How Algorithms Ruined Your Life 

Was the mayo shot worth the clean up after lol? :P

Him: "They may be able to diagnose us, before we know we're sick." Me, who just got a lung cancer treatment ad: "Oh, no."

Algorithm logic: You clicked on one food video. So I turned your homepage into the cooking channel because you clearly like it

It is nice to see internet historians son growing up

I love how he showed pigs when he said advertisers.

All my recommended videos are going to involve Mayo now...

reminds me of the time Amazon recommended to me ads to buy a bolt-gun for killing cattle for no apparent reason

I'm a data engineer who's been in the industry for near 10 years now. Here's a couple of things that are common misconceptions that a lot of lay people don't understand about "algorithms". First off, algorithms have been around since the dawn of time because they're simply steps to perform some sort of action/calculation/etc. Machine learning algorithms are actually not algorithms, they're in many cases statistical models (i.e. linear regression / decision trees/ etc) since they're not really 'programmed' steps, but rather they're mathematical models that predict the probability of something belonging to a certain category. When people talk about the 'black box' of machine learning algorithms, they mean that the calculation of coefficients of the statistical models are difficult to explain and predict. Basically when people train machine learning models they're defining coefficients for a big ass equation. That being said, "algorithms" i.e. "machine learning" is not as ever present in the industry as people want to believe because they're expensive to create / maintain. I've seen highly sophisticated algorithms trained to do something that a human can do more efficiently but at a smaller scale for which the cost of running the training was ca. 1 million dollars (yes it can be THAT expensive). This is not factoring in the human resources cost of the data engineers / data scientists / etc. Simply cleaning up a single dataset can cost thousands of dollars monthly. People outside of the industry really believe that processing data is free, when it's not, and there's a lot of practical reasons why the reality described in computer science papers is not the reality in the industry. Also re: your personal data, I can't speak for all of the US but as someone living in the EU, your data is wiped and/or anonymized after 6 months/1/2 years depending on the data and the use. This was a key concern in ALL of the companies I've worked for, to the point where projects had to be reviewed by the legal team to ensure we were privacy compliant. And again, from a practical perspective, there's a lot of reasons why you'd not want to use old data, hence why nobody really cares about storing all the personal data you ever shared online even if there wasn't a legal requirement to do away with it.

I hope your channel explodes in popularity soon. You deserve it.

This content is so high quality but criminally under-watched! Not many mayo abuse channels see the light of day but yours has great potential

"people who have followed there phone all the way to the wilderness and straight out of the gene pool" These man has some of the best writing in all of youtube

This dude just defenestrated a jar of mayonnaise for our enjoyment.

Anyone binging all his videos right now?

Thanks for watching! This was a joy to make, despite of (or perhaps because of) the mayo consumption. Please spam the comments with your suggestions for more ordinary things, it really helps the channel. Peace x

As a computer science student i can confirm that algorithms have ruined my life.

RU-vidrs: "You don't have to tell us how algorithms ruined our lives, we know!"

And now you've even proven yourself in covering increasingly complex topics in the same manner as any other ordinary thing. This video is amazing and just shows there is no limit to this channel potential, love you

You're tragically under-viewed, but I'm pretty sure you're gonna hit critical mass soon. Thanks for the great vids and for cleaning up all that mayo.

I feel like the scariest thing about algorithms is that I have no control over them. I can't vote for the people who make them or even look at the data that is collected. I can't say which parts of my data are relevant or even who gets to use it. I think that transparency and accountability should be the basis of any algorithm as they get more common.

that Schrodinger’s cat joke is sooo good

The algorithm brought me here. How ya like them oranges?!

Something interesting about your opening clip was all the manipulation that IBM, the company behind the team behind the Deep Blue chess machine, did to ruin Kasparov's accomodations and make his life a living hell while he was staying in the hotel during the competition. Yeah, Deep Blue was incredibly smart for a machine at the time, and it could've gone either way, but IBM was sleazy enough to force a victory. On turn 19 of that match, before a clear winner was even decided, Kasparov just gave up and walked out without saying a word. The team had already been accused of cheating earlier (even though they weren't involved in IBM's sabotage), so they couldn't even smile (and I'm sure they wouldn't have, given how the whole event ended. It was a damned shame how everything went down :(

God that Schrödinger's Klan cat joke killed me.

