fei-fei li

A 2023 University of Toronto conversation between Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li on responsible AI development. They look back at the history of deep learning and ImageNet and discuss the ethics and risks of AI.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on civil asset forfeiture, the process by which police can seize property they suspect is tied to crime. It explains how the property itself is put on trial and how departments profit.

James Hoffmann runs caffeine analyzer tests comparing filter versus espresso, extraction over time, steep time, instant coffee and light versus dark roast.

Institute for Justice footage of Nevada Highway Patrol troopers seizing the life savings of Stephen Lara, a retired Marine, during a traffic stop under civil forfeiture. The video documents the stop and the case that followed.

CGP Grey's short explainer arguing that caffeine addiction is mostly harmless and may even be beneficial. It covers what caffeine does in the body.

The classic Casablanca scene in which Captain Renault is 'shocked, shocked' to find gambling at Rick's, just before being handed his winnings.

Louis Rossmann examines fuses sold on Amazon that fail to trip at their rated current, including a 2A fuse surviving 8 amps. He uses it to criticize Amazon's lax control over safety-relevant products.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff lectures on how political debates are framed through language and metaphors tied to values, and on the moral worldviews behind progressive and conservative politics. It was given in 2005 at UC San Diego.

Stefan Karpinski's European Lisp Symposium 2016 talk asks whether Julia is a Lisp. He covers the features it borrows from Lisp, such as macros and closures, and where it departs, including syntax and its type system, with generated machine code shown.

A short infographic video on the distribution of wealth in America, contrasting what people believe, what they consider ideal, and the actual numbers. It highlights how top-heavy US wealth is.

Adam Curtis's 2016 BBC documentary HyperNormalisation, about 160 minutes long. It cuts together roughly forty years of politics, finance and technology to argue that people have retreated into a simplified fake world.

Julia co-creator Stefan Karpinski explains why multiple dispatch makes Julia code and types reusable across packages with so little friction. He covers sharing basic types and sharing generic algorithms.

Allieway Audio gives an informal introduction and live-coding demo of ORCA, a free esoteric programming environment for building procedural sequencers from Hundred Rabbits. It walks through the interface and how to make music with it.

Daniel Azuma's ElixirConf 2018 talk on whether Docker and OTP conflict. He shows they can coexist and uses Horde and DeltaCrdt, with a live tank-game demo, to keep state alive across container kills.

Aral Balkan's re:publica 2015 talk argues that people are the product of surveillance-based business models. It makes an ethical case against data monopolies and for privacy as a human right.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make radiative sky cooling paint from grocery and hardware store materials, including a novel calcium carbonate microsphere synthesis. The paint can cool a surface below ambient air temperature in direct sunlight without electricity.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make ultra-white radiative paint that cools surfaces below ambient temperature without electricity. He walks through the research papers and the household-materials process.

Chris McCord's ElixirConf 2018 keynote introduces Phoenix LiveView, which renders HTML on the server and updates the page over websockets. It includes a demo showing that latency is not the bottleneck one might expect.

Climate Town gives a comedic, fast-paced account of how the plastics industry promoted recycling, including the resin-code recycling symbol, while knowing most plastic could not be economically recycled. It points viewers to the Frontline documentary Plastic Wars for a deeper treatment.

A short demo of a walking droplet on a vibrating silicone oil bath passing through a double slit and producing interference, a macro-scale analogue of pilot-wave behavior.

A playful music video promoting the book Land of Lisp, with a song about Lisp programming.

Climate Town tells the history of the period when the greenhouse effect was not politically controversial and the US came close to acting on climate. It covers Exxon's early climate science and the policy failures that followed.

José Valim's ElixirConf US 2023 closing keynote on the foundations of the Elixir type system, covering set-theoretic types and gradual typing with strong arrows.

Sam Holmes Sailing visits sailing legend Sven Yrvind and tours his boat, covering the man and his small-boat design philosophy.

Kiran Pamnany's Cambridge Julia Meetup talk on Julia's shared memory parallelism and its new task scheduler. It argues that fork-join and work-stealing models nest poorly and presents depth-first scheduling for composable parallelism.

Andres Gomez Emilsson of the Qualia Research Institute presents a model of DMT experiences using hyperbolic geometry and dynamical systems theory. He describes how different intoxication levels correspond to changing curvature and information content of experience.

Jacob Collier layers ten vocal parts to arrange and perform Harold Darke's carol "In the Bleak Midwinter", with inventive harmony and tuning.

Steven G. Johnson, MIT professor and FFTW co-author, gives a JuliaCon 2019 keynote on metaprogramming and staged programming in Julia, showing how it enables high-performance numerical code and when not to use macros.

Dave Chinner's linux.conf.au 2012 talk on XFS scalability, covering pain points with large numbers of files and complex metadata, and the work to fix XFS metadata performance.

Big Clive shows how to pick up discarded disposable vape devices from the roadside and extract the rechargeable lithium cells inside. He explains why these devices contain the same circuitry as rechargeable ones and how to reuse the cells.

Julia co-creator Jeff Bezanson candidly lists fundamental problems with the language at JuliaCon 2019, including modularity, types and compiler latency, and how they might be solved.

Physicist Angela Collier rants for 42 minutes about why violin plots are a poor way to show data, citing papers on violin and bean plots. It is part lecture on how to read distributions and part opinionated critique.

Robin Deits presents the JuliaRobotics organization and shows how Julia is used to visualize, simulate and control a humanoid robot. The talk touches on real-time performance and composability across packages.

Isaac Yonemoto's ElixirConf 2021 talk on Zigler, a library for writing Elixir NIFs in Zig. He looks at its internals and how it bridges the two languages while keeping the NIFs well behaved on the BEAM.

A JuliaCon talk by a NASA Launch Services Program engineer on modeling spacecraft separation dynamics in Julia. He describes replacing a Simulink-based workflow for checking launch vehicle separation requirements with Julia and ModelingToolkit, with large speedups and much shorter code.

Big Clive does a complete teardown of a lithium phone battery, taking apart the protection circuit, case and the cell itself. He notes it was risky because the cell was not discharged first.

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.

A FRONTLINE documentary on whether efforts to fix plastic pollution made it worse. It looks at the battle over plastics and recycling and how little plastic is actually recycled.

Peter Hutterer's linux.conf.au 2020 talk on creating libinput, the unified userspace input library, and the difficulties of handling the many quirks of input devices.

The full, long-form FRONTLINE interview with Steve Bannon, recorded in 2019 for the documentary series on the Obama-to-Trump era. He discusses his populist politics, the Trump campaign and White House, and his view of the establishment.