mental models

Yaron Minsky of Jane Street shows how the OCaml Incremental library lets trading UIs express data transformations that are easy to read and efficient on streaming data. It includes a live table demo.

A five-minute SuperMemo demo of incremental reading: importing a Wikipedia article on nutrition, extracting passages, making cloze deletions and finishing the item. It lists the keyboard shortcuts used.

Robert Miles explains instrumental convergence: why an AGI with almost any goal would tend to pursue sub-goals like self-preservation and resource acquisition. It builds on Omohundro's basic AI drives and his orthogonality thesis video.

Rob Miles explains on Computerphile how language models generate plausible text and how transformers improved on recurrent networks, with a look at what comes next.

Sasha Rush surveys linear RNNs and state space models as replacements for attention in transformer-style models, in a talk for MLSys. It covers the foundational preliminaries and predates Mamba.

Andrew Huberman interviews Harvard psychiatrist Chris Palmer about nutrition, metabolism and mental health, including the ketogenic diet as a treatment for depression and schizophrenia.

The first clip from Russell Barkley's 30 Essential Ideas about ADHD series, introducing ADHD as a chronic developmental disability. It is part of a lecture series on the disorder by a leading ADHD researcher.

Jeremy Howard's 90-minute practical tour of language models. It covers how they work, GPT-4's capabilities and limits, using the OpenAI API, code writing, data analysis and fine-tuning.

Audio of Charlie Munger's 1995 Harvard speech on the psychology of human misjudgment, laying out a framework of cognitive biases and mental models for decision making. It covers factors like incentives, social proof and denial.

Andrej Karpathy gives a one-hour general-audience introduction to large language models, covering what they are, how they are trained, comparisons to operating systems, and security challenges such as jailbreaks.

A Technology Connections video essay on how analog and digital clocks shape different mental models of time, with the minute hand acting as a progress indicator.

First video in John Bartholomew's Chess Fundamentals series, focused on spotting undefended pieces. He teaches habits for scanning your own and your opponent's position to avoid hanging pieces.

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.

A roughly four-and-a-half-hour Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Stephen Wolfram about his Wolfram Physics Project and a fundamental theory of physics, computation, life and the universe.

A short excerpt of Elon Musk, interviewed by Kevin Rose, explaining first-principles reasoning with the example of the car versus improving horse carriages. He warns it takes much more mental energy than reasoning by analogy.

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.

Greg Baugues tells his story of living with bipolar II and ADHD as a developer at a Ruby conference. He urges openness about mental illness and explains how to get help and support colleagues.

Alan Kay speaks at the DEMO Founder School session on why real progress takes invention rather than incremental innovation. He argues for problem-oriented thinking and long-term research funding.

A KQED Truly CA documentary narrated by John Waters about the Salton Sea, a once-glamorous California vacation spot now home to an eccentric community. It covers the area's economic, political and environmental problems and features Salvation Mountain.

Viznut demonstrates bytebeat, experimental music generated by extremely short C programs. It is the first of a series of videos on the technique.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2019 talk on the mental habits behind effective programming, drawn from coaching, teaching and StackOverflow. He covers problem decomposition, chunking, managing working memory and getting unstuck.

Konrad Malawski's Strange Loop 2023 talk shows how the FoundationDB team adopted Swift incrementally in a C++ codebase. It covers Swift's C++ interoperability, which let them move single functions or entire types over one at a time.

Roaring Kitty's July 2020 analysis of GameStop, arguing a bullish deep-value case when the stock was about $4 and short interest exceeded 100%. It covers fundamentals, cash balance and technicals.

A long Huberman Lab episode laying out science-based daily tools for focus, sleep, exercise and mental and physical health, organized around a 24-hour day.

Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test, gives a TED talk on the blurry line between sane and crazy and on psychopathy as a spectrum, with stories of how the label gets applied.

A Kurzgesagt animated explainer on the climate and environmental cost of meat. It covers how beef drives deforestation and emissions, and how this compares with plant-based foods.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2019 talk on the mental strategies he uses when programming in Python, such as chunking, solving a simpler related problem, and repeating tasks manually until patterns emerge. This version is re-synced with the slides.

Max Brunsfeld of GitHub presents Tree-sitter, a parsing system for programming tools that supports incremental, error-tolerant parsing. He demos its integration into GitHub.com and Atom for syntax highlighting and code navigation.

Yann LeCun on the Big Technology Podcast discusses why current AI models cannot make discoveries despite their knowledge. He argues systems need abstract world models and also covers limits of AI research, investor expectations, and open source after DeepSeek.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains climate sensitivity and why recent observations suggest climate models may have underestimated warming. She says this changed her view on how worried to be.

Rob Miles discusses GPT-3 on Computerphile, covering how scaling parameters kept improving results over GPT-2 and how the model nearly learned arithmetic without anyone knowing exactly how.

3Blue1Brown's visual explanation of how transformers and GPT-style language models work, tracing data through tokens, embeddings and attention.

A lecture by Richard Feynman on how computers work, using the analogy of a filing clerk that becomes progressively dumber and faster. It also covers heuristics and how computers handle data and solve problems in finite time.

Veritasium's explainer on Godel's incompleteness theorems and the limits of mathematical proof, tracing set theory, Hilbert's program and the road to Turing and modern computing.

Martin Fowler's GOTO 2012 introduction to NoSQL databases: where they came from, their data models, how consistency thinking differs, and when to use them. He argues they won't make relational databases obsolete and introduces polyglot persistence.

Gabriel Lebec's Fullstack Academy talk introduces lambda calculus syntax, the history of mathematical logic, and the essence of functional programming using JavaScript. It also covers combinators, currying and Church encodings.

A Capella Science parody of Despacito that sings through evolutionary developmental biology, explaining how a single cell becomes a body, including body-axis genes and dormant snake leg DNA. It runs about four minutes.

Allieway Audio gives an informal introduction and live-coding demo of ORCA, a free esoteric programming environment for building procedural sequencers from Hundred Rabbits. It walks through the interface and how to make music with it.

An excerpt from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman describes how he and a mathematician friend counted in their heads in different ways, one verbally and one visually. It shows that people can reach the same goal through quite different mental methods.

In this TEDxBerlin talk, environmental activist Michael Shellenberger explains why he changed from opposing nuclear power to advocating it, after looking at the evidence on Chernobyl, Fukushima and air pollution.