bytes vs str

Will Wilson of FoundationDB explains how the team tested their distributed database using deterministic simulation. By running the whole system in a simulator with injected faults and reproducible seeds, they could find rare concurrency and network bugs.

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.

Bob Nystrom shows his process for hand-drawing the diagrams in his book Crafting Interpreters, from pencil sketches to tracing and inking. It is a time-lapse of the whole illustration workflow.

Lennart Augustsson's CUFP 2011 keynote covers using Haskell commercially at Standard Chartered Bank. He discusses non-standard Haskell implementations, including a strict dialect, and weighs strict against lazy evaluation.

Jason Cohen's MicroConf talk on designing a bootstrapped business by starting from your own strengths, goals and constraints. He works backward to the business model, pricing, market and product that fit, with practical points like annual prepay and pricing tiers.

Chandler Carruth argues in a CppCon 2019 talk that C++ has no truly zero-cost abstractions. Using examples like unique_ptr, ABI constraints and compile-time costs, he shows that abstractions cost runtime, compile time or human effort.

Robert Sapolsky's lecture on how the body's stress response, evolved for short-term physical emergencies, harms long-term health when triggered by psychological stressors. It was given as the inaugural Fenton-Rhodes Lecture.

The first lecture in Martin Kleppmann's 8-lecture distributed systems series from the University of Cambridge undergraduate course. It introduces the subject, and accompanying lecture notes are available.

Physicist Angela Collier's roughly hour-long video on how string theory was hyped to the public and what that did to science communication. She traces the history of the theory as a narrative and argues it is interesting but was oversold.

Runar Bjarnason's Scala World talk argues that restraint and precision in components beat power and flexibility. Constraints on parts make them easier to compose into systems.

Cheng Lou's react-europe 2016 talk lays out a mental framework for thinking about abstraction levels in JavaScript tooling, from Angular and Grunt to Webpack and React. It uses that framework to reason about the cost of abstractions and how to choose between competing solutions.

Nicholas Ormrod's CppCon 2016 talk on how Facebook optimizes std::string with its open-source replacement fbstring. It covers storage layout tradeoffs, small string optimization and memory allocation behavior.

Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson explains how astroturf, fake grassroots campaigns funded by corporate or political interests, manipulates media messages. The TEDx talk is about 11 minutes.

Polylog explains how algorithms can be turned into circuits and encoded as satisfiability problems, which lets you effectively run them backwards. It uses this to motivate breaking RSA, general reductions to SAT, and what P vs NP is really asking.

Moxie Marlinspike's Black Hat talk presenting sslstrip, which defeats SSL in practice by intercepting the http-to-https redirect.

Erik Demaine's MIT 6.851 Advanced Data Structures lecture introducing succinct data structures, covering rank, select and tries. It is part of the Spring 2012 course.

A 2001 VPRO Noorderlicht documentary episode, filmed in Austin in 2000, visiting Edsger Dijkstra and his views on thinking as a discipline. It is in Dutch with English subtitles.

Zoz's DEF CON 23 talk explores practical, often explosive ways to destroy data and hard drives quickly. It tests methods such as thermite and other physical techniques for rapid destruction.

A Sesame Street animation from 1979 with music composed by Philip Glass, showing geometric circle patterns.

A short clip of Jordan Peterson explaining Pareto distributions, using Soviet farm collectivization and the resulting famine as context. It also covers how outcomes concentrate in a few people.

Ned Batchelder's PyCon 2012 talk gives a quick overview of what Unicode is, then focuses on what a Python programmer needs to handle text correctly. It presents the 'Unicode sandwich' strategy: decode bytes at input, work with Unicode internally, encode at output.

A short clip of Robert Sapolsky on how social hierarchy generates chronic stress, drawing on baboon research. It links rank-related stress to heart health and life expectancy.

Wintergatan's video of the Marble Machine, a hand-built music instrument that plays a song using about 2000 marbles on a mechanical clockwork-style mechanism.

Not Just Bikes explains that car-dependent suburbs are not the only option, using Toronto's Riverdale as an example of a pre-war streetcar suburb. These walkable neighborhoods are popular but are now effectively illegal to build.

Sixty Symbols interviews Nottingham cosmologist Tony Padilla, who says string theory deserves to be taken seriously. He explains how strings emerged from the equations rather than being invented.

Psychologist Kelly McGonigal argues in this TED talk that stress is harmful mainly if you believe it is, and that reaching out to others is an underrated way to reduce its effects.

Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns explains how a land value tax differs from an ordinary property tax, why it makes economic sense, and why it is rarely used. It is a short six-minute explainer.

Videogamedunkey's satirical guide to the fragmented streaming service landscape, ending in a joke about how to watch King Kong.

Edward Kmett's 2013 talk at Prezi in Budapest on succinct data structures, which store data in close to the information-theoretic minimum space while supporting fast queries. It ties together the research and walks through his Haskell succinct library.

Andrej Bauer's IAS talk introduces constructive mathematics and what it feels like to do mathematics without excluded middle. It is framed as a tour for classical mathematicians.

A sound-designed restoration of the Miles brothers' 1906 film shot from a cable car down Market Street in San Francisco, four days before the earthquake. It shows streetcars, horse carts, cars and pedestrians mixing freely.

A RacketCon talk presenting Fructure, a prototype extensible structured editing engine in Racket. Language providers define syntactic forms and refactorings as rewrite rules, and editing operates on program structure rather than on text.

A family comedy video in which kids write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a parent follows them with exact literalness, producing chaos. This is the classroom-friendly version.

An AWS re:Invent 2014 talk on the core distributed systems primitives behind AWS and Amazon.com, such as consensus, key-value stores and transactional logging. It describes how AWS builds large services from a few common building blocks.

Not Just Bikes explains why crossing streets is dangerous in the US and Canada, where roads are designed to move cars fast, and contrasts it with Dutch designs for pedestrians.

A 24-minute interview with Edsger Dijkstra, the Dutch computer scientist, including his views on writing programs by hand and keeping errors out of them. It is part of a longer Dutch TV interview.

A one-minute Yahoo Finance clip of President Biden saying he would shut down the Nord Stream 2 pipeline if Russia further invaded Ukraine.

A two-minute clip from the Australian satirical series Utopia about the country's defence policy, presented as an explainer.

A C-SPAN clip from a joint press conference with Olaf Scholz in which President Biden says that if Russia invades Ukraine, there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. Pressed on how, he promises it can be done.

A short clip parodying Windows Vista's cancel-or-allow security prompts, in the style of Apple's Mac vs PC ads.