progress

A short side-by-side demo of a large image loading over a slow connection in JPEG, progressive mozjpeg, JPEG XL and AVIF. It shows how each codec renders partial data.

Alex Russell's Chrome Dev Summit 2016 talk on building web experiences that work on slow, flaky networks and low-power devices. It argues developers should focus on the performance of real-world mobile hardware rather than desktop machines.

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.

A Jubilee debate-format video in which progressive commentator Mehdi Hasan faces twenty far-right conservatives. It covers contentious political topics in a confrontational discussion.

CityNerd critiques the Las Vegas Loop, the Boring Company's tunnel transit system, arguing its design and operation are poor. The video covers how the system actually runs.

UC Berkeley EECS colloquium by OpenAI's John Schulman on reinforcement learning from human feedback. He covers why RL helps with truthfulness, hallucination, and the limits of behavior cloning.

A 2012 Fortune dinner debate between Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt over whether technological progress is healthy or stalling and whether Google can still innovate.

Comedian Rob Paravonian's 'Pachelbel Rant', a comedy bit showing that the chord progression of Pachelbel's Canon underlies countless pop songs. This is a high-quality 2019 re-post of the 2006 original.

Comedian and cellist Rob Paravonian rants about having to play Pachelbel's Canon in D, and shows how many pop songs reuse its chord progression. It was recorded live at Penn State.

An excerpt from an RSA event in which physicist David Deutsch makes the case for optimism as a driver of progress in the 21st century. It is a short highlight of a longer discussion.

Steven Pinker's TED talk presents data on homicide, war, poverty and pollution to argue that the world has improved over the past decades. He frames progress as problem-solving, not inevitability.

A short clip of Louis CK on Conan riffing that everything is amazing and nobody is happy, about complaining over modern wonders like air travel and wifi. The uploader added a note about the comedian's later misconduct.

Steven Pinker's TED talk charts the long decline of violence from biblical times to today, arguing that despite Iraq and Darfur we may be living in the most peaceful era of our species.

Ray Kurzweil presents his book How to Create a Mind at Google, on reverse engineering the brain and using that understanding to build intelligent machines. He shows his graphs of exponential technological progress.

A comedy-music medley from the Australian band The Axis of Awesome showing that dozens of famous pop songs use the same four-chord progression. The performers cycle through a long list of hits over the same chords.

A 2012 debate between Peter Thiel and George Gilder on whether technological progress and economic growth are accelerating or decelerating, moderated by William Davidow.

Tyler Cowen interviews Peter Thiel about technological stagnation, innovation, and lessons from Zero to One. The conversation ranges over business, startups and how Thiel thinks about progress.

David Deutsch's TED talk arguing that humanity's survival depends on solving problems through knowledge growth. He frames people as improbable "chemical scum" capable of understanding distant quasars.

Andy Bell's 2022 talk on hinting the browser rather than micromanaging it, using progressive enhancement, CSS layout, fluid type and space, and modern CSS to build resilient front-ends.

Australian comedy group Axis of Awesome perform a sketch showing that dozens of pop hits share the same four chords. It was recorded at the 2009 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Destin Sandlin tours a progressive metal stamping factory, showing machines that stamp millions of metal parts and the tooling behind them.

Sir Mashalot blends six formulaic pop country songs into one seamless mashup using Pro Tools. It shows how similar the songs' chords and structure are.

CGP Grey narrates an animated adaptation of Nick Bostrom's Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant. The story uses a dragon that demands a daily toll of lives as a metaphor for aging and society's acceptance of death.

A DevGAMM talk by Jonathan Blow arguing that civilizations can lose technological capability and that software quality is already deteriorating. He discusses how knowledge fails to transfer between generations.

Jonathan Blow's DevGAMM 2019 talk argues that software knowledge is being lost between generations and that growing layers of abstraction could lead to a decline in technological civilization.

James Mickens of Harvard gives a funny lecture at HBS's Future Assembly arguing that blockchains are a very bad idea. He covers their trust, legal and practical shortcomings for real-world problems.

Peter Thiel is the first guest on Eric Weinstein's The Portal, in a nearly three-hour conversation about technological stagnation, institutional failure and the link between growth and violence. They discuss universities, the economy and the search for a more ambitious future.

Technology Connections explains how LED traffic lights, which do not melt snow, drew complaints and were blamed for accidents. He uses it to illustrate the 'but sometimes' fallacy against new technology.

Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues that the machine-learning systems used to serve ads also decide what political and social information people see. She explains how opaque algorithms can nudge, segment and manipulate users, and warns that the real danger is powerful people using AI to control populations.

CGP Grey explains how ideas spread like germs, and why content that triggers outrage spreads fastest, using a study on what makes online content viral. He argues that opposing outrage-driven memes feed each other.

Joseph Tainter lectures at a 2010 sustainability conference on why complex societies such as Rome collapse. His thesis is that rising complexity brings diminishing returns until societies cannot afford to maintain it.

Neil Postman's 1997 lecture at College of DuPage, based on his book, argues that Americans treat technology as a national religion and depend on it to solve larger human problems. It includes audience questions.

Kurzgesagt makes a selfish case for improving the world, arguing that helping people far away raises prosperity and innovation for everyone, including yourself. The animated video frames this as egoistic altruism and positive-sum cooperation.

An Isaac Arthur episode on civilizations in the far future, past the Black Hole Era. It covers iron stars, Boltzmann brains, reversible computing and the idea of reversing entropy.

Jon Ronson's TED talk on public shaming on Twitter, centered on Justine Sacco and others whose lives were upended by online mobs. He argues we have become a baying crowd and should rethink how we treat each other online.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, explains how small contributions from many people online can digitize books. He then introduces Duolingo as a way to translate the web while people learn languages.

CGP Grey argues that aging and death are a problem worth defeating, using a short animated essay. It is part of a pair with a follow-up from Kurzgesagt.

Kurzgesagt explains stellar engines such as the Shkadov thruster and Caplan thruster, which could move the Sun and solar system across the galaxy over millions of years to avoid hazards and reach new regions.

Skateboarding pioneer Rodney Mullen talks about how the open skate community and its environments drive the invention of new tricks out of pure passion. He draws parallels to collaboration and open source.

A Virginia Tech presentation by Sid Smith about collapse, fossil fuels and overshoot, arguing that industrial civilization faces a decline and how one might live with that. It was later expanded into a video series.