Tom Scott’s work stands out as some of the best examples of how interesting and valuable web content can be. In a sea of short derivative junk-food content, he made things that i honestly learned from, without demanding more than 10 minutes of my time a week! There’s of course a lot of people also doing the same sort of great content, but it does feel like a slowly dying breed. Tom definitely deserves an indefinite break though. If/when he goes back to short form web video, I’ll be happy to watch again! :)
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 as having gone way down. In a limited sense, sure: it might be in the way. But it didn’t replace the good stuff.
Yeah but the burden is now on you to sift through the garbage to find the good stuff, especially since it's mostly mixed together in recommendations or search results etc. It feels more limited to me the other way around, like yes we have added some more good stuff, but good luck finding it.
If my favorite hobby store kept on expanding and expanding and the ratio of great stuff to garbage kept going down, I would definitely perceive the overall quality as being well into some death spiral.
Youtube makes it pretty easy for me. The algorithm recommends videos nd channels, and I say 'not interested' to the garbage, the result: a high quality subscription tab.
There seems to be a few topics which will cause your recommendations to spiral into conspiracy theory nonsense pretty quickly. Unfortunately you’ve got to be very careful with any gun content in YouTube as they almost always lead to bullshit in your feed.
Garand Thumb videos I've seen have been very good. Like the one about what supersonic rounds sound like going overhead. I'd guess there's somewhat less overlap with his content and conspiracy stuff.
This has always been the case since the printing press practically. There's always been way too much quality 'content' to manage and you have to sift your way through it. What has changed is that everything is now at our fingertips and we expose ourselves to the recommendation feed. I guess I'm saying that the problem hasn't changed, just our awareness of it.
The pulp mills must run, that capacity is already paid for. Let us convince the chattering classes of their value to the human enterprise in putting words down to keep the presses running.
"Romance" literature is honest in its own provincial way. No pretensions to much besides entertainment and consuming printing capacity.
Is it really on you to sort and sift, or is it on you to find a good guide? In the hobby store example, there are other people around to ask, and I think that is similar as well.
The future is more content, not less, so finding mechanisms to cope with that is well worth the effort.
Not exactly. Assuming the number of people in the hobby store didn’t grow exponentially, you would be completely empty in your favorite isle, most of the time.
But you aren't, because there's really only a few stores, not thousands, so people congregate at the same ones, and if there's nobody in those aisles continuously, they stop getting stocked (people create less content if nobody consumes it).
The problem is almost never that there's nobody in your aisle, it's about finding the right way to connect with them. There are numerous ways to do this. Even just leaving a comment on a video asking a question or responding to someone else's comment. That's about as low effort as you can get, but actually works.
Quality niche creators are partially motivated (and sometimes supported) by viewers. The bigger the sea of garbage they are swimming against, the less inclined they will be to start or continue.
People are motivated by viewers, but once it gets above a certain amount I think it becomes a different motivation. When I write things on reddit on a specific topic subreddit that have few posts in it, and those things get a few upvotes, I am more motivated to continue than posts in huge subs which get boatloads of upvotes. Because in order to get those one or two important ones, you need to know something specific and valuable, but to get thousands you have to find a way to appeal to a lot of people in a broad way.
Trying to chase the broad appeal will lead, in my experience, to a downslide where content gets less and less useful and more pop-culture oriented, or it becomes outright fraud or manipulation.
I’ve also been watching Tom Scott since he started, and love his content. I’ve put a few others that I enjoy below, that also produce what I consider to be high quality and entertaining content. Mind sharing any others?
Nile Red
Nick Zentner
Practical Engineering
Real Engineering
Ivan Miranda
Joe Makes
Tom Stanton
Veritasium
Numberphile
Deep Sky Videos
Objectivity (Honestly all of Brady’s channels are great)
3Blue1Brown
CGP Grey
Undecided with Matt Ferrell
The B1M
Kurzgesagt
Scott Manley
PBS Space Time
Deep Look
Looking Glass Universe
Institute of Human Anatomy
Smarter Every Day
Be Smart (formerly Its OK to be smart)
I’ve also recently started watching Scam Nation, which is a walkthrough of various magic tricks, in a relaxed setting. It’s not as dense as some of the others, but very good.
I would love a monthly “Where cool things are” post on here. Kind of like the Who’s Hiring post, but simply for listing channels, blogs, people etc. No specific works that would be better served by a regular post, but a comment with [name] and [what they do].
Hehehe. This channel is full of videos about "boring" topics and still you play them and bam, you are sucked into 15 min of nerdy details about a 90’s microwave that doesn’t even exists anymore and now you are wondering why you can’t have it. Amazing channel.
What sold it for me, was the Sunbeam toaster. I always wondered why in the cartoons people would get shocked sticking a fork in a toaster. And into the rabbit hole I went...
Steve Mould (himself a good science educator on YouTube) said that Technology Connections makes videos about things you didn't know you wanted to watch until you watched them.
