Permacomputing

I almost always find myself impatiently trying to find a single specific piece of information.

This a thousand times. Can't really skim a video. Also, written text doesn't go "HALLOOOO, noiseeee Intro music this is YT-DUDE!!! more noise wild animation your friendly tech help guy, sponsored by [brand^TM^]" at you right on the first paragraph - must be that personality thing. ;)

There will be soooo much AI BS on the internet, I'm prepping by collecting books like a madperson already.

Not sure how to fix any of this but I’d love to find a way

Possible fix: someone uses #Invidious or #YoutubeDL to fetch a video file (in fact, Invidious enables you to fetch just the audio stream). Pipe that into a speech-to-text tool. Then ideally you should be able to edit it to make a readable abstract/truncated transcript.

In a perfect world™ you could post that to the Invidious page for that video to help others. But that’s not reality at the moment. Someone should submit an Invidious feature request so volunteers can share their text extracts.

Back when I forced myself through the first half of an EE bachelor with a lots of heavy maths and physics and computing I relied on youtube videos almost completely - whenever one of my profs couldn't deliver stuff in a way I could understand it (or when my autistic ears couldn't cope with the room acoustics plus their voice) I skipped class and went to youtube for help. I could not have done it with books, honestly. I needed both a human of my preference plus some well made graphics and diagrams - and then I could make sense of the concepts in the book and memorize them. Found a treasure of wonderful lecture series that had mediocre me surfing smoothly through my course before Covid put an end to it. So I guess for complex stuff videos can be great, but I'm picky and want my preferred level of information density.

These days I look up quite a range of different things: computer stuff, plants, gardening and animal stuff. Especially for the outdoor stuff there is an enormity of content online that is either in video form - so personality is quite a thing there, but I really just would like to know if I can feed plant A to animal B, or when I should seed my herbs - information that a tech person could put quickly in a table, but which some people on youtube can spin up to a 10 min video. For the computer stuff, videos can be helpful and to the point, but I would still prefer a text with images.

But yeah, it's a little frustrating to know that the content I seek is in there somewhere, somewhere in a video between walls of spoken text I cannot search in.

I’m of the same mind. My entire region lost internet the other day, so I was reduced to my mobile data, which was quite expensive to use with the plan I was on ($5 per GB). Being forced to be acutely aware of my data consumption, the sheer inefficiency of video became glaringly apparent. While it’s possible to lower the video quality, it’s still something I had to look at sparingly, but as you say, so much interesting stuff is only in that format.

Same boat.. but in my case I live in that boat. This thread covers how to disable the media. If I want to watch a video I do that at public libraries. If you have some confidence in advance that audio alone is sufficient, you could visit the YT link on an Invidious instance and opt to download just the audio.