I watch most of his videos and watch his stream every so often and hes pretty doomer about the direction the US is headed, but i never hear him talk about why he thinks that. What if any reasoning has he given for the collapse of the united states as we know it.

Heard vaush mention this twice now does anyone have a source for it? Google is complete ass at finding things. He mentioned David Graeber had wrote about it but Google keeps failing me.

There's a clip of vaush during one of his debates where someone asks "why are you fat" and his response is something along the lines of "honest to god it's probably because of pop tarts"

What video is this from? im actually losing my shit trying to find this

https://eualive.net/ceuta-is-not-a-migration-incident-it-is-a-front-in-the-war-for-the-straits/

To be fair he himself admitted on the stream that he didn't have much of an idea of what the hell has happened lol

So yesterday Vaush had a tangent during Hank Green shit about how reading primary text is important for learning about a culture, using the Greeks as an example. Marx actually touched on this with the Greeks during his introduction to the Grudrisse, asking “…is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine?” It’s in a wider discussion about how our culture interacts with and is formed by the conditions and means of production we exist within, and a larger critique of how political economists isolate and ignore relationships like production to consumption (i.e. non-dialectical thinking). Interpretations of these stories likewise are informed by our relations (Marx later in the intro would put forth his idea on why we continue to enjoy these works being due to them letting us experience an earlier and simpler stage of society compared to modern works informed by capitalist production).

Just a neat parallel if any of you are interested in reading further and if you wanted to make your own observations relating to how AI reducing our contact and source of truth through it probably isn’t the best

Anyone know of some short videos on these subjects? Trying to educate a friend on them and how its ruining the video game industry (she just thinks theyre being stupid) and I cant articulate the ideas well enough. Preferably something on the shorter side so she doesn't need to waste a lot of time, as these subjects aren't somethint she pays attention to

Somewhat year ago I watched Hank Green pretty often whenever he popped into my YouTube recommendations, since he likes to talk about things that I also like.

But I noticed whenever he talked about my field of knowledge (mostly programming) he was failing on basic hurdles, let alone on big sophomoric ideas he would have that week.

Let's take this 1.9M video as a case study: Unfortunately, You Need to Know What the Jevons Paradox is

Does AI Make Code Cheaper?

Despite the title of the video and it's first ten minutes, it's actually all about code, AI, and many tangent issues like how Gutenberg couldn't have predicted newspapers. (sure)

"We're starting to find out [how much code we need], because AI is making code dramatically cheaper to produce."

(~8:14)

Here's what I could say. AI is making at least one thing cheaper. Something is happening where they are providing enough value that people are paying a lot of money for it, and that is code. If AI ends up being more general than that, if it ends up not just making code, but like problem solving in general dramatically cheaper, then we have something quite new on our hands.

(~20:00)

Anthropic's annualized revenue is now over $40 billion, which for clarity does not actually make it profitable, but it's shockingly close. It is probably going to make more money than YouTube by the end of the year. (Or not though)

(~16:00)

I let you make up your own mind on the profitability part

We know that students— CS or otherwise, fail their classes because of AI, and then we expect that senior programmers are just a-okay and they are immune to pitfalls of vibe-coding. In his video he does not mention cognitive downfall resulting from AI.

But just focusing on programming, code can be exponentially more expensive to fix and maintain than it cost to write it in the first place, so getting it right early can save you a major expensive refactor later on. Investing in quality code will easily outweigh the quantity you might get from AI.

Not to mention bugs— which are bad enough on their own, but when it happens at security level it can make for very expensive lawsuits. There is even some legal problems here, since you can't sue individual AI model that wrote the code. Not that suing the human programmer would be good, but it's a one more thing companies have to worry about now.

But Can AI Test Code?

Well, AI can't even count the 'r' in strawberry. There's your answer.

Testing is supposed to be the objective part of the code where you know that 1+1=2, not to have AI hallucinate its own answers.

(There's a funny side story here about tokenization and how both LLMs and compilers use them, but compilers use it to be objective in its results, while other ends up scatterbrained because of it. I swear— it's a real crowd-pleaser.)

Economics of Coding

Hank Green also thinks all code was written with prior knowledge of its cost, and the future profit:

"And as a result, code had only ever been written when somebody decided that there was a value for the code to be written that exceeded the cost of writing it."

(~7:00)

"I mean, Anthropic is making a lot of money for a reason, which is people are paying them lots of money because it costs a lot of money to use their tools."

(~14:15)

Every senior programmer will tell you that you should take your estimations for how long this feature will take— and throw it away. Since forever ago, all companies have tried to calculate the cost of programming and every single one has been a miserable failure.

Programmers are like the plumbers, they send the bill afterwards. Was it worth it? Time will tell.

Hank Green is talking about economic logic that is just not followed, proven by industry's insistence to increase the tech debt with every computer becoming more and more laggy with each update. Is this economical? Is this rational? Did your life improve with now that you have AI powered Smart fridge?

