custom silicon

Steve Blank tells how World War II, Stanford's Frederick Terman and military and intelligence agencies shaped the rise of Silicon Valley. The talk centers on the Cold War electronic warfare and signals intelligence work that seeded the region's tech industry.

An original recording of a Verizon customer service call in which the rep fails to understand the difference between cents and dollars, known as Verizon Math.

Steve Blank's Computer History Museum lecture argues that Silicon Valley's roots lie in WWII radar and electronic warfare work, Stanford's Fred Terman and Cold War military funding rather than the semiconductor alone.

A two-minute clip from HBO's Silicon Valley season 2 in which Russ Hanneman shows off his gull-wing car doors. It is a comedic scene about startup excess.

A compilation of the best Gavin Belson moments from Silicon Valley seasons 1 to 5, showing the show's self-absorbed tech CEO.

A two-minute clip from Silicon Valley season 1, episode 7 featuring the human heater idea that is rejected in a startup competition scene.

A short Silicon Valley clip in which Jian Yang copies popular apps and launches a new Pied Piper, and Seppen listens.

A clip from Silicon Valley season 3 episode 2 about Pied Piper's product, satirizing startups and stock-driven companies.

A one-minute clip of David Mitchell on a UK panel show explaining why he respects poor customer service in Britain. He argues that people who do their job well should not also be required to be nice.

A Startup School talk by YC partner and former Airbnb growth head Gustaf Alstromer on how startups get their first customers. It covers doing things that don't scale, founders learning sales, the sales funnel, and charging your first customer.

PBS Space Time considers whether life could be based on silicon instead of carbon, comparing the two elements' chemistry and why silicon is the most plausible alternative.

Louis Rossmann describes US Customs seizing replacement MacBook batteries at Apple's behest, while Apple refuses to supply the batteries to authorized service providers. It is part of his right-to-repair advocacy.

James Hamilton's Tuesday Night Live keynote at AWS re:Invent 2016, touring AWS infrastructure at scale including networking, power and custom silicon. It also features NASA JPL's Tom Soderstrom.

Alamo Drafthouse posted an angry voicemail from a customer who was kicked out for texting in the theater. The theater turned it into a humorous in-house preview.

Chamath Palihapitiya talks with Jason Calacanis about how he bought into the mythology of Silicon Valley, which he calls a Ponzi scheme, and about rebuilding Social Capital. He urges founders to grow slowly and build what matters.

Dave Carroll's song and music video about United Airlines baggage handlers breaking his Taylor guitar and the airline's refusal to compensate him. It became a viral example of a customer fighting a company.

An HBO clip from Silicon Valley season 4 in which the 'Not Hotdog' app is demoed. The app classifies food photos as hot dog or not hot dog.

A short montage from HBO's Silicon Valley of the TechCrunch Disrupt scene, in which founders repeat the phrase 'making the world a better place'.

A short clip from the show Silicon Valley in which the Pied Piper team meets a money guy who offers advice about having no revenue.

A three-minute scene from season 2, episode 4 of Silicon Valley in which Jared is excited after the company hires a woman engineer. It satirizes tokenism in tech hiring.

John Gruber interviews Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak after WWDC 2020 about the Mac transition to Apple silicon, macOS Big Sur and iOS 14.

A scene from Silicon Valley season 4 episode 8 featuring Keenan Feldspar's VR product.

A short scene from the film Pirates of Silicon Valley where Steve Jobs confronts Bill Gates after the Macintosh announcement over Windows copying Apple's work, and Gates replies that it doesn't matter.

A short scene from Silicon Valley season 1 episode 5 satirizing scrum and agile meetings. The characters mock how process rituals turn simple things into a job.

A short clip from HBO's Silicon Valley in which a focus group savages a product by calling it as bad as Apple Maps. It satirizes tech product launches.

A short clip from HBO's Silicon Valley in which Gavin Belson fires the Nucleus team.

Dodoid gives an in-depth look at an SGI Onyx RealityEngine2, a $250,000 graphics supercomputer from 1993, covering its history, a physical overview, a teardown and some demos and games.

Y Combinator partners Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell discuss how startups shifted from attracting outsiders to status- and money-seeking conformists. They give advice for nonconformist founders.

A one-minute clip from HBO's Silicon Valley in which Gavin Belson comments on sycophants. It satirizes executives surrounded by yes-men.

Gamers Nexus criticizes ASUS over its handling of exploding Ryzen CPUs, overvolting BIOS settings and warranty and support behavior. It re-benchmarks the chips at defaults and argues ASUS eroded customer trust.

Overclocker der8auer tours Hetzner's Falkenstein data center in Germany, showing custom racks, own mainboards, passively cooled servers and ATX-style cases on shelves.

Sam Zeloof shows the upgraded second iteration of his homemade silicon integrated circuit fabrication process, producing chips with around a thousand transistors in his garage. It is a short overview of what the home fab can now do.

A short 2009 video of Jeff Bezos talking about Amazon and Zappos. He discusses customer focus, invention and long-term thinking.

TJ DeVries coins the term PDE (Personalized Development Environment) to describe editors like Neovim that you shape to your own workflow. He contrasts this with out-of-the-box IDEs and discusses why customizable tools appeal to developers.

Der8auer tours Hetzner's test lab and shows a custom AM5 server motherboard with the CPU socket rotated 90 degrees, built for rack airflow in their AX52 servers.

Apple's WWDC 2020 keynote covering iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, privacy, tvOS and macOS, and the announcement of the move of Macs to Apple silicon. It includes demos of Rosetta translation and virtualization on ARM.

Jim Keller, CTO of Tenstorrent, talks at Samsung Foundry's SAFE 2021 about building AI silicon through modular, provable design. The talk also touches on Tenstorrent's RISC-V Ascalon core.

Veritasium explains that the US signed the Metre Convention in 1875 and that all US customary units are officially defined in terms of metric standards. It also touches on the standard kilogram.

A short excerpt from the 2007 iPhone launch where Steve Jobs quotes Alan Kay: people serious about software should make their own hardware. It explains part of why Apple built the phone itself.

A WIRED Future Cities documentary on Shenzhen, covering its hardware-prototyping culture and shanzhai copycat manufacturing. It looks at how the city's ecosystem evolved and what the rest of the world can learn.