“They could diagnose you before you even know you’re sick” the fact that he said that and this was uploaded in the early early days of COVID is crazy lol

In a way we’re all algorithms. Now we’re staring at ones that make us obsolete

This is like the sexy, mayonnaise heavy version of CGP Grey's 'Humans need not apply'

I worked for Amazon delivering packages for a while, where the routes are all planned by algorithms with no human oversight, often ordering you to risk your life making dangerous turns etc., to supposedly maximize efficiency, and I think there's something bizarrely post-modern about being ordered by a machine like that.

"Except we're not wondering whether the cats dead or not, we just don't know if it's wearing a f*cking clan hood"

Theres a story about a startup that promised using algorithms to do all the accounting for various companies. Later the advanced machine learning algorithm turned out to be a room full of 50yo accountants.

I guarantee you man, it's a short matter of time before this channel absolutely bows up. And I'll be doing everything in my small power to speed up that process. Your content is far to genuine and far too good, I'm just glad I got in on the ground floor to watch you become huge

I think in the US personality laws should be expanded. Almost every person is online, so we are all in a way public figures, which is usually used to see how much compensation you are entitled to for violations of your right to publicity. The collection of our data, facial recognition, etc. is akin to using our photo, name, mannerisms, without our permission to sell alone or advertise a product. Even if it is advertised to yourself. They should close the loopholes and define it specifically to include data and facial recognition for protecting privacy. People are not a commodity to be sold.

Really happy for you that your channel is blowing up, awesome content man, you deserve it. The delivery, editing, writing.. All excellent. Blowing these other channels out of the water

11:58 That would have been a great NordVPN sponsor cut away

True. I went to uni for quant finance, 2018 grad, imagine my surprise when most investment companies completely shifted to algorithm trading. I couldnt even get a job in the sector cause there were so many out of work senior analysts with 30 years exp, and companies only wanted phd's in math and engineering.

That green screen formula bit at the end, together with your related narration, so... your comedic art. It's like a refined glimmer of it all.

Happy new year! Let me start my 2021 with bingeing Ordinary Things's videos... Great content, I really like your videos and appreciate the work you put into it!

I really like this video, I wish there was some way a sort of autonomatron that could act as a conglomerate of content and show me things it has collected that I'd be pre determined to enjoy.

I wish you well brother, this is truly an underrated channel. Will be letting my friends know.

I was really waiting for "The algorithm can't be racist if the box is black!" during the police bit.

Filming yourself cleaning up the Mayo at the end made me lose my shit laughing.

7:25 Thats my city. Please for the love of god tell me this is just a coincidence and not the algorithms telling me they know where I live. Also I love your channel and your production quality has really increased. Please keep up the good work!

"A swift Phillip K Kick" is the best thing ever said by a RU-vidr.

Just found your channel and I'm loving it! Keep up the good work!

Just been binging all day. Really underrated channel. Hopefully you blow up with this random recommendations crowd like where I came from.

Giggling at trying to spray away mayo is my fav bit so far

I can't believe that this video was posted in 2019 given the content at 9:32 Then again; I'm just a stupid human meat sack.

Your content is incredible, please consider more topics on these kinds of subjects!

This channel is bar none the best thing to do with your time spent on you tube. Amazing!

I got recommended a video explaining cereal and I've been binging this for like 3 hours. I love this channel

LOL at the subtle hints of Adam Curtis-type docs

Love your channel and I hope you surge in popularity, your content is 10/10

You are so sharp and on point with your jokes. Love it. Also smart and informative. What else do I need.

I can't believe the things you did to yourself for this video. Your arteries' sacrifices shall not be in vain

Awe hell yeah this channel is great!

Where has this channel been this whole time, keep it up

with content quality this insanely high you just keep it up mate and you'll be hitting trending with every video

lol that Predpol algorithm sounds like a great way to sell someone a map of where crimes have been commited in the past

I enjoy a call back to the Simpsons "pause to see the part where his heart breaks". You're on your way up my friend. As Arin Hanson once said "Get 10,000 subscribers and then do whatever the hell you want".