I always think I will watch just 10-15 and end up watching the whole thing and then wonder why learning about a crappy refrigerator was so interesting.
There are so many great channels on there! Here are a few of my recent favorites:
Laura Kampf - german maker and problem solver, currently renovating a 120 year old house
Jimmy Diresta - maker and designer, also renovating an old house in upstate New York
Adam Savage - from MythBusters, interesting builds, and interesting discussion of shop and building techniques
Rambling Wild Rosie - former long-distance hiker and interior designer, renovating an old house in the forest Sweden, figuring things out as she goes - very beautiful and peaceful videos
Also loads of great wood working channels: Paul Sellers, Woodworking for Mere Mortals, Izzy Swan, Samurai Carpenter, and on and on!
One more vote for Steve Mould. I don't follow him directly but I still end up watching a bunch of his content through random suggestions, he's quite good.
Wendover Productions (random shit, but high quality)
Economics Explained (self explanatory)
Mini Air Craft Investigations (self explanatory)
Renegade Cut (leftist content)
LegalEagle (law)
Townsends (historical foods)
Casual Navigation (maritime/shipping)
How To Drink (mixed drinks)
Huygens Optics (optics/fabrication)
EmpLemon (weird video essays)
minutephysics (physics, and general science communications)
All of these I'd recommend for a general audience/nerdy person. Some of them are informative, some of them are funny. I've got much more that I'm personally interested in, but generally won't be interesting for the average person.
On the food topic, Tasting History with Max Miller is a favorite - it's interesting seeing him try to recreate recipes from historical primary sources and provide historical context.
Also, Adam Ragusea has some good content on food science, among his regular cooking videos.
Also on the food topic: How to Cook that with Ann Reardon is one that I like, aside from her more useful cake-related videos, she has a great series on historical recipes as well as amusing food hack debunkings.
Not quite in the same theme, but as far as gaming goes I'd put both videogamedunkey and MandaloreGaming there.
Dunkey doesn't post hour long video essays, but I find that apart from the occasional filler and joke content, his focus is on fun and it is completely infused with an empathetic passion for gaming.
Mandalore does the occasional deep dives into the weird and obscure but he's thorough and doesn't take it too seriously. Again, seems like a guy who is passionate about games but prefers to go off the beaten path in terms of game coverage.
Posy!! I can't believe I forgot him on my list! +1
Same with casual navigation! Have I ever worked on or piloted a boat? No. But will I watch little 10min explainer videos about bilge pumps and anchor chains? Definitely.
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 gain skills by watching someone else work through problems (or, in the less praiseworthy cases, glossing over problems); at best, i might get an idea to try out, or a feeling of inspiration, or a declarative, factual understanding of a particular mechanism—a kind of understanding which still requires exercise to convert into knowhow. but it's much easier to just click on another video and vicariously enjoy someone else's stunning competence than to close the window and struggle with my own
worse, sometimes it isn't actually competence. yesterday i watched a video where a guy made opaque soda-lime glass and convinced himself it was a better refractory than his insulating firebricks because he was, among other things, confused about thermodynamics, confused about different material properties, confused about the composition of waterglass, confused about the composition of garden lime, and confused about the temperature of his oxyhydrogen torch (and, I suspect, in significant danger of blowing his foundry to kingdom come)
watching porn or sex tips videos won't make you a great lover. neither will reading alt.sex.wizards
fifty tom scotts is ten hours a week of, basically, watching porn. i spend more time than that on watching the youtubers listed above and others; what if i spent that time on deliberate practice instead? ten hours a week of etudes might not get you into juillard, but pretty soon you're better than the average garage band member
where do you get your etudes or katas, and how do you judge your success on them? textbooks are pretty okay for that, and it's possible to make youtube videos with exercises in them, but those aren't the videos that become youtube hits. and i think it runs counter to the nature of the medium: not just memetic fitness, but also the effort gradient for both creators and consumers
I definitely agree that these sorts of videos have the potential to be a poor substitute for the real thing. Sometimes I notice that I've spent all my time watching videos about stuff I'm interested in and not actually doing the stuff I'm interested in. On the flip side though, as another commenter mentioned, they have the potential to serve as motivation too. For example, when I'm learning a particular technique on guitar I'll intentionally watch or listen to performances that exemplify what I want to learn in order to remind myself of how great it'd be to play that and of why I'm training. I find it helps boost and sustain motivation. Of course it can't be the only thing I do, but when I can't practice (much) on guitar because, say, I'm eating lunch and need both hands, I can loop some Paul Gilbert or EVH performances and get fired up for the next practice session.
You might be unfair to yourself in the sense that not all hours are created equal; some hours were never going to be productive hours, and so if you can immerse yourself in a subject with some easy-to-watch videos, that might be better than trying to force productivity where none is available.
the problem i have with educational youtube is
that it's competence porn. it's quite satisfying
It's a balance we all need to find, for sure -- competence porn vs. actual practice.
