The quick "You don't want to know the answer" when showing the third tetrations definitely caught me off guard. Not sure if it was just me but that was hilarious.

I like it when full numbers are shown, I feel like it makes them more meaningful. It also makes it more legible for certain languages because of spaces, eg in Estonian you'd see "413 tuh vaatamist" instead of "413K views", which is kind of hard to see on first glance.

The moral of the story is never underestimate children's inability to know when enough is enough.

I momentarily had a crisis when I tried coming to terms with how much watch time Baby Shark has. 7.57 centuries collectively. All spent watching Baby Shark.

Even though this was a "shower thought" video, I've found it really interesting! So cool to see how the metrics are truncated.

Bonus fact : Tetration is such a mysterious operation that no one knows how we should properly extend it to decimal inputs. We know that 3 tetrated by 3 would be 7625597484987, 2 tetrated by 4 would be 65536, and 100 tetrated by 100 would be [ERROR], but we're not sure what 2 tetrated by 0.5 would be, or 5 tetrated by 1.2. There's just not enough properties we've found to define them.

In YouTube Germany view count numbers to outsiders seem to be showing accurately up to 999,999, after which there is x.y million for numbers above 10^6 and then xy million for numbers above 10^7 IIRC YouTube used to just append ,000 here for thousands in Germany, probably because the "K" for thousand is not that established in the German language. But I think people might have gotten confused by that, so they changed it to exact numbers up to 999,999. note: I used a comma [,] in this comment for the thousands separator, but in German we actually use a dot [.]

if there are ~2 billion parents with internet access (if my math is correct), then the average parent has watched baby shark 5 times

9:17 "They're using 5 characters, to represent a 4-digit number" Yes, but 4 digit-numbers are also often written using 5 characters because of a thousand-separator (digit grouping)

tbh baby shark is stuck in an endless loop of views generating cause parents play this video to feed their kids or to entertain them cause it attracts kids and keeps them addicted. and they choose this video out of all the videos since this is the most popular one. this forms that loop

5:22 In fact, if you switch your language to an East Asian language on YouTube, the pattern of the number of significant figures changes, as digits are grouped by 萬/万/만 (10000) instead of K (1000): 1234 views stays as 1234, 12345 views is truncated to 1.2萬, 123456 views is truncated to 12萬, 1234567 views becomes 123萬, 12345678 views becomes 1234萬, and so on. Additionally, (at least) some Indian languages have another different digit grouping system so likely something different happens if you switch to one of those languages.

I've never thought about this before (besides thinking it's weird that the channel page doesn't show the full sub count), but this was still a very interesting and entertaining video. Great work as always, Cary!

“that is as much precision as youtube could possibly give as there’s no such thing as a fractional view” splits myself into thirds

"If we have that third number anyways, might as well make it useful" Lets hope youtube doesn't catch onto the fact that there is still something they can ruin left

i love these types of videos, thanks cary! now i know i'm not the only one who is fascinated by the way youtube trunctuates their numbers!

The truncation process is really useful in idle games that grow their numbers into exponential growth after a decent amount of time. So yeah there's gaming applications to these numbers

I remember the good ol' days when Gangnam Style was the first video ever to reach 1 billion views and we were all impressed. It even had a cute little animation next to the view count to celebrate

That's an interesting topic. Nothing to do with AI or any project of your own, but it was still very fun to watch. I'm still baffled at baby shark being so popular though. Sure, it's only 1.x views per person averaging the world, but there's only 2.6 billion users on YouTube ("only") so that's 3.8 views per person, and on such a large scale with most viewers only watching once or not at all, there must be kids watching literally hundreds or even thousands of times to make up for it.

Now it has 15B.

how is this man the only guy who can get me interested in this stuff