format war

Part one of Technology Connections' account of the VHS versus Betamax format war. It argues Sony was caught off guard by JVC's cheaper, more practical VHS system.

PBS Space Time introduces Miguel Alcubierre's warp drive, explaining how spacetime itself could be warped rather than moving a ship through it, and whether it is physically possible.

A PBS Space Time episode asking whether the universe's information can ever truly be lost, tying quantum mechanics, determinism and black holes together. It sets up the black hole information paradox.

Asianometry examines why Japan's software industry has lagged despite its hardware strengths. It looks at dependence on US software and the low prestige of programming.

PBS Space Time explains how general relativity permits warp drive in principle and covers recent theoretical advances toward solving the negative energy problem.

Robert Miles explains reward modelling, in which an AI learns what humans want from their preference comparisons instead of a hand-written reward function. He walks through the 2017 paper on deep reinforcement learning from human preferences.

PBS Space Time episode on the black hole information paradox, covering how black holes seem to destroy information, the no-hair conjecture and the proposed role of the event horizon. It is part of a series on black holes.

A video essay on how the editors of Star Wars: A New Hope recut and rearranged the footage to rescue the film. It walks through specific changes that improved pacing and drama.

Veritasium debunks common climate change myths in under seven minutes, with references to NASA and published research. Topics include CO2 sources, sea ice and 1970s predictions of cooling.

A PBS Space Time episode explaining why faster-than-light travel is equivalent to travelling back in time, using relativity and Minkowski diagrams for different observers.

Tom Scott tours Ocado's automated grocery warehouse, where thousands of robots move boxes on a grid called the Hive, and asks whether they are individual robots or a hive mind.

Linus Tech Tips warns against cheap Android TV boxes, many of which ship with preinstalled malware. It looks at several boxes and suggests safer alternatives such as Chromecast and Nvidia Shield.

A Kurzgesagt video exploring how advanced civilizations might wage war across light years. It looks at weapons such as relativistic beams and what they would do.

Technology Connections compares Betamax and VHS picture quality using footage from a 1979 RCA VCR and argues the Beta quality advantage was largely marketing.

A speedrunner-made explanation of the Super Mario World credits warp, an arbitrary code execution glitch that jumps the game straight to the ending. It simplifies the underlying assembly and memory behavior with animations so non-experts can follow.

Map Men's Jay Foreman tells the story of how the London Tube map nearly looked very different, including Harry Beck's design and TfL's initial rejection of it. A short, witty history of a design icon.

Ward Cunningham explains the history and intent of the debt metaphor, which he coined while refactoring the WyCash product. He says debt means code reflecting an incomplete understanding of the problem, not sloppy programming.

Kaze Emanuar explains how he rewrote and optimized the Super Mario 64 source code so it runs far faster on real N64 hardware. He covers performance bottlenecks and fixes in detail for his ROM hacks.

Military History Visualized charts ship production by the United States and Japan from December 1941 to September 1945. The growing numbers show why Japan, despite a stronger starting navy, could not win a long war.

A Kurzgesagt animated explainer on how humanity could build a Dyson sphere, a swarm of structures capturing the sun's energy. It covers using Mercury's materials and a step-by-step construction approach.

Modern Vintage Gamer explains why PlayStation 1 graphics warped and jittered, comparing it with the Nintendo 64. The causes are affine texture mapping and the lack of sub-pixel vertex precision.

A short video explaining the Intel Management Engine, a hidden embedded computer inside Intel machines with deep access to hardware. It is presented from an insider's perspective and raises backdoor and NSA concerns.

A PBS Infinite Series episode explaining the mathematics of quantum computers, including how qubits store complex numbers and how quantum computation differs from classical computation. Hosted by Kelsey Houston-Edwards.

IBM's Dr. Talia Gershon explains quantum computing to five people of increasing expertise: a child, teen, college student, grad student and professional. The WIRED series format moves from simple analogies to technical detail.

A 10-minute 3Blue1Brown chapter explaining the determinant as the factor by which a linear transformation scales area or volume. It builds the idea geometrically with animations before any formulas.

A Kurzgesagt video arguing that social media's problem is information flooding and tribal polarization. It suggests a return to smaller online communities and more in-person interaction.

The 8-Bit Guy explains the color limitations of 1980s computers and consoles such as the NES and Commodore 64. It shows how sprites, attributes and palettes shaped the look of old games.

An episode of Plogue's chipresearch series on emulating the Yamaha DX7 from the hardware up. It covers the sub CPU and main CPU, address map investigation, cartridges, firmware analysis and a skeleton MAME driver.

Smarter Every Day uses high-speed and Schlieren photography to show how a whip crack is a supersonic shockwave formed at the tip. It references academic papers on whip physics.

Asianometry traces how the Japanese zaibatsu families grew into vast industrial combines and how postwar reforms abruptly broke up their wealth and control.

A Vox explainer on why California's high-speed rail project is years late and far over budget, with only a few concrete structures built by 2022. It covers the political, legal and routing challenges behind the delays.

Modern Vintage Gamer looks at OpenLara, an open source Tomb Raider engine, running on the Game Boy Advance. The video explains how the port achieves playable speeds on the GBA's slow ARM CPU, with input from the developer XProger.

An Extra Credits episode on how games use Skinner box operant conditioning and reward schedules to keep players playing and spending. It argues for more immersive design mechanics than simple reward loops.

Andreas Antonopoulos answers a question about how to secure your Bitcoin. He covers holding your own keys, backing up the 12 to 24 word seed phrase, and the tradeoffs of custodial accounts, phone wallets and hardware wallets.

Veritasium visits snowflake expert Dr Ken Libbrecht, who grows designer snowflakes in the lab. The video explains how snowflakes form and why they take so many shapes.

An Asianometry explainer on why the Soviet Union, once a leading computing power, fell far behind the US in computers by the 1980s. It traces the gap from the 1960s onward despite strong state support for science.

Scott Manley tells the story of a computerized telemetry system built to sit at the heart of a nuclear test device in place of the plutonium pit, designed to transmit data in the microseconds before it was destroyed.

Tom Scott explains why Windows does not let you name a file CON, tracing the reserved device names back to backwards compatibility with DOS.

Hans Rosling uses augmented-reality animation to show 200 countries over 200 years in four minutes, built from 120,000 data points. It tracks life expectancy and income to show the world's development.

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.