khyber pass

Michael Green of Thiel Macro presents a thesis that the growth of passive investing distorts how markets price new money flows. He ties short-term market behavior to longer-term demographic cycles and its effects on valuations and volatility.

A FIDO Alliance demo with Google and Microsoft engineers showing passkeys working across operating systems, browsers, and devices. It walks through registering and signing in on new devices.

A WSJ investigation by Joanna Stern into iPhone thieves who watch victims enter their passcode, then use it to lock them out of Apple accounts and drain bank and payment apps. It explains how the thefts work and how to protect yourself.

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 Google Tech Talk by the author of Kilim, a Java library for lightweight actor-style message passing. It argues that message passing can replace shared-memory concurrency and claims performance competitive with or better than Erlang for huge numbers of actors.

David Mitchell's Soapbox rant on employers who demand passion and enthusiasm from workers, using satire to skewer fake workplace passion.

Andy Keep's Clojure/Conj talk on writing a nanopass compiler, built from many single-task passes with formally defined intermediate languages. It covers the framework's origins in a compiler teaching course at Indiana University.

A feature-length Defunctland documentary on the history of Disney's FastPass and FastPass+ expedited queue systems. It covers how the systems evolved and how they were designed, with simulation of their effects on park lines.

Nerdwriter1 shows how rearranging the scenes of the film Passengers, so the audience shares the female lead's confusion, would change the movie. It draws on discussion of the original script.

Dave Jones of EEVblog tears down a Kollsman MD-1 Automatic Astro Compass, a mechanical analog computer from a B-52 bomber. It is part of a star-tracker inertial navigation system that computes altitude and azimuth.

Tom Scott performs a fictional story at GeekyConf about the day Google accidentally stops checking passwords, letting anyone into any account. It works as a parable about how a single point of failure in login can unravel everything built on it.

Dan Callahan presents Mozilla Persona, a decentralized, cross-browser authentication system that removes site passwords, at PyCon 2013. He explains how the protocol works and how to add it to a Python site.

Matt Risinger covers installing a Zehnder ERV fresh-air system in a tight passive house, explaining balanced ventilation, the benefits of heat recovery and the costs involved.

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.

Deviant Ollam gives a long talk on risk and preparedness: get a lawyer, passport, locksmith and other resources before you need them. It covers practical steps to build defenses against serious problems in life.

A short clip of Nancy Pelosi saying Congress has to pass the health care bill so people can find out what is in it. It circulated widely in debates over the Affordable Care Act.

IIHS frontal crash test footage showing what happens to an unbelted rear-seat passenger. It illustrates that buckling up in the back matters for the passenger and for front occupants.

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas investigates the Mikkelsen Twins and the ghostwritten-audiobook passive-income course industry, even playing along with the scheme. It is a long video essay on get-rich-quick publishing grifts.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, interviews Alan Kay at Code Mesh. They discuss the meaning of object orientation, message passing, the META II paper, and the state of computer science.

OK Go's music video for This Too Shall Pass, featuring a huge Rube Goldberg machine built in a warehouse in Los Angeles with Syyn Labs. The band interacts with the contraption in one continuous take.

Deviant Ollam, head of a physical penetration testing team, presents tactics for getting into buildings, from bypassing door levers with a wire to defeating bank doors. He argues that physical security is often surprisingly weak.

Wendover Productions explains why Amtrak trains run late: most Amtrak routes run on freight-owned track, and the law giving passenger trains priority is rarely enforced. The video covers rail ownership versus control and how freight carriers hold the leverage.

Footage of FAA altitude chamber hypoxia training for pilots in which a participant passes out from oxygen deprivation. It shows how quickly and subtly cognition fails at altitude.

A short Adam Curtis clip on what he calls oh dearism, the habit of news reporting that presents events as a stream of sad, inexplicable happenings. He argues this leaves viewers passive and unable to imagine action.

A VICE report from 2011 in which Suroosh Alvi revisits the gun markets in Pakistan's tribal areas, a stronghold of the Taliban. It shows weapons being made and sold by hand and a country described as a powder keg.

A one-minute clip from the 1992 film Sneakers in which characters defeat a voice-authentication system by splicing recorded phrases, ending on the line "My voice is my passport." It was posted to illustrate a post on government surveillance.

A French comedy sketch-song by Les Inconnus parodying wealthy young people from Auteuil, Neuilly and Passy by mimicking the style of banlieue rap.

A one-minute Rick and Morty clip in which a small robot asks its purpose and learns it is to pass butter.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever on time to AGI, what comes after generative models, data limits, alignment, and competing with Google. The title centers on whether next-token prediction could surpass human intelligence.

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.

Tech Ingredients shows how to make a homemade radiative cooling paint, with a custom liquid panel that cools below ambient temperature outdoors. The video covers the materials and how to apply the paint.

Mike Rowe, host of Dirty Jobs, shares stories from messy real-world jobs in this TED talk. He argues that hard work has been unjustly degraded in society.

A two-hour driver's-eye cab ride along the Bernina railway from St. Moritz in Switzerland to Tirano in Italy. The UNESCO-listed line crosses the Alps at high altitude with steep adhesion gradients.

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.

The Lock Picking Lawyer tests the supposedly unpickable lock designs built by the Stuff Made Here channel. He looks for bypasses and weaknesses in the novel anti-picking mechanisms.

Deviant Ollam shows that most physical attacks on doors bypass the lock, with photo and video examples of how doors, frames and hardware get defeated. It is a physical security talk from Shakacon.

A Last Week Tonight segment on retirement plans, high fees and bad financial advice, with comedic sketches. It explains how fees eat into retirement savings and favors low-cost passive investing.

Professor Ruzic explains modular micro-reactors: self-contained nuclear units with passive safety whose fuel lasts about 20 years. He covers their use for process and district heat and where they can compete with diesel generation.

A long recorded seminar in which Alan Kay discusses object-oriented programming, probably from the mid-1980s. He covers the original idea of objects, messaging and the work done at Xerox.

Tech Ingredients shows how to build a liquid panel with a specialty paint that, placed outside, cools below ambient air temperature. It demonstrates radiative sky cooling.