2020

Michael Levin's keynote at the ALife 2020 conference, 'Robot Cancer', on how bioelectric signaling in embryogenesis and regeneration informs unconventional computing, cognition and the 'software of life'. He argues biology offers lessons for building adaptive machines.

Alexis King's ZuriHac 2020 talk on how effect systems in Haskell can be implemented efficiently. It looks at the performance cost of effect libraries and how to reduce it.

Fons van der Plas introduces Pluto.jl, a reactive notebook for Julia that tracks references between cells and re-runs affected cells when code changes. The talk was given at JuliaCon 2020.

Keith Packard traces the 35-year history of the X Window System at linux.conf.au 2020. He uses X to examine licensing, corporate interests and community dynamics in free software, including Unix workstation vendors and Stallman's influence.

Benno Rice's linux.conf.au 2020 talk asks whether UNIX was the best design we could have had. He looks at what alternatives existed, what was gained and lost, and what could be re-learned, including the limits of treating everything as a file.

Zig creator Andrew Kelley's RedisConf 2020 talk on modeling data flow with asynchronous I/O in Zig. It explains how Zig's async/await avoids function coloring, and Loris Cro demonstrates OkRedis, a zero-allocation Redis client.

Jared Mauch tells how he got fed up with poor internet options in rural Michigan and built his own fiber network to his town. The talk was given at NLNOG Live in September 2020.

A one-hour OCaml Workshop 2020 talk on the state of the OCaml Platform, covering IDE support, next steps for the tooling and plans for 2020-2021.

RustConf 2020 closing keynote by Sian Griffin that dives into Pokemon Blue glitches, notably Missingno and arbitrary-code-execution tricks. It uses them to explain how memory unsafety works and how memory-safe languages like Rust prevent such bugs.

Emery Berger's CppCon 2020 plenary on why performance is hard on modern hardware after the end of Dennard scaling. It covers benchmarking pitfalls and introduces new profiling tools for finding real bottlenecks.

Day one of the X.Org Developer's Conference 2020 stream, including talks on the Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan driver, the WSL graphics architecture, X11 and Wayland apps in WSL, and Mesa for D3D12.

FOSDEM 2020 talk from Collabora on pressure-vessel, an experimental mechanism that puts Steam games in containers on Linux. It covers using namespaces to give games their own runtime library stack independent of the host.

Robert Collins explains why rustup installs were painfully slow on Windows and how changes to rustup and Windows cut install time from 3m30s to 14s. The talk covers NTFS, small files and the cost of antivirus hooks on file close.

React Helsinki meetup recording featuring a talk on lessons with Apollo GraphQL and Linear co-founder Tuomas Artman on real-time sync for web apps. The sync talk explains Linear's local-first architecture.

An AWS re:Invent session explaining Amazon's Working Backwards process, where teams start from customer needs and write a press release and FAQ (PR-FAQ) before building. It covers the five customer questions that frame the process.

Omar Rizwan's short !!Con talk about writing a Breakout game in JavaScript that runs inside a PDF. It explores the surprisingly large PDF specification, including its scripting support.

Andrej Karpathy, then Tesla's head of AI, presents at ScaledML 2020 on how Tesla builds full self-driving using vision-based neural nets and fleet data collection. He covers training custom detectors and neural nets gradually replacing traditional code.

Herbert Wolverson's Roguelike Celebration 2020 talk surveying procedural map generation techniques, including integration of hand-crafted prefabs and vaults.

Tesla's 2020 Battery Day event, with a company update and a keynote on new cell design, manufacturing, vertical integration and cheaper lithium and materials. It ends with the Plaid Model S and a Q&A.

Ophthalmologist Chris Knobbe argues that excess omega-6 seed oils are a unifying cause of chronic diseases of civilization such as diabetes and macular degeneration. He presents the case at Low Carb Denver 2020.

Rich Harris's Svelte Summit 2020 talk on what a modern web development workflow could look like. It announced that Sapper would give way to what became SvelteKit.

Peter Hutterer's linux.conf.au 2020 talk on creating libinput, the unified userspace input library, and the difficulties of handling the many quirks of input devices.

Jim Keller's talk at the 2020 Scaled Machine Learning conference on Moore's Law in the age of AI chips. He compares scalar, vector and GPU-style parallel approaches to computation.

Jon Gjengset's 2020 PhD dissertation presentation at MIT on partial state in dataflow-based materialized views, the idea behind the Noria database. The Q&A is cut out.

Adam Robinson-Yu's GDC 2020 talk on how he shelved a big project to prototype what became A Short Hike. He covers the solo development process and technical choices like a pixel shader over low-poly models.

A QCon London 2020 talk by Tesla engineers on the architecture of Tesla's Virtual Power Plant. It covers aggregating distributed batteries and solar with vertically integrated hardware and software across cloud and edge.

Jason Perkins's talk at Vintage Computer Festival East 2020 compares the user interface of the Xerox Star with that of the Apple Lisa. It covers editing documents, the Star's mouse and a Q&A.