When Your Dad Worries About Your Aversion to Normal Teenage Activities
Description
A stock photo meme format. Above the image is a dialogue between a father and his child. The text reads: "Dad: Are you still watching machine learning tutorials on youtube? Me: did you check my internet history?! Dad: why can't you watch porn like a normal child?". Below the text is an image of a man, representing the dad, sitting on a beige couch and talking to a young boy, who is looking down with a sullen expression and his arms crossed. The father appears concerned, while the son looks defensive and withdrawn. This meme humorously captures the intense dedication required to learn complex subjects like machine learning. The joke inverts the typical parental concern, suggesting that spending excessive time on technical tutorials is more abnormal than typical teenage rebellion. For senior developers, it's a relatable nod to the early days of their career when their passion for technology might have been misunderstood by family, and it also pokes fun at the stereotype of developers being overly focused on their craft to the exclusion of all else
Comments
7Comment deleted
My dad was worried I spent all my time on ML tutorials. I told him I was just trying to build a model that could predict which of his jokes would land at the next family dinner. The training data is... sparse
Sure, Dad, but if I don’t binge-watch these TensorFlow playlists, who’s going to accidentally overfit the family budget?
Twenty years ago we worried about kids finding inappropriate content online. Now we worry about them finding Andrew Ng's courses and actually believing they'll use calculus in production
When your browser history is 90% 'Understanding Backpropagation Part 47' and 10% Stack Overflow, and somehow the ML tutorials feel like the thing you need to explain. At least with gradient descent, you can mathematically prove you're going in the right direction - unlike your life choices at 3 AM watching yet another explanation of transformers because 'this one might finally make it click.'
In 2025, “machine learning tutorials on YouTube” is gateway behavior - the next tab is the AWS console launching a p4d.24xlarge and overfitting your parents’ credit limit
Parents worry about “YouTube,” but the real scandal in my history is 14 tabs of “fix NaN loss,” a shaky GPU budget, and train_final_v9_really_final going straight to prod
Dad's right - ML tutorials have worse retention rates than any leaky ReLU I've trained