building codes

A Berkeley Lab Distinguished Lecturer talk on building science, with an expert covering control layers, insulation and vapour barrier placement, and how buildings fail. The delivery is humorous.

Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel lectures at Startup School on building a product people want: identifying the problem, the customer, an MVP and which customers to pursue first.

David Tong, a Cambridge theoretical physicist, explains at the Royal Institution that the fundamental building blocks of nature are quantum fields rather than particles. He covers what we know about these fields and how they fit into the Standard Model.

Jeff Dean of Google describes his experiences building Google's systems and how its infrastructure evolved over time. The Stanford talk covers search, scaling tipping points and lessons from building large-scale software.

Ian Piumarta's 2007 Stanford EE380 lecture on building a dynamic programming environment from the ground up, from the Viewpoints Research Institute's work. It covers the design of a language and system with a recursive design, parsing through code generation, and the COLA architecture.

Part 10 of Dan Gelbart's prototype-building lecture series, covering flexures: flexible joints that give precise, frictionless motion. It shows how a cheap piece of aluminum can become a nanometer-accurate mechanism.

The final part of Dan Gelbart's 18-part Building Prototypes series, focused on mechanical design. It opens with a demonstration of stiffness and covers practical design principles for prototype machines.

Andrej Karpathy's first Neural Networks: Zero to Hero lecture, which builds micrograd, a tiny autograd engine, from scratch in Python. It explains backpropagation and neural network training step by step, assuming only basic Python and some high-school calculus.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum lectures at the Royal Institution on the invention and decipherment of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, and why it is so hard to translate.

A guest lecture Jon Gjengset gave at Two Sigma on using Rust for large, high-performance systems. It covers why Rust suits such projects, the Noria research database, a concurrent data structure used in it, and practical experience.

The first lecture of Gilbert Strang's MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra course, covering the geometry of linear equations. It opens a full 35-lecture university course.

Part 1 of a lecture by physicist Albert Bartlett on the exponential function and its consequences for population growth, resource use and energy. It argues that steady growth rates quickly lead to enormous quantities.

Microsoft's Brian Beckman gives an hour-long, whiteboard-style walk through monads, building from function composition and monoids using school-level math. It is aimed at practicing programmers rather than category theorists.

Neil Postman's 1997 lecture at College of DuPage, based on his book, argues that Americans treat technology as a national religion and depend on it to solve larger human problems. It includes audience questions.

Tom Wildenhain's guest lecture for CMU's Esoteric Programming Languages course shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing complete without macros, building up to a mind-bending fractal ending.

A professor from Illinois compares the cost of building, fueling and operating a nuclear plant against a natural gas plant, using visual charts. It shows how construction time and interest rates dominate, when the investment pays off and when costs cross over.

The first lecture of Francis Su's Harvey Mudd real analysis course, covering the construction of the rational numbers. It begins a full lecture series that follows a standard analysis text.

A recording of Andres Duany's 1991 'San Antonio By Design' seminar on suburban sprawl. He lays out how codes, zoning and policy produce sprawl and makes the case for new urbanism.

Lecture 1 of Harvard's Statistics 110 with Joe Blitzstein, introducing sample spaces, the naive definition of probability, counting, binomial coefficients and the sampling table.

A panel at The National WWII Museum on the Battle of Kursk, moderated by Keith Huxen with historians Robert Citino and John Parshal. The discussion covers the armored engagement and the German, Soviet and US approaches to tank production.

Sasha Rush surveys linear RNNs and state space models as replacements for attention in transformer-style models, in a talk for MLSys. It covers the foundational preliminaries and predates Mamba.

Paul Graham's lecture in the 'How to Start a Startup' course, covering counterintuitive parts of startups and how to have ideas. It is the video form of his essay 'Before the Startup'.