react conf

Y Combinator partners Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell discuss how startups shifted from attracting outsiders to status- and money-seeking conformists. They give advice for nonconformist founders.

Serpentza, a Westerner living in China, describes Chinese influence efforts abroad and the cultural conflict between Shen Yun and Confucius Institutes. It is a commentary from his personal perspective.

Sabine Hossenfelder reads a confidential email and uses it to explain her worries about academia and incentives in theoretical physics research. She ties it to her earlier Nature Physics comment on research quality.

A former fusion scientist argues why fusion power by 2040 is unrealistic, covering the physics challenges, neutron issues and optimistic company claims, with a brief note of good news.

A commentary video by YouTuber PaymoneyWubby reacting to children's content on the Musical.ly app, which became TikTok. It highlights the child-safety concerns of young kids dancing on a public social platform.

The first part of Innuendo Studios' six-part video essay series on the online hostility around Anita Sarkeesian and GamerGate. It lays out the history and the motivations of the people involved.

An Innuendo Studios video essay from the Alt-Right Playbook series that uses the Seinfeld 'the card says moops' scene to explain bad-faith argument tactics. It describes how reactionaries use sincerity and irony as shields in online debate.

Nerdwriter1 shows how rearranging the scenes of the film Passengers, so the audience shares the female lead's confusion, would change the movie. It draws on discussion of the original script.

Coffeezilla reacts to Sam Bankman-Fried's explanation of yield farming on the Odd Lots podcast, arguing he effectively described a Ponzi scheme. The video was made well before FTX collapsed.

Louis Rossmann reacts to a CBC News segment in which an Apple Genius Bar quoted a costly logic board and display replacement for a MacBook that had only a bent pin. He explains why the repair is simple and what the case shows about Apple's repair practices.

A short, humorous critique of Helion Energy's fusion approach, framed as a response to a Real Engineering video. It covers low reactivity, neutron production, bremsstrahlung losses and diagnostics.

Louis Rossmann reacts to lobbyist ads in the Massachusetts right-to-repair ballot fight that suggest repair access would enable domestic abuse and discrimination, and urges support for the campaign.

Louis Rossmann opens a new MacBook Air and reacts to its cooling design, where the fan does not appear to be thermally connected to the CPU heatsink. He calls it placebo cooling.