Yes, you'll always have some that don't fit the mold. Off the top of my head:
bisqwit
pwnfunction
cherno
However, it's like picking through a dung pile looking for the needle, or something like that. You're better off reading some books, the news, experimenting on your own, etc.
Have to agree with this. YouTube is ok for entertainment but haven't found anything actually educational coming from tech content creators, on either YouTube or Twitch.
I hate the new trend where they make ridiculous faces on the thumbnails. I know they’re doing it because it must be increasing engagement, but it’s so annoying.
If you're able to install extensions, this one[0] removes the clickbaity thumbnails and titles using crowdsourced data. It's from the same developer of SponsorBlock
It’s less a trend and more that yt rewards it. Not sure if that is actively rewarded by algo or just organic but I recall when it started some YouTubers being reluctant but did it anyway because it worked. Think some even semi A B tested it
This has been a trend for like 10 years already. Yes, it annoys me too but they apparently have the numbers to prove it gets more engagement, which is even more annoying.
Custom thumbnails weren't a feature on YouTube until maybe 2010 or so. Before that, they had to be a frame from the video, and originally you couldn't even choose which frame. So I wouldn't exactly call it an "original sin".
Dave's Garage is pretty interesting. He worked at Microsoft and wrote things like the Task Manager and Zip folders. He tells old stories and gives the inside scoop on how some of those things came to be.
John Hammond - Cyber security/ethical hacking. He explains what he's doing well enough for even someone like me, with very little cybersec knowledge, to follow along and understand.
Someone else also commented Nathan Baggs, also a great explainer of what he's doing (and he hacks some fantastic old school games too).
More on the entertainment side than educational (but if you understand engineering/coding you would highly appreciate the work that goes into some of these videos)
Quite a few of mine are already mentioned but if you're into retro-computers or restoration, I find Usagi Electric to be an incredible wealth of knowledge: https://www.youtube.com/@UsagiElectric
I gotta mention styropyro[0] even though he doesn't deal with computers at all - his channel is all about crazy overpowered lasers and sometimes some crazy chemistry.
One of my favorites is Optimum: https://www.youtube.com/@optimumtech. Lots of gnarly PC builds. I cloned his negative pressure Ghost S1 SFFPC build (but with a deshrouded Sapphire RX 5700 XT+ and Ryzen 3700x) and I absolutely love it.
Casey Muratori and Will Byrd, though I'm not that big on tech youtubers. Strange Loop was also pretty great and I can't believe I have to say 'was' there, but so it goes.
books: stuff that's been around longer than 5 years
papers: 5-2 years
slides: 2 years-cutting edge
a few blogs are about as good as slides (basically when they're serving the same purpose: technical communication with peers)
YMMV, but I aim for things that people spent a long time thinking about to prepare, in order that I may learn from them in a much shorter time:
Good books probably take 4-12 months (wall clock) to prepare, but I can digest them in days to weeks. (theoretical CS and maths take longer to digest; I'm guessing they're proportionally more difficult to write. a physics anecdote: Halliday and Resnick reportedly took 5 years to prepare their 1st edition.)
I'm not sure I've run into anyone who's consistently written more than 6 good papers a year, so call them 1-2 months to prepare; digestible in 1-2 days.
Slides or the better blogs may take days to prepare, yet are digestible in fractions of an hour.
Low Level Learning - Sub 10 min videos with a leaning towards the security aspect of code
Ben Eater - Making a computer from scratch
Fireship - 100 seconds of X to help me keep up with whatever tech stack my colleagues are proposing this week
IppSec - Security and Hacking
Jacob Sorber - Various programming topics, mostly around C
javidx9 - Game programming topics, most writing old-school game engines
Low Byte Productions - Long form videos (1+ hours) on low level topics
Nathan Baggs - Hacks old games to get them working again
The Coding Train - Various fun programming topics mostly around visualization and graphics, done in the format of a kids program
TJ DeVries - Teaches you how to exit vim, and other vim stuff
typecraft - Neovim and tmux tutorials, plugins, configurations etc