I think it's only a problem when you fool yourself and/or hurt yourself.
Late in 2023 I started watching some streaming coders (a thing I did not know existed) and I've found it beneficial. Definitely exposed to some things I wouldn't have been otherwise.
It’s interesting to hear your perspective. I personally have had the opposite effect from watching these people on YouTube. I find it highly inspirational and I’ve gone out and made interesting projects on my own without them. Not all educational content needs to be structured like school, in fact most of it shouldn’t. With this stuff it just needs to humanize the process, so you can see the process for yourself, and follow it for yourself.
The particular problem I have with your reply is it is half wrong.
Textbooks tend to be filled with crap themselves. I have a feeling you're judging the contents of 'educational' textbooks rather than the corpus of all textbooks.
Next, you are not an island. You need both things, insight from other people that are learned in said thing your attempting and practice. If you practice without the insight you're going to waste most of your life accomplishing something you could have learned from someone else in a few minutes.
I completely agree with this observation. In fact, you can use this to your advantage to save time. During the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, Blizzard released "Classic" World of Warcraft and I had this huge itch to play the game. I satisfied it by watching YouTube videos on Classic WoW instead.
Did I waste time watching WoW YouTube videos? Yes. Did I save much more time by tricking my brain into thinking I was playing the game when I actually wasn't? Yes!
Similarly, Doug DeMuro quirks videos have saved me millions (which I do not have) on 80s and 90s dream cars.
That Porsche 928 or Lamborghini Countach or the ultimate teenage dream Vector W8? Fun to look at the videos but realistically it would not be fun to own and maintain one.
Perhaps. But I wonder how much of this completely passive entertainment was in our ancestral environment? Before 50 years ago, the percentage of all humans who had ever experienced the symphony was so low it was essentially zero. Perhaps the boredom is integral to good living?
I think of it more like learning a language.
Yes, you have to put the effort in and learn your grammar and basic vocab yourself - but in conjunction you want to immerse yourself into hearing experts speak it.
Watching a film you fancy with subtitles or another audio stream is still mainly entertainment, but it's making you better.
Every person who's picked up an instrument has done so, so they can play something they heard and enjoyed.
Also - I don't need to master something. I like the messing about. Occasionally you'll later stumble across a problem you'd accidentally learnt the answer to - and that's gratifying, but it was never the point.
That’s a good point, it’s the absolute numbers that give a bad impression. I think the main thing tainting my feeling about the whole situation is TikTok/Reels/Shorts content. Feels like the sort of video I like just can’t exist in that sort of format, and it’s a pretty over-emphasized format currently. (at least in the YouTube app)
still though, so many cool and interesting things to learn online from interesting folks! :)
Are those fifty Tom Scotts all competing with each other to become 'experts of the week' on the same topics in slightly different ways? (that's what my 5 or 6 Tom Scotts do)
I wish YouTube channels could be viable by following the Periodic Videos model - stick to a single domain but keep it fresh by improving on old content.
> 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 as having gone way down.
This is actually something which is borne out by research, though in a slightly different context. Niro Sivanathan at the LBS has studied how arguments are presented, and essentially, recipients of arguments engage in an averaging function instead of an additive function, when evaluating strength -- adding one weaker point to a pair of very strong points actually detracts from the perceived strength of an argument.
It would not be at all surprising if we did the same sort of thing in different contexts, such as the example you gave here.
Part of me misses watching Daily Planet after school. Mythbusters on weekends. How It’s Made too! There’s some gems from that channel in the 00s that got me excited about engineering. I definitely wouldn’t sell them short either.
I have the same feeling. I was sad to see Tom be done, but I'd also prefer that to watching his quality decline, and as you say - I have a lot of Tom Scotts that come up in my feed. Tom's excellent, but there's other people, and no doubt some new people inspired by Tom will enter the space.
I do worry that too many garbage aisles might mean people choose the garbage and never make it beyond, pushing non-garbage into a greater and greater minority.
Turn on the subtitles on any of his videos (particularly when there are multiple speakers) and you'll see the effort that goes in to it.
Far too many people who publish to YouTube just let users deal with the the auto-generated subtitles, even when they have the ability and budget to do it properly.
"'Oh look at me I bought a Lamborghini!' Buy some damned subtitles" -- Tom Scott.[0]
His explanation about why subtitles don't match dubbing is not convincing. Basically he says that subtitling and dubbing are done by different teams with different goals. The dubbing crew tries to match lip movement. OK, so why not use the script that the dubbing team produced for the subtitles? Why do the translation twice?
His explanation for that: (a) sometimes what's spoken is too long to fit as subtitles on the screen, (b) what's spoken needs to be summarized, like multiple people shouting over one another on a reality show, otherwise the subtitles would be a confusing jumble of words, and (c) jokes/slang/puns can be difficult to translate.
