thousand brains

Lex Fridman interviews Jeff Hawkins, founder of Numenta and author of On Intelligence, about the Thousand Brains Theory and reverse-engineering the neocortex. They also cover Hierarchical Temporal Memory and brain-inspired AI architectures.

Isaac Arthur explains the Matrioshka Brain, a hypothetical computer or artificial mind powered by an entire star using nested shells. It covers how such megastructures relate to Dyson spheres and superintelligence.

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.

Geoffrey Hinton's Google Tech Talk linking machine learning to biology, explaining dropout as a form of model averaging and why sexual reproduction and stochastic spiking neurons may prevent overfitting.

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.

Daniel Dennett's Royal Institution lecture on whether the brain is a computer and where its software comes from. He argues that minds are built by evolution and culture, with competence arising without comprehension.

Leonard Susskind's Santa Fe Institute talk on the arrow of time: why the past differs from the future when physics equations are time-symmetric. He covers entropy, cosmology and Boltzmann brains.

Jeff Hawkins presents his view that the neocortex works on principles different from traditional computers. He describes sparse distributed representations and how they are learned, then shows how Numenta applies them to predict from high-velocity data streams.

Inventor Mary Lou Jepsen demonstrates using red light and sound to see inside the body and brain, aiming at tumor detection and neural activity measurement, and potentially a cheaper wearable MRI replacement.

JetBrains interviews Zig creator Andrew Kelley about why Zig has no 1.0 after a decade, why the project left GitHub, and why it bans AI contributions. He also covers what makes Zig better than C and his views on open source.

Roman Elizarov compares Kotlin Coroutines with OpenJDK Project Loom virtual threads, looking at their design goals and how those translate into different implementations and tradeoffs. He addresses how the two can coexist.

Numberphile visits Cliff Stoll, the man behind ACME Klein Bottles, and sees how he stores a thousand glass Klein bottles in a crawlspace under his house. A remote-controlled forklift fetches them.

Casey Muratori's University of Twente guest lecture is a case study in how straightforward code can cut thousands of lines and tens of seconds of runtime down to a few dozen lines running in under a second. It uses concrete examples to show why software is often an order of magnitude slower than it should be.

Cliff Click of Azul Systems gives a Google Tech Talk on running Java business applications on a machine with about a thousand cores. He covers hardware and software codesign, including garbage collection hardware and the JIT.

Veritasium argues that Facebook's ad revenue relies partly on fake likes, after paying to promote his page and gaining tens of thousands of followers in developing countries who never engaged. He shares his experiment and cites other cases.

Sam Zeloof shows the upgraded second iteration of his homemade silicon integrated circuit fabrication process, producing chips with around a thousand transistors in his garage. It is a short overview of what the home fab can now do.

A 1973 NBC News documentary on the US nerve gas arsenal, covering leaks in Okinawa, a Utah test that killed thousands of sheep, and the long-term hazards of storage sites. It won an Emmy.

Developmental and synthetic biologist Michael Levin speaks at a Harvard Extension student event on bioelectricity, body intelligence and regenerative medicine. He discusses how cell electrical networks guide growth and form.

Sebastian Seung's TED talk introduces the connectome, the map of neural connections he argues defines each person. He explains how mapping it could change how we understand brains and minds.

UCLA professor Dario Nardi presents brain-imaging research suggesting that different Myers-Briggs personality types use their brains in different ways. He discusses how each type can reach a state of creative flow. It is aimed at a general audience.

OK Go's music video for Needing/Getting, shot in the desert with a Chevy Sonic fitted with pneumatic arms that play over a thousand instruments across two miles.

Philosopher Dan Dennett argues in a TED talk that we do not understand our own consciousness and that our brains often fool us. He uses perceptual examples, including a painting that invites the viewer to fill in detail.

Matt Godbolt tells the story of Compiler Explorer, from a hacky basement server to a cloud-scaled service handling tens of thousands of daily requests. He also shows its features and how it is built.

Not Just Bikes explains how an electric bakfiets (Dutch cargo bike) replaced the family car after a move back to Canada, saving thousands of dollars. It shows how much it can carry, including kids and groceries.

Tom Scott tours Ocado's automated grocery warehouse, where thousands of robots move boxes on a grid called the Hive, and asks whether they are individual robots or a hive mind.

A short tour of the Megaprocessor, a microprocessor built at enormous scale from tens of thousands of discrete transistors. The builder shows what the machine is made of and where it now lives, at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, where visitors can play Tetris on it.

Insider Food visits the Gurudwara Bangla Sahib temple in New Delhi, which feeds tens of thousands of people free daily and over 100,000 on holidays. It shows the machines and big-batch cooking that make this possible.

A two-minute clip in which Milton Friedman uses a humble pencil to show how thousands of strangers across many countries cooperate, without central direction, to make a simple product. It is a short visual version of the 'I, Pencil' essay's argument about free markets and dispersed knowledge.

An F8 2015 talk touring the tool-chain Facebook uses to let thousands of engineers build mobile apps, including its move to Mercurial, an Atom-based IDE and continuous integration.

A PyData London 2018 talk on how JPMorgan scaled its Athena Python platform over ten years to about 35 million lines of code and thousands of developers. It covers infrastructure, tooling and culture for analytics and visualization at that scale.

Joseph Henrich's Talks at Google presentation of his book. He argues that human success comes from collective brains and cultural learning across generations rather than individual intelligence.

A sped-up two-minute view of morning rush hour at a busy Utrecht junction, where thousands of bicycles and buses pass each day. It illustrates a city where about a third of trips are by bike.

Cockpit footage of an approach to the Megeve altiport in France that ends in a gear-up landing, with the warning horn audible throughout. Everyone aboard survived and the crew had thousands of flight hours.

A three-minute clip about Ernst Dickmanns' VaMoR and VaMP projects, in which fully autonomous vehicles drove thousands of miles on public roads in the 1980s. It is a brief look at early German self-driving research.

A one-minute clip of Steve Ballmer explaining IBM's obsession with counting thousands of lines of code (KLOCs) as a measure of programmers. He explains why that metric is useless.

A NASA video on the 29 days after the James Webb Space Telescope's launch, when thousands of parts must deploy in sequence on the way to its destination a million miles away.