Its nice watching your channel blow up. Great content 👌👏 👍

Dude this is the best Chanel I ever seen, good quality information with really hilarious touch !

If only we could use all this technology to actually improve our lifes by, for example, making machines do work autonomously (with supervision) and giving people more time at home, enjoying their hobbies or staying with their family, instead of propelling our consumerism by targeted smart ads, and unnecessary government/corporation survailance and control.

“Poking, simpler times” 🤣💀💀

Absolutely fantastic content. Keep it coming.

just discovered this channel, binging every video! Absolutely hilarious and informing. "more terrifying than your ex's engagement announcement." love your hauntingly relatable humor

This is far from an ordinary topic. This is intriguing.

"Followed their GPS into the wilderness and straight out of the gene pool" That earned you a new sub

Great video!!! I know I’m late to the party here but I just wanted to say you make some really amazing content. So funny, beautifully edited and more educational than all 4 years of highschool! Keep up the fantastic work!

Incredible video and channel friend, subbed

this channel is about to blow up

6:43 Same, man. Social skills are muscles, and if we do not use them, they atrophy rather quickly.

Found your channel today!....Subscribed & hooked.

With every video I watch his sub count goes up so much, I’m glad he’s working his way towards the sub count worthy of the quality he’s already showing. You’d never guess he wasn’t some multi-million subbed mix of Tom Scott and Scott the Woz with these amazing videos. Just for my own record keeping- when I first watched his videos he was at about 250k subs.

At least the algorithm gave me this video, so I guess it's self aware. and feels guilty

8:45 Your cranium example actually show a real problem with machine learning quite well. It is usually quite hard to know what set information would best predict an outcome and we regularly get it wrong. In your example this would mean that we think cranium shape and size is a good predictor for crime so we feed the data into the algorithm. The algorithm tries to match this data with crime statistics and will find a locally optimal solution. So the algoritm will start to predict crime based on the input data. This might even initally seem to work (the predictions are correct) but this can be luck (unlikely), it could be bad predictions that eventually fail horribly or it might lead to scewed predictions. In this case this could mean the algorithm predicts that crimes will ocur in a certain area based on the cranium size of the people living there, since the police is now more active in this area they will report more crime in this area, leading to the algorithm thinking its internal system makes sense. Meanwhile a good portion of actual crimes get by undetected.

Please keep blowing up. Your script writing is the best

Love your work

Dude... that shot of you running from the cashier is hilarious and way too relatable

So how good was the mayo at fertilizing your brick yard?

BRUH YOUR VIDEOS ABSOLUTELY SLAP I hope you get more attention on your channel soon

Almost everything amazing about your channel has already been highlighted by someone, somewhere... but I think your music selection needs some praise too!

"algorithms present a Faustian new deal for our future" brilliantly said, yeah

"It's like being able to sell heroin outside the methadone clinic" So, Ohio?

Your videos are great. Thank you for all the interesting facts.

People are calling you underwatched but I just got recommended this so that might change soon fun channel btw you explained ML pretty succinctly. Interested to see how you improve!

This video continues to age like a fine Wine 🍷Well done my friend.

Why did I feel like he was going to say that algorithms are asking for part of our soul

This was my favorite of all your videos. Your take is fantastic, and your black box worries with predictive algorithms are exactly what worry me. Also your comment on the girlfriends friend getting more powerful the more personal info she gets was fucking spot on. Hilarious dude, thank you!

Also i like how you used the pigs as an image when you mentioned advertizers lol. Well done

I nearly spat my tea out when you added osama to the mid 2000's favourites

0:30 got me laughing at work like a maniac. I love this type of comedy, almost exclusively mastered by the British and their satellites.

Blown away by how good this channel is. Congrats.

Just got recommended your content, and have been watching your sub count tick up as I go from vid to vid. So just this once: thank you algorithm.

Just read 'You Look Like a Thing and I Love You' by Janelle Shane. Great book. Covers the stuff mentioned here and some other related topics. Fun read!

“We'll be unprepared, when the algorithm stops working.”

Great video!

I'm loving your Videos!

Looks like you've been chosen by the algorithm, congrats

Me finding this video through an algorithm...

I've binged all your videos you're awesome

Gotta say, you were blessed by the algorithm. Have no idea how I found this channel but I've been binge watching