I that agree (a) and (b) are legitimate reasons why subtitles might occasionally not match dubbing, but (c) is irrelevant. Jokes/slang/puns might be difficult or impossible to translate, but whatever way it ends up being translated can be spoken and written identically. In fact his goose joke is spoken and written in Portuguese as Eu estou gansado deles in the same way (timecode 3:57). I.e., the dubbing matches the subtitles. So the examples he gives do not support what he did in his own video.
Furthermore, his video (like almost all videos and TV shows) is chock full of cases where the subtitles and dubbing are different for no plausible reason related to (a), (b), or (c) above:
All examples below are when the video is set to Brazilian Portuguese audio and Brazilian Portuguese subtitles.
Time: 0:22
Dubbing: E o motivo disso é que as legendas e a dublagem ...
Subtitles: Isso acontece porque as legendas e a dublagem ...
Time: 0:51
D: as legendas e a dublagem são praticamente idênticas
S: as legendas e a dublagem são quase idênticas
Time: 1:08
D: é sincronizar o movimento dos lábios o mais próximo possível
S: é sincronizar os lábios o mais próximo possível
Although I agree that reasons (a) and (b) above might be valid on rare occasions, I think the real reason that subtitles don't match dubbing is because they are done by different teams with no coordination, with different timelines and deadlines, and probably by completely different companies in different countries.
If you cared strongly about this issue, I don't see any reason why the subtitles and dubbing couldn't be 99% or 99.9% identical in any particular target language. The 1% or 0.1% case being when the dialog is much too long for the screen or when you have to summarize a bunch of people talking simultaneously.
It's been a while since I watch that video, but I'm pretty sure he mentioned the different team working on it reason as well, and the rest of the video was only explaining the intentional differences instead of the inherent differences that comes from different people working on the translations?
Where I live, due different dialects being widely in use, it's common for TV and movies to show subtitle in the same language as the spoken language. Even then, it is not uncommon for the subtitle to deviate from what is spoken.
Also, as an English learner I used to watch TV shows with subtitles for the visually impaired, and there are times when the English subtitle deviate from what's the actors says as well.
Sometimes it's phrases that are commonly use in speech but strange to see written down; sometimes it's just tonal things that would get lost if written as-is; sometimes long speech is summarized so it doesn't' become a wall of text; sometimes it's most likely to just be mistakes.
Unless the difference actually contains significantly different meaning and can lead to misunderstanding, I don't see why that'd an issue that is worth spending the effort on eliminating?
Especially when it comes to translation, it's not like there's only one possible way of translating a sentence, who should make the editorial choice on which version is best and would that even be helpful for the purpose of disseminating information? If anything, having two version is probably better for gaging the tone and nuance in the original language.
> Unless the difference actually contains significantly different meaning and can lead to misunderstanding, I don't see why that'd an issue
The following are some of the reasons why it's very desirable that audio and subtitles should match:
(1) It's great when you're trying to learn a language or to watch in a language in which you're not fluent. It's extremely frustrating when the audio and subtitles don't match. This point is made by many people in the comments to the video[1].
(2) Even if you're fluent in the language, if you're watching with both audio and subtitles enabled, it's jarring when they don't match.
(3) If you didn't understand something in the audio (because of poor pronunciation, poor sound quality, or whatever), and you turn on subtitles to see what was said, you expect to see exactly what was said, not something "similar in meaning".
(4) A reason quoted directly from the YouTube comments[1] (which I think is a more common a problem that people realize): As someone with sensory processing issues but technically normal hearing - sometimes understanding what i'm hearing comes with a short delay, and accurate subtitles help bridge that gap so I can still keep pace with what i'm watching! If the subtitles don't match, however, it can COMPLETELY throw me off because of the conflict in information and I end up more confused than if i'd only read the subtitles or only listened to the audio. Accurate subtitles are an accessibility feature!
> phrases that are commonly use in speech but strange to see written down
I'm curious to know if you can give an example of that?
As someone who did work on subtitles in modestly popular videos as well, I believe there should be two subtitles---one for disabled peoples and one for language learners. They serve overlapping but not entirely identical purposes. The point 1 is well said though I think Tom Scott aimed his subtitles mostly to the former, as like television regulations.
The points 2 and 3 are comparably of less concern in my opinion. I don't watch TV nowadays, but when I did I used to watch programmes with on-screen captions (as opposed to optional subtitles, pretty common in East Asian channels), which never faithfully reproduced what has been said, and I was fine. Maybe I was more annoyed if I were able to turn captions off and only occasionally turn them on, but the whole points don't really match my experience.
The point 4 is what I'm most unsure about. I believe this kind of experience can be replicated by who can hear some but not all of foreign words and need subtitles (of the second kind) to connect them. For example, I can hear and speak Japanese but very slowly, so I normally have Japanese subtitles turned on. And I think I often experienced a lack of understanding due to my weak knowledge of Japanese, but never experienced such a conflict in understanding. Maybe the sensory processing issue has a substantially different mechanism to my model then?
> I'm curious to know if you can give an example of that?
