black hat

A one-minute clip of William Shatner trying to describe the awe of space after a Blue Origin flight while Jeff Bezos sprays champagne.

An Innuendo Studios Alt-Right Playbook episode about a rhetorical tactic of dismissing partial fixes to problems. It frames this as a style of argument that treats flaws as unfixable facts of life.

Valve News Network goes through over twenty accounts from ex-Valve employees, mostly from Glassdoor, about what it is like to work at Valve. It covers the company's flat structure and culture.

Louis Rossmann visits Apple Authorized Service Providers to see what repairs they can actually do. He finds, for example, that an iPhone 6 headphone jack is not repairable and requires an expensive board replacement.

Scam-baiter Jim Browning explains how he fell for a phishing email and ended up deleting his own YouTube channel. He walks through the circumstances and prior incidents that made the scam convincing.

Not Just Bikes argues that self-driving cars will worsen sprawl and car dependence and harm cities. The video compares car-centered and people-centered urban design and weighs what cities should do instead.

Razbuten has his wife, who has never played games, try a sampling of titles and shows where she struggles. It highlights unspoken game conventions that experienced players take for granted.

Tom Scott describes trying ChatGPT to fix his Gmail labels and being unsettled by how capable it was. He argues that we cannot know where we are on the technology curve, comparing it to Napster.

Angela Collier, a physicist, revisits her earlier dark matter video, explaining dark matter as a set of observations rather than a theory and discussing MOND comments.

Nassim Taleb argues that evidence on terrorism risk presented in media is statistically naive, using extreme value theory without math to separate fat-tailed risks like Ebola and terrorism from thin-tailed ones.

A short clip of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, speaking to financial analysts in September 2008, questioning what cloud computing even means. He calls it a fashion-driven buzzword.

Joseph Anderson's long critique of Jonathan Blow's puzzle game The Witness, covering its gameplay, its hundreds of puzzles and its philosophical pretensions. He argues it is a great game that he nonetheless advises against playing.

A short clip from a 1973 NOVA episode in which Richard Feynman recalls his father teaching him that knowing the name of a bird in many languages tells you nothing about the bird.

Linus Tech Tips starts a series in which Linus and Luke move their home workstations to Linux. This episode has each pick a distro and try to get a game running on it, and Linus ends up breaking his Pop!_OS install.

Satirist Ami Horowitz interviews people at UC Berkeley and in Harlem about whether voter ID laws suppress the black vote. It is a short Fox News segment contrasting responses from white liberals with those from black residents.

Jake Archibald argues that URLs are nearly impossible for humans to interpret, especially for security. He walks through what browsers do about it, including highlighting the registrable domain, and floats a possible better design.

Louis Rossmann explains why he stopped using GrapheneOS, describing his interactions with its lead developer Daniel Micay. It includes chat logs shown in the video.

h3h3Productions describes how a hacker took over their phone number by getting a SIM card from T-Mobile, and gives security advice such as using a hardware key and an authenticator app.

The Hated One argues that Apple tracks users and shares their data despite its privacy marketing, pointing to Apple's own privacy policy. It is a critical take on Apple as a corporation rather than a friend of privacy.

Not Just Bikes explains why the channel exists, through the creator's walk in suburban Houston. It shows how car-dependent design makes cities hostile to pedestrians.

Coffee Break analyzes about 40,000 videos from seven months of YouTube's trending tab. It examines whether trending is biased toward mainstream media and late-night shows.

2kliksphilip examines UserBenchmark, a hardware comparison site known for strongly biased, pro-Intel writing. The video explains the site's credibility problems and points viewers to better sources for CPU and GPU information.

Physicist Angela Collier critiques 'vibe physics', the idea that non-experts or billionaires can make scientific discoveries by chatting with AI chatbots, drawing a parallel with vibe coding.

Essential Craftsman follows up on his earlier video about a DIY approach to sleep apnea. It centers on forcing nose breathing during sleep with mouth taping and nasal strips, and says to seek medical guidance.

A Fox News segment in which Ami Horowitz interviews people at UC Berkeley and in Harlem about whether voter ID laws are racist.

A commentary video by YouTuber PaymoneyWubby reacting to children's content on the Musical.ly app, which became TikTok. It highlights the child-safety concerns of young kids dancing on a public social platform.

Tom Gally, a former professional translator and University of Tokyo professor, discusses in April 2023 how GPT-4 and similar models may affect translators' careers. He draws on Japanese-English translation experience.

Louis Rossmann describes US Customs seizing replacement MacBook batteries at Apple's behest, while Apple refuses to supply the batteries to authorized service providers. It is part of his right-to-repair advocacy.

Music YouTuber Rick Beato describes confronting the people behind copyright blocks on one of his videos. The video is a rant about how takedowns and demonetization hit music education channels.

Benn Jordan details security vulnerabilities in Flock Safety license-plate-reading cameras and how easily they can be compromised. It includes citations from security researchers and discussion of police surveillance.

Benn Jordan concludes his Flock trilogy, filmed on a publicly deployed Flock Safety camera, covering a leak of camera feeds reported by 404 Media. He shows the cameras' capabilities, including panning to track people.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on US voting machines, covering how they work, their security weaknesses, and how elections could be made more secure.

Sal Mercogliano of What's Going on With Shipping? discusses a debate between the Center for Maritime Strategy and the Heritage Foundation over whether the Jones Act helps or harms American shipping and national security.

The Hated One argues that Kurzgesagt acts as a propaganda vehicle for its billionaire-linked sponsors, citing funding it received. The video prompted a response from Kurzgesagt.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on state lotteries. It argues that the claim that lotteries fund education is misleading, because the money is fungible and often diverted to general funds.

Ross Scott of Accursed Farms makes a 76-minute argument that selling video games as a service is a form of consumer fraud. He lays out legal arguments that games are goods, covers ownership and programmed obsolescence, and discusses game preservation.

Oh The Urbanity! questions the framing that urban planning reforms like bike lanes and traffic calming wage war on suburbanites. It argues that suburban and urban residents alike want less traffic on their own streets.

A short anarchist-leaning video by Larken Rose arguing that the Constitution and similar documents cannot legitimately grant anyone the right to take other people's property. It uses a rhetorical 'paper that lets me rob you' setup to challenge belief in political authority.

Modern Vintage Gamer examines the claim from the Super Mario 64 decompilation project that the game shipped unoptimized, and puts it in the context of 1996 N64 development.

Accursed Farms' hour-plus critique of the modern desktop GUI. It argues that current interfaces are a regression from older designs such as Windows 7 and proposes principles for better ones.