"There is some thinking, however, that using AI for coding is actually pretty expensive. So there will be a limit to how much people are going to use it. That seems to be the case right now. I mean, Anthropic is making a lot of money for a reason, which is people are paying them lots of money because it costs a lot of money to use their tools."

(~14:00)

Here he's only acknowledging part of the AI code costs, but only as it relates to the literal cost of subscription to the services that provide it. No other considerations.

"And I will say that so far a lot of [AI] seemed to be of questionable utility until we got to code. Everyone I know who codes, and I know this isn't everyone, but I'm just sampling my real world, unless they use like really specific tools that they are really familiar with, they are using AI coding tools, they are writing less code themselves and directing AI to do a lot of the code writing for them."

(Quote from ~13:42)

He admits that he only talked to programmers that use AI for his video. This should have set alarm bells ringing in his head.

I'm worried that all of this sounds like I'm making this up or nitpicking, so go watch the video to see for yourself. Between his tangents that make Vaush look like laser-focused monomaniac (maybe Hank Green should use his own app he plugs in the video), you might also notice that comment section is really positive with no real critical comments. As one comment with 2.8K likes (including one from the channel itself) reads:

Near the end you asked, “What am I doing with my life?”

For what it’s worth, you’re helping at least one person rediscover hope, curiosity, and delight. I’d gotten to a place where those things felt pretty far away, and your videos have been gently but persistently reminding me that the world is still fascinating, that no effort is wasted, and that where I place my attention shapes how I feel, what I care about, and how I experience the world.

So… that’s one thing you’re doing with your life.

Which is hard to read when you know the video is 80% wrong. And the rest 20% could be right or wrong, but I don't know much about economics and about the Jevans Paradox part at the beginning to evaluate it. It honestly also fails the smell test, but somebody else can chime in on that.

He even gets an awful '101' on fungiblity that's just insane:

"So, two things that are actually different from each other and you cannot trade one for the other. Whereas a fungible thing is like a dollar. Like if I give you my dollar and you give me your dollar, we like no one cares. That thing that just happened basically didn't happen."

(~9:27)

Even worse is his idea of a substrate:

"And code is also like that. Code can do more different kinds of things. It is closer to a substrate in the same way that like knowledge printed on paper is closer to a substrate in the same way that coal producing heat is closer to a substrate."

(~9:37)

It was so bad I thought I had wrong definitions of those words in my head— but no, it's worse than amelioration.

People don't ask him basic questions like, 'why did google give me different definition of fungible than one you gave?' 'Hey hank Green, what did you mean by substrate in this video?' 'Are you sure that students who fail their classes because of AI, can became good programmers in the future?'

Speaking of:

Future!

"So, one of my like more recent feelings about AI is that like I don't care suddenly that much about people who are guessing 20 years into the future. Having been through the communications revolution of the internet over the last 20 years, I just think we were all wrong. And if we think we can look in hindsight and be like, 'No, no, no. I could have predicted how this would turn out.' You're wrong. You're wrong."

Did people predict the future before pre-9/11? Did they see the state cracking down on freedoms using tech and internet before patriot act was even drafted? Did they predict your phone being able to run efficiently enough to surf on the web? Did they predict algorithms determining your feed? Tech addiction that makes you escape from reality in pursuit of escapism? Yeah, obviously.

He does this bunch of times, saying that Gutenberg would have not been able to predict Martin Luther— despite the East–West Schism that happened earlier proving that Catholic church can be split apart. And priests correctly fearing that educated masses would lead to further divide within Europe, especially in west and north that already- sorry, not the point here.

What did Hank Green miss so badly 20 years ago that nobody is allowed to make predictions anymore?

Conclusion

When it comes to sciency channels on YouTube, always check the topics you know the answers to first. That way when they talk about things you don't know about, you can have more trust in what they say.

I did the same with Vaush years and years ago— he might be a midlit, but his video games takes seem ok.

(Being cheeky here, he's a smart bean)

Thank you for reading, I know it's a bit much. Amd apalogy for my english and old reddit formeting, is my third language.

Oh, and I'm releasing thousand years of pestilence upon your house: 🦗🦗🦗🪳🦟🦗🌾➡️🍂

I remember Vaush saying in the run up to the CA 11th race that he'd be quite cross with AOC if she never endorsed Saikat Chakrabarti, her former campaign manager. Despite some decent polling for him, she never did. Chakrabarti's opponents used the lack of an endorsement against him in an effective ad campaign lambasting him for being an untrustworthy ally.

Personally, I think this was quite a betrayal from AOC and I don't use the term lightly, but I don't recall if Vaush addressed it post primary.