Filler words, cut-off words, etc. Faithful transcriptions need to reproduce them (and yes, I also did some transcription works and that was really annoying) but subtitles needn't and shouldn't in most cases.
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.
Yes, a few people I watch do this and it's so helpful.
I wish more people out the time in, given how the state of AI is going I'm not sure when the auto generated subtitles don't differentiate between different people.
Damn, this is a video I didn't want to see today. I love Tom Scott's videos, and just about everything he's ever made has been a great watch. I still remember the VPN videos debunking common myths about them, and the one about how electronic/online voting was a bad idea.
But sadly, I get what he means here. YouTube has basically split down the middle, with the assumption being that you'll either pump out content quickly without much time to prepare, or you'll work on more infrequent essay length videos on a monthly basis or longer. And in both cases... the expectation seems to be that most videos are a professional endeavour now, created by a team of people with pro level editing skills and different people working on things like the script, research, getting the footage needed, etc.
It honestly feels like the platform isn't 'fun' anymore, and the kind of content we used to visit for is becoming less and less common by the day.
Regardless, enjoy your break/retirement Tom! You've made some incredible videos over the years, and I'll be excited to see what you create in future too.
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.
He definitely could, but I imagine his immediate goal is to manage expectations, and making sure no one is disappointed.
Leaving it as he did, he's open to do anything he wants: upload monthly, upload in indeterminate times, never uploading again, etc. And no one will feel let down or deceived.
If he said he'll start doing monthly, but then finds that he much prefers not doing the primary Tom Scott stuff at all, many people looking forward to those monthly videos will be let down.
If there's one thing that I feel comfortable saying about Tom Scott (as a casual viewer, at least), is that he likes doing right by people. I doubt anyone, including he, knows what to expect will be next, and the best thing he can do for his audience is to set an expectation that there ought to be no expectations. Let any surprises be surprises for the better, and let him have the peace of mind that he can do what he wants without feeling external pressure to deliver.
>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?
Yeah, this immediately came to mind for me as well. There's nothing set in stone that his production has to be weekly. He could move to monthly, or whatever. It doesn't even have to be a schedule, just whenever the next thing is ready push it. Which, he did leave the door open to but he also definitely seemed to couch this whole thing in "I'm completely done". It is a little weird, but of course he's free to do it how he wants
Although, he's not quitting completely and retiring, as he is still going to do all the other stuff (podcasts, other channels, etc) so maybe he's just shifting into different types of content, which is fine
obviously, and that was a poor way of wording it. my point was he's not completely retiring, just moving on to other forms of output which fit his preferred workload and schedule
I do think it's weird how much of a "I'm never coming back" vibe it had, though, given that he's still going to be doing podcasts and left the door open to more YouTube videos. I think it would've served him well to just say "hey, I'm cutting back but I'm not gone, just moving to a more healthy balance of how often I do these incredibly complicated videos"
but to your point, he should do him and how he wants to handle it
The algorithm does not care about upload cadence. At worst it breaks viewer's habits of watching someone's videos despite the viewer not actually enjoying it. Or with the extra time they have they find someone who can make better videos. There are plenty of examples of successful youtubers like Mr Beast who can go months between uploads and still perform well.
Some YouTubers did this quietly. hbomberguy and Contrapoints come to mind. Fewer videos, more unscripted/lightly scripted stuff like streams, podcasts, and collaborations.
Same same. I get the desire to manage more folks (status, money, org impact, joy of mentoring) but the ability to see what you directly build help solve problems... Well, that's hard to beat.
I was lucky to have a boss who let me dip my toe into the water of management. I dealt with a team of 10, I was formerly a IC on, and they required very little effort. After a year I decided to go back to being an IC as well. I was glad I was able to see I didn’t want to do it when the stakes were low and the team was actually easy to manage. It also gave me some more empathy for those in those management roles.
Interestingly, back in YouTube land, Matt D'Avella also just announced he got rid of his team and is back to doing things himself. He fell into that trap of thinking he needed to hire a team and scale a few years back, then found himself as a manager and wasn’t happy. It’s good Tom was able to see the paths ahead to avoid the headaches and layoffs when he ultimately decided he didn’t like it.
I joined a company in 2021 as a tech lead after working as a IC for almost a decade. I thought it was going to be a technical role but it slowly turned into a more engineering management one. The were aspects about it that I liked and actually good at. But I really missed programming and building things on my own. Plus the stress was bad. Few months ago, I went back to an engineering job.
And it is not so much WHAT he explained but HOW he explained it, what really made it stick. It was his sheer unbridled genuine enthusiasm that put him on the map for me.
I first came to learn about the complexity of character sets by finding out that SQL Server's default characterset is 2 bytes per character. I eventually came across Scott's video. UTF-8 encoding is only as new as SQL Server 2019.
This is a great video! I’ve been writing about UTF-8 on my blog and I noticed that many programmers don’t understand it, after 10 or 20 years
The main impediment seems to be that languages like Java, JavaScript, and Python treat UTF-8 as just another encoding, but really it’s the most fundamental encoding.
