Unsolicited or not, this is good avice. Thank you!

To be honest with you, the algorithm is pretty good. I'm a pretty active user of "not interested" and "don't recommend this channel" so the algorithm generally shows me stuff I already like or things I may be interested in.

What I find frustrating is that there are so many extra UI blocks shoved in between regular videos. Featured current events, rentable movies, playable games, and the fucking shorts I don't give a shit about. Since I mainly watch on mobile I also can't just remove those sections and even when I dismiss them, YouTube decides to shove them in my face again and again.

I just want to be left alone to watch my nerdy stuff :(

Based on what the YouTube frontpage looks like when I'm not logged in I can guarantee that I will have zero interest in anything that gets hyped up on a leaderboard. But YouTube will of course malform its UI so it can constantly shove it into my face like it does with shorts.

I've selected "performance" in the PS5 settings, but I've experienced several AAA games ignoring it and having their own graphics setting that defaults to "fancy graphics" mode.

3/4 of players want performance, but publishers don't care.

If you want something with a small footprint I would personally go for Rust, but anything that compiles to a static binary is going to be better than something that needs a dedicated runtime.

Python is what I use for small one-time scripts and utility stuff that doesn't need to run long, but it may be worse than Java..

It's great that Godot was in a good place when Unity had its (inevitable?) implosion. Having used both engines I think they are comparable enough that Godot was a perfect fit for small indie and casual devs to move over to without having to learn a completely new workflow. If Godot hadn't been around I don't know where everyone would've migrated to.

Coincidentally I recently watched this Basement Brothers video about the game: https://youtu.be/NTMMZq63AIw

Great article! Ubisoft seem to be really good at making worlds that are immense and magnificent and yet utterly boring to be in.

That's a very astute observation and it made me wonder if piracy was partly to blame for the death of the B-tier game (at least on PC). In my younger pre-Steam days me and my friends would pirate 9/10 of the games we played (if not more). Games like CoD/Fifa/Sims would get enough sales from regular folks, but who the heck was going to take a chance on something like Will Rock or Scrapland? I would often check out games at my local store and then go home to torrent them, meaning they lost out on sales from the kinds of weirdos who the games were made for.

I watch a stupid amount of YouTube so I pay for YouTube Premium. I wish that meant I could have premium features like disabling shorts, disabling those annoying themed sections that keep popping up (right now it's the olympic games), a search function that actually searches for what I want instead of shoving more suggested videos in my face, and changing every "not now" button into "don't ever ask again".

Despite the fact that I'm a voracious consumer of YoutTube videos and a long-time paying customer, I have to accept that I am not the target audience. They want passive users who endlessly watch whatever gets put in front of them so that they never leave the app. If there was a respectful alternative that worked well with iOS and AppleTV I'd gladly pay for that instead.

Maybe you can get the same experience at a place llike AniList or Kitsu?

I've been a macOS user for over a decade and I am never going back to Windows. That being said, Apple does have iCloud (their version of OneDrive) which is tightly integrated into the OS and they're not shy about asking you to pay for more storage. They also want you to log in with an Apple ID when you first start your computer and I don't know how easy it is to use a local account.

It's not the same as Windows in terms of aggressive ads and upsells, but Apple aren't innocent in wanting more of your money. If you want true freedom you have to pay with your time and energy and run Linux.