enter sandman

Drummer Larnell Lewis hears Metallica's Enter Sandman for the first time on Drumeo and learns to play it by ear, using his musical vocabulary.

Benn Jordan investigates infrasound and low-frequency noise from data centers, including xAI's Colossus and a crypto mine, and reports his own experiments on the effects. The video covers the health and community impacts on nearby residents.

A Business Insider investigation into the US boom in AI data centers, mapping where they are, who owns them, and how much power and water they consume. It looks at the costs borne by communities, with a focus on Virginia.

Eager Space examines the practicality of putting data centers in orbit, walking through three scenarios with cost calculations and the launch cost reductions that would be required.

John Ousterhout's Netdev 0x16 keynote arguing that nearly every aspect of TCP is wrong for the datacenter, from connections and streams to reliable delivery and congestion control. He presents the case for a replacement protocol.

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.

Scott Manley explains the thermal balance of spacecraft and how a satellite could be configured to radiate away the heat from datacenter-scale computing in space. His rough numbers suggest it is feasible.

Scott Manley analyzes the idea of putting data centers in orbit, prompted by Lumen Orbit's funding. He examines the claimed advantage of constant solar power against launch cost, cooling and mass.

James Hamilton of AWS gives a Velocity 2010 keynote on datacenter infrastructure innovation, focused on power and cooling costs and a breakdown of where datacenter spending goes.

Joe Kava, VP of Google's Data Center Operations, gives a short tour of a Google data center. He covers security, sustainability and the core infrastructure architecture.

The official video for Carpenter Brut's Turbo Killer, directed by Seth Ickerman, with psychedelic 1980s-styled visuals set to rock-leaning synthwave.

Y Combinator partner Pete Koomen, who led Optimizely to $100M ARR, walks through the enterprise sales funnel. Chapters cover prospecting, outreach, qualification, pricing, closing, procurement and implementation.

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

A More Perfect Union report on xAI's data center in Memphis, which residents say burns gas without permits or pollution controls and harms their health.

Harvard Belfer Center lecture by Matthew Bunn explaining how nuclear bombs work, including fission and fusion weapons and which parts of bomb-making are hard. It is part 1 of 2 in the Nuclear 101 series.

A 1973 AT&T training film made for new employees at Bell Labs' Holmdel Computing Center, when Unix was in its third version and running at 16 computer centers in the Bell System. It shows how users submitted jobs and used the center's machines.

A 49-minute demo of Palantir Foundry by its chief architect. It walks through data integration, ML and AI workflows, analytics, and application building across the platform.

A 2018 local news report showing people using drugs openly in the corridors of San Francisco's Civic Center BART station.

Anthony Marcar describes lessons from three years of using Clojure at WalmartLabs, including scaling a team and a large multi-project codebase in an enterprise setting.

Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of the Center for Humane Technology present why current AI capabilities pose catastrophic societal risks. They argue companies are racing to deploy without adequate safety, and that institutions must adapt. It was given before GPT-4's launch.

Mark Rober and collaborators build glitter bomb traps and other pranks to fight phone scam call centers, and share evidence about the operations.

A documentary about Riot Entertainment, a Finnish dot-com-era startup that raised millions in funding and then collapsed. It follows the hype-driven rise and implosion of the company.

Sal Mercogliano of What's Going on With Shipping? discusses a debate between the Center for Maritime Strategy and the Heritage Foundation over whether the Jones Act helps or harms American shipping and national security.

Tyler Bosmeny, CEO of Clever, gives a Y Combinator Startup School talk on how early-stage companies should approach sales and build an enterprise sales team.

A short test firing of the XRS-2200 linear aerospike engine at NASA Stennis Space Center, which was designed for the cancelled X-33 VentureStar. The engine is shown at roughly 80 percent of max thrust.

A time-lapse from ESO's Very Large Telescope showing stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way's center over nearly 20 years.

A South Park clip in which Butters' dad takes a job at an Amazon fulfillment center to make ends meet. It satirizes warehouse work conditions.

Dr. Mark Cucuzzella of the Natural Running Center gives a short instructional video on natural running form. It describes the principles of good technique, including barefoot-style mechanics.

A two-minute 2008 clip from Sun's Fishworks team in which Brendan Gregg uses DTrace to show disk latency spiking while he shouts at a rack of drives. Bryan Cantrill narrates the demonstration.

Steve Jobs demos NeXTSTEP Release 3, showing the object-oriented development environment and UI that later became the basis of Mac OS X. Midway through he builds a database-backed GUI app with Interface Builder and Enterprise Objects Framework with almost no code.

A roughly 3.5-hour Gamers Nexus investigation into rising PC component prices, driven largely by AI data-center demand for memory and other hardware. It draws on interviews with industry figures to argue that personal computing and ownership are being eroded.

A 2008 documentary by Brett Whitcomb about the Rock-afire Explosion, the animatronic band built for ShowBiz Pizza Place restaurants. It follows the band's history and the fans who keep the machines and their technology running.

Google's Amin Vahdat gives the ONS 2015 keynote on Google's datacenter networking, including its custom hardware, software-defined networking and very high bisection bandwidth.

A short clip from John Carpenter's They Live showing how the special sunglasses reveal hidden messages behind ads and media.

A two-minute NVIDIA RTX tech demo built on Remedy's Northlight engine, showing real-time ray-traced lighting and shadows in a game scene. It was shown alongside the launch of RTX and DirectX Raytracing.

A teaser for the Skydio 2 Dock, a weatherproof charging base station that enables persistent, automated drone operations for enterprise uses such as site mapping and security patrols.

A short video of five people carrying a live, running web server across the city by public transport to a new datacenter. It stayed powered and connected to the internet the whole way, so there was no downtime.

A scene from John Carpenter's 1981 film Escape from New York in which Snake Plissken glides in over Manhattan between the Twin Towers. It features the film's wireframe green laser-grid visuals built from miniatures.

Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, introduces the language at the Recurse Center's Localhost series in 2018. He covers its goals of robustness, optimality and clarity, C interop, cross-compilation and explicit allocators.

A short animation from the DNA Learning Center showing how mRNA carries a gene's message to the ribosome, where tRNA and codons are used to assemble amino acids into a protein.