To add to this, I am getting vague error messages with any text of a certain length (longer than 100 characters or so) if I tweak any, or at least several, of the advanced settings.
I think this is a good idea, but it seems like you've made the .css file more minimalist than the actual website. I guess there's a distinction to be drawn between making YouTube less appealing to get distracted by, and making the YouTube experience nicer by reducing distraction and noise. If you're going for the latter, here are a few tweaks I would suggest:
* Pick a more aesthetically pleasing than default font, ditch the blue default link colors.
* Normalize the thumbnail size.
* Consider normalizing the video titles to all lowercase. It's still possible to search for something and see all caps everywhere which feels very noisy to my brain.
* Consider leaving the descriptions off altogether
I think this is true to an extent. Thinking you need external tools to make you more productive and spending too much time looking at new tools does the opposite. However, deciding on some tools that are good enough for you and actually using them can be a large boon. I have been more productive than ever in 2018 and it's partially because I established a system in Todoist and Trello. Of course, actually building the momentum on top of that system was the more important part, but I really don't think I could have done it without the organization.
Insects tend to have very simple sensing and processing systems and very specific signals or attractants. There's the history of the Australian beetle that was nearly driven to extinction by discarded beer bottles: the colour and shine of these precisely matched the beetle's mate-selection heuristic, and like many a man it was driven close to extinction by drink....
At large scale (think again: ag), a low-power sensor-specific signal might be worth the overhead of a specifically-tuned IR emitter. This might also avoid collateral damage in attracting other insects based on a broader signal. In this case, the example of UV-based "bug zappers", now illegal in many areas, because they were too effective in attracting, and killing, insect life. To the extent that the insect's predator populations (including songbirds) were affected.
And, for greater irony: the zappers didn't attract the insects for which they were sold as a control device: mosquitos and other biting insects, which are instead drawn by CO2.
It's not a given that such events are necessary because human population growth has already slowed down and will continue doing so as more of the world becomes developed. Furthermore, technological advancement can increase the number of people the planet can support. So, while there is definitely some population strain, it's far from certain that human overpopulation will result in catastrophe without events like this.
I don't think computers themselves have been designed that way necessarily, but a much more obvious culprit is the advertising in the 80s and 90s. Computers were strongly marketed as toys for boys. NPR's Planet Money had a very interesting episode on this. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
