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.

3Blue1Brown's second neural network chapter explains cost functions and gradient descent, showing how a network learns by minimizing error during training.

3Blue1Brown explains the math and mechanics behind Bitcoin visually: ledgers, digital signatures, proof of work and the blockchain, building up a decentralized payment system from first principles.

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 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.

Ray Dalio's 30-minute animated video explains how the economy works through credit, debt, interest rates, and short- and long-term cycles. It is based on his template for understanding the economy.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Technology Connections explains how dishwashers work, why detergent pods underperform powder, and how to use the pre-wash and main-wash compartments. It argues you don't need to pre-rinse dishes.

3Blue1Brown's visual explanation of how transformers and GPT-style language models work, tracing data through tokens, embeddings and attention.

Technology Connections takes a long, detailed look at how a 1970s electromechanical pinball machine works, from relays to stepper motors and mechanical logic. It is the first part of a series.

Technology Connections explains how the simple American drip coffee maker works, including the bimetal valve and bubble-pump heating, and compares the original Mr. Coffee with modern machines.

Adam Savage shows a set of Mitutoyo ceramic gauge blocks and uses them to explain metrology, the science of measurement. He argues that accuracy and precision work differently than most people assume, which changes how you think about every measuring tool.

Real Engineering explains the engineering behind the James Webb Space Telescope, including its folding mirror, sunshield, orbit and cooling systems, and why deployment was so difficult.

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.

A Veritasium video on AlphaFold, DeepMind's protein structure prediction system, and the protein design work it enabled. It features interviews with John Jumper and with David Baker's protein design group and explains why predicting protein folding matters.

WeberAuto explains how the Honda E-Drive (i-MMD) hybrid transaxle works in the CR-V, Accord, Insight and Clarity hybrids. It walks through the system's three modes of operation.

Technology Connections explains why car turn signals appear to drift out of sync at stoplights and how thermal and other flasher designs work. It also covers how synchronization could be achieved.

A Medlife Crisis video by cardiologist Rohin Francis on overdiagnosis and over-screening. It explains how detecting more disease does not necessarily mean saving more lives, and covers harms such as unnecessary treatment.

Veritasium traces analog computers from the Antikythera mechanism and Kelvin's tide-predicting machines to fire control and modern analog approaches. It explains how these machines computed continuously rather than digitally.

Everyday Astronaut explains the basic physics of rocket engines, the main engine cycles and fuel types, then compares SpaceX's methane-fueled full-flow staged combustion Raptor to other engines. It runs nearly 50 minutes with chapter markers.

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.

Physicist Angela Collier argues that dark matter is not a theory but a set of observations, covering rotation curves, the CMB and why modified gravity struggles to explain them.

Yannic Kilcher walks through the Attention Is All You Need paper, which introduced the Transformer, a sequence model based solely on attention without recurrence or convolutions. He reviews the architecture and the paper's translation results.

A cardiologist runs a detailed, skeptical review of the Wim Hof Method, covering the research on cold exposure and breathing techniques. It also teaches how to read scientific statistics critically.

Rune Skovbo Johansen explains Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering, a technique he invented and released as open source. It makes dithering stick to 3D surfaces and covers the experiments and shortcomings along the way, inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn.