Unfinished Projects — ShlinkedIn Contribution
I start setting up a ShlinkedIn environment while rambling about “Youtube beating Netflix in the streaming wars”
CNBC released this video three months ago:
The short version of the video is the title: YouTube has effectively “dominated” the streaming wars. I put “dominated” in quotes because it is debatable whether they should be lumped in as a streaming service. YouTube is a social media website. The content is user-generated. The CNBC video addresses this, but only in passing.
I think there are a lot of things to take away from that and this video:
If you do not have time to, or do not want to watch either of these videos, the Wall Street Journal video is actually arguing that these streaming companies are valuable. Consumers seem to be tired of fragmentation. WSJ argues that in the future, these streaming platforms will likely consolidate.
In the comments, users write about how fed up they are with paying for multiple streaming services. They are getting “streaming fatigue.”
But is YouTube’s dominance really such a good thing? Instead of spending time learning things like personal finance from professionals, people will just learn from social media influencers?
Well…I don’t know. I am heavily oversimplifying things, but imagine a time where TV was the one source of truth. Viewers would watch a TV expert talk about what stocks to buy, or what medicines to use. Now we have a million personal finance influencers and a million social media health influencers…but some of them are qualified. We get to choose who to listen to and who to disregard. We also have the means to push back on/criticize low-quality content. Maybe moving to social media can be a good thing.
Or we can buy books. I don’t know.
Gem5
I went ahead and left this comment
I thought I’d look into this, but does anyone know where the files for isca-2015 actually are? If I look at isca-2015.md as raw markdown, I see lines like this
Media:2015_ws_01_introduction.pdfsource: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gem5/website/refs/heads/stable/_pages/community/events/isca-2015.md
Where is that PDF located? I can’t seem to find it. Some files, like the amd apu model, can be mapped to here
https://old.gem5.org/wiki/images/7/7a/2015_ws_03_amd-apu-model.pdf
But I can’t find the others.
I imagine that since this is from a 2015 conference no one will know what I’m talking about, but it’s an excuse to take a break from that and move onto something else. In short, there are these two markdown files that seem to reference things that don’t exist. So yeah, the links are broken. No, there’s not an obvious location from their previous website that has all the links.
ShlinkedIn could make for a more interesting project, but I didn’t have much success last time.
The ShlinkedIn (LinkedIn, but for ****posting) website is in an odd state right now. Its founder is doing crazy, next-level stuff with AI
…and what that means for ShlinkedIn, unfortunately, is that the project is apparently on pause. The website is up, but people seem to barely use it. A lot of things don’t work. It’s a great example of “code entropy,” a term I made up just now to describe what happens when projects are not maintained. The code itself will stay the same, but underlying dependencies will change. Over time, functionality is lost.
People are writing on Discord to report that sign-ups are broken, some images are not loading, and some old features fail to load.
The Environment
I contributed to ShlinkedIn exactly once. It worked pretty easily for me out of the box on a 2013 Macbook.
Windows just has not been the same for me. I use Git Bash for Windows and the “mix” commands keep failing. Last night I had a little more luck with Powershell, but I am afraid to elaborate at the risk of spreading misinformation. I have always preferred Git Bash for Windows, if only out of habit, but the small bit of research I have done indicates that they both should work fine. On Git Bash for Windows, “mix” does not work and I have not found a way to install it. On Powershell, Mix works but then I run into problems with make and some of the tailwind dependencies on the frontend.
Back To Streaming
That’s all I have to say for now.
Back to the tangent:
In the beginning, the use case was simple. You would subscribe to Netflix, you wouldn’t have ads, and then you would watch purchased and original content. That was it.
Now there are many streaming services. They have advertising tiers and premium tiers, and I can choose to bundle different ones together. As a human, my “cravings” are hard to describe. I might wake up one day, and really want to watch a legal drama. Do I watch Suits? Do I watch The Good Wife? Well, random people on Reddit say that The Good Wife is much better than Suits. But now I have to subscribe to another service!
This ties into the whole idea of subscription services. I could buy DVDs as an alternative, but that could be a lot more expensive than binging over a weekend. Now opportunity cost comes into play — I haven’t hit the gym in five weeks because I was binging Netflix, when I could have just bought a season and spread it out over a month.
The ultimate IQ 2000 move would be to use a library card for entertainment instead, but I don’t want to do that either.
Tying It Together
When Khan Academy came out, it was pretty revolutionary.
Is your chemistry teacher incomprehensible? No problem. Just watch this guy on the Internet instead.
I feel the same way about Two Cents for educational content. It’s just high-quality content that happens to be on YouTube.
But this is where the problem begins. Social media influencers have evolved. Now there are a lot of useful, credible videos, but there are also health influencers spreading misinformation, finance influencers promoting scams, and tech influencers making bold and outlandish claims about AI to sell courses.
Closing Thoughts
