background checks

A 24-hour loop of Star Trek TNG starship engine ambience, meant as background sound for relaxing, sleeping or concentrating.

A Last Week Tonight segment on credit reports, explaining their outsized role in people's lives and how often they contain critical errors.

The first lecture of Jordan Peterson's 2017 Maps of Meaning course, setting out the Cold War context for his theory of belief and culture. He introduces the narrative structure of culture and archetypal characters for the individual, the known and the unknown.

Tom Scott explains Electrical Network Frequency analysis, where hum from the power grid in a recording is matched against grid logs to date and place it. He talks to a researcher and sets them a challenge.

An 11-minute animated introduction to P vs. NP and the wider landscape of complexity classes, inspired by the Complexity Zoo wiki. It assumes no background in computer science.

Mark Ferrari, the LucasArts background artist, explains in a GDC 2016 talk how he draws 8-bit graphics. He covers color cycling and palette shifting to create complex animated scenery without frame animation.

Rob Pike shows how the Go text/template lexer is built, using state functions, goroutines and channels. The talk was given at a Google Technology User Group in Sydney in 2011.

Rich Hickey's philosophical talk from the first Clojure Conj in 2010. He argues that good design comes from deliberate, away-from-keyboard thinking, and describes how to feed the background mind so it solves problems.

SethBling shows MarI/O, a program using neural networks and the NEAT genetic algorithm to learn to play Super Mario World. The description links the source code, the paper and background reading.

In this TED talk, Lawrence Lessig argues that American politics is corrupted by Congress's dependence on funding from a tiny fraction of citizens. He uses rapid-fire visuals and calls for a bipartisan push to reclaim the Republic.

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.

Chris Granger, creator of Light Table and the Eve language, gives a Berkeley data science lecture on what computation and programming might look like in ten years. He covers the path that led to Eve and ends with demos.

Episode 4 of Mike Maloney's Hidden Secrets of Money, explaining how currency is created through a chain of IOUs among the Treasury, banks and the Federal Reserve. It covers bonds, Fed checks, debt, taxes and fractional reserve lending, from a gold-and-silver advocate's viewpoint.

Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, the creators of ZFS, present 'ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems' at the 2008 SNIA Software Developers' Conference. They explain the design, including copy-on-write, checksumming and avoiding the write hole.

Techmoan's beginner introduction to the compact cassette, testing metal tapes and Dolby S noise reduction on a Sony TC-S1 deck. He checks whether a cassette can sound close to a CD when good tape and equipment are used.

Leo Dirac explains how transformer models have replaced LSTMs in NLP. He gives background from bag of words through RNNs and LSTMs, then a technical deep dive into multi-headed self-attention and positional encoding, with sample code.

Yannic Kilcher walks through the Attention Is All You Need paper, which introduced the Transformer, a sequence model based solely on attention without recurrence or convolutions. He reviews the architecture and the paper's translation results.

An animated, profane rant critiquing Windows 8, especially its touch-first interface on desktop PCs. The author draws on a background in tech journalism to lay out the UX problems.

Strange Parts tours JLCPCB's large PCB factory in Huizhou, China, walking through the printed circuit board manufacturing process step by step. It shows the machinery, quality checks and scale behind cheap prototype boards.

Travis Kalanick's talk at FailCon 2011 about his earlier failed startups, given as a case study before Uber's rise. It describes lessons from those ventures.

Paul Grignon's animated documentary presenting his view of how banks create money as debt and why that system requires continuous growth. It outlines the historical background of modern banking.

Jason Calacanis interviews investor Chris Sacca on This Week in Startups. Sacca discusses what makes a founder, his investments such as Kickstarter, and his personal story of losing money and recovering.

Rob Pike's GopherCon 2016 talk on the design of the Go assembler, explaining why Go uses a common assembly language translated to each architecture.

The first part of a four-part Channel 4 (UK) documentary series presented by Howard Goodall, this episode covers melody and why tunes affect us so deeply. It explains how melody works in Western music with historical background and music theory.

A Wendover Productions explainer on the political agreements, from the Chicago Convention onward, that determine which airlines can fly where. It lays out the five freedoms of the air.

A ShortCircuit (Linus Tech Tips) review of Nvidia's RTX Voice, which uses GPU-based neural networks to remove background noise from microphone audio. It demonstrates how well the filtering works.

Rich Hickey introduces Clojure to the NYC Java Study Group in the first of a two-part talk. It covers reader syntax, core data structures, code-as-data, evaluation, special operators, functions, macros and sequences, assuming no Lisp background.

Brian Kernighan gives a talk at the University of Nottingham on how to succeed in language design without really trying. He draws on his experience with awk and other languages.

A roughly 40-minute Mahalo mentor interview with Elon Musk, covering his background from Zip2 and PayPal to SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity, along with advice for entrepreneurs.

Michael Feathers' GOTO Chicago 2018 talk on reducing error checks and conditional logic in code. He offers a framework for handling errors and decisions at the level of code and architecture.

Peter Pringle sings the opening of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian, accompanied by a reconstructed ancient instrument. The description gives background on Sumer, cuneiform and how little is known about the language's pronunciation.

Ten hours of uninterrupted pink noise, intended for relaxation and masking background sound. It is a long ambient audio loop rather than a spoken video.

Tom Caputi presents the design of native encryption for ZFS at the OpenZFS Developer Summit, including design decisions and how authentication uses checksum fields.

An episode of the Well There's Your Problem podcast on five-over-one buildings, wood-frame floors atop concrete bases, with engineering background and some oil industry news. It is long, rambling and has NSFW language.

Ori Bernstein gives an overview of Plan 9 at a NYC*BUG meeting. He explains what the system is, how it is built, what has happened since Bell Labs, and what its design teaches, with a live demo.

Aaron Hsu explains why programmers often find APL harder to learn than people with no programming background. He identifies eight patterns that contrast traditional software engineering practice with APL practice, starting from Ken Iverson's language design principles.

Composer Tantacrul explores how corporatism produces soulless background music, and how some companies use such music in propaganda-style campaigns. He composes several corporate styles to show their tropes, with some music theory along the way.

Tim Ansell presents the SkyWater PDK, a fully open source manufacturable process development kit for a 130nm process, as the first FOSSi Dial-Up talk. He covers its role in a fully open chip design flow.

A PyCon 2012 talk by early YouTube engineer Mike Solomon on how YouTube scaled its architecture, which is mostly Python.

Big Clive tears down a smart meter with a wireless modem found among fly-tipped materials. He examines its internals and checks conspiracy claims about microphones, cameras and 5G.