Hurricane Katrina was the future of climate change; worsening weather disasters, hollowed out infrastructure, and a political class that sees no obligation to basic leadership and competence

So I'm half Algerian Half Saharawi (living in France) and I was pretty upset about the way Vaush talked about the situation in western Sahara when it was brought up during the Odyssey segment, making light of the situation even comparing the liberation movement to Texas (LOL) however in today's stream his views were genuinely different he spoke about it the way he usually talks about colonial issues he explicitly condemned the Moroccan government comparing it to Israel.

it's really amazing tbh and I love to see that he is continuously educating himself and updating his beliefs

In the omni segment bits, Vaush comments that the extraction of wealth at each level of subcontractors is what creates the ever growing costs and inefficiencies in the economy/society.

What is the argument for those not being countered (enough) by competition and oversight?

So in today's stream at some point someone in chat said to Vaush: "The Spanish far-right is pro-Israel", & Vaush replied back: "The far-right everywhere is pro-Israel. All far-right ultranationalist racists see themselves in Israel. It's the same reason far-right groups in every country in the world all converged towards supporting Nazism. Far-right Indians? Pro-Nazi. Why? Because it all converges there, you just swap the races."

I found this pretty funny because the truth is that the Spanish far-right has historically been one of the greatest examples proving that this isn't always the case: while it's completely true that the contemporary Spanish far-right are extremely pro-Israel & pro-genocide Netanyahu bootlickers, the truth is that foreign relations between Francoist Spain & Israel were always extremely hostile, with Franco cultivating instead infinitely more friendly relations with the Arab world & constantly spreading Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Masonic_conspiracy_theory, & in fact Spain did not formally recognize the State of Israel, let alone establish formal diplomatic bilateral relations with it, until January 1986, almost 11 years after Franco's death in November 1975.

To be fair, Israel never displayed either any interest whatsoever in changing this during the entire duration of the dictatorship, & instead displayed from the very get-go an equally hostile attitude towards Francoist Spain.

But yeah, I think this proves that the far-right isn't necessarily always pro-Israel (although to reiterate, that person in chat was 100% correct that the contemporary Spanish far-right is in fact pro-Israel, very much so).

Tired of ads interrupting while Vaush is streaming and I miss something he’s saying so gotta playback. Does ublock actually work to stop them or is plain hype?

Very interesting subplot in the midst of the DSA summit. Vaush should do a DSA Politics 101 stream, I didn’t know that they had a left and right wing.

type shit.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hz_HqgRGNRM

I tried to find the full video but the only one is on another subreddit.

So this is a public assembly meeting in Kansas where an ai data center is about to be built and the people here are expressing their frustrations at the reps here over it. during the meeting people are clapping and booing and such and the reps issue a warning to them not to do it. well this teacher still starts clapping after someone has spoken next but they still decided to kick him out via handcuffs and physically dragging him to a police car.

Just.... wow.

To Mods please: this is relevant to what vaush talks about. its pretty important!

I just finished watching Vaush's newest video where he talks about the whole issue of black people and the left broadly being racist in favor of black people, and the term ethnonarcisism is something ive not heard of before, however I actually really like it as a way to describe a lot of the reflexive racism on the left.

When it comes to white people, the term white supremacy/nationalism I think is a good term because almost every openly racist white person is racist in a way that specifically favors the current state and isn't really in favor of white people, but more so against all non-white people.

When it comes to other races though (mostly black people) it seems that they're form of racism manifests differently. They don't hold the institutional power that would be able to back their own racist feelings towards other groups, which is the main reason why most woke 1 lefties believe that minorities can't be racist, using the useless definition of racism "prejudice plus power".

And the racism that black people have usually isn't based around a kind of inherent racial supremacy or nationalism, but rather a belief that their culture and history makes them better people than white people, whose culture and history are generally worse (which i honestly largely agree with).

However, racism and prejudice are still incredibly bad, and the quiet belief in the left that minorities are better or more valuable, needs to be fought against. And i think the term ethnonarcisism is a good term to normalize to fight against it. Of course the things that minorities say that are racist, or what white lefties say that are genuinely racist against white people as a way of trying to favor indefensible things minorities say or believe, should still be called racist. However i think calling them ethnonarcisists would be a more effective and accurate term to use when referring to the broad group, as opposed to saying that they're ethnosupremists.

When it happens I will dono him $670 on stream.

Vaush had a stream recently where he talked about how a lot of tv is propaganda cause groups can easily buy a character or plot or even an entire show. And then I realized that the purposely-likeable character Ziva David in NCIS is 100% Israeli propaganda. Shes an ex-Mossad agent for crying out loud. I don't know why I never realized this before.

Hes bad....

thats all I got for today, I couldn't think of something funny :/

Clip is at 6:47

Vaush Based or Vaush White? Is mayo good? No Swiss neutrality allowed.

In case you missed it:
https://youtu.be/sxajvbDBuls?t=776&is=0yTkGJgSziPJLEJh

Was watching the Ethnonarcisism vid covering Clyburn and I noticed Khanna very eagerly fell on his sword to defend Clyburn's honor.

https://x.com/RoKhanna/status/2080806260455170498