tom chi

Tom Chi gives the opening talk of a Foresight Institute competition on clean energy and clean air, framing excess CO2 as a carbon debt to repay and discussing large-scale tree planting, including by drone.

A WSJ report on China's 'dark factories', highly automated plants run by robots with little human presence, visiting Zeekr's EV factory. It covers Chinese labor costs, automation and overproduction in the EV industry.

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.

A short South China Morning Post report on Nio's second-generation automated battery-swap stations for electric vehicles. It notes that Nio had built more than 800 stations in China by early 2022.

Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, presents GreenArrays' 144-core asynchronous chip at Strange Loop 2013. He explains how idle cores draw almost no power and how tight code minimizes energy use.

A short promotional video of a 5-axis CNC machine milling an elaborate helmet, made by DAISHIN SEIKI with a DMG machine and hyperMILL CAM software. It shows what 5-axis machining can produce.

Sandy Munro sits down with engineers from 3IS to compare the electrical architectures of the Tesla Model Y, Ford Mach-E and VW ID.4. They discuss ECU counts, bus architectures and what the differences mean for cost and integration.

Machine Thinking argues the 1751 machine, a metal-cutting lathe associated with Vaucanson, triggered the biggest explosion of wealth in history by enabling precise manufacturing of other machines.

Lex Fridman interviews Stephen Wolfram for about three hours on cellular automata, computation, the Wolfram Physics Project and his career with Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha.

The ADVChina hosts tour a villa neighborhood in southern China that was built only three years earlier and is already empty and deteriorating. They use it to discuss ghost cities, building quality and the real estate bubble.

ADVChina tours Chinese ghost cities and discusses the housing bubble, with speculative buyers purchasing empty apartments as investments.

A Plogue developer shows the custom electronic test rigs built to measure the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis sound chip (YM2612) for the chipsynth MD emulation. It covers the years of testing and reverse engineering needed to reproduce the chip's quirks accurately.

A Clojure/conj 2014 talk by Lucas Cavalcanti and Edward Wible on four uses of Datomic. They cover HTTP caching, audit trails, mobile database sync and authorization, drawing on the immutable transaction log.

Machine Thinking traces where mechanical precision comes from, from flat surface plates and the three-plate method up through lathes and early measuring tools. It is the first in a series on recreating the first micrometer.

Tom Scott explains how he built his emoji keyboard, which turned out to be a series of bodged-together tools including AutoHotkey and LuaMacros. He tells stories about the value of quick-and-dirty solutions.

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.

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.

Time-lapse of Broad Group erecting a 30-story prefabricated hotel (J57) in Changsha, China in about 15 days. The description touts modular construction's precision, speed and low waste.

A Seeker short documentary on a lab where robots run experiments with almost no human intervention, covering automation and active machine learning in drug discovery and synthetic biology.

A NeXT, Inc. promotional video showing its highly automated factory and the manufacturing of the NeXT Cube, including automated circuit board assembly.

Strange Parts spends four months, seven custom circuit boards and several disassembled iPhones adding a working headphone jack to an iPhone 7 in China. The build is documented in detail.

A full-length recording of Tom Lehrer's 1967 concert in Copenhagen, mixing his satirical songs with spoken comedy between numbers. It runs about 51 minutes with good audio for its age.

Chinese Cooking Demystified shows an ordinary, everyday Chinese wet market to counter sensationalized coverage during the early pandemic, with a pinned comment adding nuance.

A re-upload of American Airlines captain Warren Vanderburgh's 1997 presentation warning that pilots who over-rely on cockpit automation lose manual flying skills and awareness. The uploader adds context from his own flying.

The first lecture of Andrew Ng's Stanford CS229 Machine Learning course, giving an overview of the course. It introduces supervised and unsupervised learning, learning theory and reinforcement learning.

Robert C. Martin's Ruby Midwest 2011 keynote argues that software architecture should express the application's intent rather than its framework. He covers separating entities, interactors and boundaries so the web, database and framework are details.

Johnny Harris investigates why McDonald's ice cream machines are so often broken, covering the Taylor machines, the repair restrictions on franchisees and the Kytch workaround device.

The first episode of Google's Machine Learning Recipes series. It introduces machine learning and builds a first supervised-learning classifier in about six lines of Python using scikit-learn.

A Wendover Productions explainer on how China built the world's largest high-speed rail network so quickly and why its rail strategy differs from America's. It covers politics, social benefits and the economics of unprofitable lines.

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison visits the chinampas, the floating gardens of Xochimilco in Mexico City. He looks at this ancient Aztec agricultural system and the project restoring it.

Mark Rober and Jabril build an app that uses machine learning to decode baseball sign sequences. The video also explains neural networks in a simple, accessible way.

Chai Jing's 104-minute documentary on China's smog, with full English subtitles. A former TV anchor, she investigates what smog is, where it comes from and what can be done, prompted by her daughter's health problems.

Fedor Pikus's CppCon 2017 talk on C++ atomics, looking at what they let the programmer express and what the hardware actually does. It covers memory ordering and lock-free programming from basic to advanced.

Serpentza, a Westerner living in China, describes Chinese influence efforts abroad and the cultural conflict between Shen Yun and Confucius Institutes. It is a commentary from his personal perspective.

James Howard Kunstler's TED talk argues that American public spaces and architecture have become unworthy of care, damaging civic life. He presents suburban sprawl and car-first design as failures of the common good.

Steve Mould explains homochirality: why biological molecules like sugars and amino acids come in only one handedness. He covers ideas about how this asymmetry might have arisen, touching on meteorite samples and RNA.

PolyMatter explains China's housing bubble and why around 50 million homes sit empty. It covers cultural and economic reasons behind the overbuilding and the government's bind.

Huygens Optics experiments with etching tiny patterns in glass, covering hydrofluoric acid risks, buffered oxide etch, photoresist and chromium masks, and laser-induced etching. It ends with attempts at microscopic Tesla valves.

Simon Brown's Agile on the Beach 2019 talk presents the C4 model, a lightweight approach to diagramming software architecture with a shared vocabulary and simple notation.

Economist Martin Jacques offers three building blocks for understanding China's rise, including seeing China as a civilization-state rather than a nation-state. He also covers how Chinese people view the state.