YouTube shorts should be forbidden

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

I spent some of my sabbatical watching YouTube. I know, this is not the best activity of all and I did other things that were more meaningful. I’ll post about it later.

So, here’s my problem with YouTube, after a few months of embarrassingly high usage. I don’t like their recommendations algorithm. I see what they do, I see why, it is very clever, it just feels like it turns the users into victims, and some of their users are my kids. Here’s what I think the algorithm does.

You are into science but I don’t really have much else to offer here. Maybe you’ll like an investment video by similarly looking creators? Oh great, you watched 30 minutes of that. Let me now fill your feed with similar videos, all full of reasons why we are all going to suffer imminent apocalypse from at least 10 different sources. AI is taking over. Data centers destroy communities and don’t pay taxes. We are running out of water. A tanker was hit in the Strait of Hormuz. The petrol will go up, prices will inflate, the electronic tickets spy on you, so do the Flock cameras. The Chinese cars are coming and that’s awful for the industry but the industry is also awful because modern cars are bad and expensive. Choose your own doom and I’ll show you 100 videos telling exactly the same but with more drama.

It’s the same story of productive emotions repeated over and over by an almighty ML algorithm, ordering videos, and clever influencers, saying whatever the target audience wants to hear. The bubbles of content naturally form because they’re ordered by the probability of what would keep me watching.

But why ban just YT shorts if it looks like a broader problem?

I think that long content is higher-effort to both create and watch. The learning loop is longer, the creator has to go deeper. It’s much easier to identify if they are reading an AI generated script and stop watching them before the message is transferred. It doesn’t mess up with your dopamine as much. So it’s a bit better and perhaps some of these videos can really be useful. I don’t need to buy a DGX Spark or Mac Studio to see them in use. I don’t need to tear down an engine to learn how bad oil looks like. There’s some value in that.

After spending several rounds in YouTube rabbit holes in the areas of mathematics, car repairs, local AI, and particle physics, I think reading is still the way to learn things for me. Videos look like a proof someone else did their homework and can do something, like fix a computer, or run a benchmark. But watching someone fix something doesn’t teach me how to fix it myself, something books and education can do, or at least can still do for me. Slop invades books as well.

Thoughts on AI watermarking

~ Veselin ~ 8 Comments

Claude is now watermarking its text outputs using a statistical token-choice watermark. According to what the AI told me, when generating the next token, it often has a choice between options that have similar meaning. It applies a statistical bias for some words at certain places over other words, which it’s able to identify over a text that’s long enough. Going over a paragraph, it can see if these equal-meaning words match the formula. Even if you change a word or rewrite a sentence, the watermark will persist in all the other words and sentences. It’s not hiding in the em-dashes and single quotes.

I have mixed feelings about this.

One of the ways I use AI for written text is for grammatical improvements. Last thing I want is AI claiming that my text is AI-generated just because it fixed grammar. I also use it to translate my Goodreads reviews, which I usually write and publish in Bulgarian first, and then translate, expand, and share here in English. The act of auto-translation doesn’t make the text AI. So, I very much don’t want AI to claim ownership over texts and experiences that are my own. Not that it matters all that much, but I still would rather not have these watermarks anywhere.

On the other hand, the AI content has expanded so much that it’s very difficult to distinguish a good-quality human text from AI slop. Many of the YouTube videos by popular influencers watched over the last month felt like a real human is reading from a slop script. For reasons I have difficulties specifying, I would like zero percent exposure to AI slop during free time. I don’t want to read AI books (increasingly prevalent), I don’t want to watch AI slop influencers, AI slop animation. I don’t even want CGI anymore.

I’ve mentally accepted that AI belongs to certain spaces, like work automation and coding, but doesn’t belong to others, like personal life. I’m not willing to succumb to the vision that AI should see and hear everything I do, remember it, and then use it. This vision feels like people with Meta glasses in a public bathroom.

And every conversation you’ve ever had in your life, every book you’ve ever read, every email you’ve ever read, everything you’ve ever looked at is in there, plus connected to all your data from other sources. And your life just keeps appending to the context

— Sam Altman, source

And I’m mixing the subjects a bit here but if AI is going to watermark its improvements to my blog posts, there will be no AI improvements here, and you’ll be stuck with bad grammar and other signs of character 🙂

The Trapped Girl by Robert Dugoni

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I seem to have a thing for catching a crime series and going as far as I can with it. This book was part 4 of a series of 6, makes you wish there were at least 5 more. Robert Dugoni needs to learn from Janet Evanovich and Alexandra Marinina. Six books is not enough for a successful Sherlock to fully develop. We need more.

Back to the book.

A crab poacher finds a trap with a dead woman inside, 20-25 meters underwater. Detective Tracy Crosswhite starts digging into the story, one clue at a time. It’s not very clear who the victim was but there was no shortage of people who had the means and motivation to harm her. The case is in good hands. Detective Crosswhite is tall, persistent, and a sharp shooter. Out of these qualities, she’ll most frequently need the first one, because clues are sometimes placed on high shelves.

The story is simple, the characters are believable, and vaguely remind you of someone. Multiple detectives are following the leads. No genius conclusions or superheroism. I wasn’t even close to guessing what really happened and why. Robert Dugoni is building up the protagonists slowly but surely. I won’t be surprised if this series turns into a romance within 3-4 books.

5*/5, and probably the best of the series so far.

Bansko in 2026

~ Veselin ~ 6 Comments

Bansko is a winter ski resort town that’s rebranding to a summer resort.

Twenty years ago, Bansko was tiny. It had a small old town with historical buildings where people actually lived, a large museum for a person the communists really liked, and some restaurants where you could actually eat without spending a fortune. It was a place you’d visit on your way to the mountain and back, eat tarator, and drink beer.

Over the years, it gained a larger ski zone with a gondola, a million hotels, and became very busy in the winter. However, summers remained mostly empty with most hotels and restaurants closed until next winter. We would roam around between the 4-5 functioning nice restaurants. Even the nicest were still mostly okay price-wise, just a few started turning into tourist traps.

Something started changing over the last 2-3 years. The municipality started rebuilding the central streets and sidewalks. That process is pretty far ahead already, as you can see from the photos. The walking areas now stretch for many kilometers, historical buildings have been restored, the river has been cleaned, street gyms have been installed, and so on. It worked, and Bansko is now so full of people in the summer that it’s the busiest I’ve ever seen it. Restaurants that didn’t even exist last year are open, working and full of customers, with only a few still closed for the season.

Cats are everywhere

Unfortunately, I’m not sure I like this new Bansko as much as I liked the old one.

  • More foreign tourists have driven the prices up, and they are reaching levels that are not okay for locals. Prices are at least 30% up since last year.
  • The hotel we used to visit every year (Lucky Bansko) started charging us €60 extra per night for our big kid. I paid this a few times but it got under my skin and I decided that enough is enough.
  • Food quality at the central restaurants is noticeably lower. I suspect they had to hire some unskilled kitchen workers, which led to both compromises in taste and in hygiene. I can no longer recommend eating there, after decades of being a safe town where the food was generally fine everywhere.

We won’t quit going to Bansko, it’s one of the places we are connected to. But we have to alter how we use it. From 5* hotels to rented apartments, and from trying restaurants to just sticking to the few places where we know the people who run them. After all, it’s the mountain that makes that place nice, not the freshly built 100-year-old tourists traps.

We certainly like the new pedestrian areas and the cat explosion that all these people have caused.