arms race

Bryan Cantrill's 2007 Google Tech Talk on DTrace, showing how dynamic tracing improves debugging of both development and live production systems. It includes a vivid war story about tracking down a problem on a Sun Ray server.

Part one of Capt. Grace Hopper's 1982 NSA lecture on the future of data, hardware, software and people. It includes her humor, her nanosecond demonstration and views on scaling and resisting old ways of doing things.

Erlang co-creator Joe Armstrong's Code BEAM SF 2018 keynote revisits good ideas from the history of computing that were dropped, and asks which should be revived. It also touches on Erlang and Elixir.

Joe Armstrong's GOTO 2018 talk contrasts the problems computer scientists study with the problems users have. He revisits forgotten great ideas such as tuple spaces, flow-based programming, Xanadu and Unix pipes, with anecdotes.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk in which Bryan Cantrill demonstrates DTrace and explains how it improves debugging of both development and live production systems.

Captain Disillusion debunks the Cicret Bracelet, a crowdfunded wearable that claimed to project a touchscreen onto the wrist. He looks at the concept, design, execution and fundraising.

Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, gives a funny and opinionated Strange Loop talk on the tangled state of software: build tools, package managers, entropy and the physical limits of computation. He argues for ideas like naming things by content hash and throwing away your first version.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, interviews Alan Kay at Code Mesh. They discuss the meaning of object orientation, message passing, the META II paper, and the state of computer science.

Admiral Grace Hopper holds up a length of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond, about 11.8 inches. She explains how she made the idea concrete to people who could not picture a billionth of a second.

A panel with Tony Hoare, Joe Armstrong and Carl Hewitt, hosted by Francesco Cesarini, on the history and future of concurrency. The three creators of CSP, Erlang and the actor model discuss their differing approaches.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, and Jeremy Ruston, creator of TiddlyWiki, discuss hypertext, Ted Nelson's idea of intertwingled knowledge, and a way to combine TiddlyWiki with Erlang. It is a Code Mesh LDN 2018 talk.

Bisqwit writes a raytracer from scratch in C++ for DOS, rendering in the 16-color VGA palette at 640x480. The video also covers color quantization and ordered dithering.

Joe Armstrong, inventor of Erlang, gives a GOTO Chicago 2018 talk on building fault-tolerant systems. He covers what to do and avoid when handling errors, arguing for letting processes fail and recover.

Joe Armstrong's Strange Loop 2013 talk on building large scalable systems from small isolated parallel components. It covers detecting and correcting errors at run time, changing code while it runs, and how Erlang embodies these principles.

Grace Hopper appears on Letterman and uses a foot-long piece of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond.

A lecture by Commodore Grace Hopper on the future of computing, posted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. It includes her well-known nanosecond wire demonstration and humorous comparisons of device latencies.

A clip from the 1998 film The Big Hit featuring the 'trace buster buster buster' scene, where characters try to defeat a phone trace.

Engineering Explained follows up on Tesla's claim that a Cybertruck towing a Porsche 911 could beat the 911 alone over a quarter mile. He walks through the MotorTrend drag race and explains why the claim did not hold up.

A timeline visualization plotting the 2053 nuclear tests and detonations from 1945 to 1998 on a world map, with sound marking each blast. It conveys the pace of the nuclear arms race.

A one-minute clip from the movie The Big Hit showing a gangster explaining how a trace buster works.

A comedy song by the Irish duo Foil Arms and Hog about the experience of flying Ryanair, with its many upsells and indignities.

Phil Vischer of VeggieTales and Holy Post gives an 18-minute history of racial injustice in America, covering why anger persists despite civil rights laws. It is told from an evangelical Christian perspective and adapted from a class he co-taught.

A dramatized fictional video of micro drones with facial recognition and swarm AI used as autonomous killer weapons. It is a Slaughterbots-style warning about lethal autonomous weapons.

A two-minute video of an athlete sprinting against a London Underground Circle Line train between Mansion House and Cannon Street. It shows a runner keeping pace with and beating the train.

Slaughterbots is a fictional short film, backed by Stuart Russell, depicting swarms of cheap autonomous drones that use facial recognition to assassinate targets. It was made to argue for banning autonomous weapons.

Slaughterbots is a short sci-fi film in which swarms of cheap autonomous drones are programmed to kill targets by profile. It was made as arms-control advocacy against autonomous weapons.

Tom Scott stands by a construction site and explains why reversing vehicles now use a white-noise hiss instead of beeping. The sound is easier to locate directionally and less annoying to neighbours.

An 8-minute fictional short film, made by campaigners for a ban on autonomous weapons, depicting swarms of cheap AI-guided micro-drones used to kill targeted people. It ends with a call to action against autonomous weapons.

A short animated explainer that stages a $100 footrace in which contestants start at different distances from the line, depending on the advantages or disadvantages they inherited. It uses the race as a metaphor for how unequal starting points shape outcomes, citing US census income and poverty figures.

Gamers Nexus builds a fully ray-traced demo in Unreal Engine to compare faked global illumination with RTX ray-traced GI. It covers the gains in dynamic scenes and accuracy against the performance cost and noise.

Josef Holzer walks through his family's Krameterhof, one of Europe's oldest permaculture farms in the Austrian mountains, with fish ponds, terraces, fruit trees and grazing animals. It showcases water management and microclimates.

Ted Young of LightStep proposes trace testing, using distributed tracing data to unify testing and observability. The KubeCon-era talk argues for testing against trace data rather than treating tests and monitoring separately.

Steve Cutts' dark animated short follows a rat chasing happiness through consumerism and endless work. It satirizes materialism and the rat race.

Ross Scott's Game Dungeon episode critiques Deus Ex: Human Revolution, looking at its design, politics and visual style. It is part of his series of opinionated game reviews.

Veritasium argues that Facebook's ad revenue relies partly on fake likes, after paying to promote his page and gaining tens of thousands of followers in developing countries who never engaged. He shares his experiment and cites other cases.

Mentour Pilot's 56-minute account of the MH370 disappearance and what is now known, including the WSPR radio tracking technique and other sensing methods. It was made ahead of renewed search efforts.

A BSD Now episode featuring a long interview with Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill on dtrace, ZFS, pkgsrc, containers and more. It includes his rant on why Linux epoll is flawed and stories from Sun.

A two-minute 2008 clip from Sun's Fishworks team in which Brendan Gregg uses DTrace to show disk latency spiking while he shouts at a rack of drives. Bryan Cantrill narrates the demonstration.

The 1965 Cambridge Union debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on race, justice and history in America. Baldwin argues that the American dream came at the expense of Black Americans.

A Sam Harris podcast episode from June 2020 on the protests and unrest after George Floyd's death, discussing racism and police violence in America in light of the available data.