They/them preferred, but I won’t be mad if you forget :). Retired programmer. Many health conditions. If I’m uncharacteristically grumpy, I probably have a migraine.

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2026

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  • If it wasn’t to confuse people, they could just show both bits and bytes. There’s no reason not to. I’ve seen this occasionally with ethical ISPs who care about their customers (extremely rare) - they would display it like this:

    Typical evening speed: 25Mbps (approx 3 megabytes per second)

    Almost everyone I know who isn’t in tech is extremely confused by this distinction. Absolutely they keep the bigger number because it directly benefits them. If they’re offering the 3 speed, but competitors are offering the 25 speed, of course customers want the bigger number! Normies don’t even know what a bit is.

    I don’t particularly think the historical value of a byte is really relevant either. It’s been 8 bits for half a century now.

    Since 1975 or so, the word byte has come to mean a sequence of precisely eight binary digits

    I don’t think it’s a big deal or a hill to die on or anything. Since everyone does it, at least it’s consistent. But the industry is kind of shooting themselves in the foot because they get ten thousand service desk calls per day complaining about slow internet speeds that are less than one eighth of the advertised number.







  • I dunno if I would call it rough; it’s just a CLI tool. You write yt-dlp and then paste in the URL.

    Maybe I’m doing that xkcd comic where I overestimate average people’s familiarity with CLI though. It only gets complicated if you want to customise it beyond the basic flags in your global config file. I set it to include chapters and download subtitles for example. Once I get home I’ll try and remember to paste my config file here.

    Edit: ~/yt-dlp.conf

    # Save the files to this directory with this format
    --paths /mnt/Vidoes/inprogress/youtube
    --output "%(uploader)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s"
    
    # Include subtitles and chapter metadata
    --write-subs
    --embed-chapters
    
    # Resume incomplete downloads
    --continue
    
    # I use Vivaldi exclusively with a burner account to find videos to download so that Google thinks my activity is more organic
    --cookies-from-browser vivaldi
    
    # Optional - Only needed if you have issues downloading subtitles. I had to git clone and build "bgutil-ytdlp-pot-provider" to generate tokens to download files properly. This part was just copy pasted from their instructions
    --extractor-args "youtubepot-bgutilscript:server_home=/home/[username]/git/bgutil-ytdlp-pot-provider/server"
    
    # Optional quality filter - Possibly the only complicated part. This tells YT-DLP to prefer downloading H264 MP4 files, because my old as fuck android tablet doesn't support any other format. It also forces 1080p video, because I found after downloading too many videos YouTube will downgrade you to 360p and I'd rather get an error message than watch a 360p video. Some 720p only videos I edit this temporarily
    --format "bv[height=1080][vcodec^=avc1][ext=mp4]+ba[ext=m4a]/b[height=1080][vcodec^=avc1][ext=mp4]/bv*[height=1080]+ba/b[height=1080]"
    

    You will need to delete any # comments in your own config - I don’t think they’re supported. I included them for explanation.


  • I do this again now. I use YouTube as just a frontend and copy links into yt-dlp to watch without ads at my leisure. If I like it and think I’ll watch it again I simply don’t delete it after I’ve watched it. They’re like 80mb videos each.

    In days of yore, I did this because I wanted to rewatch the same videos over and over. It was hugely wasteful and also frustrating to do this on a dial up connection.

    My favourite part is I get “real” 1080p, rather than whatever Google thinks I’ll believe is 1080p.