The language abstractions get in the way and distort the way people think about text
Newer languages like Go and Rust are more sensible, they don’t have global mutable encoding variables
It's misleading to describe UTF-8 as "the most fundamental encoding", because of the existence of UTF-32 (essentially just a trivial encoding of "raw" Unicode code points) and UTF-16 (which has certain limitations that later became part of the specification of what code points are valid in any encoding)
The word "fundamental" here probably has the same meaning as "elementary" as in elementary mathematics, i.e. something you should absolutely understand first, not something that makes up everything else.
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 get it.
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).
Unicode is variable length even if you use 32 bits, because glyphs sometimes require multiple codepoints. People sometimes write as if using more bits will remove complexity from Unicode but it doesn't really, you still need to handle multiple units at once sometimes.
I disagree, if you are correctly handling Unicode you already are going through some "decode" function which parses a 32 bit quantity from utf-8 or utf-16. From there you need to handle multiple codepoints together sometimes, like for non-composed diacritics, han unification, and some emojis. This is complex regardless of whether or not you use utf-8 or utf-16, in fact I'd say it's more difficult to handle than those.
If you want to teach someone how an encoding works, why would you not tell them that a single symbol can take multiple codepoints?
It seems like you're advocating people learning incorrect information and forming their impressions of it on falsehood. Which is probably why people think utf-32 frees you from variable-length encoding.
You should tell them, yes. And talk about it more at some point. But you don't have to go into much detail when today's lesson is specifically teaching UTF-8 or UTF-32. I don't know about you, but I think I could teach the latter about ten times faster.
As part of a comprehensive dive into Unicode it's a minor part, but for teaching an encoding it's a significant difference.
> I think I could teach the latter about ten times faster.
I've lectured computer science at the university level, and I think you could introduce all this information to a CS undergrad pretty coherently and design a lab or small assignment on it no problem. Maybe you could ask them to parse some emojis that require multiple 32-bit codepoints.
Even ignoring all the other advantages (mostly synchronization-related, which do objectively make implementing algorithms on UTF-8-encoded data simpler), "the number of set prefix bits is the number of bytes" doesn't seem meaningfully more complex than a single continuation bit.
> Plus UTF-8 has more invalid encodings to deal with than a super-simple format.
If your format supports non-canonical encodings you're in for a bad time no matter what, so a whole lot of that simplicity is fake.
> And it also means you're dealing with three classes of byte now.
If you're working a byte at a time you're doing it wrong, unless you're re-syncing an invalid stream in which case it's as simple as a continuation bit (specifically, it's two continuation bits).
The simple encoding already allows smaller characters to have the same bytes as subsets of larger characters. Non-canonical is not a big deal on top of that. Also there are other banned bytes you don't need to deal with.
> If you're working a byte at a time you're doing it wrong, unless you're re-syncing an invalid stream
It's very relevant to explaining the encoding and it matters if you're worried that invalid bytes might exist. You can't just ignore the extra complexity.
Also if you're not working a byte at a time, that kind of implies you parsed the characters? In which case non-canonical encodings are a non-problem.
If you're going beyond decoding, then you're beyond the stage where canonical and non-canonical versions exist any more.
Non-canonical encodings make it difficult to do things without decoding, but you have bigger problems to deal with in that situation, and the non-canonical encodings don't make it much worse. Don't get into that situation!
Specifically, even with only canonical encodings, one and two byte characters can appear inside the encoding of two and three byte characters. You can't do anything byte-wise at all, unlike UTF-8. But you already said "If you're working a byte at a time you're doing it wrong" so I hope that's not too big of an issue?
More properties of UTF-8: It is self-synchronizing. It has the same lexicographical sort order as UTF-32. It allows substring matches without false positives. It is compatible with null-terminated strings.
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. Interesting how that can be the main factor -- maybe both in keeping people's interest, but also developing the skills to create content that was improving each time and becoming more engaging. And I guess he points to that explicitly in this last video, where he says he challenged himself to make it his real job. For 10 years.
There’s something grounded in a very particular kind of 1980s/90s BBC Television content in the values Tom Scott’s videos embody. It’s sort of like he managed to give himself a job roleplaying as a Blue Peter/Tomorrow’s World presenter. He basically carried forward the kind of Reithian ‘mission to inform’ BBC values that largely disappeared in the John Birt era and somehow brought them onto YouTube.
IIRC in one of his videos, he explicitly said he was modelling himself on the Blue Peter style he grew up with. If I had to guess, somewhere in this video, but I'm not watching 17 minutes again even at double speed just to make a comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUF4afxMpQk
He tried and AFAICT failed to do TV in the past — this is probably not a bad thing given how the tides have changed.
I have always found his patterns of speech interesting. Quite measured but untrained.
I've never met him but I know a few people who have and I'm told that he's exactly the same in person (at least at a formal dinner!) which probably tracks.
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.
