machine language

A short cartoon explaining how language models like ChatGPT work, from autocomplete and conditional probabilities to neural networks, gradient descent and backpropagation. It shows how networks act as universal function approximators.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths demonstrates MENACE, Donald Michie's 1961 machine made of matchboxes that learns to play noughts and crosses through reinforcement. He builds and trains a physical version.

Tom Scott, with linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Molly Ruhl, examines whether the language you speak changes how you think. The short answer is mostly no, with caveats about the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Veritasium short showing Drew Berry's scientifically accurate animations of the molecular machines that drive cell division. It walks through mitosis, chromosomes and motor proteins.

Jared Owen's 3D animated breakdown of how a Brunswick GS-X bowling pinsetter works, showing its mechanisms for sweeping, lifting and resetting pins and balls.

A Business Insider World Wide Waste episode on H&M's garment recycling machines, which turn used clothing into new apparel. It asks whether a fast fashion company can solve the waste problem it helped create.

Rob Miles explains "glitch" tokens, odd strings in large language model vocabularies that make the model produce gibberish. He covers how they likely arise from tokenizer training data, such as Reddit usernames, that never appeared in the model's own training.

Steve Mould explains motion amplification and video magnification, techniques that find tiny changes in video invisible to the eye and exaggerate them. He covers the MIT research and industrial uses such as diagnosing vibrating machinery.

A short Al Jazeera animation narrated by Amy Goodman presenting Noam Chomsky's five filters of the mass media: ownership, advertising, media elite sourcing, flak and a common enemy. It is part of the MediaTheorised series.

Vox explains the Berlin and Kay research showing that languages around the world tend to invent color words in the same order. It walks through the hierarchy and the debate around it.

Veritasium explores compliant mechanisms, devices that move by flexing rather than using hinges and joints, with researchers at BYU. It covers advantages such as fewer parts and precision, including uses in nuclear weapon safety.

Michael Wesch's five-minute video about Web 2.0, showing how the read/write web, XML and user-generated content change how people create and share information.

Tom Scott makes a short descriptivist argument that language keeps changing and that casual internet writing conventions, like lowercase typing and dropped full stops, are legitimate. It is part of his Language Files series, written with Gretchen McCulloch.

A short Harvard Online animation, narrated by Professor Rob Lue, showing how ATP synthase works inside mitochondria. It comes from the HarvardX Cell Biology: Mitochondria course.

Yuta asks whether native Japanese speakers can actually write kanji by hand, showing that many struggle to recall characters from memory.

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

Huygens Optics explains the Fourier transform and shows how a lens performs one optically. A DLP projector is used as a Fourier filter to do simple pattern recognition on lithographic character patterns.

A Computerphile video in which Dr Mike Pound and PhD student Lewis Stuart explain 3D Gaussian splatting, a quick technique that turns photos of a scene into a 3D model without much compute. It includes a demo and compares the approach to NeRFs.

FortNine looks at why Tesla Autopilot has rear-ended motorcyclists, speculating that the vision system misreads motorcycle taillights as a distant car. It argues that radar and other sensors would help.

3Blue1Brown's first chapter on deep learning explains what neurons and layers are and the math underlying a basic neural network, using handwritten digit recognition with visual animations.

The Map Men explain why British place names are so hard to pronounce, tracing it to layers of Viking, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norman influence, with a pronunciation guide.

Aaron Francis walks through how PHP has changed from 2012 to 2023, covering traits, array destructuring, generators, typed properties and more. It is a quick chaptered tour of modern PHP features.

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.

Asianometry explains the EUV light source inside ASML's lithography machines, where lasers hit falling tin droplets twice to produce 13.5 nm light. It walks through the engineering of the droplet generator, the pre-pulse and main laser, and the plasma that results.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why electronic voting is a bad idea, arguing that paper ballots are transparent, auditable and hard to tamper with at scale. He covers why moving voting to phones, tablets or computers undermines trust and verifiability.

Numberphile's Dr James Grime explains the flaw in the Enigma machine, namely that a letter could never be encrypted to itself, and how that helped the Allies break the code. It touches on the Bombe and Alan Turing.

Linguist Simon Roper reconstructs how a London accent would have sounded from the 14th to the 21st centuries, reading passages in period pronunciation. It draws on the Cambridge History of the English Language.

Rick Beato argues that adults cannot develop true perfect pitch, which he ties to critical-period brain plasticity and language acquisition. He says it can only be developed in young children, and discusses the research behind this.

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.

Linus Tech Tips reviews the first Framework Laptop, a fully repairable and upgradeable machine. The reviewer expected a flimsy chunky device and was happily surprised.

Cliff Stoll shows and explains his two Friden EC-132 electronic calculators for Numberphile. The video covers how these early machines worked, including their unusual acoustic delay line memory.

Yuta, a Japanese YouTuber, explains whether Japanese speakers can read Chinese text. He shows how shared kanji let people guess meanings while the two languages remain completely different.

3kliksphilip summarizes Valve's GDC talk on VACNet, a deep-learning system that flags CS:GO cheaters and feeds the Overwatch review queue. It covers Trust Factor, VAC, and how the data is collected and analyzed.

A short video explaining the Intel Management Engine, a hidden embedded computer inside Intel machines with deep access to hardware. It is presented from an insider's perspective and raises backdoor and NSA concerns.

Tom Scott explains why subtitles often differ from dubbed dialogue, covering how translation, timing and reading speed shape each. It features translators and voice talent working in several languages.