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A short clip of 1980s news coverage in which people react angrily to new drunk driving laws, with some calling them communist.

An AWS re:Invent session explaining Amazon's Working Backwards process, where teams start from customer needs and write a press release and FAQ (PR-FAQ) before building. It covers the five customer questions that frame the process.

FTC Chair Lina Khan sits down with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show to discuss the agency's work protecting consumers from unfair business practices. Topics include the FTC's antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, healthcare industry actions, and whether tech companies are racing to control AI.

Konrad Malawski's Strange Loop 2023 talk shows how the FoundationDB team adopted Swift incrementally in a C++ codebase. It covers Swift's C++ interoperability, which let them move single functions or entire types over one at a time.

Adam Neely explains that Warner Music claimed his video, which defended their copyright in a lawsuit, over a work whose copyright they had lost. He calls it an ironic and absurd claim, and the claim was later released.

Climate Town traces the history of American parking minimums, how they came from shaky research and ITE guides, and how they shape zoning, cities and housing costs. It is a long, comedic video essay.

Louis Rossmann recounts calling NYC's Department of Consumer Affairs after his repair business was fined, only to find the agency staff could not explain what the law required. The call starts around 3:14.

A Welch Labs explainer on neural scaling laws and the compute-efficient frontier, asking why model loss seems to hit a line it cannot cross. It draws an analogy to an ideal gas law for AI.

Tantacrul explains how he and engraver Simon Smith designed the free music notation font for MuseScore 3.6. It draws on the history of the SCORE notation application by Leland Smith.

Adam Neely interviews Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin about their project to generate and copyright every possible melody as MIDI. The video explains their reasoning and how it bears on music copyright lawsuits.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on the Sackler family and how they have handled opioid lawsuits. It covers how hard they fought to defend their name and is the third of three segments on the opioid crisis.

Veritasium explains why many real-world systems follow power laws rather than normal distributions. It covers self-organized criticality, with simulations of sandpiles, magnetism and forest fires.

Afroman's music video for a song about police damaging his door, built from home security footage of an officers' raid on his house.

Adam Neely examines Phil Ewell's paper arguing Western music theory is framed by a white racial perspective. He covers North Indian theory, alternative frameworks, Schenker and responses to the paper.

Ahoy's documentary traces tracker music from early Amiga software like SoundMonitor and Soundtracker through the demoscene, Protracker, and PC trackers such as Screamtracker and FastTracker. It covers the sound, culture and history of 16-bit module music.

Tantacrul's 76-minute deep dive into the history of western music notation and the many proposed replacements, such as piano rolls, colored notes and the jubilate. He explains why none have displaced the current system.

Overclocker der8auer tours Hetzner's Falkenstein data center in Germany, showing custom racks, own mainboards, passively cooled servers and ATX-style cases on shelves.

Bryan Cantrill of Oxide Computer Company gives a Stanford EE380 talk on rethinking the server. He argues that hyperscaler-style rack-scale machines with open firmware, RISC-V and Rust should be available to everyone, not just the giants.

Benn Jordan investigates infrasound and low-frequency noise from data centers, including xAI's Colossus and a crypto mine, and reports his own experiments on the effects. The video covers the health and community impacts on nearby residents.

Guitarist Jim Lill methodically tests what in an electric guitar affects its tone, swapping parts on a partscaster and even trying a 2x4 body. He finds that wood and construction matter far less than people assume.

The author of copyparty introduces the FOSS file server he has built over five years, demoing its features such as resumable uploads, WebDAV and deduplication. The video itself is shown running on a demo server.

Adam Neely explains what perfect (absolute) pitch is, how it differs from relative and quasi-absolute pitch, and why he would not want it. He covers its drawbacks, including drift with age.

DHH's opening keynote at Rails World 2024 in Toronto, where Rails 8 beta shipped. It covers built-in authentication, Propshaft, Solid Cache, Solid Queue, Solid Cable, Kamal 2 and Thruster, pitching the One Person Framework that needs no PaaS.

Musician and audio engineer Benn Jordan tries Dolby Atmos as a consumer, covering the theory of immersive audio, its business model, and home theater and headphone listening. He concludes it often falls short of the pitch.

A short Tracklib video visualizing the disco sample that Daft Punk's One More Time is built from. It shows how the track is composed from the original material.

Part one of Look Mum No Computer's series on buying a whole church pipe organ, covering how it was removed from its home. The series goes on to restoring it and rewiring it for MIDI.

Tantacrul walks through how the MuseScore 4 team was built and how design decisions were made for the overhaul of a huge legacy notation app. It covers playback and engraving quality improvements.

Andrew Huang explains the harmonic series, which he calls the foundation of almost all music. He builds the idea up step by step, with demonstrations of overtones and how harmonies derive from them.

Dave Plummer tours the IBM z16 mainframe from design through factory assembly, test lab, accelerators and water cooling. He explains why mainframes still exist and what makes them reliable.

A Business Insider investigation into the US boom in AI data centers, mapping where they are, who owns them, and how much power and water they consume. It looks at the costs borne by communities, with a focus on Virginia.

A short music video by the Japanese group Electronicos Fantasticos, led by Ei Wada, playing festival-style music on repurposed old electronics. Instruments include CRT TVs, a barcode reader, an electric fan harp and TV taiko drums.

Jared Mauch tells how he got fed up with poor internet options in rural Michigan and built his own fiber network to his town. The talk was given at NLNOG Live in September 2020.

Eager Space examines the practicality of putting data centers in orbit, walking through three scenarios with cost calculations and the launch cost reductions that would be required.

An episode of Plogue's chipresearch series on emulating the Yamaha DX7 from the hardware up. It covers the sub CPU and main CPU, address map investigation, cartridges, firmware analysis and a skeleton MAME driver.

A walkthrough of installing Synapse, Riot and Jitsi from scratch on Debian to run your own Matrix communication service. The description warns it is now quite outdated and links to updated material.

Classical guitarist Brandon Acker shows how guitars with tied-on gut frets, as used 300 years ago, can play more in tune than modern fixed metal frets. He demonstrates microtonal and meantone tunings on a guitar with movable frets.

Guitarist Jim Lill spends a year testing where guitar amplifier tone comes from, swapping tubes, rectifiers and bias types. He finds that much of it can be reproduced with EQ and distortion in different orders.

A fasterthanlime video essay arguing that GitHub Actions is a poorly designed system, with a history of personal computing and CI, and a look at how it works behind the scenes. It is sponsored by Brilliant.

Scott Manley examines why SpaceX, Google and others are looking at orbital data centers. He walks through the economics, heat rejection and solar power arguments, with links to the Lumen/Starcloud and Google Suncatcher papers.

Tantacrul critiques the UX and UI of Steinberg's Dorico music notation software, comparing it with Sibelius and user testing it with real musicians alongside his own attempt to compose in it.