generative ai

Kurzgesagt examines how AI-generated content is flooding the internet, from video and music to news and books. It looks at how this makes verifying what is real harder.

Musician Benn Jordan uses AI to detect AI-generated music and digs into music industry data, including streaming payouts and sample library copyright problems. He covers ways to tell whether a track is human-made.

Chubbyemu presents a case study of a man who followed AI health advice, replaced salt with sodium bromide and developed bromism with severe neurological effects. It is told as a dramatized medical case by a doctor.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explores how grain bins work and the engineering and know-how involved in farming. His point is that farmers are exceptionally capable.

Robert Miles explains instrumental convergence: why an AGI with almost any goal would tend to pursue sub-goals like self-preservation and resource acquisition. It builds on Omohundro's basic AI drives and his orthogonality thesis video.

Robert Miles examines whether the case for AI safety is a Pascal's mugging, a tiny probability of an enormous payoff. He argues it is not, because AI risk does not depend on vanishingly small probabilities.

Robert Miles introduces the first of several videos on the paper 'Concrete Problems in AI Safety', focusing on how AI systems can cause accidental negative side effects. It explains the problem in accessible terms.

Robert Miles goes through ten common reasons people give for dismissing AI safety, adapted from Stuart Russell's list, and answers each one. It is aimed at skeptics and newcomers.

Alex O'Connor shows that ChatGPT cannot draw a wine glass filled to the brim, and ties the failure to David Hume's missing shade of blue. It asks what the failure says about how image models learn.

A Welch Labs explainer on neural scaling laws and the compute-efficient frontier, asking why model loss seems to hit a line it cannot cross. It draws an analogy to an ideal gas law for AI.

An MTA video on communications-based train control, the system meant to replace the New York City subway's century-old signaling. It also shows the mechanical interlocks and signals in use today.

CGP Grey explains split-brain patients, where severing the corpus callosum lets the two hemispheres act independently. He uses this to explore the idea of two minds in one head.

Wendover Productions explains how airlines make money from different cabin classes and why premium seats matter so much to profits. It also touches on how this shaped decisions such as the decline of supersonic travel.

3Blue1Brown shows how the uncertainty principle arises from Fourier transforms. A wave packet cannot be narrow in both position and frequency, so the principle is a property of waves rather than of measurement.

Wendover Productions explains why US passenger rail lags behind other countries. It covers freight companies owning most of the track, geography and population density, and the economics of competing with flying.

A Wendover Productions explainer on why train tickets, especially Amtrak in the US, cost so much compared with flying. It breaks down staffing, speed and the cost components behind a ticket.

A Wendover Productions explainer on how China built the world's largest high-speed rail network so quickly and why its rail strategy differs from America's. It covers politics, social benefits and the economics of unprofitable lines.

A Wendover Productions explainer arguing that major airlines make much of their profit from loyalty programs and co-branded credit cards rather than flying. It frames airlines as quasi-banks that sell points in bulk, using United's pandemic-era loan as a hook.

Dave Plummer tours the IBM z16 mainframe from design through factory assembly, test lab, accelerators and water cooling. He explains why mainframes still exist and what makes them reliable.

Wendover Productions explains how UK rail privatization worked and why it failed. It covers the fragmented operator and infrastructure structure and why market forces apply poorly to rail.

A Wendover Productions explainer on how airport security is designed, covering screening layers, x-ray scanning, and the contrast with Israel's profiling-based approach. It walks through the logic behind why security works the way it does.

A Wendover Productions explainer on how budget airlines can sell tickets for under 10 euros. It covers the costs airlines face and how low-cost carriers structure their business.

A short clip of Richard Feynman explaining how a train stays on its tracks, through the conical shape of wheels and how it handles curves without differentials.

A guest video by Welch Labs on 3Blue1Brown explaining how text-to-image and video models work. It covers CLIP, shared embedding spaces, diffusion models (DDPM, DDIM), conditioning, guidance and negative prompts.

Not Just Bikes examines Toronto's GO Transit commuter rail, arguing it is a costly system with park-and-ride stations and rush-hour-only service that subsidizes car-dependent suburbs.

A short clip from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman explains how a train stays on the track. He covers the geometry of tapered wheels that steer the train back toward the center of the rails.

Practical Engineering explains how continuous welded rail copes with thermal expansion by restraining it, using the relationship between temperature, stress and strain. The video is part of a series on railways.

CGP Grey explains the history and legal status of territorial claims on Antarctica. It covers the overlapping national claims and the Antarctic Treaty that freezes them.

Hugh Jeffreys tears down the iPhone 12 and assesses its repairability, focusing on how parts are serialized and tied to the device so swapping components between phones does not work.

Everyday Astronaut's Tim Dodd runs an hour-long, data-driven analysis of what rockets actually emit and how that compares with airliners and other industries. It breaks down exhaust by propellant type, per-passenger and total emissions, and ways launches could be cleaner.

An Economics Explained video on the different kinds of billionaires, from founders to oligarchs. It explains how wealth is held in illiquid stock and why diversification is a problem for some.

RealLifeLore explains with maps why Russia invaded Ukraine, focusing on energy resources, security buffers, Black Sea access and Crimea's strategic value.

Technology Connections explains why single-hose portable air conditioners are inefficient and often a poor choice compared with window units. It details how the single hose pulls in warm outside air and wastes energy.

Louis Rossmann gives a basic, non-technical introduction to right to repair legislation for people new to the issue.

An RSA Animate summary of Iain McGilchrist's lecture on the divided brain, arguing the brain's two hemispheres attend to the world differently and that this has shaped culture and society.

Rob Miles explains on Computerphile how language models generate plausible text and how transformers improved on recurrent networks, with a look at what comes next.

Brian Douglas introduces Braitenberg vehicles, simple robots whose sensors are wired directly to motors yet show surprisingly lifelike behavior. He draws on Valentino Braitenberg's book Vehicles.

Musician Benn Jordan explains and demonstrates adversarial noise that poison-pills music files against AI training and scraping.

Computerphile video in which Mike Pound explains a University of Maryland paper on watermarking LLM output. The method biases token choices so generated text can later be detected statistically.

Half as Interesting explains why airlines flew empty 'ghost flights' out of Heathrow to keep their landing slots under use-it-or-lose-it rules.