The latest articles on DEV Community by Oort Cloud (@firevenus). https://dev.to/firevenus https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F466648%2F89138340-e1f6-4429-bbcb-9fc846d189a4.png https://dev.to/firevenus en Oort Cloud Sun, 02 Aug 2026 19:31:19 +0000 https://dev.to/firevenus/waiting-on-ai-here-are-the-youtube-channels-i-actually-listen-to-2dli https://dev.to/firevenus/waiting-on-ai-here-are-the-youtube-channels-i-actually-listen-to-2dli <h1> Waiting on AI? Here Are the YouTube Channels I Actually Listen to </h1> <p><em>Bored in the gaps between AI outputs? You're not alone. Here's how I built a "background layer" of YouTube worth keeping on — curated from my own taste, with a lot of AI help.</em></p> <h2> The problem: dead air while the AI works </h2> <p>You know the moment. You've sent the prompt, the AI is churning — maybe it's writing code, generating an image, crunching through a report. That gap is too short for real work and too long to sit in silence. You reach for your phone… and instantly you're gone: scrolling, reacting, pulled out of the flow. Coming back to the result feels like waking up.</p> <p>I'm a heavy YouTube user, so my solution is a "background layer" — channels I can <em>listen to</em> while I work, pause the moment a result lands, and pick right back up. No feed-switching, no rabbit holes. Just content that earns the right to sit in the corner of my attention.</p> <p>The catch: content that's always-on needs to be <em>trustworthy</em>. And YouTube's finance/trading/tech corner is one of the noisiest places on the internet — day-trading gurus, "get rich quick" promoters, course salesmen, signal pushers. So I built a simple process, and had AI do the grunt work. Two filters, that's it.</p> <h2> The two filters (my taste, enforced by AI) </h2> <p><strong>Filter 1 — Real people who actually do the thing.</strong> The person behind the channel has to be independently verifiable as a practitioner: a hedge fund partner who teaches finance on the side, a professor who runs a quant fund, a working developer explaining the job. If I can't confirm who they are outside their own channel's marketing, they don't make the cut — no matter how good the videos look.</p> <p><strong>Filter 2 — Active within the last 6 months.</strong> A great channel that stopped uploading two years ago is a museum, not a listening companion. My AI checks each channel's official YouTube RSS feed and stamps the real date of the latest upload — no guessing, no trusting third-party "last video" sites.</p> <blockquote> <p>Small technical note, since I learned this the hard way: the feed-level <code>&lt;published&gt;</code> tag in a YouTube RSS feed is the channel's <em>creation</em> date, not a video date — you have to read the dates inside each <code>&lt;entry&gt;</code>. And Python's default <code>urllib</code> user-agent gets blocked by Cloudflare (HTTP 403, error 1010) — send a browser <code>User-Agent</code> header and it works.</p> </blockquote> <h2> What made my list (English, verified active in 2026) </h2> <h3> Quant &amp; data science </h3> <div class="table-wrapper-paragraph"><table> <thead> <tr> <th>Channel</th> <th>Who's behind it</th> <th>Latest upload</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Patrick Boyle on Finance</td> <td>Quant HF partner + King's College professor</td> <td>2026-07-25</td> </tr> <tr> <td>StatQuest with Josh Starmer</td> <td>Stats/ML educator</td> <td>2026-07-13</td> </tr> <tr> <td>QuantPy</td> <td>Financial mathematics, Python strategy implementation</td> <td>2026-02-20</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Flirting with Models</td> <td>CIO of Newfound Research, factor investing podcast</td> <td>2026-07-06</td> </tr> <tr> <td>The Algorithmic Advantage</td> <td>Interviews with professional systematic traders</td> <td>2026-07-20</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Coding Jesus</td> <td>Working quant developer</td> <td>2026-07-31</td> </tr> </tbody> </table></div> <h3> AI </h3> <div class="table-wrapper-paragraph"><table> <thead> <tr> <th>Channel</th> <th>Why it's on</th> <th>Latest upload</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>AI Explained</td> <td>Calm, non-hyped AI industry analysis</td> <td>2026-07-22</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Matt Wolfe</td> <td>Weekly AI tools reviews</td> <td>2026-08-01</td> </tr> <tr> <td>AI Jason</td> <td>Building LLM apps and multi-agent systems</td> <td>2026-07-30</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Andrej Karpathy</td> <td><em>Special case — see below</em></td> <td>2025-02-27</td> </tr> </tbody> </table></div> <h3> Game development (my day job) </h3> <div class="table-wrapper-paragraph"><table> <thead> <tr> <th>Channel</th> <th>Why it's on</th> <th>Latest upload</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Game Maker's Toolkit</td> <td>Game design analysis (Boss Keys series)</td> <td>2026-07-22</td> </tr> <tr> <td>GDC</td> <td>Official game developers conference talks</td> <td>2026-07-31</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Sebastian Lague</td> <td>Procedural generation &amp; simulations</td> <td>2026-07-25</td> </tr> </tbody> </table></div> <h2> What got cut (saying no is the point) </h2> <ul> <li>A famous economist with great macro takes → dropped: no personal channel; their content lives on media outlets, nothing stable to subscribe to.</li> <li>A popular science channel, 615 days silent → dropped: a museum, not a feed.</li> <li>A classic Unity tutorial channel, 195 days idle → dropped from the active list.</li> <li> <strong>The special case</strong>: Andrej Karpathy publishes maybe twice a year (520+ days of silence at check time) — but every video is a masterclass in understanding AI from first principles. The freshness rule would kill it, so it gets an explicit carve-out: <em>low-frequency, high-quality exceptions are flagged and decided by the human, not auto-deleted.</em> </li> </ul> <p>That's the nuance: the filters are a <strong>default</strong>, not a dictatorship. They exist to force a conscious decision about every subscription — not to automate taste.</p> <h2> If you want to try one tonight </h2> <ul> <li> <strong>Pure background listening</strong> (no screen needed): Patrick Boyle, Flirting with Models, AI Explained — long-form, spoken-word, zero visual dependency.</li> <li> <strong>Worth keeping an eye on</strong>: StatQuest, Sebastian Lague — great content, but you'll want to actually watch.</li> <li> <strong>The "waiting room" starter pack</strong>: one channel from each table above. That's a solid month of gap-filling.</li> </ul> <p><em>Verified August 2026. This is my personal list built on my own taste — the AI did the verifying, not the choosing. If you have channels that survive these two filters, I'd genuinely love to hear them — the list is always hungry.</em></p> youtube ai productivity learning