business model

A Wendover Productions video on how dollar store chains expanded across America and why they displace grocery stores in small towns. It covers their business model and supplier leverage.

Louis Rossmann interviews Kaylie Milliken and Mellissa Wood, producers of the documentary Billion Dollar Bully, about Yelp's alleged practices toward businesses.

A short Frank Zappa interview clip on the decline of the music business, contrasting old cigar-chomping executives with younger industry people.

Stripe's John Collison interviews Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about growth to around $5 billion ARR, model economics, agentic AI and vitalism.

A standing whiteboard conversation at Lang.NEXT 2012 among Carl Hewitt, Erik Meijer and Clemens Szyperski about the actor model. Hewitt, who originated the model, explains its foundations.

Tom Scott tells how John Reber's plan to dam San Francisco Bay was disproved by the Army Corps of Engineers' giant hydraulic Bay Model in Sausalito. The model showed the plan would have been dangerously wrong.

The official tour video of Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, the world's largest model railway. It shows the 1,300 square meter layout with trains, aircraft, cars and ships moving around.

The South Park clip in which underpants gnomes explain their three-phase business plan: collect underpants, then a question mark, then profit.

Clayton Christensen explains his theory of disruptive innovation at Oxford's Said Business School, using examples from steel, Toyota, Sony, Walmart and Godrej. He applies the theory to why some economies stagnate and others grow.

Fox Business interview in which Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison claims Oracle will beat Amazon at cloud databases. He argues the world's valuable data lives in Oracle and says Amazon struggled to move off it.

Scott Wlaschin's NDC talk on using statically typed functional programming, F# in particular, to model a business domain. Types are used to represent the domain precisely and to encode business rules so that illegal states cannot be built, with the compiler acting as an instant unit test.

Imphenzia's 83-minute tutorial covers the low poly modeling techniques he learned over five years of Blender use, with timestamps from navigation and extrusion onward. It uses Blender 2.83 with default keys.

Maciej Ceglowski's talk at Web Directions argues that small teams and lone programmers can build sustainable businesses without chasing Silicon Valley's grow-or-die model. He offers alternative, more achievable definitions of success.

A Wendover Productions explainer arguing that major airlines make much of their profit from loyalty programs and co-branded credit cards rather than flying. It frames airlines as quasi-banks that sell points in bulk, using United's pandemic-era loan as a hook.

Rob Miles explains on Computerphile how language models generate plausible text and how transformers improved on recurrent networks, with a look at what comes next.

A short cartoon explaining how language models like ChatGPT work, from autocomplete and conditional probabilities to neural networks, gradient descent and backpropagation. It shows how networks act as universal function approximators.

Linus Tech Tips breaks down the company's income streams, including sponsors, YouTube Premium, merch and other products. It gives percentages for each revenue source.

Rob Miles discusses GPT-3 on Computerphile, covering how scaling parameters kept improving results over GPT-2 and how the model nearly learned arithmetic without anyone knowing exactly how.

Jason Cohen's MicroConf talk on designing a bootstrapped business by starting from your own strengths, goals and constraints. He works backward to the business model, pricing, market and product that fit, with practical points like annual prepay and pricing tiers.

Scott Wlaschin shows how statically typed functional languages, using F# examples, can model a business domain so that invalid states cannot be represented. The type system acts almost like an instant unit test at compile time.

An Autoline After Hours episode with teardown expert Sandy Munro and a panel of auto journalists. It covers his Tesla Model 3 teardown, including the battery, drive modules, build quality and manufacturing automation.

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.

Andrej Karpathy builds a bigram character-level language model from scratch, introducing torch.Tensor and the framework of training, sampling and loss evaluation. It is the first step toward a GPT-style Transformer in his makemore series.

Not Just Bikes contrasts typical car-dependent North American business parks with one near the airport in the Netherlands that works for driving, cycling and transit. It looks at how the design makes commuting easier.

An engineering explainer on why Tesla abandoned the induction motor for the Model 3 and used an IPM-SynRM design. It covers the reluctance torque and permanent magnet principles behind the choice.

Thunderf00t critiques Starlink's economics and technical claims alongside other unfulfilled Musk promises. It argues Starlink is a poor business.

Louis Rossmann lays out evidence that a Yelp salesperson had friends leave negative reviews of his repair shop after he declined advertising. He frames it as extortion and defamation.

Autoline's John McElroy visits Sandy Munro's shop, where a Tesla Model 3 is being prepared for a teardown benchmarking study. Munro, with deep design and manufacturing experience, points out issues he dislikes about the car's build.

Richard Feldman's elm-conf talk on designing models so that bugs from impossible application states cannot occur, using Elm's compiler and types. It demonstrates techniques for making invalid states unrepresentable.

Veritasium's Derek Muller argues that Facebook's business model works against pages and creators, because it charges them to reach the audiences they built. He explains how filtering and paid promotion undermine the value of likes.

Jeremy Howard's 90-minute practical tour of language models. It covers how they work, GPT-4's capabilities and limits, using the OpenAI API, code writing, data analysis and fine-tuning.

The first lecture of Andy Pavlo's CMU 15-445 Intro to Database Systems (Fall 2019), covering course introduction and the relational model.

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.

Jay Parlar's Strange Loop talk shows how model checkers such as Alloy can find complex bugs in a system's design without running or reading any code. He walks through modeling architectures and checking every possible sequence of operations, including a real security bug and a UI feature-interaction bug.

Aral Balkan's re:publica 2015 talk argues that people are the product of surveillance-based business models. It makes an ethical case against data monopolies and for privacy as a human right.

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.

A panel with Tony Hoare, Joe Armstrong and Carl Hewitt, hosted by Francesco Cesarini, on the history and future of concurrency. The three creators of CSP, Erlang and the actor model discuss their differing approaches.

Benn Jordan argues that Spotify's business model undermines the music it sells, using streaming payout figures and the economics for artists and labels.

Luke Wagner of Fastly explains what a WebAssembly component is, how it relates to familiar concepts, and what the Component Model enables. It emphasizes security, composability and modularity.

Simon Brown's Agile on the Beach 2019 talk presents the C4 model, a lightweight approach to diagramming software architecture with a shared vocabulary and simple notation.