Alan Pan, also William Osman, Mark Rober and basically every other tech creator on shittube ever, are all corporate marionettes. They make trivial things sound smart then shove sponsored products up every damn frame of their videos. Then they go through their email box and accept invites to every public event possible so that they get paid for being in cults. They are the reason some people call all single board computers “Raspberry Pi®s” and all microcontrollers “Arduino®s”.
Half of them have nothing to even fucking do with a gamejam, the thing they are promoting, like William (well, except until he started getting paid by Anthropic to showcase bullshit code). He is there for the sake of being there and circling money around. Jabrils was supposed to be there but he was one of the few who seems to have caught on and left (although most of his videos are just saying “AI” 16 times in a row (although although the few ones where he doesn’t do that are fun)).
Do you have a spec of evidence for this supposed “circling money around”? The finances for that game jam are completely open (as are all Hack Club events).
Also, if I remember correctly, Jabrils didn’t come because he was sick.
In general, there are a few greedy friends who own Microsoft, AMD and so on and so forth. Each worker in the chain does their thing, produces something, gets a paycheck (usually) smaller than the worth of what was produced and then all of the differences add up so that the people up top may buy another yacht. When they do that a similar thing happens but that’s not relevant. It may seem they only take a little, but together the difference is like 1 to 360. Imagine 1/360th of a pizza, like one metric degree of a circle. There was a meme about that around Lemmy somewhere.
Anyways, the stuff they have is called capital. They want more. One way to achieve that would be to have more people be aware of their products (because selling analytics…), so they look online (actually just hire someone who will hire someone else to look online but that’s not relevant) for ways to do that. They find a non-profit, then they offer to give a little bit of this amazing shiny capital but ONLY if they put up a logo or something. Cool, they now have some guarantee that people will see their “good” and use the stuff. Now, inside of the non-profit (ahem), they need themselves to advertise to fulfill some of the goals of the partnership. To do that, they buy themselves some symbolic capital in the form of the influencers. They go hi, I am person X, therefore you should like and subscribe. Nerds go cheering, and go to the non-profit, then see that and go to for-profit aiding them to make money, therefore making a circle. Meanwhile the influencers themselves end up using the stuff by the for-profit as well and make a circle themselves.
My bad if true on Jabrils. I did speak to him when I was bored, his take was that “well I was just asked to be there by open sauce lol, I will see though”, and he wasn’t there so I naively assumed it was related, but I guess not.
I don’t disagree that that happens in our world, but Hack Club really isn’t advertising products like you insinuate. And I really don’t see how simply accepting a sponsorship is inherently evil. By that logic, do you also think that open source projects like KDE Plasma, GNOME (both sponsored by Google, Canonical etc), Fedora (sponsored by red hat) etc are also bad because they’ve accepted sponsorships from giant tech companies?
Yes, I plan on moving to BSD. I don’t use Plasma anymore.
Talk a bit on Lemmy, join a few communities, engage in comments. There’s no algorithm which will only show you stuff you like, only defederation lists and instance rules. Come back in a month and see if your opinion changed.
Huh. Personally I think developers getting paid is not inherently evil.
So you recommend Lemmy? Personally I like it so far too. Totally unrelated fun fact… Lemmy also has sponsors. Are you gonna leave Lemmy now? https://opencollective.com/lemmy
That OpenCollective page doesn’t list any corporations, it’s community funded. Biggest donation of all time is 2.8k freedoms. Nutomic is a bit of an asshole, yes, but Lemmy may continue without him regardless in case of anything.
So they appeared in an ad, for a game jam happening in an event that they all take part in, and William literally created and operates at a loss? And the ad is for a non profit? How horrible!
And yes, wills video with anthropic is weird, I skipped it.
FYI, the game jam was not part of Open Sauce, it was completely separate. William created Open Sauce, but he was not very involved in the making of the game jam, he was just invited as a guest.
That said, I agree with the sentiment of your post. I really don’t see anything wrong with the video.
Open Sauce? Believe it or not, it also represents the interests of the rich. Guess why they are there.
William literally created and operates at a loss
Created what? What loss? :.|:;?
EDIT: see reply
the ad is for a non profit
So? A NaNprofit it is, yes. With a few million in the bank. It is funded by corporations (previously also Elon Musk until someone on xitter convinced him it’s somehow related to tesla protests, separate story) to promote their products to literal kids who don’t know any better. And they are bad even at that.
What products are they supposedly promoting to kids? The link you gave for that doesn’t work.
I’ve never seen them do that, and I’ve heard Hack Club staff specifically state that they do not do that, even if a corp sponsors them.
Anyways, that is kind of the whole point of the sponsorship. Companies want AT MINIMUM a giant logo shining on some page if it looks like it’s for some cause (in this case kids education). Products related to sponsors are usually put up as prizes and/or have events built around them as constraint. Example quote from https://blueprint.hackclub.com/prototype :
Build your most amazing AI powered hardware gadget using:
An AI PC powered by AMD Ryzen AI processor
A Hugging Face Le Robot arm
Any additional hardware you need to customize your project
and use it to solve a challenging problem
The biggest advertisement is Slack. Nobody else really uses Slack for anything informal.
Also, how are they advertising through Slack? I’m active on there and I haven’t seen that. They have announcements about their own events, but they don’t advertise products at all.
And yes, it is unusual for Slack to be used as a non-formal space. They use it because most other options can’t handle such a huge amount of users. Not sure how that’s even relevant though?
How do you expect them to get money without sponsorships?
Yes, they accept donations from companies sometimes as prizes for events. So what? Is there something inherently wrong with that?
As you pointed out, Prototype is an exception. I had forgotten about that, but yeah they did have some AMD hardware at the Hackathon that you were expected to use. And I’m not a fan of that.
I’m pretty sure that’s the only time they’ve ever done that though. Even things like GitHub is one of their biggest donors, yet they specfically make a point to allow you to use whatever code hosting server you want.
Donors benefit because resources going to help teens build technical projects benefits the industry as a whole, rather than the donor specifically.
I’m pretty sure that’s the only time they’ve ever done that though
Wrong. Most website YSWSes expect you to use something like bun.js and write so in the manual. Most tutorials expect you to use GitHub. Most 3D printing expects you to use Bambu Labs (and I would need an example where a 3D printer was offered from another brand). This event literally tells you that you will get less if you don’t use sponsored tools, instead of outright saying no or expecting otherwise. And as you may already note, they are normalizing Claude and gamifying it.
Alan Pan, also William Osman, Mark Rober and basically every other tech creator on shittube ever, are all corporate marionettes. They make trivial things sound smart then shove sponsored products up every damn frame of their videos. Then they go through their email box and accept invites to every public event possible so that they get paid for being in cults. They are the reason some people call all single board computers “Raspberry Pi®s” and all microcontrollers “Arduino®s”.
Bro is hater of engineering YouTube, actually crazy.
They make entretaining videos aboutdumb projects and get sponsored. Its no that bad.
Mark Rober is by far the buggest and most sell out-y, other than him, most of these youtubers are really chill.
Cmon, look at this fucking circlejerk https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=0aMAHuLxg3s
Half of them have nothing to even fucking do with a gamejam, the thing they are promoting, like William (well, except until he started getting paid by Anthropic to showcase bullshit code). He is there for the sake of being there and circling money around. Jabrils was supposed to be there but he was one of the few who seems to have caught on and left (although most of his videos are just saying “AI” 16 times in a row (although although the few ones where he doesn’t do that are fun)).
Do you have a spec of evidence for this supposed “circling money around”? The finances for that game jam are completely open (as are all Hack Club events).
Also, if I remember correctly, Jabrils didn’t come because he was sick.
I recall there being an extremely specific Wikipedia article but I couldn’t find it, unfortunately, but it was political theory. Instead see: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_capital
In general, there are a few greedy friends who own Microsoft, AMD and so on and so forth. Each worker in the chain does their thing, produces something, gets a paycheck (usually) smaller than the worth of what was produced and then all of the differences add up so that the people up top may buy another yacht. When they do that a similar thing happens but that’s not relevant. It may seem they only take a little, but together the difference is like 1 to 360. Imagine 1/360th of a pizza, like one metric degree of a circle. There was a meme about that around Lemmy somewhere.
Anyways, the stuff they have is called capital. They want more. One way to achieve that would be to have more people be aware of their products (because selling analytics…), so they look online (actually just hire someone who will hire someone else to look online but that’s not relevant) for ways to do that. They find a non-profit, then they offer to give a little bit of this amazing shiny capital but ONLY if they put up a logo or something. Cool, they now have some guarantee that people will see their “good” and use the stuff. Now, inside of the non-profit (ahem), they need themselves to advertise to fulfill some of the goals of the partnership. To do that, they buy themselves some symbolic capital in the form of the influencers. They go hi, I am person X, therefore you should like and subscribe. Nerds go cheering, and go to the non-profit, then see that and go to for-profit aiding them to make money, therefore making a circle. Meanwhile the influencers themselves end up using the stuff by the for-profit as well and make a circle themselves.
