nyt op-docs

A New York Times Op-Docs short in which actors perform a real legal deposition transcript. A lawyer gets tangled in an absurd argument with a county employee about what counts as a photocopier, in a dispute over fees for public records.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the hard parts of running an open source project: online community conflict, why its patterns arise, and a cultural history of open source. He offers ideas for more civil, productive communication.

Nina Paley's one-minute animated free culture anthem with vocals by Connie Champagne, arguing that copying is not theft.

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 New York Times Opinion documentary tracing Soviet and KGB disinformation, from the 1980s AIDS origin hoax to modern campaigns like Pizzagate. It features former KGB officers and the people who tried to counter the lies.

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.

A 2019 Android Dev Summit session on the scoped storage model in Android 10. It gives a plan overview and best practices for apps adapting to the new restrictions.

Adrian Crenshaw's DEF CON 22 talk gives an overview of Tor and I2P, then goes through real cases where darknet users were caught. These include Silk Road and its operator.

Neil Gaiman tells the Open Rights Group how the internet and piracy affect books and publishing. He describes how free web copies of his books boosted sales.

A short clip of the Snowbird, a human-powered ornithopter built by University of Toronto students. On August 2, 2010 it sustained altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds, the first such flight.

An F8 2015 talk touring the tool-chain Facebook uses to let thousands of engineers build mobile apps, including its move to Mercurial, an Atom-based IDE and continuous integration.

NYT Opinion video essay arguing that Democrat-controlled states like California, New York and Illinois often fall short of their egalitarian values. It focuses on housing costs, homelessness, regressive taxes and school segregation as drivers of inequality.

A DevOps YouTuber tests GitHub Copilot on a range of Leetcode problems and finds it solves most immediately, with a few needing tweaks and some far off. He concludes it would outperform him in a FAANG-style interview.

Top Gear segment in which Hammond and May try to turn a Reliant Robin into a space shuttle. Launching is easy, but landing it safely is the problem.

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.

Philip Roberts explains the JavaScript event loop, call stack, callbacks and asynchronous behavior with live visualizations using a tool he built. It demystifies terms like non-blocking and single-threaded.

Tom Scott's long explainer on YouTube's copyright system, Content ID and the DMCA. He argues the platform's system is a workaround for a broader copyright system that does not fit the modern world.

Andrew Huberman's long Huberman Lab episode is a masterclass on dopamine. It covers the neural circuits, peaks and baselines, dopamine depletion, and 14 tools for motivation, focus and avoiding addiction.

Howard Abrams demonstrates, in an EmacsConf 2015 talk, how he uses org-mode's Babel and Tramp to configure and operate remote servers from a single document. Code blocks, their results and the explanatory text all live together.

The Grugq's Hack In The Box 2012 talk on operational security for hackers, drawing on hacker indictments and counter-intelligence research. It reviews OPSEC goals and methods for avoiding detection and arrest, with case studies of how hackers got caught.

Okta developer advocate Nate Barbettini explains OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect in a roughly hour-long talk. It starts from the problems the protocols solve and walks through the flows. The description notes the implicit flow material is now out of date.

Thunderf00t, a physicist, critically assesses the Hyperloop concept, covering the vacuum, pressure, safety, and cost problems of high-speed tube travel. He argues the media accepted the claims uncritically.

Jake Archibald's JSConf.Asia 2018 talk "In the Loop" explains the browser event loop, covering tasks, microtasks, requestAnimationFrame, and how rendering interleaves with JavaScript. It uses visual walkthroughs to show why code runs in surprising orders and why setTimeout fixes are unreliable.

A Last Week Tonight segment on the US opioid epidemic, tracing how prescription painkillers fed addiction and heroin use. It is the first of three episodes the show devoted to the crisis.

Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk is a hypothetical account of how an intelligence agency such as the NSA would sabotage open source software, standards and online discussion. It covers Skype's history, OpenSSL and psyops against standards.

David Kipping presents his proposed Terrascope, a telescope that uses Earth's atmosphere as a lens to achieve enormous magnification. He covers the history of telescopes and his path to the idea, plus Sol-scope and Jupiter-scope variants.

A Kurzgesagt explainer on why the human population exploded and why growth is slowing, drawing on Our World in Data. It argues that birth rates fall as countries develop, easing overpopulation fears.

CGP Grey's five-minute animated explainer on how copyright terms grew from 14 years to life plus decades. It uses Disney and Star Wars examples to argue the system has gone wrong.

Hans Rosling uses population statistics to explain why the world population will level off rather than grow without limit. He shows that falling child mortality and rising prosperity lead to smaller families.

David Heinemeier Hansson's opening keynote at RailsConf 2019 argues against the expectation of payment for open source work, drawing on his experience releasing Rails. It also includes lighter asides about the industry.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explains Multi-Domain Operations through footage from his last mission at RIMPAC 2018. He covers missile and torpedo testing and interviews military leaders about the cyber and information domains.

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

3Blue1Brown's third deep learning chapter gives a visual, intuitive account of backpropagation and what happens to a neural network as it learns. A follow-up video covers the underlying calculus.

Modern Vintage Gamer examines the claim from the Super Mario 64 decompilation project that the game shipped unoptimized, and puts it in the context of 1996 N64 development.

John Oliver's second Last Week Tonight segment on the opioid epidemic, covering the role of large companies in driving it. It touches on Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family.

A DEF CON 30 talk by Sam Bent, a former darknet vendor, on operational security when using Tor and the darknet. He applies the hacker mindset to staying anonymous and avoiding capture.

A short edited excerpt of Terence McKenna arguing that culture acts as an operating system for the mind, set to imagery and music. It touches on psychedelics and how they change thinking.

A very long, detailed look at the A4/V2 rocket turbopump, the steam-turbine-driven twin propellant pump system. It covers the peroxide and permanganate catalysis that drives the turbine. This is part 1 of a series on V2 components.

A Soho Forum debate in which patent lawyer Stephan Kinsella argues for abolishing copyright and patents against law professor Richard Epstein. Both come from libertarian perspectives.

Bruce Hauman presents Figwheel, a ClojureScript tool for live, interactive development with hot code reloading. He explains the main ideas, demonstrates how it works, and shares tricks for getting the most out of it.