fluidized bed

Mark Rober builds a hot tub filled with sand fluidized by air blown from below, so that the sand behaves like a liquid. He explains how fluidized beds work and shows people swimming in them.

Mark Rober digs into bed bugs, testing popular beliefs about where they come from and how to get rid of them. It mixes entertaining experiments with research-based advice on what works and what does not.

An Apple WWDC24 session introducing Embedded Swift, a subset of Swift with no runtime that targets tiny microcontrollers. It demonstrates the idea on an off-the-shelf Matter smart home device.

Khalil Estell's CppCon 2024 talk argues C++ exceptions can reduce binary size in firmware. He digs into how exceptions work and how to shrink their code footprint on embedded platforms.

Peter Munch-Ellingsen explains at NimConf 2021 why he wrote his own keyboard firmware in Nim instead of using QMK or Arduino. He shows that the resulting firmware is very small.

3Blue1Brown's visual explanation of how transformers and GPT-style language models work, tracing data through tokens, embeddings and attention.

An older 3Blue1Brown video on why topology matters, built around the inscribed rectangle problem. It walks through how tori and Mobius strips appear in the solution. The channel later replaced it with an updated version.

A 10-minute clip from a Jonathan Blow Twitch stream in which he argues that game engines do not really need separate scripting languages. He questions the value of embedded interpreters when the main language can do the job.

An AdaCore webinar in which NVIDIA engineers explain why and how they adopted Ada and SPARK for security-critical firmware. It covers the business case and the engineering experience of the transition.

Rob Landley compares Toybox and BusyBox and surveys options for embedded system command-line tools, including GNU. He also tells the story of leaving BusyBox, Toybox becoming Android's command line, and licensing.

Patricia Aas's EuroBSDCon keynote is about ethics for people who build software, covering how the tech industry got to its current state and what engineers can do about it. It steps back from technical detail to the bigger picture.

Dan Saks's CppCon 2016 talk on why C programmers resist C++ and how to talk to them about it. He argues that persuasion rarely works by arguing and examines the culture gap between the two communities.

Mark Raasveldt of CWI presents DuckDB, an embeddable analytical database described as the SQLite for analytics, in a CMU Database Group talk. He explains why it was built, what it is for, and how it works.

Admiral William McRaven's 2014 University of Texas commencement address, built around lessons from Navy SEAL training. It famously opens with the case for making your bed every morning.

Real Engineering examines whether greening the Sahara could draw down carbon and slow climate change. It concludes that the effort would be enormously costly and that changes in albedo and other effects undercut the climate benefit.

Coffeezilla recounts being offered a $20k bounty to expose a Counter-Strike skin casino, then investigates and finds a different story. It is the first episode of a series on CS skin gambling.

Ang Cui and Jonathan Voris present firmware modification attacks on networked printers at 28c3, showing how HP printers can be compromised and used as footholds for malware inside sensitive networks.

A documentary about Vipassana meditation in India's Tihar Prison, led by Kiran Bedi, the prison's Inspector General. It follows inmates who went through the courses and the changes they describe.

A 2006 Google TechTalk in which SQLite's author Richard Hipp introduces the embeddable, zero-configuration C database library. He covers its history, strengths and weaknesses, and where it beats client/server databases.

A Cracked video about the experience of intervening in a violent stabbing attack and the lack of police protection afterwards.

Jason Turner's CppCon 2016 talk builds a simple Commodore 64 game using C++17, showing how constexpr and const let a modern compiler produce tight 6502 code. He walks through assembly output to show abstractions being optimized away.

SQLite creator Richard Hipp gives a history of SQLite and explains where it shines as a database at the edge of the network with no DBA. He covers long-term support, testing and how it is used in products.

A maker's time-lapse of building a working computer inside a LEGO-style brick, using a tiny 0.42-inch OLED screen, with a demo at the end.

A Strange Loop 2019 talk by Aaron Cummings on the computing systems aboard Voyager 1 and 2, which control the spacecraft and record and return data decades after launch in 1977.

Hamish Coleman describes reverse engineering the keyboard controller in a Thinkpad and reflashing it with custom firmware. He covers how Lenovo secures its firmware, and his ongoing work on the protocol between the BIOS and the vendor flash tool.

A Ropecon 2019 talk by a lighting designer and a software engineer on how the Odysseus larp spaceship was built, using over ten IT systems, hundreds of lights and dozens of speakers. It covers the lessons learned.

A DEF CON 23 talk by Marc Rogers and Kevin Mahaffey walking through the architecture of the Tesla Model S, what Tesla got right and wrong, and how the interconnected systems can be hacked. It also covers the data the car collects.

A Google Tech Talk by Laurens van der Maaten, co-creator of t-SNE, on visualizing high-dimensional data by mapping it to two dimensions. It explains how the technique works and how it compares with other visualization approaches.

D. Richard Hipp's PGCon 2014 keynote on SQLite's relationship to PostgreSQL. He explains that SQLite was originally written from PostgreSQL 6.5 documentation and that the two engines serve different classes of problems.

An episode of C++ Weekly in which Jason Turner shows modern C++14 compiling to the Commodore 64's 6502. It demonstrates writing efficient high-level code for 8-bit hardware.

A short clip of Louis C.K.'s Conan interview riff 'Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy', about how people take modern technology for granted and complain about marvels.

Nate Harrison's 2004 video history of the Amen Break, a six-second drum sample from a 1969 b-side that became the basis of hip-hop sampling, jungle and drum and bass. It is also a meditation on cultural ownership and creativity.

Code Rush is a one-hour documentary following Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley through the company's last year as an independent firm. It covers the Mozilla open-source announcement, the frantic push to ready the source for release by March 31, 1998, and the toll on engineers' lives before the AOL acquisition.

Gil Tene of Azul Systems explains common pitfalls in measuring latency and response time, including why averages mislead and the problem of coordinated omission. He introduces open source tools like HdrHistogram for better measurement and reporting.

Ben Anderson's VICE documentary shows embedded reporting on Afghan security forces and US Marines in Helmand during the troop drawdown, exposing incompetence, drug abuse and corruption.

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.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains how the greenhouse effect actually works, given that infrared is mostly absorbed low in the atmosphere already. She walks through why more CO2 still warms the surface.

An ESOTERICA episode tracing Yahweh from a warrior-storm god near Mt Seir to the god of the Israelites in the Judean highlands. It examines how Yahwism absorbed and contended with Canaanite religion.

Richard Hamming's 1995 lecture on n-dimensional space, showing how geometric intuition about spheres and cubes breaks down in high dimensions. It is part of his course on learning to learn.

A long George Hotz livestream in which he explores the coronavirus genome and molecular biology from scratch using a browser and Python, hacking on the science in real time.