Richie’s Computer Stuff

God, if there was only one AI thing that really drives me up the wall, it has to be those frickin’ AI voices. They make a video literally unwatchable for me.


I saw an odd pattern that probably has an easy explanation (views). While I was looking for reviews of a certain newly launched car model, I saw A LOT of videos where all they did was repeat the manufacturer-supplied information with stock photos and videos from the manufacturer, using those gaudy and cringe-worthy AI voice overs, while providing nothing new or of substance. They weren’t reviews, they were just… telling us the same thing we already knew. Like, those videos existed for the sake of existing.


The funniest part were all the generic channel names. Auto Review, Car News Now, Gear Review, random stuff like that.


It is some of the laziest and most… cash-grabby type of thing and I found it so weird and annoying. I think it’s meant as a cheap and fast way to get views without doing any actual work, but the algorithm wasn’t favouring them. I don’t think I saw a single one of those videos listed with more than 1,000 views. Many had less than 100 views, and that was despite being uploaded days or weeks prior to the search. They probably just asked some AI “make a script about such-and-such car”, copy-pasted whatever it threw out without even looking at it, made the AI read it, and called it a day. Wow, such value.


Like, I don’t really like my own voice if I’m being honest, but I’d rather read a script myself than make an AI do it. It’s authentic.


I used FreeTube to search for reviews for that car, and I don’t think it favours YouTube’s algorithm as much, so I was seeing weird nonsense like that. And there was just so much of it, it made it hard to find actual good content when I had to weed through all that sloppy nonsense. Like, for every legit video made by someone who could actually see and drive the car, there were probably five or six slop videos.

I always wondered. Ghosts who died in the 1980s dressed in neon windbreakers practicing the Thriller dance. Why don’t they talk about those ghosts in TV shows? They sound like they’d be a lot of fun to meet!

Omg you guys that’s obviously a chicken.

One way to deal with this I’ve been doing for a little while is to use a service that enables me to use email aliases. It’s mostly meant to avoid email address leaks, but will also make it harder for online services and companies to track you, since it’s a big point of tracking. You can also use it to figure out who sold your email address. Not a perfect solution, but it’s something. I’ve been using Proton. Whether or not you trust them is up to you, but they do offer this ability (I just can’t remember if it’s free or paid).

I guess they need to train the AI to better differentiate between gut issues and last night’s borscht.

Reminds me of my big upgrade a little while back. I wanted a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which of course meant a new motherboard and RAM too. I was coming from 64GB of DDR4, and while most of the time I didn’t need it, there were times where I did need it, or it was great to have.


I didn’t want to spend the extra money on 64GB of DDR5 memory at the time, and settled with 32GB thinking “it’s fine, I don’t need more than that most of the time anyways, and I can always upgrade later if I need to”. I got 2x16GB, leaving room for two more later on (and allowing myself to graduate from dual channel to that tasty quad channel).


Well, fast forward to now, and… it’s not hard to get close to that ceiling. Between video/audio work, BeamNG.Drive being an absolute pig on memory (the Linux kernel is like “absolutely f****** not”, and boots it out of memory to prevent an OOM situation), and running AI models locally just for funsies, I’ve been thinking about an upgrade.


lol imagine my face when I see how “64GB prices” are now “32GB prices”. And all of a sudden… I don’t really need it anymore.