not come. But YouTube is almost the same in these 10 years I think.

Even simple web apps can benefit from web platform improvements. JS, HTML, and CSS have all gotten significantly better in recent years.

But YouTube is also a very complex app. Yes it "just" exists to play videos, but the app is so much more than a video player. Browsing, searching, comments, chat, playlists, YT Live, subscriptions, profiles, ratings... there's a lot there.

And which of those things that people could build already in mid-90s require some nebulous unspecified "new broswer features"?

Perhaps they could start with just cutting down their bloated 100x-duplicated 4MB CSS file?

<video> tag is probably the biggest change, but I still remember YT used SWF/FLV before then (and likely could still do today).

However, it's clear that the devs are mainly composed of trendchasing sheeple who have drunk the Goog-Aid and are addicted to newness and reinventing wheels to make them square... because they have to justify their existence.

YT2009 and WarpStream (Protoweb) prove the old YouTube can still work today. The new one is just a cat and mouse game of diminishing returns.

Make no mistake, "standards" really mean "what Google wants" these days.

YouTube was perfectly usable 15 years ago, on the machines and software of the time.

I'll stop at the imminent conclusion that having Cobalt is a good thing for various reasons.

Are there alternate YouTube frontends (or apps) that emulate Cobalt?

Looks like stable API like that is a perfect candidate for usage in an open source app that replaces the official one.

why can't they just serve different sites based on identifying the browser/app, and if it's old you get less features?

That's exactly what they do. The hard part is making it work with fewer features

And those fewer features are?

It's a site that shows a bunch of text, a few images, and then loads and plays video. What features does it need on a TV that it's so hard to implement?

Edit: I know which ones, and they have very little to do with Cobalt, but with the fact that even high end TVs are often worse than a Raspberry Pi, and can stick around for a decade. But this is nothing ditching Cobalt would fix.

E.g. you can't run 4k video on some models that can technically show it because there's not enough CPU and RAM to run the browser, the video, the decoder, and the DRM at the same time, the video stutters