great compression

A short Kurzgesagt animation explaining the Great Filter, the idea that finding alien life might be bad news because it implies something usually destroys civilizations. It connects the concept to the Fermi paradox.

The first part of a long series documenting Dave Bull's Tokyo woodblock workshop as it produces a reproduction of Hokusai's The Great Wave. It follows the carving, proofing and printing of the reward print for Kickstarter backers.

Political economist Mark Blyth gives a lecture tracing two versions of capitalist 'software': the postwar Great Compression era and the neoliberal era from 1980 to 2008. He explains the bug that crashed the first and the design of the second.

Tom Scott explains why confetti and snow wreck video quality, using interframe compression and bitrate. He demonstrates it live by changing the quality on screen.

A 146-minute Merged Podcast episode in which UAP researcher Ryan Graves talks with economist Robin Hanson about UFOs. Topics include the Great Filter, Hanson's grabby aliens model, and the push for more inquiry into UAPs.

The closing speech from Charlie Chaplin's 1940 film The Great Dictator, in which the barber appeals for humanity, kindness and liberty over machinery and cleverness.

Ilya Sutskever gives a Simons Institute talk on why neural networks generalize, framing learning as finding short descriptions, like compression. It was part of the Large Language Models and Transformers program.

Mike Pound explains the discrete cosine transform and how it underpins JPEG compression. It is part two of Computerphile's JPEG series.

Tom Scott explains why hold music sounds worse than it used to, tracing it to old telephone exchanges and the audio compression applied by modern switches. It is a short visit to the Milton Keynes Museum.

A King of the Hill clip in which Hank-style character rants about saving images as PNG instead of JPEG after exporting from Windows Paint.

A condensed rendition of a project that re-uploaded one video to YouTube 1000 times, showing the accumulating compression artifacts. It pays homage to Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room.

A short Yes Minister clip in which Sir Humphrey explains why a hospital with no patients still needs a large administrative staff. It is a satirical look at bureaucratic bloat in the public sector.

A Yes Minister sketch in which Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey meet the BBC and discuss its independence from government pressure. It is a satirical look at the relationship between the state and the broadcaster.

A Yes, Prime Minister scene in which Sir Humphrey shows how leading questions can make a poll produce either answer on national service.

A Blackadder the Third scene in which Dr Johnson delivers his dictionary, which lacks Blackadder's invented insults such as contrafibularity.

The classic Fawlty Towers scene in which Basil Fawlty tries not to mention the war while serving German guests, ending in goose-stepping and mocking. It is a two-minute BBC comedy clip with John Cleese.

Simon Sinek's TEDx talk arguing that great leaders and companies inspire action by communicating why they do something before how or what. He uses Apple as his main example.

Geologist Nick Zentner of Central Washington University gives an hour-long public lecture on the great earthquakes of the Pacific Northwest, including the Cascadia subduction zone and the evidence for past megaquakes. It is part of his Downtown Geology Lecture Series, recorded in Ellensburg in 2016.

A long Machine Learning Street Talk interview with Kenneth Stanley, creator of NEAT and novelty search, about his book on why greatness cannot be planned. They discuss open-endedness, the tyranny of objectives, serendipity and the evolution of ideas.

Simon Sinek's TED talk presents the 'golden circle' model: great leaders and companies inspire action by starting with why they do something, before how or what. He illustrates it with Apple, Martin Luther King, the Wright brothers and, as a counterexample, TiVo.

A two-minute demonstration of the loudness war, showing how heavy dynamic range compression in CD mastering makes music louder while degrading sound quality. It uses audio examples so you can hear the distortion.

Dollar Shave Club's low-budget launch ad, in which the founder jokes his way through the case for cheap mail-order razors.

An animated adaptation of Captain David Marquet's talk on greatness, based on his book Turn the Ship Around!. It argues for pushing decision-making down to the people doing the work instead of controlling everything from the top.

David Kriesel's FrOSCon talk on how Xerox scancopiers, due to JBIG2 compression, silently replaced digits in scanned documents. He walks through how he discovered the bug and why it is so dangerous.

A Noclip Greatest Hits documentary on the legacy of RollerCoaster Tycoon, covering its original design, Chris Sawyer and the OpenRCT2 community that keeps it alive.

Lex Fridman interviews Marcus Hutter of DeepMind about universal artificial intelligence, AIXI, Kolmogorov complexity, Solomonoff induction and the idea of intelligence as compression.

Joseph Anderson's long critique of Jonathan Blow's puzzle game The Witness, covering its gameplay, its hundreds of puzzles and its philosophical pretensions. He argues it is a great game that he nonetheless advises against playing.

The opening scene of HBO's The Newsroom, in which anchor Will McAvoy answers a student's question about why America is the greatest country. He delivers a blunt speech arguing it no longer is.

A six-minute excerpt from Steve Jobs' 1995 Lost Interview on why a great idea does not automatically become a great product. He says ideas change substantially once you actually build them.

A short clip, apparently the opening scene of the TV series The Newsroom, in which a character answers why America is not the greatest country in the world. It is a brief political monologue.

Leandro Facchinetti explains why he thinks Racket is a great language and why he stopped using it. He describes his backstory and experiences with the Racket community.

Gary Wilson's TEDxGlasgow talk argues that internet pornography hyperstimulates the brain's reward system and can cause symptoms that reverse when people stop. TED notes that several claims are not supported by respected academic studies.

CGP Grey's quick, witty explainer on the differences between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England, and the countries that make up the UK.

A short street-level clip of Joe Ades, the New York pitchman who sold vegetable peelers to crowds on the sidewalk. It shows his patter, showmanship and crowd handling in action.

Morphcat Games explains how they fit Micro Mages, a full-featured NES game, into 40 kilobytes. It covers compression of sprites and level layouts and other space-saving tricks.

A 2007 Channel 4 documentary by Martin Durkin arguing that human-caused global warming is overstated or a scam. It features contrarian scientists such as Richard Lindzen and promotes sunspot and cosmic-ray explanations for temperature change. Its claims are rejected by mainstream climate science.

Captain Disillusion's comedic talk at the 2018 Blender Conference recounts how he uses Blender as a production tool for his VFX-debunking web series. It is part case study and part love letter to the Blender community.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum tells how a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet came to him for examination. It revealed the oldest known account of Noah's Ark and led to a book and a documentary.

An Onion Talks satire in which a young media professional pitches compost-powered cars, offering the idea itself and leaving all implementation to others.

Tom Wildenhain's guest lecture for CMU's Esoteric Programming Languages course shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing complete without macros, building up to a mind-bending fractal ending.