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Comment by svrtknst | Hacker News Reader

Unnecessarily negative imo.

I like the video because I cant read a blog post in the background while doing other stuff, and I like Gadget Hackwrench narrating semi-obscure CS topics lol

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> I cant read a blog post in the background

You can consume technical content in the background?

this is a thing people do. convince themselves they can consume technical content subconsciously. its now how the brain works though. it will just give you the idea you are following something.

not all technical content is the same, or has the same level of importance. this video does not introduce anything that i need to be able to replicate in my work, so i don't need to catch every detail of it, just grasp the basic concepts and reasons for doing something.

Lots of people will have a show on or something while they're cooking or cleaning or doing other things. Is it worse for it to be interesting technical content with fun other stuff thrown in than if was an episode of Friends or Fraiser or Iron Chef or 9-1-1: Lone Star or The Price is Right?

I guess I'm only allowed to have The Masked Singer on while I make dinner.

if your foreground work doesn't occupy your brain, why not?

Because I prefer not to think about the hair I'm removing from my shower drain?

FWIW, I like her videos but I usually prefer essays or blog posts in general as they're easier to scan and process at my own rate. It's not about this particular video, it's about videos in general.

Same; thanks to modern technology, videos can be transcribed and translated into blog posts automatically though. I wish that was a default and / or easier to find though.

For years I've been thinking "I should watch the WWDC videos because there's a lot of Really Important Information" in there, but... they're videos. In general I find that I can't pay attention to spoken word (videos, presentations, meetings) that contain important information, probably because processing it costs a lot more energy than reading.

But then I tune out / fall asleep when trying to read long content too, lmao. Glad I never did university or do uni level work.

I get a similar feeling for when friends send me 2minute+ Instagram reels, it's as if my brain can't engage with the content. I'd much rather read a few paragraphs about the topic, and It'd probably take less time too.

You're saying that the audio channel of that video has the useful information all by itself. The video channel, which consumes most of the bandwidth, is useless. You could go a little further and say about 80% of the 54 minute audio is also useless, and it could be cut to maybe 10 minutes. Keep going and say to post it as text instead of audio, so you can read it in 2 minutes. Now you don't have to put it in the background.

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