craft process

Stanford Health Care hosts Christopher Gardner and Robert Lustig on whether all calories are equal, with a focus on processed food and sugar. The talk questions the idea that calories in versus calories out fully explains weight and health.

A three-minute clip of Steve Jobs arguing that great products come from people who care about content rather than process. He says process-focused people take over and cause decline, citing IBM as an example.

Day9 gives a passionate first look at what his StarCraft: Brood War Remastered series will teach. He argues Brood War is primarily a real-time game and only secondarily a strategy game, making the commander fantasy a matter of mechanics.

SalC1 explains how the seed behind the Minecraft title screen panorama was found, using community effort and the Minecraft@Home project. It covers the search through Beta 1.7.3 world seeds.

A showcase of the author's fifth-generation quad-core computer built entirely from Minecraft redstone, after two years of development. It features cache, a hardware stack, a GPU driving a 15x15 display, and serial I/O ports.

Folding Ideas' long essay on why playing poorly in World of Warcraft feels rude. It traces how raiding culture shifted from relaxed fun to optimization, theorycrafting and wikis.

FitMC tells how the Nocom exploit let griefers track players across Minecraft's oldest anarchy server, 2b2t, and the fallout that followed.

Bob Nystrom shows his process for hand-drawing the diagrams in his book Crafting Interpreters, from pencil sketches to tracing and inking. It is a time-lapse of the whole illustration workflow.

ArtosisTV's commentary on Game 1 of DeepMind's AlphaStar (Protoss) against top Zerg player Serral at Blizzcon 2019. Artosis analyzes the match with beginner-friendly commentary.

A short tour of the Megaprocessor, a microprocessor built at enormous scale from tens of thousands of discrete transistors. The builder shows what the machine is made of and where it now lives, at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, where visitors can play Tetris on it.

A Gource visualization of 826 days of Minecraft development, from alpha 1.2 to release 1.5, condensed into eight minutes. Each dot is a file, folders are links, and developers fly around zapping files as they work on them.

An HBO special in which Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Ricky Gervais and Louis CK discuss the craft of stand-up comedy. They talk about writing jokes, technique and how they handle old material.

A two-minute video of Ira Glass on the creative process, describing the gap between taste and skill when starting out and urging you to keep producing until your work matches your taste.

Christopher Domas's DEF CON 26 talk on secret processor registers that vendors reserve for third parties holding trusted keys. He examines how users are locked out of parts of their own CPUs.

Sophie Wilson, designer of the ARM instruction set, discusses the future of microprocessors, including the economics of scaling below 28nm and why much of a chip must stay powered off.

Lilium's CTO gives a short update on the electric jet's design, certification and development. It shows the canard and rear wing layout and the wheel design.

Footage of Notch (Markus Persson) live-coding his Minicraft game in Java during a Ludum Dare 48-hour game jam. It shows a working game developer building a complete small game from scratch.

Lex Fridman interviews legendary chip architect Jim Keller about Moore's Law, microprocessor design, and first-principles thinking. Keller draws on his work at AMD, Apple, Tesla and Intel, discussing instruction sets, transistor budgets, and self-driving.

Matt Parker analyzes the Minecraft speedrunning controversy in which Dream was accused of cheating via improbably lucky drops. He walks through the probability and the statistical arguments in the original accusation and the reply.

The first lecture of Stanford's Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning course, taught by Chris Manning and Richard Socher. It introduces NLP and word vectors, including SVD, skip-gram, CBOW, negative sampling and word2vec.

A 1979 BBC Nationwide report asking whether word processors and networked microprocessors could end office commuting. It shows early word processing and a woman working from home, with surprisingly prophetic predictions.

David Ditzel of Esperanto Technologies presents their massively parallel, energy-efficient RISC-V processors at the 7th RISC-V Workshop in 2017. It covers the high-performance many-core design aimed at machine learning.

Samuel Falvo II live-codes a text preprocessor and blog engine in Forth over about an hour. It shows Forth's dictionary being snapshotted and restored in place of mutation, and how a small Forth system gets real work done.

A step-by-step guide to building a lifter, a small triangular ionocraft made from balsa wood, aluminum foil and thin wire, powered by a high-voltage supply. It also shows high-voltage safety practices.

A short demo of Automaton 2000 Micro, a StarCraft bot built in Blizzard's World Editor that splits marines perfectly against banelings. It shows inhuman unit micromanagement with zero losses.

An early 2009 tech test by Notch of an Infiniminer-style cave game running about 700 fps on a 256x256x64 tile map. It is the prototype that grew into Minecraft.

A StarCraft 2 custom-map demo where a bot controls 100 zerglings against 20 sieged tanks and dodges the splash damage, leaving 19 survivors. The code was written in Blizzard's World Editor.

An Onion News Network satire about a Warcraft sequel in which you play a character who is playing Warcraft, in a cramped dark apartment.

A short Conan segment in which George R. R. Martin explains that he writes his Game of Thrones books on WordStar 4.0 on a DOS machine.

In a New York Times interview, Jerry Seinfeld describes the anatomy of his Pop-Tart joke, still a work in progress, and shows his longhand writing process.

Bryan Cantrill's Craft 2019 talk on the ethical dilemmas software engineers face as software eats the world. He explores cases where engineering thinking conflicts with the law or personal morals, including Facebook's news feed experiments.

Tim Ewald's Clojure/conj talk uses furniture making with hand tools versus machine tools as an allegory for software. It explores how automation changes what we make and how we think about our work, and why Clojure's small set of simple tools matters.

The first part of a long series documenting Dave Bull's Tokyo woodblock workshop as it produces a reproduction of Hokusai's The Great Wave. It follows the carving, proofing and printing of the reward print for Kickstarter backers.

A Strange Loop 2019 talk by Aaron Cummings on the computing systems aboard Voyager 1 and 2, which control the spacecraft and record and return data decades after launch in 1977.

A short film following Moroccan artisans from Fez as they build a traditional 15th-century-style Moroccan court inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It shows zellij tilework and other traditional techniques.

Jeija demonstrates a modified Minetest game with a spherical planet, using a grid transform to make a voxel world round. It includes the orbit math and download links for the spheretest build.

A one-minute clip from the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons. Thomas More refuses to arrest the Devil, saying he would give even the Devil the benefit of law for his own safety's sake.

Dave Jones of EEVblog tears down a 1991 IBM 9121 thermal conduction module from a System/390 mainframe, a 63-layer ceramic hybrid module with 2772 pins worth about $250,000, and demonstrates a BGA desoldering technique.

An over-the-shoulder view of StarCraft 2 pro player Sound at a WCS qualifier, showing his monitor, keyboard and mouse. It shows his very fast actions per minute in real time.

Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program gives a graduate-student session on writing effectively. His core idea is that readers care about value to them, not the writer's thinking process.