credit

An Extra Credits episode on China's Sesame Credit, which gamifies obedient citizenship through a social score. It covers how the system rewards conformity and pressures people through their friends' behavior.

A VICE News piece on China's Social Credit System, including a neighbor-watch pilot where paid watchers record behavior. It covers rewards for high scores and public shaming or restrictions for low ones.

A Last Week Tonight segment on credit reports, explaining their outsized role in people's lives and how often they contain critical errors.

An Extra Credits episode on how games use Skinner box operant conditioning and reward schedules to keep players playing and spending. It argues for more immersive design mechanics than simple reward loops.

SethBling performs the first credits warp in Super Mario World on a real SNES console, a glitch that plays the ending without beating Bowser. The run relies on pixel-perfect positioning and tools such as a helper ROM hack.

Extra Credits explains from a game developer's perspective why AAA games have stayed at $60 despite inflation, and how that pressure drives DLC, microtransactions and loot boxes.

An Extra Credits episode on how MMO economies get overrun by inflation when players can mint unlimited gold by killing monsters. It covers approaches borrowed from real-world economics, such as anchoring or pegging currency, as alternatives to simple gold sinks.

A speedrunner-made explanation of the Super Mario World credits warp, an arbitrary code execution glitch that jumps the game straight to the ending. It simplifies the underlying assembly and memory behavior with animations so non-experts can follow.

A vlogbrothers video tracing how the claim that people eat a credit card of plastic every week spread. It walks through the funded talking point, the misleading amplification, and the peer review that missed it.

The opening credit sequence of the 1960s British spy series The Prisoner, with Patrick McGoohan. It is a short intro to a cult TV show.

Ray Dalio's 30-minute animated video explains how the economy works through credit, debt, interest rates, and short- and long-term cycles. It is based on his template for understanding the economy.

A long rebuttal arguing that the Wright Brothers truly invented the airplane, responding to other YouTubers who credit others. It walks through the engineering breakthroughs the Wrights achieved, such as control and wind tunnel work.

An ABC 20/20 investigation into whether the Better Business Bureau sells its ratings. It looks at BBB finances, executive pay and how grades relate to paid accreditation.

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.

John Bird and John Fortune satirize the investment banking mindset in a mock interview about the subprime mortgage crisis. The sketch lampoons structured credit products and the banks' reassurances shortly before the crash.

A scene from The Big Short in which Jared Vennett pitches credit default swaps on mortgage bonds to a hedge fund team, using a Jenga tower to illustrate collateralized debt obligations.

Frank Abagnale, the real subject of Catch Me If You Can, speaks at Google about his life as a con man turned FBI fraud and cybersecurity expert, including advice on fraud, breaches and credit cards.

Wendover Productions examines why carbon offsets so often fail to reduce emissions, covering specific examples and the perverse incentives in offset schemes.

A Last Week Tonight segment explaining carbon offsets, what they claim to do, and how they may worsen climate change. It looks at perverse incentives and questionable projects.

A 2006 Saturday Night Live fake infomercial with Steve Martin and Amy Poehler selling the sure-fire way out of debt: don't buy stuff.

A Black Hat USA 2017 briefing by the prosecutors who caught Russian carder Roman Seleznev. It covers the electronic evidence collected, the international trail, and how he was located and arrested.

A short Australian dystopian film in which a man returns home to find citizens fining each other for infractions via a government app, with cameras everywhere.

A five-minute clip from The Big Short (2015) in which FrontPoint Partners confront Morgan Stanley risk assessors and an S&P ratings representative about inflated mortgage bond ratings.

The first chapter of 3Blue1Brown's Essence of Linear Algebra series, introducing vectors with animated geometric visuals. It begins a series that builds intuition for linear algebra from the basics.

Sasa Juric explains what makes Erlang and Elixir suited to server-side systems, focusing on the BEAM concurrency model rather than syntax or ecosystem. He demonstrates processes, supervision, and fault tolerance.

Svelte creator Rich Harris explains moving reactivity into the compiler and language rather than tracking state at runtime, with a history of spreadsheets as reactive systems and comparisons to React.

SethBling shows MarI/O, a program using neural networks and the NEAT genetic algorithm to learn to play Super Mario World. The description links the source code, the paper and background reading.

Veritasium examines the role of luck in success, with simulations and examples showing how small advantages and chance can compound. It argues that top outcomes are disproportionately luck-driven while still crediting effort.

Andrew Huberman's podcast episode on what makes us sleepy, helps us sleep soundly and keeps us alert. It lays out the science and a set of behavioral tools such as light timing.

The first lecture of Jordan Peterson's 2017 Maps of Meaning course, setting out the Cold War context for his theory of belief and culture. He introduces the narrative structure of culture and archetypal characters for the individual, the known and the unknown.

John Oliver's 13-minute Last Week Tonight segment explains the 2014 net neutrality fight over cable companies creating unequal internet speeds. It uses comedy to make a dull regulatory topic engaging and tells viewers how to comment to the FCC.

Sociologist and comedian Harald Eia argues in a TEDxOslo talk that Nordic social democracies produce more rich people per capita than the US or UK. He credits high taxes, welfare and strong unions for creating a safety net that enables risk taking.

Pete Hunt of Facebook and Instagram presents React at JSConf.Asia 2013, explaining its design principles and why they seemed shocking at first. He argues that React separates concerns rather than technologies, and the talk also announces the React Chrome developer tools.

Rich Hickey's long presentation on Clojure and concurrency covers locking and immutability, then goes in depth on refs, transactions and agents. It ends with a multithreaded ant colony simulation demo.

Techmoan's 45-minute retrospective on Sony's MiniDisc, covering the first and last machines, ATRAC, MD-LP, Net-MD and HiMD. It argues the format deserves more credit than its US failure narrative suggests.

A four-minute TED talk in which Derek Sivers argues that announcing your goals can make you less likely to achieve them. He cites psychology research going back to the 1920s.

A short screencast tour of JSPM, SystemJS and ES6 features, building a small app with the then-new JavaScript module and package tooling. It shows how JSPM works as a package manager, bundler and loader.

An RSA Animate video that illustrates a talk by geographer David Harvey on the crises of capitalism. It covers creative destruction, wage stagnation masked by credit, and the search for a more just economic order.

At DEF CON 27, Nina Kollars tells how buying Nespresso capsules on eBay led her to investigate fraudsters reselling goods bought with stolen credit cards. She describes her non-technical tracking and reporting efforts.

Michael Shellenberger argues in a TEDx talk that solar and wind need huge amounts of land and mining, and says nuclear power is a better path to protecting both the climate and nature.