My bad if true on Jabrils. I did speak to him when I was bored, his take was that “well I was just asked to be there by open sauce lol, I will see though”, and he wasn’t there so I naively assumed it was related, but I guess not.
I don’t disagree that that happens in our world, but Hack Club really isn’t advertising products like you insinuate. And I really don’t see how simply accepting a sponsorship is inherently evil. By that logic, do you also think that open source projects like KDE Plasma, GNOME (both sponsored by Google, Canonical etc), Fedora (sponsored by red hat) etc are also bad because they’ve accepted sponsorships from giant tech companies?
Yes, I plan on moving to BSD. I don’t use Plasma anymore.
Talk a bit on Lemmy, join a few communities, engage in comments. There’s no algorithm which will only show you stuff you like, only defederation lists and instance rules. Come back in a month and see if your opinion changed.
Huh. Personally I think developers getting paid is not inherently evil.
So you recommend Lemmy? Personally I like it so far too. Totally unrelated fun fact… Lemmy also has sponsors. Are you gonna leave Lemmy now? https://opencollective.com/lemmy
That OpenCollective page doesn’t list any corporations, it’s community funded. Biggest donation of all time is 2.8k freedoms. Nutomic is a bit of an asshole, yes, but Lemmy may continue without him regardless in case of anything.
So they appeared in an ad, for a game jam happening in an event that they all take part in, and William literally created and operates at a loss? And the ad is for a non profit? How horrible!
And yes, wills video with anthropic is weird, I skipped it.
FYI, the game jam was not part of Open Sauce, it was completely separate. William created Open Sauce, but he was not very involved in the making of the game jam, he was just invited as a guest.
That said, I agree with the sentiment of your post. I really don’t see anything wrong with the video.
deleted by creator
Open Sauce? Believe it or not, it also represents the interests of the rich. Guess why they are there.
Created what? What loss?
:.|:;?EDIT: see reply
So? A NaNprofit it is, yes. With a few million in the bank. It is funded by corporations (previously also Elon Musk until someone on xitter convinced him it’s somehow related to tesla protests, separate story) to promote their products to literal kids who don’t know any better. And they are bad even at that.
What products are they supposedly promoting to kids? The link you gave for that doesn’t work. I’ve never seen them do that, and I’ve heard Hack Club staff specifically state that they do not do that, even if a corp sponsors them.
11 hour account hmmm…
Anyways, that is kind of the whole point of the sponsorship. Companies want AT MINIMUM a giant logo shining on some page if it looks like it’s for some cause (in this case kids education). Products related to sponsors are usually put up as prizes and/or have events built around them as constraint. Example quote from https://blueprint.hackclub.com/prototype :
The biggest advertisement is Slack. Nobody else really uses Slack for anything informal.
Also, how are they advertising through Slack? I’m active on there and I haven’t seen that. They have announcements about their own events, but they don’t advertise products at all.
And yes, it is unusual for Slack to be used as a non-formal space. They use it because most other options can’t handle such a huge amount of users. Not sure how that’s even relevant though?
It is flying over your head that you are on Slack in the first place while you otherwise wouldn’t.
Yes, I just joined. So?
How do you expect them to get money without sponsorships? Yes, they accept donations from companies sometimes as prizes for events. So what? Is there something inherently wrong with that?
As you pointed out, Prototype is an exception. I had forgotten about that, but yeah they did have some AMD hardware at the Hackathon that you were expected to use. And I’m not a fan of that. I’m pretty sure that’s the only time they’ve ever done that though. Even things like GitHub is one of their biggest donors, yet they specfically make a point to allow you to use whatever code hosting server you want.
Donors benefit because resources going to help teens build technical projects benefits the industry as a whole, rather than the donor specifically.
Wrong. Most website YSWSes expect you to use something like bun.js and write so in the manual. Most tutorials expect you to use GitHub. Most 3D printing expects you to use Bambu Labs (and I would need an example where a 3D printer was offered from another brand). This event literally tells you that you will get less if you don’t use sponsored tools, instead of outright saying no or expecting otherwise. And as you may already note, they are normalizing Claude and gamifying it.
Diminishing effect.