Erratum: That cursed sentence is from Why 99% of YouTubers Fail (And How to Be the 1% That Doesn’t).

Dan Olson finds a cursed subreddit:

R/aitubers is all the entitlement of NewTubers but exclusively for people openly churning out slop.

“I’ve automated 2-4 videos daily, zero human intervention, I spend a half hour a week working on this, why am I not getting paid yet?”

The original reddit post:

I’ve been running my YouTube channel for about 3 months. It’s focused on JavaScript and React tutorials, with 2–4 videos uploaded daily. The videos are fully automated (AI-generated with clear explanations, code demos, and screen recordings).

Right now:

• Each video gets only a few views (1–10 views).

• I tried Google Ads ($200 spent) → got ~20 subscribers and ~20 hours of watch time.

• The Google campaigns brought thousands of uncounted views, and the number of Likes was much higher than dislikes.

• Tried Facebook/Reddit groups → but most don’t allow video posting, or posts get very low engagement.

My goal is to reach YPP within 6 months, but the current pace is not enough. I’m investing about $300/month in promotion and I can spend 30 minutes weekly myself.

👉 What would you suggest as the most effective strategy to actually get there?

I finally steeled myself to look at the page history. After dgerard commented about it, someone else tagged the article for additional problems:

• This article contains wording that promotes the subject in a subjective manner without imparting real information. (August 2025)

• This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. (August 2025)

Then a third editor added a section … made of LLM bullshit.

I’d probably be exaggerating if I said that every time I looked under the hood of Wikipedia, it reaffirmed how I don’t have the temperament to edit there. But I wouldn’t be exaggerating by much. It’s enough of a hassle to agree upon text in a paper co-authored with a colleague I know personally and like. Dealing with posers whose ego pays them by the word… Ugh.

I bet they learned their intellectual history from a chatbot summary of the Sokal hoax.

Incidentally, Sokal is a TERF now.

for h in Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch

sickos.jpg

Everyone else has to #appropriate their culture.

Idea: a programming language that controls how many times a for loop cycles by the number of times a letter appears in a given word, e.g., “for each b in blueberry”.

Either way, they have been cordially directed to the egress.

From the comments:

On the contrary, I think that almost all people and institutions that don’t currently have a Wikipedia article should not want one.

Huh. How oddly sensible.

An extreme (and close-to-home) example is documented in TracingWoodgrains’s exposé.of David Gerard’s Wikipedia smear campaign against LessWrong and related topics.

Ah, never mind.

Oh, wow, that biography is hilariously bad. Contexuality is not the same thing as superdeterminism. And locality is not “a lost cause”. Plenty of people throw around the term quantum nonlocality, but in the smaller population of those who take foundations seriously, many will say that quantum mechanics is local. Most but not all proponents of Copenhagen-ish interpretations say something like, “The moral of Bell’s theorem is that nature needs a non-(local hidden variable) theory. We keep locality and drop the hidden variables. In other words, quantum physics is a local non-(hidden variable) theory.” The Everettians of various flavors also tend to hold onto locality, or try to, while not always agreeing with each other on how to do that. It’s probably only among the Bohmians that you’ll find people insisting that quantum physics means nature is intrinsically nonlocal.

Clicking through and fumbling around led me to the time Yud wanted HPMoR to win the Hugo for Best Novel. Oh, and also the time that he bet against the LHC finding the Higgs boson, because

I don’t think the modern field of physics has its act sufficiently together to predict that a hitherto undetected quantum field is responsible for mass.

Is there any more solid evidence of Hossenfelder taking Thielbux, or is this just a guess based on the orbit she moves in: appearing on Michael Shermer’s podcast years after the news broke that he was a sex pest, blurbing the new book edited by sex pest Lawrence Krauss, etc.

It truly blows that cryptocurrency turned out to be useful only for crimes (uncool) and sex weirdos (derogatory).

“The word blueberry contains the letter b 3 times.”

Also reported in more detail here:

The word “blueberry” has the letter b three times:

• Once at the start (“B” in blueberry).
• Once in the middle (“b” in blue).
• Once before the -erry ending (“b” in berry). […] That’s exactly how blueberry is spelled, with the b’s in positions 1, 5, and 7. […] So the “bb” in the middle is really what gives blueberry its double-b moment. […] That middle double-b is easy to miss if you just glance at the word.

(via)

ChatControl in the EU, the Online Safety Act in the UK, Australia’s age gate for social media, a boatload of censorious state laws here in the US and staring down the barrel of KOSA… yeah.

Back in 2017, Freddie lost an argument with Malcolm Harris, lobbed some completely made-up sexual harassment allegations against Harris, and then blamed the whole thing on a bipolar episode. Nowadays he just makes up professors to get mad at.

Wikipedia has higher standards than the American HIstorical Association. Let’s all let that sink in for a minute.

Lightcone Infrastructure is running The Inkhaven Residency. For the 30 days of November, ~30 people will posts 30 blogposts – 1 per day. There will also be feedback and mentorship from other great writers, including Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, Gwern, and more TBA.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CA6XfmzYoGFWNhH8e/the-inkhaven-residency

“Hmm, your blog post is good, but it would be better with more Adderall, less recognition that other people have minds distinct from your own, and 220% more words.”

Because I read Yudkowsky being interviewed about writing HPMoR, and you should suffer too.

Funniest bits:

Yudkowsky still thinks that he described Mendelian inheritance, despite everyone from FF.net commenters on pointing out his mistake.

Wandering off into “the multiverse” and algorithmic information theory to fumble at explaining that magic works the way it does in a book because the writer made it that way.

This paragraph:

So to generalize that, let’s talk about the principle of “Make All the Characters Awesome.” This was an explicit process as I was envisioning the story, where I thought, for each character, how can I make this character awesome?

This comment:

My own belief about why so many people didn’t want to believe Quirrell was Voldemort is that Eliezer is nearly incapable of writing characters that people actually dislike (perhaps due to, as mentioned: “make every character awesome,” “give characters understandable flaws drawn from real life”).