technical debt

Ward Cunningham explains the history and intent of the debt metaphor, which he coined while refactoring the WyCash product. He says debt means code reflecting an incomplete understanding of the problem, not sloppy programming.

Not Just Bikes explains how many American suburbs, built all at once rather than incrementally, cannot cover their infrastructure costs and survive on growing debt. It draws on Strong Towns' work on the growth Ponzi scheme.

Ray Dalio's 30-minute animated video explains how the economy works through credit, debt, interest rates, and short- and long-term cycles. It is based on his template for understanding the economy.

An animated 44-minute summary of Ray Dalio's book Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. It lays out the Big Cycle of rising and declining nations, covering debt cycles, internal conflict, and shifts in global power over the past 500 years.

Roaring Kitty's July 2020 analysis of GameStop, arguing a bullish deep-value case when the stock was about $4 and short interest exceeded 100%. It covers fundamentals, cash balance and technicals.

A scene from The Big Short in which Jared Vennett pitches credit default swaps on mortgage bonds to a hedge fund team, using a Jenga tower to illustrate collateralized debt obligations.

Episode 4 of Mike Maloney's Hidden Secrets of Money, explaining how currency is created through a chain of IOUs among the Treasury, banks and the Federal Reserve. It covers bonds, Fed checks, debt, taxes and fractional reserve lending, from a gold-and-silver advocate's viewpoint.

Tom Scott visits Yale's archives to look at a 367-year-old bond from a Dutch water authority that is still paying interest. Finance professor Geert Rouwenhorst explains how it works.

A 30-minute animated film explaining how money, banking and the Federal Reserve work and arguing that the American economy is heading for collapse. It is opinionated and has a strong point of view.

Practical Engineering explains Mechanically Stabilized Earth, where layers of reinforcement make soil strong enough to hold heavy loads, shown with a sand structure supporting a car. It notes that MSE walls are everywhere in infrastructure.

Practical Engineering explains why San Francisco's Millennium Tower is sinking and tilting, covering how geology and foundation design (friction piles in the Colma Formation) affect skyscrapers. It also covers the fix being attempted.

Practical Engineering's explanation of the February 2021 Texas winter storm and the resulting power grid outage. It lays out the facts about ERCOT, the grid's isolation, and how generation across fuel types failed in the cold.

The first part of Extra History's animated miniseries on the South Sea Bubble. It explains how England's government debt led Robert Harley to turn to financier John Blunt, whose schemes began inflating artificial demand for shares.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained dissects how Atari's Quadrascan vector displays and vector generator hardware drew games like Asteroids and Tempest.

A five-minute CGP Grey explainer arguing that a phone is effectively an extension of your mind, and that any backdoor or master key into encrypted devices will inevitably be abused or leaked. It frames the encryption debate as locks that are either unbreakable or absent.

Pannenkoek explains how Super Mario 64 handles wall, floor and ceiling collisions, including triangles, normal vectors, quarter steps and out of bounds. It is a detailed 37-minute technical walkthrough of the game's physics.

Tom Scott-style exploration by suckerpinch (Tom7) of generalized anagrams where letters can be broken into pieces, called anagraphs, with a whimsical computational approach.

Louis Rossmann gives a basic, non-technical introduction to right to repair legislation for people new to the issue.

Kyle Hill explains what nuclear waste actually is and how it is stored, arguing that the problem was effectively solved decades ago. It covers solid shielded waste and deep geological storage.

Marques Brownlee explains why iMessage's blue and green bubbles matter, covering the technical, commercial and social side of Apple's messaging lock-in. It also discusses RCS and what could be done about it.

IBM's Dr. Talia Gershon explains quantum computing to five people of increasing expertise: a child, teen, college student, grad student and professional. The WIRED series format moves from simple analogies to technical detail.

A short Coding Secrets episode explaining why hitting a Sonic 3D cartridge triggers a hidden level select. The cause was a custom crash handler that redirected CPU error interrupts to the level select screen.

A filmmaker explains why the Apollo moon landing footage could not have been faked in a studio, based on the video and film technology of the late 1960s. He walks through the limits of cameras, frame rates and effects of the era.

minutephysics, in collaboration with the US Census Bureau, explains differential privacy and why the 2020 census adds noise to protect individuals' data. It walks through how statistics can leak private information.

A 105-minute technical deep dive from Noise In Space evaluating whether Starlink satellites could work as synthetic aperture radar. It covers SAR signal-to-noise, amplifiers, antennas, duplexing, phased array beamforming and simulations of V2 Mini and V3 satellites.

A three-minute Positive Money UK explainer arguing that the commercial banking system, where banks create most money as debt, redistributes income from the bottom 90 percent to the top 10 percent through interest.