I do not understand the attraction of nearly all YouTube creators and celebrities. I don't get the appeal. All the videos sound the same and have the same stupid looking tag lines to get you to watch them. Outrageous actions for attention are deeply troubling to me.
And I'm also SUPER aware that it's because it's not for me. I'm not the target demographic at all, and never will be.
At some point you have to realize that the world moves on, and that's just part of getting older. It feels awesome when you're 18-24 and everything is relevant to you. It feels way less awesome when you're over 40 and everything seems to be out of control.
So I’ve switched to using RSS to follow the specific niche creators that add value for me. As a result, my YT experience is entirely unlike what the YT algorithm suggests.
My official YT subscriptions are now just a subset, mostly as a mechanism to give small channels a little algorithm boost.
Check out stuff by Johnny Harris , veritasium, etc… for more educational stuff.
Also I didn’t like the ageism comment. I’m about your age and I can definitely understand the appeal of Mr. Beast. I feel a lot of the disdain for him is more snobbery than anything. Some people think they’re better or too good for that type of entertainment. If you truly don’t understand the appeal I think that’s actually a sign of autism. It’s unlikely you’re autistic and it’s more likely to be snobbery disguised as lack of understanding.
Entertainment is usually mindless anyway. It’s not like Shakespeare is some higher form of entertainment. It’s all snobbery that segregates these things. Transformers has more technical complexity and represents a bigger human achievement then Shakespeare.
The technical know how of thousands of people utilizing technology decades in development combined together to achieve the transformers movie to tell a story with more clarity then the equally cliche story of Romeo and Juliet.
It’s all mindless entertainment and class based prejudice.
Mr. Beast videos are actually insightful and educational in certain contexts. It’s just snobbery all the way down.
(derek's results in the linked video, which incidentally links to one of the two i linked above, were quantitatively different but qualitatively similar)
the really unintuitive thing about this i think is that people think of electrical energy as flowing inside wires, when actually almost all of it flows around the wires, as veritasium explained quite ably. this is something people doing high-speed pcb layout have to deal with a lot in order to avoid emi problems
as i understand it, derek has a ph.d. in physics, or actually in physics education research https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Veritasium. that doesn't mean he knows everything about physics, but generally my experience with people in ph.d. programs is that they're good at listening to counterarguments and admitting when they're wrong, and also seeking out experts before publishing
(i think the veritasium video does contain a minor error in that it says electrons collide with metal ions, which as i understand it is not exactly how ohmic resistance works—the 'electrons' moving through the lattice are not exactly electrons but virtual particles similar to phonons or plasmons, and so the things they scatter off of are not individual ions—but possibly derek knows this and was intentionally simplifying, or possibly my understanding is wrong. i mean, i don't have a ph.d. in anything, much less solid-state quantum physics! derek certainly knows the electrons traveling through the wire aren't point-like particles bouncing around like billiard balls, and that the ions aren't red spheres with plus signs on them, despite depicting them that way.)
electrons are moving through the wire. The virtual particle thing is a misunderstanding on your part I think.
I think your talking about current. Current flows in the opposite direction of electron drift velocity. In the simplified model they use these things called negative and positive charges flowing through the wire and current is defined as the movement of positive charge. These "charges" are of course virtual in nature because it's not what's actually happens.
What actually happens is negative charge is moving and positive charge (protons) are frozen.
And yes of course derek knows that it's a wave traveling through the lattice.
there is a good introductory presentation in https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_13.html but note that it assumes some previous familiarity with quantum mechanics. §13.6 explains that mostly what the electrons (really propagating waves of quantum probability amplitude for there to be an extra electron) are scattering off of is imperfections in the lattice. but that can't be the whole story or all perfect crystals would be superconductors
Theres no YouTuber without criticism. Referring to no one in particular: There’s even offensive snobbish garbage comments equivalent to the banality of Mr. Beast videos here on HN yet this doesn’t reflect the overall vibe here.
Don’t try to bring my overall point down by attacking one particular aspect of one particular example. What should the snobbery of some of the commentary on HN here render the entire site moot? No. My point stands regardless.
No, you giving two for two garbage suggestions shows how easy it can be for garbage content to masquerade as good. Both on YouTube, in HN comments, and elsewhere.
Shakespeare is Wicked or Hamilton is probably a good modern comparison.
The evidence behind the accusations is sooooo bad.
