llm theory

Adam Neely examines Phil Ewell's paper arguing Western music theory is framed by a white racial perspective. He covers North Indian theory, alternative frameworks, Schenker and responses to the paper.

The first lecture in Bartosz Milewski's category theory series for programmers. It covers the motivation and philosophy behind category theory and why composition matters for handling complexity.

Physicist Angela Collier's roughly hour-long video on how string theory was hyped to the public and what that did to science communication. She traces the history of the theory as a narrative and argues it is interesting but was oversold.

Andrew Huang teaches the basics of music theory in about half an hour, covering intervals, chords and patterns. He stresses understanding how music works over memorizing terminology.

The first lecture of David MacKay's Cambridge course on information theory, pattern recognition and neural networks. It introduces the core ideas of his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms.

Eugenia Cheng gives the opening keynote at Lambda World 2017, presenting category theory as very abstract algebra whose abstraction gives it broad applicability. She applies it to everyday questions including privilege and prejudice.

Tom LaGatta's talk on category theory at a 2014 LispNYC meetup, covering objects, morphisms and the basic ideas in an informal, conversational style. It runs about 97 minutes.

Nicholas Carlini of Anthropic talks at [un]prompted 2026 about how adversaries could misuse current LLMs for attacks. He shows recent models finding zero-day vulnerabilities in heavily tested software, including a SQL injection in Ghost.

Sixty Symbols interviews Nottingham cosmologist Tony Padilla, who says string theory deserves to be taken seriously. He explains how strings emerged from the equations rather than being invented.

3Blue1Brown uses Wordle as an excuse to teach information theory and entropy, building a solver that picks guesses by expected information and incorporating word frequencies.

Lex Fridman's long podcast interview with Yann LeCun on Meta AI, open source, the limits of LLMs, AGI and the future of AI.

Erik Meijer argues that category theory is the mathematicians' version of interface-based design. He shows that Java 8 lambdas and method references form a Cartesian closed category.

A short clip from a lecture Q&A in which Richard Stallman appears to pick something off his foot and eat it.

A talk by Eric Weinstein on gauge theory and its possible application to economics and inflation. It proposes extending the Wu-Yang dictionary into a geometric tool beyond physics.

3Blue1Brown builds intuition for Euler's formula, e^(pi i) = -1, using the core ideas of group theory. It treats exponentiation geometrically as rotation and scaling instead of repeated multiplication.

ScienceClic gives a 15-minute animated introduction to quantum field theory, covering fields, spin, conserved quantities, the standard model and interactions.

A short compilation of Steve Ballmer energetically shouting and dancing on stage at Microsoft events, including the famous developers chant.

Adam Neely analyzes vaporwave through music theory, timbre and nostalgia, and includes a parody track made for the video. He also touches on the phenomenology of music.

A short clip of Steve Ballmer at a Microsoft event chanting "developers" over and over. It became a lasting internet meme.

Andrej Karpathy's three-hour-plus general-audience deep dive into how ChatGPT-style LLMs are built, covering the full training stack from pretraining to post-training. It also gives mental models for their quirks, like hallucination, and how to use them well.

A short explainer on the history and mechanics of public key cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. It uses a mixing-paint-colors analogy to show how two parties can agree on a shared secret in public.

Veritasium explores the Prisoner's Dilemma and Axelrod's tournaments, showing why tit-for-tat and forgiving strategies win in repeated games. It extends the ideas to cooperation in evolution and conflict.

Zach Tellman's Clojure West talk covers the basics of queueing theory and its practical use in systems, including backpressure, how queues break down under load, and pitfalls of naive core.async use.

A PBS Space Time episode introducing de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory, an interpretation of quantum mechanics that avoids much of the strangeness of the mainstream views. It is aimed at curious lay viewers.

A short extended clip of Steve Ballmer sweating and chanting "developers" on stage at a .NET presentation around 1999 or 2000.

A 2012 lecture by Richard Stallman at Reykjavik University arguing that copyright, built for the printing press, fits poorly with computer networks. He criticizes draconian enforcement and corporate lobbying.

Andrej Karpathy builds the GPT tokenizer from scratch, implementing byte pair encoding along with encode and decode. He shows how many odd LLM behaviors trace back to tokenization, and covers Unicode byte encodings along the way.

Lex Fridman interviews University of Glasgow chemist Lee Cronin about the origin of life, aliens, complexity and consciousness. The conversation centers on Cronin's assembly theory.

Looking Glass Universe explains de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory (Bohmian mechanics) as an alternative to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. The video lays out the pros and cons of the theory and links to related videos on contextuality and entanglement.

Isaac Arthur examines the Dark Forest theory, Cixin Liu's proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox in which civilizations stay silent and may destroy any that reveal themselves. He tests the theory's underlying assumptions and arguments.

Richard Stallman's TEDxGeneva 2014 talk describing how nonfree programs give companies control over users and what users can do to regain control. It introduces the free software movement and the four freedoms.

The first part of a four-part Channel 4 (UK) documentary series presented by Howard Goodall, this episode covers melody and why tunes affect us so deeply. It explains how melody works in Western music with historical background and music theory.

Lex Fridman interviews MIT psycholinguist Edward Gibson on human language, syntax, grammar and how large language models relate to them. The conversation runs nearly three hours.

A short Art of the Problem clip explaining Diffie-Hellman key exchange, using a paint mixing analogy for one-way functions and touching on modular arithmetic and discrete logarithms.

3Blue1Brown introduces group theory and abstract groups, then builds toward classification of finite simple groups and the enormous Monster group with its 196,883 dimensions.

A short clip of Richard Stallman singing the free software song, recorded during a visit to Ecuador.

A video essay from Pop Culture Detective arguing that The Big Bang Theory normalizes sexism and toxic masculinity through its portrayal of nerd men. It analyzes recurring tropes in how the male leads treat women.

A short clip from MIX08 in which Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer grabs Guy Kawasaki's MacBook Air from its envelope during a Q&A and mocks it.

A two-minute clip of Steve Ballmer laughing at the $500 price of the newly announced iPhone and dismissing its lack of a keyboard. It captures a famously wrong early reaction from an industry executive.

A short parody that removes the laugh track from The Big Bang Theory to show how unfunny the scenes are without it.