2012

Mike Hearn's talk at the 2012 London Bitcoin Conference on the future of Bitcoin, new applications and rebuilding the banking system. He covers lesser-known protocol features such as contracts, escrow and scripting.

Giant Bomb interviews John Carmack at E3 2012 about his virtual reality head-mounted display prototype. He demos it and talks about latency, depth and focus problems in VR.

Aaron Swartz's keynote at Freedom to Connect 2012 describing how ordinary people helped defeat the SOPA censorship bill. He recounts how the Senate unexpectedly united behind the bill and how grassroots action stopped it.

A short excerpt from Dr Russell Barkley's 2012 Burnett Lecture on ADHD, focused on treatment. He argues ADHD is a disorder of executive function and self-regulation, and that environments should be designed to compensate.

Rob Pike's Google I/O 2012 talk shows how goroutines and channels solve tricky concurrency problems with simple Go code. It features a playful goroutine demo with gophers passing messages and a search engine example.

The Grugq's Hack In The Box 2012 talk on operational security for hackers, drawing on hacker indictments and counter-intelligence research. It reviews OPSEC goals and methods for avoiding detection and arrest, with case studies of how hackers got caught.

Rich Hickey's keynote at RailsConf 2012, a close sibling of his 'Simple Made Easy' talk. He distinguishes simple (not intertwined) from easy (familiar), and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things, with Rails-specific examples including large gem collections.

John Carmack's long QuakeCon 2012 keynote, a free-ranging talk covering software engineering, game platforms, game streaming, and his early head-mounted display and VR work.

Official trailer for Eugene Jarecki's 2012 documentary The House I Live In, an investigative look at America's war on drugs and its effect on the criminal justice system. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

Martin Fowler's GOTO 2012 introduction to NoSQL databases: where they came from, their data models, how consistency thinking differs, and when to use them. He argues they won't make relational databases obsolete and introduces polyglot persistence.

Herb Sutter's deep C++ and Beyond 2012 talk on atomics and the C++ memory model, covering why programmers chasing top performance need to understand hardware ordering. This is part one of two.

Dr. Richard Cook, a physician and patient safety researcher, presents his ideas on how complex systems fail, at Velocity 2012. He argues for designing for resiliency rather than trying to exhaustively handle every failure mode.

A 3-minute demo of a tiny IOCCC 2012 winning C program that simulates fluid dynamics in an 80x25 terminal, using any text (including its own source) as input. The video shows the simulation running to Handel's Water Music.

Russell Barkley gives the keynote at UNC's 2012 Burnett Seminar on ADHD. He presents it as an executive function disorder and discusses its effects and how to help.

Locksport historian Schuyler Towne's RVASec 2012 talk on why people lock their doors, tracing the history of locks and the assumptions about security behind them.

Tef's EMF 2012 talk on lessons from a career in programming, a candid and humorous look at why programming is so often terrible. Slides and a draft script are available online.

Part 2 of a Q&A workshop with security researcher Jacob Appelbaum from April 2012, covering mobile phone security, cellphone forensics, state repression and surveillance. Topics include booting Tails from USB and surveillance self-defense resources.

Part two of Herb Sutter's C++ and Beyond 2012 session on atomic weapons, a deep dive into the C++ memory model, atomics, memory ordering, and hardware behavior. It ends with the modern meaning of volatile.

Hartverdrahtet by Akronyme Analogiker, the winning PC 4k intro at Revision 2012. It is a realtime demo with music and fractal visuals in 4096 bytes.

A 2012 Fortune dinner debate between Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt over whether technological progress is healthy or stalling and whether Google can still innovate.

Eben Moglen's re:publica 2012 talk argues that media which spy on and data-mine the public threaten freedom of thought, and that free technology and free culture are needed to protect it.

Yehuda Katz's Railsberry 2012 talk on why Rails is hard to learn and use. He explains that the framework's many features reflect real complexity in web applications that newcomers do not yet see.

Bjarne Stroustrup's keynote at Going Native 2012 covers the ideas behind C++11, including using types to prevent errors and simplifying code with the STL.

A dotJS 2012 conference talk by Fat (of Twitter Bootstrap fame) on what open source really means and why maintainers feel guilty about it. It covers the obligations, expectations and burnout that come with releasing popular open source software, delivered with humor.

Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software and StackExchange, speaks at Y Combinator's Startup School in 2012. He shares his perspective on building startups.

Matt Wynne's GoRuCo 2012 talk on why Rails apps get hard to change as they grow, and how a ports-and-adapters hexagonal architecture separates application logic from the framework.

Chandler Carruth's GoingNative 2012 talk on Clang, covering how the compiler helps defend C++ code from mistakes. It makes the case for Clang's diagnostics and tooling.

Brian Leroux's dotJS 2012 talk WTFJS is a quick, humorous tour of JavaScript's odd behaviors and quirks.

A fireside Q&A with the Go team (Pike, Thompson, Griesemer and others) at Google I/O 2012. They answer audience questions about Go's design, goals, garbage collection plans and future.

Moleman 2 is a feature-length documentary about the demoscene, tracing its rise from 1980s Commodore 64 culture to modern real-time art. It explains the algorithms and creative process behind demos and intros.

A VPRO documentary following ecologist and cameraman John D. Liu. He documents the regreening of China's Loess Plateau and other efforts to restore deserts and biodiversity around the world.

Gary Bernhardt argues that software history moves in reactions to earlier tools, and that new tools are not simply better in every way. He distinguishes capability (what a tool allows) from suitability (what it fits), and warns against repeating past mistaken reactions.

A BBC Four documentary following Alan Bond and Reaction Engines as they pursue the Skylon spaceplane and its SABRE engine. It covers the history from HOTOL and the heat-exchanger breakthrough.

Kalman Reti, one of the last Symbolics developers, gives a roughly hour-long talk on Symbolics Lisp machines. It covers the machines and their environment from an insider's perspective.

Casey Neistat's social experiment in New York City where he tries to 'steal' his own bike with various tools, showing how little stops passers-by from helping.

Lieutenant General Mark Hertling gives a TEDx talk arguing that obesity and poor youth fitness are a national security problem because too few young Americans can meet military physical requirements.

A real-time demoscene production made with an overhead projector, released by DESiRE and TRSi for @Party in the OHP category. It is a short, quirky entry in the demoscene tradition.

Pannenkoek2012's commentated tool-assisted Super Mario 64 run collecting the Watch for Rolling Rocks star with half an A press, using parallel universes and QPU movement. The video is marked outdated in favor of a newer version.

A one-minute 2012 Microsoft television commercial for Internet Explorer 9, set to Alex Clare's 'Too Close'. It pitches a 'more beautiful web' with fast one-click access to favorite sites.

A Gamereactor interview at E3 2012 with John Carmack, who shows his lag-free head-mounted display running DOOM 3 BFG Edition. He discusses what the headset could mean for the games industry.