Sounds like HowToBasic (or Basics?), from memory.

So I work at DeviantArt, and we actually saw this in real-time. A few years ago, we added external ads all over the place, and had to add a whole framework to detect “ad-unsafe” works that wouldn’t get ads served against them. So we only got ads against a percentage of views, and people were getting pissed at the ads and leaving.

So we tore the ads back out, traffic’s recovered, and a focus on providing actual tools for artists to make money through the site has meant we’re doing better without ads than we were with ads.

Each show is unique, from what I see in the comments. I feel like he’s not doing the traditional ‘write a set’ thing, but he works backwards from an idea (“America feels like a Dollar General nowadays”, for example) and has the ability to conjure an hour of almost shaggy-dog-story material on the spot leading you to that endpoint.

Rare talent.

This came up in the latest episode of Tom Scott’s Reverse Trivia: they got onto the topic of princes, and Tom had the sudden realisation of where “principality” comes from.

And Gary then dropped “duchy”: region granted to a duke.

Words have histories, we often forget it.

So this came up with this user a few days ago, and apparently ð fell out of use later in Old English and its usage was merged into þ for hundreds of years.

I remain unconvinced.

Whenever I come across ASCII art in the comments, it’s a good day. Here’s one from the day job:

So there are multiple people in this thread who state their job is to unfuck what the LLMs are doing. I have a family member who graduated in CS a year ago and is having a hell of a time finding work, how would he go about getting one of these “clean up after the model” jobs?

My leatherman was a little over a ton That thing must be huge!

I’ve actually written exactly that before, when I needed to check the lowest bit in an SQL dialect with no bitwise operators. It was disgusting and awesome.

There’s a short story (more of a novella) by Stephen Baxter on this exact topic, for what it’s worth. Touching Centauri: https://www.e-reading.mobi/chapter.php/1035265/30/stephen-baxter-phase-space.html