modular building

A Berkeley Lab Distinguished Lecturer talk on building science, with an expert covering control layers, insulation and vapour barrier placement, and how buildings fail. The delivery is humorous.

Time-lapse of Broad Group erecting a 30-story prefabricated hotel (J57) in Changsha, China in about 15 days. The description touts modular construction's precision, speed and low waste.

The first episode of Stewart Brand's 1997 BBC series based on his book How Buildings Learn, covering how buildings change after they are built. Brand presents and the series has music by Brian Eno.

Ian Hubert's Blender Conference talk on world building in Blender, covering photogrammetry, camera projection and assembling complex environments from simple shapes at great speed.

Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel lectures at Startup School on building a product people want: identifying the problem, the customer, an MVP and which customers to pursue first.

Zack Freedman introduces Gridfinity, his free, open-source modular workshop storage system of 3D-printable bins and baseplates. The video walks through the design, the parametric templates and the many module types that fit parts, tools and accessories.

A condensed film of Dick Proenneke's footage of building a cabin and living alone in the Alaskan wilderness, using hand tools and local materials. It draws on the 8mm films he shot himself.

Gary Vaynerchuk's Web 2.0 Expo keynote on building a personal brand in social media. He urges keeping a day job while building something on the side, with passion and persistence, in a loud and profane style.

The ADVChina hosts tour a villa neighborhood in southern China that was built only three years earlier and is already empty and deteriorating. They use it to discuss ghost cities, building quality and the real estate bubble.

Jim Keller, CTO of Tenstorrent, talks at Samsung Foundry's SAFE 2021 about building AI silicon through modular, provable design. The talk also touches on Tenstorrent's RISC-V Ascalon core.

World Builder is a short film by Bruce Branit in which a man uses holographic tools to build a world for the woman he loves.

Ed Catmull of Pixar speaks at Stanford's 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference on running a creative company. He argues for surfacing small problems early and building good teams, with stories like the Toy Story 2 crunch.

Dean Friedman's near-hour-long introduction to synthesis, covering the building blocks of sound and the controls on a synthesizer. He slowly adjusts knobs so viewers hear what each parameter does.

David Tong, a Cambridge theoretical physicist, explains at the Royal Institution that the fundamental building blocks of nature are quantum fields rather than particles. He covers what we know about these fields and how they fit into the Standard Model.

The first episode of Clickspring's series on reproducing the Antikythera Mechanism by hand, laying out the plan and the history. The series follows a machinist building the ancient Greek device with traditional tools and methods.

James Mickens's 2015 Harvard colloquium argues that browsers are bloated and insecure because feature races trump clean interface design. He presents a cleaner, more secure browser architecture (Atlantis) with a much smaller API surface.

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.

First of an 18-part lecture series by engineer Dan Gelbart on building prototypes. The series covers practical mechanical design and fabrication of precision machines.

The first part of Robert Baruch's series on building a 6800 CPU on an FPGA with nMigen, a Python-based hardware description language. It introduces the HDL while implementing a simpler 6800 core.

Not Just Bikes explains why cars rarely crash into buildings in the Netherlands, attributing it to street design that forgives mistakes and to systematic crash investigation. It contrasts this with North American acceptance of such crashes.

Ian Piumarta's 2007 Stanford EE380 lecture on building a dynamic programming environment from the ground up, from the Viewpoints Research Institute's work. It covers the design of a language and system with a recursive design, parsing through code generation, and the COLA architecture.

A roughly 90-minute film of John Dobson building a Dobsonian telescope step by step, including hand-grinding the mirror.

Mario Zechner explains why he built pi, a minimal coding agent, out of frustration with existing agent harnesses. He also discusses how AI agents are straining open source projects and argues for slowing down.

An Odd Lots podcast episode on why converting empty office buildings into apartments is hard. A managing director at Vanbarton Group walks through the zoning, financing and construction obstacles, mostly in New York.

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.

Johns Hopkins APL shows Les Baugh, a bilateral shoulder-level amputee, controlling two Modular Prosthetic Limbs by thought after a short training period. Nerves rerouted to his chest drive the arms.

Part 10 of Dan Gelbart's prototype-building lecture series, covering flexures: flexible joints that give precise, frictionless motion. It shows how a cheap piece of aluminum can become a nanometer-accurate mechanism.

Cory Benfield's PyCon 2016 talk on building protocol libraries that can be reused widely, using the Python Hyper HTTP project as the example. He argues for separating protocol parsing from I/O.

The final part of Dan Gelbart's 18-part Building Prototypes series, focused on mechanical design. It opens with a demonstration of stiffness and covers practical design principles for prototype machines.

Nicholas Zakas of Yahoo discusses architecture for large, modular JavaScript web applications. He lays out the theory behind building front ends that scale in complexity.

A half-hour television special on the 2007 fiery collapse of a connector in the Bay Area's MacArthur Maze and its rebuilding in 26 days. It was produced for the Professional Engineers in California Government.

Chamath Palihapitiya talks with Jason Calacanis about how he bought into the mythology of Silicon Valley, which he calls a Ponzi scheme, and about rebuilding Social Capital. He urges founders to grow slowly and build what matters.

The 8-Bit Guy proposes building his dream retro computer, an expandable C64-like machine using sourceable parts and modern I/O, which became the Commander X16 project.

Daniel Dunbar of Apple presents llbuild, a framework for building build systems, at the 2016 LLVM Developers' Meeting. He argues that the traditional way C compilers integrate with build systems limits compile speed, and proposes a new architecture.

Valve's short video on building the Steam Controller on a heavily automated assembly line, which the company designed itself. It shows the robotic manufacturing process and US final assembly.

A video debunking popular primitive-building YouTube channels, arguing that their digging, concrete and construction are staged. It uses the Primitive Technology channel as a baseline for what is plausible in a natural setting.

A short EDS television commercial that shows an airplane being built while it is in flight. It is an early use of the 'building the plane as it flies' metaphor.

The Browser Company's CTO explains how the team is building the Arc browser for Windows using Swift. It covers the de-risking work and why they believe it is feasible.

Microsoft engineers Chiara Mooney and Shiven Mian describe the journey and challenges of building and consuming React Native for Windows inside Microsoft. It was given at Chain React 2023.

Andrej Karpathy's first Neural Networks: Zero to Hero lecture, which builds micrograd, a tiny autograd engine, from scratch in Python. It explains backpropagation and neural network training step by step, assuming only basic Python and some high-school calculus.