Every so often, i suffer fancies. One such fancy is playing with Unreal Engine. I rotate static meshes as to create a decor, and add anime girls in it. Sometimes i also rotate the anime girls to make them kiss, and think i should devise a way to automate this noble endeavor.
Yet my fancies always end up stopped dead in their tracks: absolutely no practical knowledge of Unreal Engine exists at all.
In your laudable eagerness to foster more girlkissing in the arts, you might object to what i just said, and tell me such knowledge exists.
I would press you on the matter.
Your answer will consist of YouTube links: Faustian bargains wherein you wager two hours of your lifespan in exchange for the promise of knowledge, and always end up short-changed.
I have just read someone mention they must, at this point, have watched over 500 hours of video tutorials about Unreal Engine, and i am tilted enough to tell you how i feel about this.
”Watch our Two Hours Exclusive Learning Flow with our World-Class Engineers,” Epic Games advertises, as if the time taken away from your life were a positive.
The Learning Flow turns out to really be the replay of a livestream: thirty minutes in, they have yet to bring up the main topic, or indeed, to even invite the guest of honor to speak of it.
Once they finally discuss my concern, i do not understand a word that is being said.
Not due to a lack of field knowledge: due to my inability to turn muffled sound waves into linguistic data.
Video harms accessibility
I have an auditory processing disorder, though it is rather mild. I will understand a BBC radio host almost perfectly, with their trained voice and impeccable audio quality. I will understand 90% of the words of an average speaker of my native language if they make an effort to speak clearly: i will manage to fill in the blanks. But i will never understand someone with a heavy accent mumbling into a bargain bin bluetooth headset.
YouTube’s how nomadic sub skittles are never good enough, beak hause all hot of jargon is fused in those videos, throwing you off all the segue when it fails to understand a horde fast enough.
The speech recognition algorithm generally struggles with the same people whose voices i personally struggle with, too. And the subtitles are poorly synchronized, matching the delivery word for word, instead of presenting them as coherent sentences.
This is not a call to record more material in French: i want to engage with technical topics in English. Were i to learn the terms of the art in French, it would harm my ability to speak of those topics with engineers from Brazil or Sweden.
Yesterday, i had to read Japanese technical documentation: my tourist-grade mastery of the language forced me to use Google translate. It was good enough to get the general idea, especially since the technical jargon was already in English in the original document.
I will take clear technical documentation written in a language i don’t know over poorly written English documentation any day: automatic translation has become very reliable with the recent advances in machine learning.
But had this documentation not been written in text—had it been a Japanese language video? The combination of automatic subtitles and automatic translation would have made it such a miserable experience, i’d have given up immediately.
Which is a roundabout way to say: an English language video is only reasonably accessible to people who speak English well, while English offered as well-formed text in the web browser can easily hop the barrier of language.
Enough about accessibility, let’s discuss the real problem: mortality.
You will die one day.
You will die having either read text tutorials at a pace of 240 words per minute, or you will die having watched video tutorials at a pace of 120 words per minute. Time left over after that can be spent on creating great art and/or petting dogs.
Assuming no time is wasted in either case, text delivery, by itself, is sufficient to double the pace at which information enters your brain.
But video wastes time beyond what is intrinsic to the speed of speech, often by design.
Videos on YouTube have unskippable ads.
Now, i will not count the time spent watching them as as wasted, because i trust that, like any normal person, you use uBlock Origin, and never have to watch any ad.
Yet, even if you never end up watching ads, they waste your time in other ways: to be able to show you two advertisements, instead of a single one, videos must be longer than eight minutes. Any information that can be shared in one minute will pay only half what it would pay if it wasted seven more.
But it’s not just the deliberate waste of time: it’s also that most video is entirely improvised, and almost never cut to remove wasted time. People’s thoughts meander. Their explanations take five sentences to convey what a single one could have said with more clarity. They wait on software to load, and make you wait along. They perform a repetitive task six times, and make you watch it six times, they perform a repetitive task six times, and make you watch it six times, they perform a repetitive task six times, and make you watch it six times, they perform a repetitive task six times, and make you watch it six times, they perform a repetitive task six times, and make you watch it six times, they perform a repetitive task six times, and make you watch it six times.
And while it is easy to skip repetitive text, it is difficult to know where to skip ahead in a video.
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After yet another attempt at earning a few more cents to survive late capitalism at the expense of your limited time on this planet, the tutorial about the advanced technical concept you wished to learn about will start. And take two minutes to explain how to download a Zip file from Github, extract it, then run the executable file therein.
Now, there shouldn’t be a single person both having the qualifications to watch the material, yet lacking the experience how to unzip a file. Still, you will find this scene de rigueur to include in any tutorial.
Were the author to skip it, many viewers who managed to survive two decades without learning how to tie their shoes would berate them in the comments section, saying things such as “u didnt evan explane how. to get the program u is showing?? in the video. milquetoast philistine-ass channel, unsurscribed (sp?)”
And while it is easy to skip irrelevant text, it is, once again, difficult to know where to skip ahead in a video.
In an online video, to be precise. Every technical aspect of today’s video formats was optimized for streaming delivery at scale, not for end-user comfort. Even for me enjoying France’s excellent fiber optic network, temporal navigation of YouTube videos is unreliable, because YouTube doesn’t care to optimize for this use case. Every skip always requires a second or two of buffering, and there’s always a chance skipping will break the video player.
You don’t want to know just how bad it is if you depend on mobile networks in some less affluent countries—by which i mean, every engineer working in the field should be forced to experience it firsthand for a few months, to develop their compassion.
Because online videos are difficult to quickly scan like text, it’s difficult to appraise their quality quickly. You can appraise their production values, sure, but those are a weak signal: some of the finest technical writing i have ever read was typeset in Comic Sans.
One thing that can redeem online video tutorials is that the format makes it easy to demonstrate a practical skill that requires a trained hand to perform. That can be true at times, but often, very little of the video actually demonstrates the skill, most of it is spent on talking head delivery. A text tutorial interrupted by short clips would remain much more efficient.
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You might point out i’m an hypocrite: i’ve released some video material about my DIY synthesizers hobby, and plan to make more. But the way i see it, those videos are for entertainment, not about teaching you. They may educate you as a side-effect, but that’s not their purpose. And i edit them aggressively for pacing.
Any serious knowledge i have to offer gets the text-first treatment.
It might be gauche to promote my hobby video material after an entire article criticizing the very format, though.
So if you are eager to watch a video of mine, why not watch this old shitpost—which also doubles as a summary of the article you have just read?