work

Historia Civilis traces the history of work and time discipline, comparing modern working hours with those of medieval peasants and the changes brought by clocks and industrialization. It draws on works such as Schor's The Overworked American.

Branch Education explains how Starlink works, from the ground dish and satellites to phased-array beam steering and data routing. Animations cover how a beam stays connected to a satellite moving at 27,000 km/h.

Jared Owen's 3D animated breakdown of how a Brunswick GS-X bowling pinsetter works, showing its mechanisms for sweeping, lifting and resetting pins and balls.

A Kurzgesagt animation giving a big-picture tour of the human immune system, its organs, transport network, and the cells it produces every day. It accompanies their IMMUNE book.

Linus Tech Tips reviews the first Framework Laptop, a fully repairable and upgradeable machine. The reviewer expected a flimsy chunky device and was happily surprised.

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.

A 3D-animated walkthrough of a heavy-haul diesel-electric freight locomotive, covering the frame, coupling, draft gear, engine and drive systems. Made in Blender by Animagraffs.

Veritasium explains why bicycles are stable, arguing that gyroscopic effects are not the answer. The video shows countersteering and an experiment where riders blocked from steering the opposite way cannot turn.

Veritasium explores how electrical energy actually travels in a circuit, arguing that it flows through electromagnetic fields around the wires rather than through the electrons. It builds a long-cable experiment with Caltech to test when a distant bulb lights.

Technology Connections explains how dishwashers work and how to use them well, including detergent use, the prewash cycle and why pre-rinsing hurts. It follows his earlier dishwasher videos.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains how the greenhouse effect actually works, given that infrared is mostly absorbed low in the atmosphere already. She walks through why more CO2 still warms the surface.

A 36-minute animated deep dive from Branch Education into how DRAM works. It shows how memory connects to the CPU and how billions of bits are stored in nanoscale capacitor cells. It also covers why DRAM sits between SSDs and the processor.

CuriousMarc powers up a vintage HP 5061A cesium beam clock and explains both the quantum principle and the HP implementation in detail. It is part of a longer atomic clock series.

Ben Felix explains how central bank money creation and quantitative easing actually work, and what they do and do not imply for asset prices and currency. He addresses the common belief that the Fed prints unlimited money and props up markets.

A step-by-step animated explanation of how SHA-256 works, from padding and message schedule to the compression function and final hash, with source code for the animations.

Scott Manley covers how GPS works and how civilian accuracy went from a planned 100 meters to about one meter. He explains the technology and the removal of restrictions that made this possible.

Veritasium visits the US Navy's Crane facility to test top night vision goggles. It explains how image intensifier tubes and thermal or digital systems work and compares the generations of the technology.

Veritasium builds a QR code by hand to explain how it works. It covers the history of Morse code and barcodes, how QR codes encode data, why damaged codes still scan, and how safe they are.

Tom Scott visits an eHighway test in Lubeck, Germany, where electric trucks with pantographs draw power from overhead wires. He explains how this could electrify road freight.

CGP Grey argues that the two-day weekend is poorly structured and proposes taking days off midweek, such as Wednesday and Sunday, instead.

CGP Grey argues that your brain treats a whole home as one room during lockdown, blurring work, rest and leisure. He recommends creating separate spaces and routines for different activities to stay balanced.

Tom 7 (suckerpinch) delivers a long, comedic digression on gradient descent and floating-point imprecision. He shows how rounding behavior can supply the nonlinearity needed to build a neural network.

Veritasium explains why analog computing may suit AI workloads, covering old analog computers, The Analog Thing and Mythic's analog chips that use flash memory for neural network inference. It argues digital hardware is hitting limits.

Wes Bos breaks down the techniques behind the McMaster-Carr website's speed: server-rendered HTML, prefetching, CDN and service worker caching, preloading, critical CSS and fixed-size images. He also notes its old-school jQuery and YUI JavaScript.

A short cartoon explaining how language models like ChatGPT work, from autocomplete and conditional probabilities to neural networks, gradient descent and backpropagation. It shows how networks act as universal function approximators.

Harvard professor Arthur Brooks explains why boredom is useful rather than something to avoid. He describes how a wandering mind engages the brain's default mode network, which supports creativity and curiosity, and suggests it may protect against depression.

Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder explains how 5G works and examines the health concerns around millimeter wave radiation. She reviews the scientific evidence and the open letters from scientists.

A Welch Labs explainer on neural scaling laws and the compute-efficient frontier, asking why model loss seems to hit a line it cannot cross. It draws an analogy to an ideal gas law for AI.

Technology Connections explains what forced-air furnaces are, how they work and why they need electricity. He covers combustion, airflow and the parts of a modern furnace.

Yosh trains a reinforcement learning agent to drive Trackmania until he can no longer beat it. The video explains how the training works and the design choices involved.

Technology Connections explains how an ordinary tank water heater works, including twin-element designs, and why it is cleverer than it looks.

An Economics Explained video on the different kinds of billionaires, from founders to oligarchs. It explains how wealth is held in illiquid stock and why diversification is a problem for some.

Tom Scott makes the difference between a million and a billion dollars tangible by using distance on a road trip instead of volume. The drive makes the scale of a billion intuitively felt.

About Here looks at the housing crisis and argues for non-market solutions such as co-op and social housing, drawing on Vancouver's situation. It discusses how public supply can hold down rents.

Asianometry traces how the Japanese zaibatsu families grew into vast industrial combines and how postwar reforms abruptly broke up their wealth and control.

An Economics Explained video arguing that the Netherlands shows taxes alone can't reduce wealth inequality. It distinguishes income inequality from wealth inequality and discusses the Gini index.

A Wendover Productions video on how dollar store chains expanded across America and why they displace grocery stores in small towns. It covers their business model and supplier leverage.

A short ProPublica video explaining the "Buy, Borrow, Die" strategy wealthy Americans use to cut taxes. They borrow against appreciating assets instead of selling, and the gains are never taxed at death.

The Signal Path takes apart a Starlink dish layer by layer, analyzing the phased array RF design, system architecture and integrated circuits, with an X-ray of the RF stack.

Oh The Urbanity! tests the theory that banning housing investors would fix affordability, using Rotterdam's ban as a case study. The video finds mixed results.