Tales from the jar side: YouTube Partner Program, Tuck Bridge program, jChampions Conf, College enrollment crisis, and the usual toots and skeets
A friend said she recognized me from vegetarian club, but I'm sure I've never met herbivore. (rimshot, @IHasWisdom@mastodon.social)
Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of January 12 - 19, 2025. This week I finished the Tuck Bridge program offered by Dartmouth University to remote students at several colleges, including Trinity College in Hartford, CT.
Hey, My Channel Is Official
The last few weeks I’ve been monitoring the Tales from the jar side YouTube channel as it crept closer and closer to full membership in the YouTube Partner Program. The requirements for the full program are:
A minimum of 1000 subscribers
4000 hours of watch time during the last 365 days
Most people thing the subscriber requirement is reasonable, but that’s a lot of watch hours. It’s hard to get that many in a year without some video going “viral”, whatever viral means for a small channel like mine. Therefore, some time ago, YouTube granted more limited memberships for 1000 subscribers and 3000 watch hours, presumably to encourage you to keep going.
The Tftjs YouTube channel hit that milestone at the end of August, 2024. Ever since then my subscribers numbers have been gradually climbing, but watch hours are tough. They go up, but much more slowly. My videos aren’t the sort that go viral, after all.
Over the last week, though, I’ve been getting closer and closer. I noticed when I passed 3900, and have been getting between 5 and 20 watch hours a day since then, keeping in mind that any watch hours older than 365 days drop off each day as well. Yesterday I hit 3988, meaning I only needed another dozen to make it.
Today I checked, and I’m well up into the 4000s. If I look at the watch hours, you can see something happened:
Yeah, 71 watch hours in a day is a huge number for me. I’m not sure why, but it’s the one video I have that comes closest to going viral: my Java tier list video:
As they say, that one has legs. It’s got over 7K views since it was published back at the beginning of July, and it has nearly 1000 watch hours by itself. My son (who is my unofficial, official Social Media Consultant) keeps telling me I should make another tier list video, and I keep telling him this may be the only one I was qualified to make, but we’ll see if I can think of something else.
When I logged onto YouTube Studio today, I expected to see I still had a few more watch hours to go. Instead, I just got a page saying I needed to log in from a browser to I could sign some agreements and join the program fully. That’s a bit of an anticlimax from the choirs of angels I was expecting, or at least some animated fireworks, but so be it. I’m now officially in, for whatever that’s worth. I’m guessing my entire catalog will earn me a few cents a month now. When I hit a full dollar in earnings, I’ll let you know.
(Incidentally, I currently have 2903 subscribers, so the next number I’m waiting for is to pass 3K.)
One last thing. On that particular video shown above, I got one (fortunately, only one) commenter saying he stopped watching because the silly icons I used were too distracting, like the seal for sealed interfaces, or the shell for JShell, or the spools of yarn for virtual threads. I’m very happy with those icons and thought they were clever, so I’m afraid we’re going to have to agree to disagree on that issue. My challenge will be what to use for “synchronize virtual threads without pinning” or “stream gatherers” or “ahead of time class loading and linking”, all scheduled for Java 24 in March.
Tuck Bridge Program Ends
This week completed the three-week Bridge program for undergraduates given by the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. That meant there was remarkably little for me to do, given that the students were mostly working in their small groups, preparing for their big presentations on Friday. That was good for me, though, because my new Trinity semester starts this week, and I’m busy preparing for that.
The final project for each group was based around a publicly traded company. The idea is that they would be hosting “investors” interested in purchasing the company, and they had to explain was a reasonable evaluation for their company was and why. They were essentially acting as consultants, giving a stock price valuation and backing it up with reasons from what they had learned in the program.
All the presentations were well done, but I did learn an interesting lesson. Many of the valuations the groups determined didn’t even come close to the current stock prices. One group was particularly far away, coming up with a price that was nearly half the existing value, though they eventually settled on a number 30% below the existing one.
(No, I’m not going to say which company. This was a student exercise, and should definitely not be used for actual market decisions.)
The students did what I probably would have done in their place, which was to verify the process they used to get the figures and then come up with a story explaining the results. What I learned from the investor feedback is that real investors don’t rely on the figures nearly as much as you might think. In more than one case, the questions were like, “Sure, the numbers came out that way, but you can make the numbers say anything. What do you actually think?”
