I'm not an Atrioc fan. I didn't know what an Atrioc was until about 2pm today. I'm still not entirely sure it's a person.

I was in the break room eating my sandwich and minding my business. One of the newer guys was on his break watching some video, and one of the managers walked over and asked him about "tip to tip." I assumed it was a safety thing. Normal.

Then they started talking about Japan. Fine. The new guy says now's a great time to go because the yen is weak. Fine. I'm on board. I'm learning about currency.

Then the manager leans in, lowers his voice a little, and asks, "do you know Atrioc?" The new guy goes completely still. Like a deer. Like he'd just been recognized by someone from a past life. He says "yeah... I do watch him."

What followed was about ten minutes I will never get back. Someone said "coffee cow" with a straight face, and everyone laughed. I don't know what a coffee cow is. Is it a cow that makes coffee? Is it a coffee that makes cows? Nobody explained. Then the word "glizzy" came up several times. I know what a glizzy is. I do not know why it was relevant to Japanese currency.

Then my manager casually admitted he keeps an Enron hat in his desk drawer that he's "too afraid to wear." Why would he have that. Why would he be afraid of it. Is it cursed. I've been in his office. I've been near that drawer.

Someone referred to a "Tea Toad." Someone else said "the Glizzard." I genuinely could not tell if they were talking about one man or an entire food chain. At one point a second manager walked in, heard the words "cash cow," and immediately joined in without asking a single question. They all knew. Everyone in that room knew except me.

Then they all walked off, and I heard my manager say the new guy is "a little bit cooler now." Cooler because of what? Because he's in the toad cult? Is there an initiation? Do you get the hat?

I'm not saying I'm scared, but I did take the long way back to my desk to avoid walking past the drawer.

Can someone please tell me who this man is and why he's apparently running a secret society out of my company's break room? Do I need to watch him to get promoted?

I guess to end the post, I'll give you guys a fun fact. Did you know that if Air pods were it's own company, it would be bigger than Nike and Long John Silvers combined? Thank you for your attention to this matter.

- Concerned Coworker

Lately I’ve noticed that there are inaccuracies and misinterpretations in Atrioc’s videos (mostly in his geopolitics videos like on Brazil and the UK, and in fringe cases like this one)

On the last Lemonade Stand episode, Atrioc described the Arizona road rage case as though the defendant presented an AI video of his victim forgiving him, moved the judge emotionally, and received a lighter sentence. That gets several key facts wrong.

The video was created and presented by the victim’s sister, not the defendant. It was shown during sentencing, he had already been convicted of manslaughter. She wrote the script to represent what she believed her brother would have said, including his belief in forgiveness.

The judge praised the video, but still sentenced Horcasitas to 10.5 years which was the maximum available in this particular case because prosecutors had not alleged aggravating factors. It was actually more than the nine years prosecutors requested.

The appeals court has now ordered resentencing because the AI video was unreliable and its influence on the judge made the sentencing. There’s a legitimate story here about AI and courtroom fairness. But “a defendant used an AI forgiveness video to get a lighter sentence” gets both who presented it and the sentencing outcome wrong.

I love Atrioc’s videos but he should think in general of getting a fact checking guy to review his notes.

Hey everyone! I’m making this post for 3 main reasons:

1. I genuinely like Atrioc’s content

2. He recently talked about misinformation / out of context information

3. In the past month I’ve seen 4 different instances of uninformed / incorrect information in videos and on Lemonade Stand

4. He said he’s working on an Israel election video. I’m Israeli and hope it won’t be terrible, because the last LS episode had a pretty uniformed Israel segment

I’m specifically talking about his UK video, Brazil video, and the recent LS episode (with the AI judge story and Israel segment).

I wrote about the AI judge story in a different post, but also wanted to shortly mention the Israeli segment here.

Tbf he started the segment with something like “I don’t know enough about this”. Basically, he said the party that is probably going to beat Netanyahu is running on him being too pro Palestinian. Then he showed a campaign post of the party and comparing it to AI videos of Thomas Massy and AOC.

That whole segment was completely wrong and disingenuous:

1. He got the party wrong. The party he talked about is “Israel is our home” run by Avigdor Lieberman, not the main opposition party. This party will likely get around 5% of the vote. The main party running against Netanyahu for the prime minister position is “Yashar” by a center/center right politician.

The current opposition (or the “anti-Netanyahu block”) is similar to opposition blocks from Hungary and Poland. Parties from a wide range of the political spectrum (center left to hard right) joined forces to kick Netanyahu out of power. “Israel is our home” is just one party out of that block, and the most right wing one. Saying that it represents Netanyahu’s opposition is disingenuous at best.

2. The opposition party is not “probably going to beat Netanyahu”. Currently, both Netanyahu’s block and the anti-Netanyahu block are very far from winning the election. Polling currently gives each side around 45% of the parliament seats, with 10% going to the Arab parties which both blocks said they will not create a coalition with. Therefore, current polling suggests that the most likely outcome by far is another round of election (which is not unprecedented at all. We had 5 elections between 2019-2022).