The point here is the finality: pure waste of resources
it's a question of "grow up and look at reality for what it is"
we're on a planet with limited resources that we have to preserve
and we're celebrating people doing shit videos like "I spent 24h in Ketchup" as "big successes" to be emulated ?
It's also silly to imply that simply doing some philanthropy somehow washes out anything bad you might have done. Often philanthropy is precisely a PR exercise to distract from that stuff.
Meanwhile the entire point of "giveaways" and the lotteries he runs is so that children will beg mom and dad to buy them Mr Beast's garbage chocolate for a high price that tastes like ass for a hope that it contains a golden ticket like some sort of Capitalist Evil Willy Wonka.
And the answer to that question is that it's not profitable to provide clean drinking water to people who can't pay for it. Not that it's not possible, not that it's not a solved engineering problem, clearly it is because some fuckin YouTuber pony's up the cash and suddenly there's a goddamn well. The only reason it's not already there is because we decided someone has to pay for the problem to be solved, and if none of the people who need it solved can afford it, we let them continue drinking dirty water and die from preventable illness because they were born in the wrong income bracket.
And by the same logic, why does Mr. Beast have this money in the first place? Because he's making bullshit videos about """solving""" these problems, because presenting loud, stupid nonsense to a western audience, for free, so they can be showed video ads in the midst of it, is worth enough to pay for these fucking wells.
To make this completely fucking clear: the attention of a western, young audience who's parents have money to spend and may, MIGHT, influence them to buy a product, is worth more than providing clean fucking drinking water to entire villages of people who live in a non-western place, with enough leftover for Mr. Beast to draw a frankly unethical salary for what he's actually doing, and providing to the world. That level of inequity between two groups of people is the grand fucking canyon.
And, to make this other point extra clear, that's not Mr. Beast's fault. He's acting completely rationally within a system that has utterly lost the plot in terms of what actually has value. The fact that unhinged amounts of money are going to a frankly, by all accounts I can find, quite amoral man who has cracked the code for generating loud, obnoxious nonsense that children will consume on an industrial scale so equally morally bankrupt companies can shove advertisements down their eyeballs and convince them to buy shit they don't need, so much so that he can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make yet more loud, obnoxious bullshit, is the problem. All of this is so completely and thoroughly disentangled from any notion of what anyone actually needs, and the fact that tons of people on this board and elsewhere still manage to call this system the most rational economic system yet discovered while looking at this complete fucking nonsense is astonishing to me.
Ok. so then the world is a better place because instead of having zero solutions, there is instead an imperfect solution.
Glad you agree that this is still massively a good thing.
> why don't you ask "why do so many people all across the world lack clean water?"
Then other people should feel free to go do something to fix that, instead of attacking other people who are fixing it in their own way.
> it is because some fuckin YouTuber pony's up the cash and suddenly there's a goddamn well.
Yep. There is a well. That is measurably helping people. And the world is a significantly better place with that well than without it.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/stand-out-of-our-light/...
(I mean I get it: they are "good at making money" and "efficient" so you call it a "success" because that's what the capitalist society is pushing you to say / feel without asking yourself deeper questions)
Would you say that "heroin" is a success because it's very good at making people dependant?
You should probably use the term "they are very efficient at what they are doing" (descriptive) rather than "they are successful" (value judgment)
And then you should ask yourself: why are you praising efficiency for the sake of it?
And if you look further at the world, can't you see that efficiency and speed is actually one of our big issues? It's because we're over-efficient that we're consuming so much oil, decimating species, polluting our planet
If we were less efficient, sure we might have less stuff to play with (but who really cares?), but we would not be damaging our world so much
Perhaps you can take a few minutes to think deeply about it, and it might change your definition of "a success"
There are plenty of successful politicians who I disagree with on virtually every issue. I would still classify them as “successful” and I am still interested in understanding how they managed to achieve those goals, despite disliking what they have done with those skills.
I'm betting over 90% of what we do, collectively, really doesn't offer any true "value" to the world for however you're defining value.
Which means that your measurement is bad because it's based on your opinion.
Just like your comparison to Hitler. For supporters of Hitler, the things he did were amazing. But that was just their opinion.
They just sell shit. Why should we rejoice because they do it efficiently?
But one thing that did help me gain perspective is a comment that these are literally global products where English is a second language at best. They’re designed to really be the least common denominator.
Someone who wants to make YouTube videos or not can ask themselves.
Those guys are just selling shit to people that are so lazy that the only thing they consume is shit
It's not a "success".. or it's a "success" for very wrong metrics.. it's as stupid as saying Hitler or Attila were successes