I’m a paying user of YouTube Premium, and I am pretty happy about it, I do think you either should pay or consume Ads in order to pay the bill for the infrastructure and video making, but, there are a few things I hate: Not being able to split the Shorts functionality out of the main YouTube app. Can’t remove the “Record”/Upload video functionality from the button bar in the app. Translation of video titles. Automatic change of audio to your “native” one. As you can see, mainly customization issues being the last one the worst for me, now that every youtuber has access to automatic audio translation, I find more and more videos with those translations and I just hate it. I will probably be fine about it in the future when the audio seems more integrated, but it’s just an advanced version of Loquendo and I just can’t 😭. ...
Paying to Search
A few months ago—maybe more than a year?—I was watching a Geohotz livestream when at some point he used Kagi, a paid search engine (it has a free tier). I was already pretty tired of Google Search and other search engines, and they weren’t even including the new AI slop at the top at that time. Paying for a search engine was a pretty weird thought, but I gave it a try just to see if it would stick, and… I’ve been paying since then. ...
Using ChatGPT o3 for Actor Ages
From time to time, I start binging a show, and being the old man I already am, I start questioning the age of the actor at that exact chapter. For this, I have started using ChatGPT o3 with a prompt like this example with Search On: Age of the actor who plays Harvey in Suits in episode 16 of season 4 And it will answer something like this: Gabriel Macht, the actor who plays Harvey Specter, was born on January 22, 1972. As Suits season 4, episode 16 aired on March 4, 2015, he was 43 years old at the time. ...
Changing Phone Number
I have the opportunity to upgrade my phone to a new iPhone 16 Pro while keeping the old one with me. Because of this, I have considered changing my phone number and keeping the old one active for a few months on my current phone. Why change the phone number? I have, practically, never changed my phone number simply because I’m lazy and because of the fear of missing something important when the current phone number is finally disabled. ...
Leaving Social Networks
At this point in time, I have stopped using Instagram and X (aka Twitter) and also removed all notifications from LinkedIn and Twitch. Here’s what I use right now: YouTube for media and music sessions. Twitch; although without Twitter, Instagram and the hype/overstimulation they produce, I just don’t care of most of streamers. Hacker News. I’m happier, more focused, less stressed, and more peaceful. Would recommend 👍 Some other time I will talk about the way I accomplished this ...