common knowledge

A five-minute demo of the Common Lisp debugger fixing a bug, recompiling a single function, and resuming execution from the failed stack frame. It shows how to avoid re-running long computations.

Lex Fridman interviews Douglas Lenat, founder of Cyc, a decades-long project to encode common-sense knowledge and reasoning for AI. They discuss symbolic AI and how it may complement neural networks.

WIRED has UCLA professor Amit Sahai explain zero-knowledge proofs to a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student and an expert. Each round goes deeper into the cryptography and why it matters.

Tom Scott races a London black-cab driver who has memorized The Knowledge against a phone GPS across the city, comparing local expertise to navigation software.

Medlife Crisis asks whether academic research should sit behind paywalls, covering publisher profit margins, unpaid reviewers, Sci-Hub and Aaron Swartz. It includes an interview with Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan.

A ten-minute clip from Jonathan Blow's talk on preventing the collapse of civilization, arguing that software quality and the knowledge to build it are in decline.

A 12-minute beginner lesson from Nick Milo's Linking Your Thinking series introducing the Obsidian note-taking app and the first steps to start using it.

A 43-minute skeptical critique arguing that Starlink fails to live up to its promises, covering satellite lifespan, costs, bandwidth and viability. The creator later added an update about FCC grant requirements.

Part one of a two-part skeptical series examining Elon Musk's past business dealings to test whether he is a self-made genius billionaire.

Technology Connections explains how heat pumps work as reversed air conditioners and why they can deliver several times the heat of resistive heating per unit of energy. It also tackles common myths such as poor cold-weather performance.

Not Just Bikes introduces the "stroad", a street-road hybrid common in the US and Canada that fails at both jobs. He contrasts it with Dutch design, where each road has a single purpose, and covers cost, danger and ugliness.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day gives a talk to an aerospace audience, comparing how Apollo was engineered and managed with NASA's Artemis program. He raises concerns about unresolved details, the number of launches and in-orbit fuel transfer needed to reach the Moon, and the loss of institutional knowledge.

Casey Muratori shows how fast a terminal renderer can run, building a simple reference renderer that handles Unicode and colored text far quicker than Windows Terminal. He argues that common excuses for slow terminals do not hold up.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day tries to manufacture a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. Along the way he runs into missing supply chains, tooling and institutional manufacturing knowledge.

Technology Connections explains why electric kettles are uncommon in the US, centering on 120V circuits limiting power. He tests ways of boiling water on gas, electric ranges and kettles.

Robert Miles gives a remastered introduction to AI safety, adapted from a talk in London. It lays out why advanced AI could go wrong and answers common objections.

Explains induced demand beyond roads, showing that it applies to transit, walking and cycling infrastructure too but with different consequences. It corrects common misunderstandings of the concept.

Physicist Angela Collier argues that dark matter is not a theory but a set of observations, covering rotation curves, the CMB and why modified gravity struggles to explain them.

Not Just Bikes takes on the common excuse that a country is simply too big or spread out for good transit and walkable cities. The video argues that city density and short everyday trips matter, not national size or overall population density.

Hoeg Law's Virtual Legality walks through the 185-page Epic v. Apple decision, covering antitrust law, relevant markets, anti-steering and who actually won. It runs well over two hours and corrects common media misreadings.

Musician and audio engineer Benn Jordan tries Dolby Atmos as a consumer, covering the theory of immersive audio, its business model, and home theater and headphone listening. He concludes it often falls short of the pitch.

Ben Felix explains how central bank money creation and quantitative easing actually work, and what they do and do not imply for asset prices and currency. He addresses the common belief that the Fed prints unlimited money and props up markets.

Ben Felix argues that common beliefs about renting versus buying are wrong: homes are not great investments, mortgages are not a wealth hack, and ownership does not reliably bring happiness.

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.

Dave Plummer, a retired Microsoft engineer who wrote Task Manager, responds to the claim that Windows sucks. He describes how he would fix common annoyances, in what he calls a love letter to Windows wrapped in a rant.

A five-hour documentary history of the Super Mario 64 A button challenge, which aims to beat the game with as few A presses as possible. It covers the bugs and exploits discovered over the years.

Greg Wilson surveys what empirical research actually shows about software development, why we believe it, and how to share that knowledge more widely. It covers evidence on practices such as TDD and design patterns.

Robert Miles goes through ten common reasons people give for dismissing AI safety, adapted from Stuart Russell's list, and answers each one. It is aimed at skeptics and newcomers.

Scott Manley examines why SpaceX, Google and others are looking at orbital data centers. He walks through the economics, heat rejection and solar power arguments, with links to the Lumen/Starcloud and Google Suncatcher papers.

Anders Puck Nielsen clears up common misunderstandings about what legally counts as genocide, then compares the situation in Gaza with the genocide case against Putin. The chapters cover the definition, individual intent, and the two case comparisons.

A lecture for high school seniors and college freshmen making the case for nuclear power and answering common objections. It is an overview of the channel's more detailed videos on each topic.

Yann LeCun on the Big Technology Podcast discusses why current AI models cannot make discoveries despite their knowledge. He argues systems need abstract world models and also covers limits of AI research, investor expectations, and open source after DeepSeek.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains superdeterminism as an interpretation of quantum mechanics, addressing common objections and misconceptions, including the worry that it kills free will or science. She ties it to Bell's theorem and hidden variables.

Physicist and YouTuber Angela Collier argues in this hour-long video that AI as commonly described does not really exist. She covers the limits of the tools, biased datasets, and why they should not be used to make decisions.

Ben Felix rebuts common arguments for holding only US stocks, such as past outperformance and international revenue exposure. He supports the case for international diversification with cited academic research.

Tom Scott's video whose title shows its own live view count, and the story of how he made that work. It explains why open APIs were once common and why they largely disappeared.

Dave2D looks at why MacBook speakers sound so much better than those on other laptops, with input from an audio researcher. He compares them against the best Windows laptop speakers.

Rational Reminder podcast episode with Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money. They discuss how investing success depends more on behavior than knowledge, the role of luck and the dangers of emulating top investors.

Munro Live's Model Y episode 36 has Sandy Munro walk through the disassembled Tesla Octovalve and heat pump system. He explains how the components are made and what each one does.

A TEDx talk arguing that battery electric vehicles are not as environmentally friendly as commonly believed and that the rush to adopt them is misguided. TED flagged it as containing claims that lack scientific support.