I agree that there was a lot of room for interpretation in the numbers (way more than I expected, actually), but to hear real business people shrug at them and ask for actual reasons was fascinating. In the end, it sounded to me like a good presentation would have taken a different attitude. Say something like, “We followed the procedures we were taught and this is the number we got, and here are the reasons we got it. How much weight you want to give to those reasons, however, is up to you. Based on the other fundamentals, this is what we think, but you are free to interpret this information however you like.”
That’s more of an acknowledgement of the limitations of the analysis and the limited experience of the students performing it, while still providing the results. Too many of the group (in my opinion) argued too forcefully for the numbers they found, claiming the management of their companies were making serious mistakes. I’d be reluctant to say something that definitive in public, but, then again, I’m not in my late teens / early twenties any more and lack the conviction of youth. But hey, that’s just me Your mileage may vary.
I’m glad it’s done, though. I’m ready to get back to my computer science world. I did find it interesting that not one of the presentations said anything about running the results through ChatGPT or some other AI tool to see what it thought or to check their reasoning. I probably would have started with that, but I live in that world.
The students were supposed to wear “business formal” attire for the final presentations, and even though I wasn’t speaking, I went along with it. Here’s a photo my wife took on Friday:
Don’t I just look the classical New England liberal arts college professor? All I’m missing are elbow patches and a pipe. The hat being askew is no doubt due to me being in computer science rather than actual business, or maybe my head is crooked.
Data-Oriented Programming and REST
I want to remind everybody that the jChampions Conference, the free (!) virtual conference where all the speakers are Java Champions, is this Thursday/Friday and next Monday/Tuesday. I’m giving a talk called A Data-Oriented Programming Approach to REST on Friday afternoon at 1 pm EST.
I’ve got some good examples of data-oriented programming in general, involving Java records, sealed interfaces, and pattern matching for switch. I’ve got a couple of REST-based web services lined up for demos, one of which is using the Ollama system to access local LLMs for chat and vision. After all, every conference presentation is required, by law, to involve AI these days, and I don’t want to get into trouble.
I’m hoping to simultaneously stream the talk to my Tales from the jar side channel. If you’re there, please say hi. :)
The College Enrollment Crisis
I watched a fascinating YouTube video this week, called The College Enrollment Crisis. I actually watched it on Nebula rather than YouTube, because I really like that site, to the point where I bought a lifetime subscription (for way less than you’d expect — they have good sales on a regular basis).
Here’s the YouTube version, though, if you want:
It’s a fascinating look at the financial aspect of small colleges in the U.S. The basic ideas are:
After each recession (again, in the US, though it may apply elsewhere), state governments cut back on funding for education. Though that eventually recovers, it can take a while, and sometimes doesn’t happen.
As external funding drops, colleges without large endowments (which is almost all of them) become increasingly dependent on tuition, which has been rising faster than inflation forever.
We’re headed for a big demographic drop in the number of college-age students. In the US this is at least partly because rising housing, daycare, and healthcare costs make it harder to afford having children in the first place.
That demographic shift is hitting colleges now. Many of them are going out of business. Others, who should be cutting administrative costs, are simply raising tuition even higher and bringing in more international students who pay the full rate.
The result is unsustainable, and is leading to a real problem in academia. Now that I have a stake in that, I’ll be watching to see if it impacts anyone I know.
Toots and Skeets
Shocking
Yup, let’s start with a bad Dad joke. After you finish wincing, I’m sure you can think of someone else to inflict it on.
Breaking News
Why, is something newsworthy happening this week? Not for me. I plan to be busy. On the same theme:
Update from the team
Sarah Cooper is always great, and this video is no exception, other than the fact it might hit too close to home.
True crime
I don’t like the direction this is heading.
Staying alive
In retrospect, what does “nobody gets too much heaven no more” even mean?
That’s rad
Are you not (warmly) entertained?
This week’s earworm
Good luck getting that song out of your head.
Good bye, Uecker
We lost one of the true greats. This week I watched several old videos of his appearances on Johnny Carson from back in the 70s and David Letterman in the 80s in his honor. Classic stuff. “I came up to bat with two outs in the bottom of the 9th. When I looked over at the other team’s dugout, they were already dressed in street clothes.”
One Elon gag
And finally:
Attracts me like no udder lover
Have a great week, everybody!
Last week:
Tuck Bridge Program, week 3.
This week:
Deep Dive Into Spring, an NFJS Virtual Workshop
New semester at Trinity College begins