Comment by teitoklien
2 days ago
lol, you have no idea just how hard it is to make something as mammoth size financially viable or even sustainable as a business, due to sheer technological bottlenecks in video streaming, encoding/decoding videos at that scale, and everything else.
It is a technological marvel, similar in comparison to designing and building an F-35 fighter jet or anything else.
It requires custom Hardware Accelerators designed at a chip level, on top of decades of algorithmic refining of video encoder decoders in stuff like gstreamer or ffmpeg, refining video streaming at inconsistent cellular data networks, various ISPs doing shenanigans with ports, etc. Storing and ingesting that much video data at "Free" initial pricing, streaming that much data to viewers, building analytics algorithms to pair advertisements with watchers, to get a high enough conversion rate to make ads economically viable enough while having minimal number of ads per vids.
Even an infinite money printer like google would struggle were it not for systematically solving technology at all levels from hardware, to chip design, to algorithms, to network level tuning, to frontend device optimizations, etc.
And has been made possible by only the cumulative effort of humankind to build such advanced sophisticated systems in the palm of our devices such that even a normie average iphone 16e has more compute capacity than early 1990s or so, much more.
It is a miracle, in every shape and form.
If that is a miracle so is every engineering and scientific effort because most things are hard multifaceted problems. Maybe these aren’t actually miracles but the inevitable products of structured teams of trained people.
That's like saying "The Great Wall of China is just like any other garden wall."
I’m saying if you have an organized and sufficiently economically powered empire, along with a nearby roving band of nomads, the great wall of china becomes inevitable.
I don't see that comparison at all. Rather, I see an idea that's more akin to, "This is the sum testament to our overall technological capabilities at that time", for both YT and the Great Wall.
That's why I question whether it's actually a "miracle". I don't mean to suggest that it's not quite the feat to make something like that exist, but I see it as more of a representation of where we're at technologically, rather than some sort of improbable, inexplicable thing that otherwise shouldn't be. The fact that the response to my post seems to clearly understand how it exists kinda-sorta supports that, IMO - you can draw a clear path towards understanding how it came to be.
Beautifully put