text preprocessing

A Business Insider World Wide Waste episode on H&M's garment recycling machines, which turn used clothing into new apparel. It asks whether a fast fashion company can solve the waste problem it helped create.

Ted Nelson explains the original Xanadu hypertext idea of visible connection, the notion that links between documents should be shown and preserved. He argues that the Web and current document standards lost this concept.

Modern Vintage Gamer explains why PlayStation 1 graphics warped and jittered, comparing it with the Nintendo 64. The causes are affine texture mapping and the lack of sub-pixel vertex precision.

A design essay on why products designed in Western contexts often fail when deployed in developing countries. It covers expert blindness and cultural assumptions, with examples such as malaria nets and the One Laptop Per Child project.

Computerphile video in which Mike Pound explains a University of Maryland paper on watermarking LLM output. The method biases token choices so generated text can later be detected statistically.

A guest video by Welch Labs on 3Blue1Brown explaining how text-to-image and video models work. It covers CLIP, shared embedding spaces, diffusion models (DDPM, DDIM), conditioning, guidance and negative prompts.

Freya Holmer explains how Bezier curves work, from the helper-line construction to their uses in animation, text rendering and shapes. It uses visuals from her Unity Shapes plugin and was a SoME1 contest winner.

Technology Connections explains why brown is not a spectral color but a context-dependent perception, essentially dark orange seen against brighter surroundings.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.

Kurzgesagt compares how many people nuclear accidents have killed against other energy sources. It walks through the worst nuclear accidents and puts their death tolls in context per unit of energy.

3Blue1Brown's visual walkthrough of the attention mechanism inside transformers, covering self-attention, multiple heads and cross-attention. It is chapter 6 of his deep learning series.

Looking Glass Universe explains de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory (Bohmian mechanics) as an alternative to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. The video lays out the pros and cons of the theory and links to related videos on contextuality and entanglement.

Musician Adam Neely examines whether certain keys sound sadder than others, looking at the history of tuning systems and temperaments and at how instrument timbre shapes the emotional character we hear. It draws on historical aesthetics writing and audio examples.

Dr Mike Pound of Computerphile shows how a modern laptop can crack Enigma, using a ciphertext-only attack based on an older paper. He compares it with the tooling in CrypTool.

Historia Civilis tells the story of 46 BCE, the 445-day year in which Julius Caesar reformed the Roman calendar. It covers the political context, including the civil war, Cato and Cicero.

Rob Miles explains on Computerphile how language models generate plausible text and how transformers improved on recurrent networks, with a look at what comes next.

Anders Puck Nielsen clears up common misunderstandings about what legally counts as genocide, then compares the situation in Gaza with the genocide case against Putin. The chapters cover the definition, individual intent, and the two case comparisons.

Veritasium visits Chernobyl, Fukushima and other places to find who on Earth is exposed to the most ionizing radiation. The answer turns out to be surprising and puts radiation risk in context.

Veritasium examines whether food has become less nutritious, weighing soil depletion, selective breeding and rising atmospheric CO2. It evidences nutrient decline even in weeds over a century and ties it to faster plant growth.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths examines scatter plots that were claimed to show fraudulent vote-switching in Michigan's 2020 election. He recreates the analysis and shows that the pattern arises from comparing percentages across different bases, not from fraud.

3Blue1Brown's chapter 4 on deep learning gives a more formal, symbol-based account of backpropagation calculus, connecting the intuition from the previous chapter to the math found in textbooks and code.

Yuta, a Japanese YouTuber, explains whether Japanese speakers can read Chinese text. He shows how shared kanji let people guess meanings while the two languages remain completely different.

A Design Club episode that analyzes how Super Mario Bros. level 1-1 teaches players to play through level design alone, without text tutorials.