Consistency in quality and other metrics is the key, I think.
People like McDonald's because it's filled with sugars, salts and fats but also because they know what they're getting and it's (mostly) consistent from visit to visit.
I think Tom was also one of the earlier "cool/casual science & technology" channels and was probably actually one of the main drivers of this type of content. The only downside is that as other people have mentioned in comments, this type of content has gotten more popular, which seems great at first but it ends up being treated as entertainment rather than provoking thought and really being absorbed (not Tom's fault, just the way the average person consumes).
It really took me a surprising amount of time to notice the difference between his channel (and similar other actual content creators like Veritasium) and the many many other channels where some guy pretty much regurgitates information he did with only desk research, showing about 200 short stock footage clips while voicing over from some bedroom.
I suppose it just goes to show how easily you can be on autopilot and not appreciating or being able to tell actual journalism or original content from junk.
I always appreciate when authors of successful projects decide to stop after they've figured out the formula for success. Whether these are films without sequels, TV shows without dozens of seasons, or video content creators who are not compelled to keep uploading in perpetuity. It shows true care and dedication to their craft, and a desire to keep innovating in perhaps other areas of their career. It also avoids the pressure of keeping the high bar for quality, as there are not many authors who can consistently pull this off. I'd rather enjoy high quality content for a short time than see it gradually worsen over a long period.
Still, 10 years is a long run for any type of content, and uploading every week without fail is very impressive. I'm sure Tom Scott used the "Seinfeld strategy" for this, which goes to show that great minds think alike, considering Seinfeld is one of the shows that ended at the peak of its success.
Thanks for the interesting content over the years, Tom, and best of luck in whatever you decide to pursue next.
He's in a nice position in that he's diversified his content with a game show and podcast, so he can stop his main channel content and still have some income flowing. That gives him time to take a step back and re-invent himself if he chooses. I wonder if he would be doing the same thing if he only had his main channel.
I would think if he invested well and lives a modest life, he could live off the investments and effectively retire. Not that he’d want to stop doing things, but he could focus on what he finds interesting rather than what will pay the bills.
Of course I have no idea what his financial situation is like, but he doesn’t strike me as the type of YouTuber to blow all his income on fast cars and other “status” symbols.
> I'm sure Tom Scott used the "Seinfeld strategy" for this, which goes to show that great minds think alike, considering Seinfeld is one of the shows that ended at the peak of its success.
Jerry Seinfeld himself didn't use the calendar habit technique attributed to him. Of it, he said:
> This is hilarious to me, that somehow I am getting credit for making an X on a calendar with the Seinfeld productivity program. It's the dumbest non-idea that was not mine, but somehow I'm getting credit for it. -- https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ujvrg/comment/ceiugt...
On the latest cortex, CGP Grey made the point that what's happening in youtube education-adjacent videos is much the same as what's happening for entertainment in those spaces: the law of the excluded middle. You either do long infrequent videos e.g., like MrBeast, or frequent short videos. Both CGP Grey and Tom Scott did frequent mid-length content, which gets squeezed out.
We need to figure out what "frequent" is here. Tom Scott was doing >4 videos per month, Mr. Beast does about 2 per month, CGP Grey has done 1 per month for a decade.
Tom Scott, even on a very relaxing working schedule, could put out 1 video per month.
Oh I missed how youtube was rounding things, okay so for Q1 2022 - Q1 2023 he did 5 videos, but the year before that he did 10 and in the 8 months since he did 8.
Or depending on how you count Rock, Paper, Scissors, it was more like 115 videos, though most were unlisted. Plus he's been doing more subscriber-only videos.
To someone who knows, they are "clearly" the right thing. To someone who is searching for random words, but usually searches for some of these words in a different context ... it isn't.
My level of knowing was about the same as "I assume it's a channel" from seeing it mentioned once, much like the above post mentioned it. And then every single result was channel/podcast. So I don't think this is a bias from already knowing the answer.
When you search some words and the first ten results are all the same thing, and they fit this context and assumption perfectly, while your normal context for some of those words doesn't fit at all... Then you did it. You found the answer.
Tom Scott is one of the great YouTubers. I don't know him personally but he does come across as a genuine down to earth guy who just wants to share knowledge with the world.
I also only recently learned that he has a newsletter. He mentions it briefly in some of his videos but I have never seen him ask people to sign up. The only reason I found out about it is because he included one of my articles in it[1]. Definitely highly recommend checking it out[2].
What's even the point of a newsletter in 2023 unless you need to gather people emails for marketing campaigns or other shady stuff? What does it do that RSS doesn't?
I like having a newsletter. Goes into my email inbox after signing up my email addtess. Doesn't need a separate app. Doesn't rely on a corporate who might kill my preferred RSS reader. Etc. I liked RSS in its heyday and used Google Reader to aggregate my feeds but that's long gone now.
Self-hosted, open source options are out there for RSS readers, like Tiny RSS or Inoreader if you want a nice replacement for Google Reader. Email relies on a separate app to read them though (email client).
