xy mode

A standing whiteboard conversation at Lang.NEXT 2012 among Carl Hewitt, Erik Meijer and Clemens Szyperski about the actor model. Hewitt, who originated the model, explains its foundations.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk by the creator of Org-mode, introducing the Emacs subsystem for plain-text note-taking and project planning. It covers outlines, TODO states, tags, dates and priorities, and later shows using Org-mode as a spreadsheet.

A demo of writing technical documents in Emacs Org mode using org-babel, so that code blocks and generated content stay consistent when things change. The author shares the demo files and his dotfiles.

Tom Scott tells how John Reber's plan to dam San Francisco Bay was disproved by the Army Corps of Engineers' giant hydraulic Bay Model in Sausalito. The model showed the plan would have been dangerously wrong.

The official tour video of Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, the world's largest model railway. It shows the 1,300 square meter layout with trains, aircraft, cars and ships moving around.

Harry Schwartz gives a roughly hour-long tour of Emacs Org mode as an outliner, task manager, markup language and agenda tool. He demonstrates how he uses it for documents, presentations and todo lists.

A dialogue with Gary Weber on the default mode network, meditation and non-dual awakening, with discussion of psychedelics, thought and time. It is part of the Non-Dual Couch series.

A spectrogram visualization of the sounds in a dial-up modem handshake, with an annotated image explaining each noise. It shows how the handshake's tones map to the negotiation steps.

Imphenzia's 83-minute tutorial covers the low poly modeling techniques he learned over five years of Blender use, with timestamps from navigation and extrusion onward. It uses Blender 2.83 with default keys.

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 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.

Linus Tech Tips explains how Windows Modern Standby causes laptops to drain battery while asleep, arguing it makes Windows laptops hard to recommend compared to MacBooks.

Rob Miles discusses GPT-3 on Computerphile, covering how scaling parameters kept improving results over GPT-2 and how the model nearly learned arithmetic without anyone knowing exactly how.

A short animation that pairs the sound of a dialup modem handshake with a graphic explaining what each phase of the sound means.

Scott Wlaschin's NDC talk on using statically typed functional programming, F# in particular, to model a business domain. Types are used to represent the domain precisely and to encode business rules so that illegal states cannot be built, with the compiler acting as an instant unit test.

John Kitchin shows how Emacs org-mode with Python lets researchers combine narrative, math, figures and executable code in one document. It exports to LaTeX, HTML and PDF, and he used it for papers and e-books.

Casey Muratori's 2005 video introducing immediate-mode GUIs as an alternative to retained widget toolkits. He explains the motivation and shows minimal-state button logic.

A Smarter Every Day episode from aboard a nuclear submarine on how the crew makes breathable air. It covers oxygen generation from seawater, oxygen candles and CO2 scrubbing with amine.

Anders Hejlsberg whiteboards how compilers are taught versus how modern ones are actually built. He explains the shift to compilers as services with incremental, error-tolerant, IDE-oriented design, as in Roslyn and TypeScript.

An Autoline After Hours episode with teardown expert Sandy Munro and a panel of auto journalists. It covers his Tesla Model 3 teardown, including the battery, drive modules, build quality and manufacturing automation.

Sasha Rush surveys linear RNNs and state space models as replacements for attention in transformer-style models, in a talk for MLSys. It covers the foundational preliminaries and predates Mamba.

Jerobeam Fenderson shows how to draw a mushroom on an oscilloscope in XY mode using stereo audio, then animates it by modulating with a larger wave. Pd and Max4Live patches are provided.

Cliff Click walks through a small performance example on a modern out-of-order CPU. He covers pipelining, ILP, CISC vs RISC, multicore, and why cache misses and the memory subsystem dominate performance.

Luca Sas's ACCU 2021 talk on Modern C, a style of C and C-like C++ aligned with data-oriented design. It covers centralized memory management, zero-is-initialization, error handling and API design.

Andrej Karpathy builds a bigram character-level language model from scratch, introducing torch.Tensor and the framework of training, sampling and loss evaluation. It is the first step toward a GPT-style Transformer in his makemore series.

Gamers Nexus benchmarks the Ryzen 9 7950X in its BIOS Eco Mode presets (65W, 105W and stock 170W). It measures the performance cost against the power and heat savings.

An engineering explainer on why Tesla abandoned the induction motor for the Model 3 and used an IPM-SynRM design. It covers the reluctance torque and permanent magnet principles behind the choice.

Markus Winand shows how SQL has evolved since SQL-92, comparing old-style solutions to modern features such as window functions and system versioning, and notes that many developers never learn them.

Stripe's John Collison interviews Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about growth to around $5 billion ARR, model economics, agentic AI and vitalism.

Autoline's John McElroy visits Sandy Munro's shop, where a Tesla Model 3 is being prepared for a teardown benchmarking study. Munro, with deep design and manufacturing experience, points out issues he dislikes about the car's build.

Richard Feldman's elm-conf talk on designing models so that bugs from impossible application states cannot occur, using Elm's compiler and types. It demonstrates techniques for making invalid states unrepresentable.

Jeremy Howard's 90-minute practical tour of language models. It covers how they work, GPT-4's capabilities and limits, using the OpenAI API, code writing, data analysis and fine-tuning.

The first lecture of Andy Pavlo's CMU 15-445 Intro to Database Systems (Fall 2019), covering course introduction and the relational model.

Andrej Karpathy gives a one-hour general-audience introduction to large language models, covering what they are, how they are trained, comparisons to operating systems, and security challenges such as jailbreaks.

A three-hour-plus Joe Rogan podcast with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, policy lead Vijaya Gadde and journalist Tim Pool. They discuss Twitter's moderation, bans and rule enforcement, with Pool challenging Dorsey and Gadde with examples.

Aaron Bieber, a longtime Vim user, describes his experience trying Emacs with evil mode. He covers what he found, what he missed from Vim, and what Vim could borrow from Emacs.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day undergoes hypoxia training and experiences his own impaired thinking as oxygen is withdrawn. The video shows how quickly and unnoticeably oxygen deprivation degrades judgment, illustrating why you put your own mask on first.

Jay Parlar's Strange Loop talk shows how model checkers such as Alloy can find complex bugs in a system's design without running or reading any code. He walks through modeling architectures and checking every possible sequence of operations, including a real security bug and a UI feature-interaction bug.

Scott Wlaschin shows how statically typed functional languages, using F# examples, can model a business domain so that invalid states cannot be represented. The type system acts almost like an instant unit test at compile time.

Robert Miles explains reward modelling, in which an AI learns what humans want from their preference comparisons instead of a hand-written reward function. He walks through the 2017 paper on deep reinforcement learning from human preferences.