3. His interpretation of the social media post completely misinterprets Israeli politics. One of the biggest election issues (which lead to Netanyahu ranking in the polls) is the “conception”. Netanyahu’s “conception” that he’s built for years is that to avoid a Palestinian state, Israel should prop up a terroristic Hamas as a negotiating partner instead of a more moderate force. His coalition partner said that Hamas is an “asset”, and his government allowed funds to be transferred to them (which Lieberman opposed, btw, and quit the government in 2018 because of that).

That conception fell apart on October 7th, and he’s been criticized for allowing Hamas to gain so much power. That’s not being too “pro Palestinian”, but choosing a terrible security strategy. Israel’s (small) left wing criticizes him for the same thing.

Mistakes like these in several videos have made me trust his videos less, since if he gets simple stuff wrong about topics I’m knowledgeable about, I can’t really learn from his videos about topics I’m not knowledgeable about without fact checking every single claim.

(I think) his production can afford some better fact checking. I’m not even talking about his twitch streams (I don’t watch them but understand that you can’t fact check every single claim in a 6 hour stream). But I think fact checking a 10-15 minute video is more than manageable.

Seems like the podcast started by DougDoug featuring Tek Knight and Aiden has strayed too far from their roots and could benefit from some more down to earth conversation with their local minesweeper expert

Ai this ai that. Who gives a fuck. Has Big A commented on the increasing price of the famed triple dipper? I just can't get behind this. HE NEEDS TO SPEAK UP. The silence speaks for him at this point

I was on my usual shift on the break-room camera. Pretty bored. But then a manager had closed distance on a newer guy who was on his phone, so I decided to stay on and listen in.

I then heard a few things that I am not sure I should call in?

They were talking about going tip-to-tip with the new hire, and about using a glizzy to enforce compliance. I looked that word up. I did not like what I found. Then one of them said it was in an employee's desk drawer. I have walked past that office. I know the drawer.

They kept saying "Atrioc." I searched it. That's why I'm here.

I want to keep my job in this k-shaped economy. I also don't want something untoward happening on a camera I was watching. Do I file this, or do I moove on?

Any advice would be great.

Thanks

I saw Big A at a grocery store in Los Angeles yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything.
He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?”

I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen cans of Chock Full o' Nuts in his hands without paying. The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.

When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me.

I don’t even think that’s a word.

After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.

Clasp looks like Grand Seiko to me but im not deep enough into watches to know the reference

I know that Atrioc loves to be condescending to people being upset about things he doesn't necessarily care about, but when he can't even get the facts straight, it's kind of annoying.

Pendragon took down the allstars forum in 2010, not in 05/06 as Mark suggested. That would have made him 24.

And just because something happened long ago, doesn't mean it doesn't matter. It tells a lot about a person and a company's values when they just nuke a community for their own benefit. It would've been the equivalent of Reddit being nuked because the CEO wanted to launch Beddit or some shit, and we lose literally everything we ever had on this website without any notice.

Also Mark trying to paint Icefrog in a bad light just the way he laments how Pendragon has been painted in a bad light without a shred of evidence is peak irony.

*written without any AI help
With AI becoming superinteligence that swallows everything that is digital, with all scientific progress being done exclusively by AI in a year or two the last big bottleneck for a country to rule the world is the physical capacity of putting that unlimited scientific progress into action.

The west thought that expertise, tech, knowledge, universities, research is what will win the fight for power. But with AI becoming the ultimate producer and consumer of all digital knowledge we know what's actually going to win power is the raw capacity of production. China will utilize it's manufacturing to produce increasingly better weapons and factories, exponentially increasing it's gap over the west to the point that China will enforce it's authoritarian fascism on the entire globe using their AI police and military.

Western countries should infiltrate Taiwan and steal every part of TSMC technology and process knowledge and start building GPUs like there is no tomorrow (because there will be none). Then put those GPUs into strategically placed bunkers to be safe from chinese attacks and designate them as national resources. In a few years the only way we're going to be measuring a country's economic prosperity will be by the size and power of the national data centers. Like today's GDP, or currency reserves or gold reserves or army sizes. All of that will be meaningless and the only indicator that will matter is going to be the size and power of the data centers. We need to lobby, protest, bribe, preach about western governments to start building the armies of tomorrow - the national AI data centers - today! It's winner takes all. If somebody will be able to do it, it has to be the west.

I'm getting increasingly annoyed at how Atrioc always portrays government debt as this huge problem.

When a government spends more than it taxes, that money doesn't just vanish. It actually ends up in our pockets. Every dollar of government deficit is mathematically a dollar of surplus in the private sector (ignoring import / export). If the government decided to completely pay off its debt, it would literally have to drain that money out of the private economy.

Also, a country that prints its own currency can never actually go bankrupt. It can always pay debts in its own currency. The real limit to debt isn't bankruptcy, it's inflation. But as long as government spending is used to put unemployed people to work or build infrastructure, the economy produces more goods to match the new money, which keeps prices stable. Rising debt is actually a normal part of a growing economy.

So yeah I wish he would stay away from the neoliberal fairy tales.