With RSS, I like that I dont have to give up my email address that can get hacked or stolen. It's one of the reasons we have so much spam in our emails. Also like companies like openrss and rss.app that are making RSS useful and cool again.
Huh? It's the same as saying RSS doesn't rely on corporations that might kill your preferred email client. Both are true in a way, but RSS reader is as user-end, as an email client, all you need to read RSS feeds is a browser extension.
What a brilliant bit of foreshadowing with the helicopter statement.
Given the other comments about the deep sea or space, maybe those are areas which he hopes he could've explored which he might end up tackling at some point!
I'm really glad I was around for his journey. Sometimes creatives will keep pushing a form of media long past the point where it's interesting or exciting. It takes a great deal of courage and creative integrity to let great things come to an end.
Same here, and not even a whisker of trepidation either. Just pure, total exaltation as his feet lifted off the ground - can't help but smile and laugh along with him, what a genuine personality.
I started watching his channel at the beginning of Things You Might Not Know. He’s one of the all-time greats. His RI lecture “There Is No Algorithm For Truth” is as prescient as ever. He truly helped make YouTube a special platform, even if it doesn’t always recognize its own strengths, and chases trends it’s fundamentally incapable of adopting properly.
I'm glad he's still doing the Lateral podcast (as that's the only thing I know him from). I do wish he would get somebody besides Youtubers as guests, though. It's frustrating to hear 20-somethings with very little cultural and historical knowledge try to work through the problems.
One of the more recent ones actually had a joke about this - one of his guests was significantly older than the other two, and some cultural references didn't quite land on either side.
I first saw Tom Scott on Computerphile. He’s so good at explaining topics with excitement and enthusiasm. It’s amazing he’s been so consistent with a video every week for the last 10 years. Not only “a video”, but videos that go above and beyond the norm in quality. He’s an inspiration.
I agree with his self assesment. I liked many of his videos but many I also found disagreable and opinionated without much of a sound argument. Sounds like he doesn't like those videos either. All in all, his videos are heads and shoulders above most of YouTube and I wish him well.
As a teenager Tom Scott helped write the documentation for POPFile. By chance he interviewed me years later on stage at some conference and just before we went on stage he told me that some of his very first contributions to anything on the Internet were to POPFile documentation. I had no idea.
I first saw Tom Scott onscreen around 2010, when he appeared as a contestant on the esoteric - and very good - BBC quiz show Only Connect. Link to 2022 Reddit discussion, which includes video [0].
It is a fun look back at a ponytailed Tom exercising his intellect and his natural aplomb on-camera, at around - or perhaps just before? - the era when his Youtube work began in earnest.
It's nice to see Youtube channel end on their own terms. So many creators burn out without warning, maybe a written explanation somewhere. Very few would post a video saying this channel is dead for obvious reasons.
It's probably against the rules, but I hope he reuploads every week from episode 1. I haven't gone through 10 years of backlogs and it's nice when new videos, as in videos that's never been watched comes to you.
It would also be nice if he (and creators in general) reformatted the videos into season format. Way easier to mentally keep track whether you watched something or not. 20 seasons of 6 months / 24 videos each.
I'm not sure exactly how to define it but this is the end of something — certainly something for that clique of British YouTubers (e.g. Tom Scott did the graphics for many jay foreman videos and so on)
And really YouTube in general — Tom Scott understood the medium of youtube very early on. https://youtu.be/MrppkAIVhH4?si=6y2yRkk2QY6hknwF from 17 years ago is basically the exact same rhythm as a modern video, Tom Scott doesn't like memes so its also not massively dated either (other than the obvious).
Tom's incredible ten year run inspired me to write a thing about escalating streaks, and the power of doing something on a repeating schedule and trying to make it a tiny bit better every time: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jan/2/escalating-streaks/
When major YouTubers like this stop uploading, I assume they're still getting fairly generous Adsense checks each month, which may decline over time, but, are probably not nothing and would continue ostensibly forever? I wonder what the numbers are if you grind for 5 years to build a multi-million subscriber count, then just stop (but leave everything online)?
With the excuse of there being a MOUNTAIN of high-quality content on YT, for someone like me who's never heard of nor watched Tom Scott: would anyone care to curate me a couple of his best videos to sample from?
I wouldn't say this about a lot of channels, but in the case of Tom Scott I think it applies: just pick a couple-minute video from his channel that seems interesting from the title, and give it a shot. The quality and enthusiasm are impressively consistent throughout all of it, if you ask me :)
FYI Tom Scott has several other active channels, and this only marks the end of weekly scheduled videos in the main channel after a full decade. It is not even the final video for the main channel.
I honestly didn't feel I'd be so emotionally moved by this send off, but here I am.
When you're done you're done, and 10 years of persistent, meaningful and education videos(not merely 'content'), published weekly, is more than anyone can ask of a single person and his crew.
Onwards and upwards, the adventure of life, and not work, still beckons.
