ai progress

James Mickens of Harvard gives a funny lecture at HBS's Future Assembly arguing that blockchains are a very bad idea. He covers their trust, legal and practical shortcomings for real-world problems.

The first class of Timothy Snyder's Yale course on the making of modern Ukraine. It introduces the course and asks what it means for a nation to exist in light of the Russian invasion.

Geoffrey Hinton's 2025 Royal Institution Discourse on what AI has learned from biological intelligence and how it might surpass it. He explains neural networks and argues that human language use resembles what backpropagation-trained networks do.

The opening lecture of MIT's Blockchain and Money course taught by Gary Gensler, covering the course plan, the history of failed digital currencies, cryptography and what a blockchain is.

University of Chicago lecture in which John Mearsheimer argues the West, through NATO and EU expansion, bears primary responsibility for the Ukraine crisis. He also discusses how to end it and its consequences.

Joseph Tainter lectures at a 2010 sustainability conference on why complex societies such as Rome collapse. His thesis is that rising complexity brings diminishing returns until societies cannot afford to maintain it.

Doug McGuff presents the biochemistry behind high-intensity strength training and the paleo diet, including how the body stores and burns fat. It is a roughly hour-and-a-half full-length lecture.

Jonathan Haidt's Hayek Lecture at Duke argues American universities pursue two potentially incompatible sacred values, truth and social justice. He discusses campus conflict, honor, dignity and victimhood cultures, and viewpoint diversity.

A short Harvard Online animated lesson on how the mitochondrial electron transport chain works. It shows proton pumping and the machinery that drives ATP synthesis.

Jaron Lanier delivers the 2018 Willy Brandt Lecture in Berlin on who civilization is for, covering data, AI, tech platforms and the economics of who benefits, followed by a Q&A with Germany's data protection commissioner Ulrich Kelber.

An American Airlines training video by Captain Warren VanderBurgh on control malfunctions and flight instrument anomalies. It discusses real incidents such as runaway trim and instrument failures and how crews should respond.

A pulmonologist and critical care physician explains how COVID-19 can lead to pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome. He covers evidence-based ARDS treatments such as low tidal volume ventilation.

Rick Hartley gives a roughly two-hour live training on proper grounding in PCB design. He explains how energy actually flows in the space between conductors, and how that governs noise, EMI, return paths and signal reflections.

Physicist Al Bartlett's well-known lecture on the arithmetic of exponential growth, applied to population, energy consumption and resource depletion. He argues that steady percentage growth cannot be sustained on a finite planet and that most public discussion ignores this.

A Jordan Peterson university lecture on the Big Five trait openness to experience, covering creativity and intelligence. It explains how IQ is measured, how well it predicts life success, and the Pareto distribution of creative output.

Energy scholar Vaclav Smil argues that global energy transitions are slow and that renewable targets should not rest on wishful thinking. He appraises how energy dependencies are likely to change and asks for using much less.

Admiral Grace Hopper holds up a length of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond, about 11.8 inches. She explains how she made the idea concrete to people who could not picture a billionth of a second.

Daniel Dennett's Royal Institution lecture on whether the brain is a computer and where its software comes from. He argues that minds are built by evolution and culture, with competence arising without comprehension.

Rhonda Patrick of FoundMyFitness makes a case for isothiocyanates such as sulforaphane from cruciferous vegetables and broccoli sprouts. It covers cancer, aging, heart disease, brain and behavior, and neurodegeneration, with chapter timestamps.

Part 2 of a Q&A workshop with security researcher Jacob Appelbaum from April 2012, covering mobile phone security, cellphone forensics, state repression and surveillance. Topics include booting Tails from USB and surveillance self-defense resources.

Neuroscientist Karl Friston gives a 15-minute talk on the free energy principle, covering Markov blankets, Bayesian model evidence and global brain theories.

A 2020 UC San Diego event with Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff presenting their Orch OR theory that consciousness arises from quantum processes in brain microtubules, followed by a conversation with Roger Bingham.

A philosophy lecture by Professor Moeller on the philosophy of identity. It builds on a discussion of Abigail Thorn's video and covers authenticity, sincerity and how online profiles reshape identity.

The full 1973 BBC Lighthill debate on artificial intelligence, featuring James Lighthill, Donald Michie, Richard Gregory and John McCarthy. It documents the argument that preceded the 1970s AI winter and includes early robot demos.

Part 1 of Jean-Marc Jancovici's 2019 course at Ecole des Mines de Paris, on energy and its central role in the economy and climate. It is in French with English subtitles available and runs about two and a half hours.

A re-upload of American Airlines captain Warren Vanderburgh's 1997 presentation warning that pilots who over-rely on cockpit automation lose manual flying skills and awareness. The uploader adds context from his own flying.

Andrej Karpathy's three-hour-plus general-audience deep dive into how ChatGPT-style LLMs are built, covering the full training stack from pretraining to post-training. It also gives mental models for their quirks, like hallucination, and how to use them well.

Lawrence Krauss's 2009 talk on the current picture of the universe, how it will end and how it could have come from nothing. It covers the expanding universe, cosmic background radiation and the cosmological constant.

Russian-American journalist Vladimir Pozner lectures at Yale on how US foreign policy toward Russia after the Soviet collapse shaped Putin, then takes audience questions on election interference, the Skripal poisoning and media independence.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth gives a Royal Institution lecture on the science of consciousness. He separates conscious level, content and self, and argues that experience arises from the brain's predictive inference.

Andrej Karpathy builds the GPT tokenizer from scratch, implementing byte pair encoding along with encode and decode. He shows how many odd LLM behaviors trace back to tokenization, and covers Unicode byte encodings along the way.

Erik Demaine's MIT 6.006 lecture introducing dynamic programming through Fibonacci numbers and shortest paths. It covers memoization, subproblems and optimal substructure.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS107 Programming Paradigms, taught by Jerry Cain, giving an overview of the course. The course goes from C and assembly through C++, concurrency, Scheme and Python.

Hennessy and Patterson's 2018 Turing Award lecture at ISCA, A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture. It covers domain-specific hardware, security, open instruction sets and agile chip development.

Weber State's Professor Kelly explains the Toyota RAV4 Hybrid transaxle, including its planetary gearset eCVT and all nine operating modes. It also covers how the engine reaches nearly 40 percent thermal efficiency.

Robert Sapolsky's Stanford lecture on language, comparing human and animal communication, ape language projects like Koko and Kanzi, and how language is acquired. It is part of his human behavioral biology course.

Erik Demaine's MIT 6.851 Advanced Data Structures lecture introducing succinct data structures, covering rank, select and tries. It is part of the Spring 2012 course.

Physicist Albert Bartlett's full-length lecture on how steady exponential growth in population and energy use collides with finite resources. It uses examples like bacteria in a bottle and covers peak oil.

Leonard Susskind's Santa Fe Institute talk on the arrow of time: why the past differs from the future when physics equations are time-symmetric. He covers entropy, cosmology and Boltzmann brains.

Part one of an American Airlines training video presented by Captain Warren VanderBurgh on automation dependency. It grew out of a program on wake turbulence avoidance, and this restored version has the audio cleaned up.