time to first plot

A Startup School talk by YC partner and former Airbnb growth head Gustaf Alstromer on how startups get their first customers. It covers doing things that don't scale, founders learning sales, the sales funnel, and charging your first customer.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on timeshares covers how people get sold into them, why they are so hard to leave, and the exit-company scams that target owners trying to get out.

Climate Town argues for moving away from gas stoves. It covers the gas industry's decades of marketing and lobbying, health effects of gas cooking, methane leaks, and the case for induction.

A circa-1964 film showing AMF's AMFare system, which ordered, cooked and packaged hamburgers, fries, shakes and more automatically for a pilot fast-food operation.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why handling time and timezones in code is so hard, walking through a simple web app that computes how long ago something happened. It covers the quirks of timezones and calendars and ends in an exasperated rant.

A 29-minute cinematic timelapse by melodysheep that journeys trillions of years into the future, covering the death of the sun, the end of stars, proton decay, black hole evaporation and the fate of the cosmos.

A video essay from Every Frame a Painting on animator Satoshi Kon and his editing style, which distorts and warps space and time. It draws on his four features and one TV series.

An MIT colloquium by Dennis Whyte on power exhaust and first-wall cooling in fusion reactors, including recent innovations and the SPARC and ARC designs.

A short first look at Dasung's 25.3-inch Paperlike 253 e-ink monitor, edited from the company's own Weibo reveal video. Price and release date were not yet known.

Climate Town tells the history of the period when the greenhouse effect was not politically controversial and the US came close to acting on climate. It covers Exxon's early climate science and the policy failures that followed.

Martin Kleppmann's Local-First Conf talk reviewing where the local-first idea came from, where it stands five years after the essay, and what the community should work toward. He argues for generic sync infrastructure.

A short lecture in which Kurt Vonnegut graphs the simple shapes of stories, such as Man in Hole and Boy Gets Girl. He sketches how fortune rises and falls over a narrative.

Allan Blomquist demonstrates the internal programming and debugging tools Tomorrow Corporation uses to make games, including live modification of a running game and time-travel debugging.

Bret Victor's talk from Dropbox's DBX conference about living by a guiding principle, in his case that creators need an immediate connection to what they are making. He shows live-coding and time-manipulation demos that let ideas take form at the speed of thought.

Isao Hashimoto's time-lapse map shows all 2053 nuclear explosions between 1945 and 1998, with each nation getting a blip and a running tally. Each second represents one month.

The Verge's documentary on Handspring and its Treo, a smartphone that came a decade before the iPhone. It tells how a small team tried to build the modern smartphone and was held back by carriers and timing.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Sarah Paine, a Naval War College historian, about continental versus maritime powers and how that explains decisions by Xi and Putin. They also cover a possible Taiwan war, the fall of the British Empire, WW2 strategy and how to study history.

A timeline visualization plotting the 2053 nuclear tests and detonations from 1945 to 1998 on a world map, with sound marking each blast. It conveys the pace of the nuclear arms race.

The first lecture of N J Wildberger's History of Mathematics course, starting with Pythagoras' theorem and following Stillwell's text. It emphasizes the flow of ideas over proofs.

A Computer History Museum oral history with Avie Tevanian covering his math talent, work on the Mach microkernel at CMU, joining NeXT, leading NEXTSTEP development and the 1996 Apple acquisition.

A timelapse compilation of the night sky above the Very Large Telescope at Paranal, Chile, using ESO photographers' footage set to music. It shows the stars wheeling overhead and the observatory at work.

A PBS Space Time episode hosted by Gabe Perez-Giz on the nature of spacetime and whether space and time are fundamental. It builds up reference frames and causality in a short, dense format.

A Zig SHOWTIME talk by Benjamin Feng on what a memory allocator is, followed by an interview. It covers allocation strategies and different allocator types in Zig.

A Computer History Museum oral history panel with four 3dfx founders on the company's rise with Voodoo Graphics and Glide, and its fall into bankruptcy. It runs about two and a half hours.

Linus Torvalds tells the story of Linux in a 2001 talk at the Computer History Museum, from writing code as a graduate student in Helsinki in the early 1990s to becoming an icon of open source. It covers the project's origins, its growth, and his views on licensing and kernel design.

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 Computer History Museum oral history with Bill Mensch, designer of the 6502 and 65816, covering his path from a Pennsylvania farm through Motorola and later work.

A 47-minute restoration of a 1920s IBM computing cheese cutter, a machine with parts patented between 1901 and 1907. The video covers the restoration work and explains why it is a computing cheese cutter.

Computer History Museum oral history of Steve Naroff, an engineer at Stepstone, NeXT and Apple who worked on Objective-C. This first session covers his childhood, music background and early career.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli gives a public lecture at the Royal Institution on how our understanding of time has changed, from Boltzmann and Einstein to quantum theory and loop quantum gravity. He blends physics, philosophy and art to argue that time is stranger than everyday intuition suggests.

Kurt Vonnegut's 2004 Case College lecture, with Spanish subtitles, in which he sketches the shapes of stories on a blackboard. He plots story arcs as good and bad fortune against time.

Kirk Sorensen's Google Tech Talk on thorium molten-salt reactors (LFTR). He covers why the technology was shelved after early development and argues that now is the right time to revisit it.

CGP Grey explains how the 2015 UK general election showed the flaws of first-past-the-post voting, with parties like UKIP winning many votes but few seats.

In this first Crust of Rust episode, Jon Gjengset live-codes an example that needs multiple explicit lifetime annotations. Along the way he covers string types and generics over a custom trait.

Mark Rober shows an automatic bullseye dartboard that tracks a thrown dart with motion capture and moves in real time so it always hits the center. He spent over three years on the project.

Tesla's 2014 event where Elon Musk unveiled the dual motor all-wheel-drive Model S and the first Autopilot features.

Ilya Grigorik of Google's Make the Web Fast team explains how to build a mobile site that appears on screen within one second. He covers the network and rendering constraints on mobile.

A man with no flight instruction and only desktop flight simulator experience attempts to take off and land a Cessna 172, with a commercial airline instructor aboard who gives no help. The flight came out of a prop bet.

Deviant Ollam's two-hour conference talk explains how elevators work, from the pit and buffers to the car top, controller logic and access-control features. It shows how this knowledge can be used for optimization and for bypassing building security.

Tom Scott investigates the claim that the microwave was invented to heat hamsters, and interviews James Lovelock about freezing and microwave-thawing hamsters in the 1950s. It traces early magnetron uses beyond radar.