Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • 8 Posts
  • 850 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Oh whoops! My mistake! I’ll edit the above comment to fix that. It was Kurzgesagt who was in the wrong.

    The drama was (to copy/paste an earlier comment, because it’s rather lengthy):

    It started when a YouTuber whose channel is called Coffee Break reached out to Philip of Kurzgesagt as part of a video he was doing into the flaws of popular science communication. Specifically, about some significant errors in K’s video on Addiction. Instead of agreeing to collaborate, or even giving a simple “not interested, sorry”, K took an instant accusatory tone, claiming CB must have been making a “gotcha” piece. CB and K agreed that they would talk more about the matter to try and assuage K’s concerns, but K kept stalling while working on a retraction video, at which time K took down the video that was the impetus for this discussion (shortly after, as one of those aforementioned stalling efforts, having said “I never could bring myself to take it down”, claiming it would be “cruel and unnecessary” to do so—funny, considering in his AMA attempting to spin the story, he said “I was really stressed out about the addiction and the refugee video for years. Being finally open about my mistakes and deleting them felt like weight leaving my body.”). The Refugee video was also taken down along with the Addiction one that CB was interested in.

    K claims to be interested in science communication. But here, he decided to make the selfish decision to do what he thought would protect his own personal brand through duplicitous means. He got ahead of the story that falsely assumed was coming, and put up a pre-emptive response to that. Now, CB isn’t entirely blameless. In response to the above, CB put out a rather hot-headed reaction to the whole incident. He didn’t follow up with K to try to understand what had happened; he lashed out in anger at K’s self-righteous arse-covering video.

    And then CB started getting harassed. K called out CB, and many of K’s friends (other very large, powerful YouTubers such as CGP Grey and Philip de Franco) made very public statements to their audiences attacking CB. It ended up forcing CB into taking down his video, deleting a whole heap of tweets explaining what happened, and putting out an apology. Perhaps it was an apology that CB should have indeed made, but the need for an apology from K was much, much greater. And one never came. K used his larger platform to spin the narrative so that his large audience, and now also the general public who becomes aware of this, almost all take his side.

    Incidentally, here’s the video that CB was working on at the time. Hari, the scientist discussed in the video whom K worked with on his video discussed earlier, communicated very well with CB on it.




  • Just mentioning this here because I literally can’t see @[email protected]’s comment while signed in and hoping they’ll see this.

    Duke, you’ve accidentally mislabelled all your comments as being in German. This has the effect that anybody whose account is set to say which languages they speak, but hasn’t included German in that list, won’t be able to see your comments.

    On Jerboa it shows up saying “There is no record of this comment”

    On lemmy-ui (the default web UI) it’s way worse: it doesn’t show your comments, and it doesn’t show any replies to you either. It shows a “load more replies” button, which spins for a couple of seconds before failing and still showing the load more button when you click it.





  • Shadiversity

    Oh boy. I do HEMA, and let me tell you, he is not popular among people who actually have any understanding of historical fighting. The guy preaches his own opinion based on vague vibes and what seems right to him, and I think he’s even put out some videos saying how HEMA is terrible and wrong. Meanwhile, we read actual historical texts from people who were using these weapons and techniques at a time when it was actively being used, and we regularly train and fight people to prove to ourselves just how effective they are.

    And that’s without even getting in to the very clear bigotry he demonstrates on his second channel, and which occasionally makes its way subtly into the main channel.

    Anyway, as far as bigotry and people interested in swords are concerned, Jill Bearup. I haven’t watched her since she did the collab with Tom Scott and as a result her history of transphobia and refusal to denounce those beliefs became more widely known, leading to Tom Scott taking down the collab, and Nebula kicking her off their platform.



  • I still watch his main videos (when they actually happen…), but with a much higher degree of scepticism than I used to. And I stopped listening to his podcast (singular…).

    My disillusionment with him started with a few issues with his videos. The blatantly ridiculous “royal family is good actually” video. The less obvious but no less egregious touting of Guns, Germs, and Steel. The AI techbroism of his automation video. Then he just killed off the podcast with no explanation, leaving his cohost Brady to put out a note saying “yeah we’re just on hiatus for now”. Over 4 years ago that was. There was the fact that he sided very vocally with Kurzgesagt in the CoffeeBreak drama, despite CB Kurzgesagt obviously being in the wrong at every step of the way.

    Then the final straw where I was no longer willing to say I was a fan of his was when he did a video about some missile silo in America, in which he used the name of a submarine-based missile instead of a land-based missile at some point. Shortly afterwards he put out a massive mea culpa video saying it was a “catastrophic” error that he could not live with himself for, and that he holds himself to too high a standard to let that stand. All while still not acknowledging the problems with those earlier videos. So one nitpicky detail gets a massive hullabaloo and a retraction, but fundamental flaws in the underlying thesis of the video gets nothing? Give me a break.



  • It turned out to be from a “satire” news company (scare quotes because I just don’t see how it was satire…it’s not poking fun at any institutions or beliefs or advocating for any particular action), and not a real story.

    But it’s worth investigating how we feel about it anyway, because stories where something similar has happened have also been true.

    I think the people doing the interviews are the lowest scum-tier “influencers”. I hate that they exist, I can’t understand who’s watching them. They’re not producing anything of value. But they’re not doing anything morally wrong, in my opinion.

    The blame here lies 100% on the employer. What she’s doing when not on company time or in company uniform are none of the company’s business. It should not be legal and is definitely not ethical for an employer to take any disciplinary action for something an employee does that has no connection to their business.




  • The fantastic thing about renewables is how much they lend themselves to a less centralised model. Solar collector? Sure, why not‽ Rooftop solar on people’s houses? You bet! Geothermal? If local conditions are favourable to it, absolutely!

    Instead of a small number of massive power plants that only governments or really large corporations can operate individuals can generate the power for themselves, or companies can offset their costs by generating a little power, or cities can operate a smaller plant to power what operations in their city aren’t handled by other means. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.

    This contrasts with nuclear. SMRs could theoretically do the same thing, but haven’t yet proven viable. And traditional plants just put out way too much power. They’re one-size-fits-all by definition, and only have the ability to operate alongside other modes with the other modes filling in a small amount around the edges.