bad ideas

A six-minute excerpt from Steve Jobs' 1995 Lost Interview on why a great idea does not automatically become a great product. He says ideas change substantially once you actually build them.

A long Machine Learning Street Talk interview with Kenneth Stanley, creator of NEAT and novelty search, about his book on why greatness cannot be planned. They discuss open-endedness, the tyranny of objectives, serendipity and the evolution of ideas.

An Ars Technica War Stories episode in which Richard Garriott and Starr Long describe Ultima Online's planned virtual ecology and how players wrecked it. Players slaughtered the animals and also broke the in-game economy.

A long Lex Fridman interview with Stephen Wolfram on complexity, cellular automata, computational irreducibility and the Wolfram Physics Project.

A short excerpt from Werner Herzog's film Lo and Behold in which Ted Nelson lays out his ideas about hypertext and interconnection. Herzog concludes that Nelson is the only sane person in computing.

Unreleased 1996 footage of the Wired editors interviewing Bill Gates when he visited their office. Gates talks about software, the internet and Microsoft's thinking at the time. The video is about 53 minutes long.

Sam Holmes Sailing visits sailing legend Sven Yrvind and tours his boat, covering the man and his small-boat design philosophy.

A short clip of Simon Peyton Jones talking about the future of programming languages, saying Haskell is useless in the sense that pure programs cannot have effects, while mainstream languages are useful but unsafe. He describes languages converging, with ideas such as STM and LINQ moving between them.

A 30-minute edit of a conversation between Adam Curtis and Russell Brand in which Curtis explains HyperNormalisation and his ideas on individualism, power and real change.