Tom Scott: After ten years, it's time to stop making videos [video]

Post by morelisp » Mon, Jan 01, 2024, 6:59 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #92

jfengel wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's not to understand about UTF8? It's a way of coding up points in the Unicode space. You decode the bits and it yields a number that corresponds to a glyph, possibly with some decorations. The only thing special about UTF8 is that it happens to write ASCII as ASCII, which is nice as long as you realize that there is much outside that. Either that, or I'm completely off base and part of the vast horde who don't g…

Variable width encodings are inherently harder to understand. And while UTF-8 tries very hard to be simple whenever possible, it does have some nonobvious constraints that make it significantly more complex than the actual simplest variable-width encoding (a continuation bit and then 7 data bits).

Post by vorticalbox » Mon, Jan 01, 2024, 7:02 PM UTC

Twirrim wrote: post #77

vorticalbox wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lost a lot of my hearing so I play games, watch videos and people who put effort into subtitles are very much appreciated. Simple things like tagging who is talking is so helpful to understanding what is going on when there are multiple people in the video

In a number of his videos, they'll use different colours for different speakers. As best as I can see, while also choosing bright colours unlikely to cause problems for people with colour-blindness. It makes such a difference.

Post by ubercow13 » Mon, Jan 01, 2024, 7:03 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #66

Waterluvian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree! But the thing is— I’ve got about fifty Tom Scotts in my subscription list. I’m perplexed by doomsaysers’ laments about the state of online educational media. I’ve got far more high quality content for a huge variety of topics than I’ve ever had before. My theory is this: your favourite hobby store expands and adds one more aisle of fantastic products and five aisles of garbage. You’ll likely perceive quality…

the problem i have with educational youtube is that it's competence porn. it's quite satisfying to watch lyle peterson, kiwami japan, grandpa amu, nigel braun, grant sanderson, andy george, or xyla foxlin working through the problems involved in creating something, to the point that hours spent getting satisfied that way displace the far more effortful hours required to work through those problems myself. but i don't…

Post by mixdup » Mon, Jan 01, 2024, 7:06 PM UTC

CooCooCaCha wrote: post #42

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #11

What struck me was “it’s either keep growing and become a manager or stop and do smaller projects” As someone who many years back looked at a team of 40 developers I was leading and went “nah, I want to be an IC again” that resonates

I'm not sure I buy his reasoning there. He said that he uploads a video every week which is a brisk pace. Why not a video every month? Every quarter? Perhaps he really just wants a break and this explanation sounded the most reasonable. But I hope he didn't get burned out because he was afraid of switching things up.

Post by mhh__ » Mon, Jan 01, 2024, 7:07 PM UTC

CM30 wrote: post #47

supernova87a wrote: post #16

I remember asking at some point what seemed to make Tom Scott so successful compared to the thousands of others who have probably tried to make it big on Youtube/social media. Was it the format/length/style, the topics, the camera work, the commentary/research, etc? I think the consensus was that he came out with generally interesting content, but most of all, predictably and sustained , which generated viewership. I…

Yeah this makes sense to me. He covered interesting and unique topics, and posted about them on a regular basis. That's extremely difficult to do in any medium, let alone something like video where filming and editing demands are significantly higher and a well researched piece just takes far longer to put together.