extremely large telescope

The first video in a series on extremely large numbers, introducing the topic with examples. Later parts go deep into the fast-growing hierarchy.

David Kipping presents his proposed Terrascope, a telescope that uses Earth's atmosphere as a lens to achieve enormous magnification. He covers the history of telescopes and his path to the idea, plus Sol-scope and Jupiter-scope variants.

A timelapse compilation of the night sky above the Very Large Telescope at Paranal, Chile, using ESO photographers' footage set to music. It shows the stars wheeling overhead and the observatory at work.

Real Engineering explains the engineering behind the James Webb Space Telescope, including its folding mirror, sunshield, orbit and cooling systems, and why deployment was so difficult.

A roughly 90-minute film of John Dobson building a Dobsonian telescope step by step, including hand-grinding the mirror.

A NASA video on the 29 days after the James Webb Space Telescope's launch, when thousands of parts must deploy in sequence on the way to its destination a million miles away.

Andrej Karpathy gives a one-hour general-audience introduction to large language models, covering what they are, how they are trained, comparisons to operating systems, and security challenges such as jailbreaks.

PBS Space Time explains the proposal to use the Sun's gravity as a giant lens, sending a train of small light-sail spacecraft to the focal point roughly 550 AU out. It covers how such a telescope could image exoplanets in surprising detail and the engineering challenges involved.

Hyrum Wright shares lessons from five years of mass code migrations in Google's huge C++ codebase. He covers why to migrate, how hard it really is, and how Google updates core libraries and their users continually.

A short cartoon explaining how language models like ChatGPT work, from autocomplete and conditional probabilities to neural networks, gradient descent and backpropagation. It shows how networks act as universal function approximators.

Fraser Cain interviews JPL physicist Slava Turyshev about using the Sun's gravity as a lens to image distant exoplanets. They cover how the lens works, how a spacecraft would align with it, and mission design.

Footage from the Chasing Ice project of the largest glacier calving event ever filmed, at Greenland's Ilulissat Glacier in 2008. A 75-minute event is condensed to a few minutes of cameras watching ice collapse.

Timothy Daly, an original author of the Axiom computer algebra system, talks about turning a large Common Lisp codebase into a literate program. He argues code should be written as readable manuals, and the talk was given at Write the Docs 2013.

Numberphile's Tony Padilla and Matt Parker discuss Graham's number, once the largest number used in a mathematical proof, and how enormous it is.

The official tour video of Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, the world's largest model railway. It shows the 1,300 square meter layout with trains, aircraft, cars and ships moving around.

John McCall of Apple's Swift team presents at CppNow 2023 on introducing a memory-safe successor language into large C++ code bases. He argues incremental improvement of C++ hits hard limits and explains Swift's C++ interoperability for gradual migration.

Tom Scott visits Dinorwig Power Station in Wales, a pumped-storage hydro plant often called Britain's largest battery. He explains how it works and how its role has shifted from TV pickup spikes to balancing wind and solar.

A Discovery Channel computer simulation of a large asteroid impact on Earth, showing the scale of the devastation. It sits in a broader context of early Earth impacts and the moon-forming collision.

Technology Connections explains how old-fashioned non-electronic rice cookers work, using a magnet and spring switch tripped by the Curie point. It shows the thermodynamics and magnetism behind a simple appliance.

Numberphile talks with mathematician Ron Graham about the magnitude of Graham's number, building up from arrow notation to show how impossibly large it is. It is part of a series of videos on this number.

Practical Engineering explains pumped storage hydropower, which makes up most grid-scale electricity storage. It covers how it works and why it fits only certain geographies.

Jeff Dean of Google describes his experiences building Google's systems and how its infrastructure evolved over time. The Stanford talk covers search, scaling tipping points and lessons from building large-scale software.

A short supercut showing many Sinclair-owned local news anchors reading the same scripted warning about biased news, word for word.

Charlie Marsh of Astral explains how uv, a Rust Python package manager, got so fast. He covers allocators, concurrency, zero-copy tricks and the challenges of Python packaging.

An NFB documentary about the shipbreaking yards of Alang, India, where about 40,000 people dismantle huge ships by hand in dangerous conditions.

Tom Scott makes the difference between a million and a billion dollars tangible by using distance on a road trip instead of volume. The drive makes the scale of a billion intuitively felt.

Ross Scott of Accursed Farms lays out a campaign to stop publishers from permanently shutting down games, using The Crew as the test case. He covers government initiatives and the legal options, and the stopkillinggames.com site.

Coffeezilla investigates the company behind the Rabbit R1 AI gadget, alleging a shady history as a crypto and NFT startup and questioning its large action model claims.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths explains why people keep making the same mistake with millions and billions, using a Bloomberg cash calculator example. He looks at the unit slip behind the repeated arithmetic error.

Explains the proposed NASA JPL plan to use the Sun as a gravitational lens, sending solar sail craft to its focal region to image an exoplanet's surface. It covers the distances involved, how imaging with the Sun would work and the mission design.

Andrej Karpathy's three-hour-plus general-audience deep dive into how ChatGPT-style LLMs are built, covering the full training stack from pretraining to post-training. It also gives mental models for their quirks, like hallucination, and how to use them well.

Veritasium explains what a black hole should look like, using J.P. Luminet's 1979 work and a cardboard 3D model to show how light bends around it. It was made just as the first black hole image was released.

Richard Feldman's Elm Europe 2017 talk on how to structure and scale large Elm applications, including when to nest messages.

Vsauce explores math through card tricks and big numbers, including an animation of how enormous 52 factorial, the number of deck orderings, really is.

Nicholas Zakas of Yahoo discusses architecture for large, modular JavaScript web applications. He lays out the theory behind building front ends that scale in complexity.

Google engineers describe Google's internal build system, a unified, language-agnostic system used across the company. It was presented as a 2012 NYC tech talk.

John Graham-Cumming of Cloudflare talks at dotScale 2015 about handling roughly 10 trillion log lines a month. The talk touches on Cloudflare's hardware, its logging stack and its use of Lua in Nginx.

A PyData London 2018 talk on how JPMorgan scaled its Athena Python platform over ten years to about 35 million lines of code and thousands of developers. It covers infrastructure, tooling and culture for analytics and visualization at that scale.

A Google Tech Talk by Raymond Blum on how Google backs up massive amounts of data such as Gmail and Picasa. It covers scaling challenges, failure types, and approaches that did not work, including tape.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Richard Sutton, reinforcement learning pioneer, Turing Award winner and author of The Bitter Lesson. Sutton argues LLMs are a dead end because they cannot learn on the job, and that continual learning from experience will require a new architecture.