aging

Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a technique that captures a trillion frames per second, fast enough to show light itself moving through a scene. He discusses possible uses such as cameras that see around corners or inside the body.

Harvard geneticist David Sinclair discusses his book Lifespan at Google. He covers the biology of aging, lifestyle interventions and possible future ways to slow or reverse it.

Inventor Mary Lou Jepsen demonstrates using red light and sound to see inside the body and brain, aiming at tumor detection and neural activity measurement, and potentially a cheaper wearable MRI replacement.

TED talk by biochemist Cynthia Kenyon on how a simple genetic mutation can double the lifespan of the worm C. elegans, and what that suggests about extending healthy human life.

Excerpts from Linus Torvalds's DebConf 14 talk on why desktop Linux struggles. He covers application distribution, distros breaking backwards compatibility, wasted package management effort and how Windows does app distribution better.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp speaks at MeetBSD about running a messaging service on FreeBSD and Erlang at huge scale. He covers the stack, tuning and the challenges of millions of connections per host.

Robert Erdmann, a materials scientist at the Rijksmuseum, gives a PyCon keynote on the ultra-high-resolution imaging of Rembrandt's Night Watch. He covers the automated gantry camera system, the Python software that drives it, and the large volumes of image data involved.

A FOSDEM 2023 talk from the Matrix team on Matrix 2.0, covering sliding sync, the Element X client rewrite and next-generation calling. It explains how Matrix aims to match the speed of proprietary messengers.

Psychiatrist Daniel Amen discusses lessons from 83,000 brain scans, arguing that brain activity patterns relate to psychological symptoms and that you can improve your brain.

Scott Chacon introduces Git by showing what happens under the hood for basic commands: staging, committing, data storage, branching, merging and pushing. He contrasts it with Subversion and shows history viewing with log.

Kirk McKusick gives a narrative history of BSD from its start at UC Berkeley in the late 1970s through the 1980s releases and the lawsuit that led to 4.4BSD-Lite in 1992. It is full of anecdotes from a key developer.

A DEF CON 21 talk by Adam Laurie and Zac Franken on decapping chips, covering how to remove chip packaging and image the die to read out contents such as ROM.

Charlie Marsh of Astral explains how uv, a Rust Python package manager, got so fast. He covers allocators, concurrency, zero-copy tricks and the challenges of Python packaging.

Moxie Marlinspike speaks at Next Generation Threats 2014 about the challenges of encrypted communication and how Signal addresses them. He also draws on American action movies as narrative for secure communications.

Frederic Laloux presents his research on self-managing, purpose-driven organizations, followed by Q&A. He summarizes the findings of his book Reinventing Organizations and examples such as Buurtzorg.

UCLA professor Dario Nardi presents brain-imaging research suggesting that different Myers-Briggs personality types use their brains in different ways. He discusses how each type can reach a state of creative flow. It is aimed at a general audience.

FreeBSD developer Benno Rice traces the history of init and bootstrap systems at linux.conf.au 2019 to explain why systemd was seen as necessary and why it provokes such strong reactions. He also discusses why change is scary.

Daniel Stone, a longtime X and Wayland developer, explains at linux.conf.au 2013 why X11's design became untenable and what motivated Wayland. The talk walks through X's history and accumulated cruft.

Bryan Cantrill's LISA11 talk on how illumos arose after Oracle closed OpenSolaris. It covers the history of Sun, ZFS, DTrace and Zones, and the diaspora of kernel engineers, with a famous rant about Oracle and Larry Ellison.

Linus Torvalds gives a Google tech talk on git, the source control system he created two years earlier. He argues for distributed version control over centralized systems such as CVS and Subversion.

Dr. Michael Greger presents his book How Not to Die at Google NYC, arguing that diet and lifestyle changes can prevent or reverse many of the top causes of death. He walks through evidence on whole-food plant-based eating.

Dr. Jason Fung, a nephrologist, explains therapeutic fasting as a treatment for obesity and type 2 diabetes. He frames it around the two-compartment problem of fat storage and insulin resistance.

Dr. Terry Wahls tells how she used diet to manage her multiple sclerosis and get out of a wheelchair, drawing on mitochondrial biology. TED flagged the talk as health advice based on personal narrative.

Gary Taubes presents the argument of his book Why We Get Fat to Googlers in 2011. He claims the type of calories matters more than the count, challenges calories-in-calories-out thinking and criticizes the low-fat dietary consensus.

Dirk Hohndel explains why the Subsurface dive log project migrated from Gtk to Qt, the obstacles encountered, and advice for other applications frustrated with Gtk. It is a linux.conf.au 2014 talk.

Paul Turner of Google presents kernel interfaces for user-level scheduling of real threads, aiming at a uniform synchronous programming model across C++, Java, Go and Python. It introduces the switchto-style system calls behind Google's fibers.

Dr. Sarah Hallberg argues in a TEDx talk that type 2 diabetes can be treated and potentially reversed through diet, especially by restricting carbohydrates. TED flagged the talk as outside its guidelines and warned against taking it as medical advice.

Cardiologist James O'Keefe argues in a TEDx talk that moderate running confers the best longevity benefits, while extreme endurance training can damage the heart. He draws on data and his own experience as a lifelong runner.

Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk is a hypothetical account of how an intelligence agency such as the NSA would sabotage open source software, standards and online discussion. It covers Skype's history, OpenSSL and psyops against standards.

X.Org developer Daniel Stone explains the history and technical limits of the X Window System and why Wayland was created, debunking myths from forum comments. He covers topics such as network transparency and blocking calls.

Ronald Minnich of Google explains how UEFI firmware is a large closed attack surface and describes Google's work replacing it with Linux-based boot firmware. It also touches on Intel ME and other security coprocessors.

Actress Claudia Christian tells how she overcame alcoholism using the Sinclair Method, which uses naltrexone to gradually reduce cravings. She discusses fresh perspectives on treating alcohol use disorder.

A clip from Steve Jobs's 1997 WWDC session, in which he answers a hostile question from an audience member about Apple killing OpenDoc. He says to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology, and that saying no is part of focus.

Rob Landley compares Toybox and BusyBox and surveys options for embedded system command-line tools, including GNU. He also tells the story of leaving BusyBox, Toybox becoming Android's command line, and licensing.

Dr. Jason Fung, a nephrologist, presents his view of the causes of obesity and type 2 diabetes, focusing on hormones such as insulin rather than calories alone. The talk draws on research and his Intensive Dietary Management program.

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 BSDCan 2018 talk on why systemd exists and what it got right and wrong. It traces the history of Unix init and why Linux distributions adopted it, while asking what the BSDs should learn.

Dr. Howard Schubiner presents his research that much chronic pain comes from learned neural pathways rather than structural damage, and outlines a treatment approach based on that view.

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.

Isaac Freund, author of the River Wayland compositor, talks about writing a Wayland compositor in Zig. He covers why he chose Zig over C and Rust and how Zig can wrap a hairy C library.