agent-based model

Tom Scott tells how John Reber's plan to dam San Francisco Bay was disproved by the Army Corps of Engineers' giant hydraulic Bay Model in Sausalito. The model showed the plan would have been dangerously wrong.

The official tour video of Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, the world's largest model railway. It shows the 1,300 square meter layout with trains, aircraft, cars and ships moving around.

A short cartoon explaining how language models like ChatGPT work, from autocomplete and conditional probabilities to neural networks, gradient descent and backpropagation. It shows how networks act as universal function approximators.

Primer simulates green beard altruism, where individuals recognize and help others carrying a shared marker, and shows how imposters affect its evolution. It is an animated evolution simulation based on published papers.

An engineering explainer on why Tesla abandoned the induction motor for the Model 3 and used an IPM-SynRM design. It covers the reluctance torque and permanent magnet principles behind the choice.

A JuliaCon talk by a NASA Launch Services Program engineer on modeling spacecraft separation dynamics in Julia. He describes replacing a Simulink-based workflow for checking launch vehicle separation requirements with Julia and ModelingToolkit, with large speedups and much shorter code.

A 2013 research demo of simulated bipedal creatures whose natural gaits are found by optimizing muscle-based controllers, with no motion capture or keyframe animation. It shows physics-based walking and running emerging from musculoskeletal models.

Autoline's John McElroy visits Sandy Munro's shop, where a Tesla Model 3 is being prepared for a teardown benchmarking study. Munro, with deep design and manufacturing experience, points out issues he dislikes about the car's build.

Mark Rober makes a plant-based burger for Bill Gates and explains why meat production strains the environment. Gates also appears and discusses his worry about steel and cement.

Robert Miles explains reward modelling, in which an AI learns what humans want from their preference comparisons instead of a hand-written reward function. He walks through the 2017 paper on deep reinforcement learning from human preferences.

Mario Zechner explains why he built pi, a minimal coding agent, out of frustration with existing agent harnesses. He also discusses how AI agents are straining open source projects and argues for slowing down.

PBS Space Time explains the Standard Model Lagrangian, the single equation encapsulating the particle physics theory, and visualizes what its terms mean.

CuriousMarc inspects a newly arrived Teletype Model 19, an early military unit built around a Model 15 keyboard and printer, after an initial rough cleaning. It is the first part of a restoration series and touches on 5-bit Baudot code.

Munro Live's Model Y episode 36 has Sandy Munro walk through the disassembled Tesla Octovalve and heat pump system. He explains how the components are made and what each one does.

Freeman Dyson recounts how Enrico Fermi rejected his team's meson scattering model, noting that it had too many free parameters. It is the source of the quote about fitting an elephant.

Munro Live's team breaks down the thermal management system of the Ford Mustang Mach-E and compares it with the Tesla Model Y. They look at parts count, coolant loops and heating approaches.

A pieced-together clip of the Agent Smith interrogation scene from The Matrix (1999), where Smith delivers his monologue about humanity.

A short Al Jazeera animation narrated by Amy Goodman presenting Noam Chomsky's five filters of the mass media: ownership, advertising, media elite sourcing, flak and a common enemy. It is part of the MediaTheorised series.

Blender Guru's beginner tutorial series, in which you model, light, texture and render a donut while learning Blender's core features. This is Part 1 of the Blender 3.0 version.

Sebastian Lague explores an ant-inspired algorithm and simulates ant and slime mold behavior, using compute shaders. Source code for both simulations is available.

Sentdex demonstrates GAN Theft Auto, a GameGAN-based neural network that recreates GTA V so the network itself is the playable environment. He shows the results and releases the code.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

An MTA video on communications-based train control, the system meant to replace the New York City subway's century-old signaling. It also shows the mechanical interlocks and signals in use today.

Apple's late-1980s Knowledge Navigator concept video, produced under John Sculley, showing a professor using a tablet-like device with a conversational software agent. It envisions hypertext, touchscreens and voice assistants.

A video showing a virtual camera built in Blender that simulates lenses and film layers using path tracing, to make physically modeled photographs.

A 1984 interview with former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov on ideological subversion and psychological warfare, reposted in 2020 with a modern political framing.

A short demo video for NVIDIA's StyleGAN paper, which proposes a style-based generator for GANs. It shows face synthesis with style mixing and scale-specific control over attributes like pose and freckles.

A short excerpt from Dr Russell Barkley's 2012 Burnett Lecture on ADHD, focused on treatment. He argues ADHD is a disorder of executive function and self-regulation, and that environments should be designed to compensate.

A five-minute excerpt of Rich Hickey's Clojure Made Simple talk, with new slides, ranting about HttpServletRequest and specificity. He argues for using generic maps instead of many specific classes and getters.

Cody's Lab builds a 200-billionth-scale model to show how far away the nearest stars are, using parallax and light speed. A short astronomy explainer on interstellar distances.

A short animated TED-Ed lesson in which two competing ice cream vendors on a beach illustrate why rival shops cluster together. It introduces game theory and the Nash equilibrium through the Hotelling model.

The introduction to MangoJelly's beginner course for FreeCAD 1.0. The course teaches solid modeling with the Part Design, Sketcher and Part workbenches.

A Technology Connections video essay on how analog and digital clocks shape different mental models of time, with the minute hand acting as a progress indicator.

Yannic Kilcher explains how he trained a language model on three years of 4chan's /pol/ board and let it post on the site. He evaluates how good the model was and discusses the ethics and fallout.

SuperfastMatt looks at how the Tesla Model S retracting door handles were redesigned over time, from many parts to a motor plus sensor, with a focus on engineering and reliability.

A nine-minute excerpt from the 1992 documentary Manufacturing Consent in which Noam Chomsky summarizes how corporate media shapes public discourse.

The final chapter of Rich Rebuilds' saga about buying a used Tesla Model X that went missing, with cameo appearances and the end of the dispute. It is part of a longer series on the problems he had with Tesla.

A short documentary about Eric Maundu's Arduino-controlled aquaponics setup in West Oakland, where contaminated soil rules out ordinary farming. Fish and circulating water grow plants without soil.

Two Minute Papers covers OpenAI's multi-agent hide-and-seek experiment, in which agents learned emergent tool use and found ways to break the game's rules. It summarizes the 'Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Interaction' paper.

ScienceClic gives a 15-minute animated introduction to quantum field theory, covering fields, spin, conserved quantities, the standard model and interactions.