basic training

Chapter 11 of the documentary The Corporation, on how marketing targets children, including the Nag Factor study that taught kids to nag their parents more effectively.

An episode of Gwynne Dyer's 1983 documentary series War, about how military basic training turns recruits into soldiers. It covers the psychological side of conditioning.

A Dartmouth-produced documentary on how professors John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz, with a group of undergraduates, invented the BASIC language. It covers the creation of BASIC and the early time-sharing environment at Dartmouth.

A short clip of Bill Gates demonstrating Visual Basic in 1991, showing drag-and-drop building of a Windows GUI.

A 1953 US Navy training film on the basic mechanisms in fire control computers: shafts, gears, cams and differentials. It shows how these mechanical parts compute ship and target firing solutions.

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.

The 8-Bit Guy reviews the Color Maximite 2, a modern ARM-based computer that boots straight into BASIC. He shows what it can do as a retro-style machine.

8-Bit Show And Tell walks through the BASIC source code of the original Commodore 64 Sid Meier's Pirates!. It covers bugs, quirks and traces of abandoned features and scenarios left in the code.

Footage of FAA altitude chamber hypoxia training for pilots in which a participant passes out from oxygen deprivation. It shows how quickly and subtly cognition fails at altitude.

A demonstration of loading Altair 4K BASIC on an Altair 8800 clone, using a front-panel bootloader and an ASR-33 Teletype. It shows the full sequence of entering boot code, loading BASIC and running a program.

A Ray Summit 2022 keynote fireside chat between OpenAI's Greg Brockman and Anyscale's Robert Nishihara. They discuss how OpenAI's training infrastructure evolved and its use of Ray.

A short CSI clip in which characters try to track a killer's IP address by writing a Visual Basic GUI. It is a famous example of absurd TV hacking.

A 1953 US Navy training film explaining the basic mechanisms in mechanical fire control computers aboard ships. It shows how gears, differentials and cams solved mathematical problems in permanent mechanical form.

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.

The first stream in the Emacs From Scratch series, building a custom Emacs configuration from zero while teaching basics. It covers a usable baseline setup and the packages for completion, themes and productivity.

Fedor Pikus's CppCon 2017 talk on C++ atomics, looking at what they let the programmer express and what the hardware actually does. It covers memory ordering and lock-free programming from basic to advanced.

A 1973 AT&T training film made for new employees at Bell Labs' Holmdel Computing Center, when Unix was in its third version and running at 16 computer centers in the Bell System. It shows how users submitted jobs and used the center's machines.

The first part of a ShaderToy live-coding series that lays the groundwork for The Drive Home, a rainy night-traffic shader. It covers basic setup and builds toward rain and bokeh effects.

The first episode of a long live-coding series in which Immo Landwerth builds the Minsk compiler for a small language in C#. It starts with a basic expression evaluator and builds toward a full language.

Herb Sutter revisits basic C++ questions in light of C++11 and C++14: how to declare and initialize variables, pass values to functions, write loops, and use smart pointers. It covers auto, rvalue references, range-for, uniform initialization, lambdas, unique_ptr and shared_ptr.

Yosh trains a reinforcement learning agent to drive Trackmania until he can no longer beat it. The video explains how the training works and the design choices involved.

3Blue1Brown's first chapter on deep learning explains what neurons and layers are and the math underlying a basic neural network, using handwritten digit recognition with visual animations.

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.

Andrej Karpathy gives a one-hour general-audience introduction to large language models, covering what they are, how they are trained, comparisons to operating systems, and security challenges such as jailbreaks.

A 1930s Chevrolet training film explaining the principles and development of the differential gear. It builds the idea step by step from first principles to the finished mechanism.

A 1968 Firing Line interview in which Milton Friedman explains the negative income tax, a proposal to replace welfare bureaucracy with direct payments.

Harvard Belfer Center lecture by Matthew Bunn explaining how nuclear bombs work, including fission and fusion weapons and which parts of bomb-making are hard. It is part 1 of 2 in the Nuclear 101 series.

Ted Nelson explains the original Xanadu hypertext idea of visible connection, the notion that links between documents should be shown and preserved. He argues that the Web and current document standards lost this concept.

Rick Beato argues that adults cannot develop true perfect pitch, which he ties to critical-period brain plasticity and language acquisition. He says it can only be developed in young children, and discusses the research behind this.

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.

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 roughly 45-minute vintage US military instructional film that gives a comprehensive overview of celestial navigation, covering sextant use and the theory behind lines of position.

A Big Think talk in which hedge-fund manager William Ackman goes through the basics of finance and investing in under an hour. It is pitched as a crash course on the most important concepts.

Andrej Karpathy walks through how GPT assistants are trained, from tokenization and pretraining to supervised finetuning and RLHF, and gives practical prompting strategies and a view of the tooling ecosystem.

Joe Rogan's long interview with Andrew Yang during his 2020 presidential run. They discuss universal basic income, automation and his policy proposals.

The first part of Freya Holmer's three-part, nearly four-hour lecture on shader coding for game devs in Unity. It covers what shaders are, vertex and fragment shaders, interpolators, data types, blending and textures.

FortNine's tongue-in-cheek guide to why drivers fail to see motorcyclists and how riders can make themselves more visible. It touches on perception psychology, including the role of saccades.

Alex O'Connor shows that ChatGPT cannot draw a wine glass filled to the brim, and ties the failure to David Hume's missing shade of blue. It asks what the failure says about how image models learn.

Andrew Ng speaks at the Stanford MSx Future Forum about how AI is transforming industry after industry, comparing its impact to electricity. The talk also touches on evil-AI worries, jobs and basic income.

Rick Beato discusses a theory of why some children develop perfect pitch, based on early exposure to music. He draws on his experience with his own children.