prediction markets

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment examines prediction markets such as Polymarket: the legal and moral questions, weak regulation, and insider trading and manipulation concerns.

A 1997 Noam Chomsky talk at Northeastern University about the gap between free-market rhetoric and practice. He argues that business relies heavily on state intervention, and he discusses trade, NAFTA and labour versus capital mobility.

A VICE report from 2011 in which Suroosh Alvi revisits the gun markets in Pakistan's tribal areas, a stronghold of the Taliban. It shows weapons being made and sold by hand and a country described as a powder keg.

A video by expat YouTuber serpentza about animal-eating practices and hygiene in China, presented as showing what the country's authorities do not want seen.

Chinese Cooking Demystified shows an ordinary, everyday Chinese wet market to counter sensationalized coverage during the early pandemic, with a pinned comment adding nuance.

A long Portal podcast episode in which Bret Weinstein tells Eric Weinstein the story of his lab mice telomere work, the prediction behind it, and what it means for science and aging.

A Vox explainer on how the wildlife trade and wet markets are linked to coronavirus and why new diseases keep emerging in China. It stresses that most people in China do not eat wildlife.

A 1979 BBC Nationwide report asking whether word processors and networked microprocessors could end office commuting. It shows early word processing and a woman working from home, with surprisingly prophetic predictions.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever on time to AGI, what comes after generative models, data limits, alignment, and competing with Google. The title centers on whether next-token prediction could surpass human intelligence.

A one-minute clip of Steve Ballmer laughing at the original iPhone and dismissing its price and appeal.

Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains in this 2017 GDC session how Overwatch uses an Entity Component System architecture for layered gameplay. He also covers its server-authoritative netcode with client-side prediction and how they keep the game responsive and fair.

Paul Graham's keynote at PyCon 2012, in which he talks about startup ideas and what kinds of companies are likely to matter in the future. He discusses ideas such as a better email client and a search engine for hackers, and argues for looking back at the present from the future.

Chandler Carruth shows how to squeeze more performance out of already-optimized C++ code, covering how the CPU executes it. The talk goes into pipelining, branch prediction and speculative execution using benchmarks.

Lex Fridman interviews chip architect Jim Keller about the future of computing, AI, life and consciousness. Topics include CPU design, branch prediction and why imperfect designs often win.

The first episode of Milton Friedman's 1980 Free To Choose series, on how markets and voluntary exchange organize economic activity and the price system. It includes visits to Hong Kong, the U.S. and Scotland and a panel discussion with critics.

Strange Parts builds a working refurbished iPhone 6S entirely from components bought in the Huaqiangbei phone parts markets in Shenzhen. The video explains how the markets work and what the parts cost.

Matt Godbolt builds a toy path tracer in C++ in three different styles and compares them on clarity, testability, compile time and run-time performance. The talk was given at CppCon 2019.

A two-minute clip in which Milton Friedman uses a humble pencil to show how thousands of strangers across many countries cooperate, without central direction, to make a simple product. It is a short visual version of the 'I, Pencil' essay's argument about free markets and dispersed knowledge.

A Veritasium video on how a feud between Russian mathematicians led to Markov chains and the modern prediction algorithms built on them. It covers the history and the math behind them.

A one-minute clip about Paul Otlet, the Belgian bibliographer who in 1934 imagined users accessing a remote database through an electric telescope over a phone line. It presents his vision as a precursor of the web.

A short clip of Milton Friedman arguing with students that equal pay laws are counterproductive, and that markets penalize discrimination because cheaper equally productive workers are an advantage to hire.

A one-minute clip from a 2016 Toronto conference in which Geoff Hinton comments on deep learning and radiology. He suggests radiologists should stop being trained because machines would soon read scans better.

A 1978 documentary hosted by Leonard Nimoy about the coming ice age, reposted with a framing that contrasts it with today's climate science.

Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2019 talk revisits sorting, showing how branchless tricks, hybrid strategies and a cost metric can speed up std::sort-style algorithms on modern hardware.

Linkus7 explains how a community reverse-engineered The Wind Waker to predict its random number generator and beat the Sploosh Kaboom battleship minigame consistently. It includes d3 animations by Peter Schmidt-Nielsen.

A short film from the Competitive Enterprise Institute adapting Leonard Read's 1958 essay I, Pencil, showing how no one person knows how to make a pencil and how many people cooperate without central planning.

A 2006 television appearance in which Peter Schiff warns on Kudlow & Co about the housing bubble and an approaching US economic collapse.

Andrej Karpathy builds a bigram character-level language model from scratch, introducing torch.Tensor and the framework of training, sampling and loss evaluation. It is the first step toward a GPT-style Transformer in his makemore series.

Yanis Varoufakis argues that Europe's electricity price spikes stem from how the energy market was designed and privatised, plus corporate profiteering. He proposes ways out.

A VPRO documentary on quantitative analysts who designed the mathematical models and high-speed trading systems behind modern finance. It features figures such as Paul Wilmott and asks what risks come from treating markets as a machine.

Peter Schiff's November 2006 speech to the Western Regional Mortgage Bankers Conference, in which he warned an audience of mortgage bankers that the housing bubble would collapse. The clip runs about 73 minutes.

Michael Green of Thiel Macro presents a thesis that the growth of passive investing distorts how markets price new money flows. He ties short-term market behavior to longer-term demographic cycles and its effects on valuations and volatility.

Jeff Hawkins presents his view that the neocortex works on principles different from traditional computers. He describes sparse distributed representations and how they are learned, then shows how Numenta applies them to predict from high-velocity data streams.

A two-minute clip from a 1979 Phil Donahue interview in which Milton Friedman makes the free-market case for taxing pollution. He treats pollution as an externality that can be given a price.

A look at AT&T's 1993 You Will ad campaign, which showed technologies such as video calls and telemedicine that were then under development. It explains the story behind ads that anticipated much of today's technology.

A four-minute 2017 clip of geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan discussing a Russian land grab, in which he anticipated a Russian move on Ukraine.

The full-length Numberphile interview with mathematician and hedge fund founder Jim Simons. He discusses his path from mathematics and codebreaking to founding Renaissance Technologies, his use of algorithms in markets, and his philanthropy.

CGP Grey's video "Humans Need Not Apply" argues that automation will make a large part of the workforce economically obsolete, much as engines did for horses. It surveys robots and software replacing both physical and mental labor.

Physicist Al Bartlett's well-known lecture on the arithmetic of exponential growth, applied to population, energy consumption and resource depletion. He argues that steady percentage growth cannot be sustained on a finite planet and that most public discussion ignores this.

Veritasium traces analog computers from the Antikythera mechanism and Kelvin's tide-predicting machines to fire control and modern analog approaches. It explains how these machines computed continuously rather than digitally.