long scale

A recording of Richard Feynman's talk on the possibilities of manipulating matter at very small scales, widely seen as an early vision of nanotechnology. This is a later version of his 1959 "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" lecture.

Leo Dirac explains how transformer models have replaced LSTMs in NLP. He gives background from bag of words through RNNs and LSTMs, then a technical deep dive into multi-headed self-attention and positional encoding, with sample code.

Jeff Dean of Google describes his experiences building Google's systems and how its infrastructure evolved over time. The Stanford talk covers search, scaling tipping points and lessons from building large-scale software.

Patrick Winston's long-running MIT lecture on public speaking teaches heuristic rules for talks. It covers how to start, use time and place, boards, props and slides, and how to inform, persuade and finish.

The opening lecture of Robert Sapolsky's Stanford course on Human Behavioral Biology, explaining the course premise and how to avoid categorical thinking. It starts a roughly 25-lecture series on how biology, genes, hormones and environment shape behavior.

Zach Hartwig of MIT introduces the key concepts of magnetic fusion energy and the state of fusion research. He then presents MIT's proposed pathway of using high-field superconducting magnets to build smaller, cheaper tokamaks on a climate-relevant timescale.

James D'Angelo argues that the 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act made congressional votes public, opening the door to lobbyists and special interests. He proposes restoring secret voting as a cheap fix for corruption and many social ills.

Microsoft's Brian Beckman gives an hour-long, whiteboard-style walk through monads, building from function composition and monoids using school-level math. It is aimed at practicing programmers rather than category theorists.

The first lecture of Jordan Peterson's 2017 Maps of Meaning course, setting out the Cold War context for his theory of belief and culture. He introduces the narrative structure of culture and archetypal characters for the individual, the known and the unknown.

Historian and journalist Gwynne Dyer gives a long UBC talk on how climate change will reshape international politics. He covers food, borders, refugees and the possibility of unilateral geoengineering by affected nations.

John Ousterhout's slides-and-voiceover lecture on Paxos, made for the Raft user study comparing how students learn Raft and Paxos. It is a full introduction to the Paxos consensus algorithm.

Robert Sapolsky's lecture on how the body's stress response, evolved for short-term physical emergencies, harms long-term health when triggered by psychological stressors. It was given as the inaugural Fenton-Rhodes Lecture.

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.

Sean Carroll's 2013 Fermilab Users Meeting lecture on particles, fields and the future of particle physics. He explains that particles are vibrations in underlying quantum fields and touches on the Higgs, neutrinos and dark matter.

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.

A short Harvard Online animated lesson on how the mitochondrial electron transport chain works. It shows proton pumping and the machinery that drives ATP synthesis.

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

The opening lecture of Jordan Peterson's 2017 University of Toronto personality course. He defines personality from historical, constructivist, psychoanalytic, behavioral and neuropsychological angles.

Ron Vale of UCSF and HHMI gives an introductory lecture on kinesin, dynein and myosin motor proteins. He covers their roles in cells and how they turn ATP hydrolysis into directed motion and force.

Chuck Spinney, a long-time associate of John Boyd, presents Boyd's thinking on the OODA loop and evolutionary epistemology. The talk runs about two and a half hours and includes Q&A.

A short clip of Robert Sapolsky on how social hierarchy generates chronic stress, drawing on baboon research. It links rank-related stress to heart health and life expectancy.

Dr. Michael Greger gives a live presentation on evidence-based weight loss, previewing his book How Not to Diet. He focuses on foods that aid weight loss while also supporting health and longevity.

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.

Nathan Kutz presents the spatio-temporal dynamics of rotating detonation rocket engines, including combustion fronts that behave like solitons. He shows a bifurcation analysis of a multiscale model that captures the main features.

Stanford's Christopher Gardner presents his large, long comparison of four popular diets under real-world conditions, in which the lowest-carbohydrate Atkins diet came out on top.

A long Mill Computing lecture on the Mill CPU's compiler toolchain, covering the specializer that targets family members, scheduling and latency passes, and the belt. It explains how the compiler handles a wide-issue, exposed-pipeline design.