side projects

A four-minute programmer rap by stdout about abandoned side projects and the promise to finish them someday. The lyrics poke fun at dev procrastination and big app ideas.

Darius Kazemi's XOXO 2014 talk on releasing 72 weird internet side projects in a year. Framed as 'How I Won the Lottery,' it argues that success needs both luck and buying many tickets.

Zack Freedman gives advice on why makers fail to finish projects, including scrapping bad ideas, showing work publicly and writing a plan that keeps projects fun. It is aimed at hardware DIY but generalizes.

Tom Scott and Matt Gray talk at Electromagnetic Field about making Emojli, an emoji-only messenger that began as a joke, how it was built and why they never want to do it again.

Pieter Levels talks at Dojo Bali about building startups without venture capital through bootstrapping, persistence and learning many skills as a generalist. He reviews his own past projects.

A short clip, from 2003, of Noam Chomsky going through crimes of post-WW2 US presidents. He argues that they would be indictable under the Nuremberg principles.

An SMBC Theater sketch in which JP Nickel presents 'both sides' on every issue, satirizing false balance in news coverage.

Bo Burnham's song from his special Inside, a satirical take on internet culture, attention and extremism.

A short Not Just Bikes video on continuous sidewalks in the Netherlands, where the sidewalk runs unbroken across side streets so cars must visibly cross pedestrian space. It places them within Dutch sustainable safety and Vision Zero efforts.

Robert Miles introduces the first of several videos on the paper 'Concrete Problems in AI Safety', focusing on how AI systems can cause accidental negative side effects. It explains the problem in accessible terms.

Digital Foundry investigates why Resident Evil Village on PC runs worse with Capcom's Denuvo DRM than a cracked version. They benchmark and confirm performance and frame-pacing differences.

The Rubberbandits perform "Horse Outside", a comic Irish song about a horse waiting outside, from the RTE show Republic of Telly.

A short repost of a TikTok in which AI-generated voices of US presidents discuss their top five animes. It is a comedic meme video.

A Business Insider investigation into the US boom in AI data centers, mapping where they are, who owns them, and how much power and water they consume. It looks at the costs borne by communities, with a focus on Virginia.

A short Insider Tech look at Ocado's grocery warehouse where thousands of robots on a grid pack orders, communicating over 4G to avoid collisions. It handles around 65,000 orders a week.

Insider explains how The Mandalorian replaced green screens with LED walls that project real-time 3D environments behind actors, with over half the show filmed on such virtual sets.

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.

AdoredTV relays leaks and insider accounts of what it is like inside Intel, including staffing changes and morale. It is a commentary video from 2020.

A short clip of President George W. Bush stumbling through the saying 'fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me'.

A clip of "My Pal Foot Foot" by The Shaggs, the 1960s sisters band famous for their off-kilter amateur sound. The uploader credits a Frank Zappa quote claiming they are better than the Beatles.

Michael Levin's NeurIPS 2018 talk on bioelectric computation outside the nervous system, showing how cell electrical networks shape development and regeneration. It covers morphological information processing in living tissue.

Adam Savage and engineer Zach Radding examine Lumafield CT scans of Apple's $130 Thunderbolt 4 cable alongside cheaper USB-C cables. They explain the internal components that distinguish Thunderbolt from ordinary USB-C.

A PBS Space Time episode explaining how space and time swap roles inside a black hole's event horizon. It is part of the channel's black hole series.

Strange Parts tours JLCPCB's large PCB factory in Huizhou, China, walking through the printed circuit board manufacturing process step by step. It shows the machinery, quality checks and scale behind cheap prototype boards.

Vice founder Shane Smith travels to North Korea, speaking with refugees in South Korea before crossing the DMZ. It is part one of a three-part documentary with rare on-the-ground footage.

OK Go's music video for Upside Down & Inside Out, filmed during parabolic flights so the band and performers are weightless in the plane.

A 98-minute LEMMiNO video reconstructing what happened inside the Texas School Book Depository before, during, and after the Kennedy assassination. It draws on testimony to map people's movements and discrepancies.

A PBS Space Time episode asking what black holes really are and whether events can happen inside them. It covers event horizons, time dilation and common misconceptions about black holes.

A short CGP Grey animation showing how the US electoral college lets a candidate win the presidency with as little as about 22 percent of the popular vote. It lays out the arithmetic of winning states by narrow margins.

A BSidesLV 2013 talk from the Sixteen Colors project on archiving the ANSI and ASCII art scene. It traces the scene's evolution from BBSs to the NFO and IRC era.

A BBC Earth clip from Inside the Animal Mind in which a crow named 007 solves an eight-step puzzle to get a reward. It showcases crow problem-solving.

Chuck Moore, creator of Forth, gives his annual Fireside Chat at Forth Day 2011 at Stanford. He talks about his multi-core GreenArrays chip design and demonstrates code running on it.

A CNBC clip of President Trump's August 2017 press briefing at Trump Tower in which he answers questions about the Charlottesville rally and says there were 'very fine people on both sides'. It is the unedited footage of the remarks.

Big Clive shows how to pick up discarded disposable vape devices from the roadside and extract the rechargeable lithium cells inside. He explains why these devices contain the same circuitry as rechargeable ones and how to reuse the cells.

The full 2010 documentary Inside Job, directed by Charles Ferguson, examines the causes of the 2008 global financial crisis. It traces the story through interviews with key financial and political players across several countries.

A reading of David Foster Wallace's essay Consider the Lobster, about the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival and the ethics of boiling lobsters alive. The reading runs about 50 minutes.

A short Whitest Kids U' Know sketch, with Spanish subtitles, in which a man repeatedly announces he wants to kill the president. It satirizes how speech and threats are policed.

President Reagan's 1987 radio address on free and fair trade, in which he argues for free trade over protectionism.

A side-by-side edit lining up footage of the Wuppertal Schwebebahn suspended monorail filmed in 1902 and in 2015. It lets you compare how the buildings and surroundings changed over 113 years.

Episode 7 of the Inside Koenigsegg series, where Christian von Koenigsegg demonstrates the camless Free Valve engine technology. It discusses how such innovation could affect the wider auto industry.