code as data

Kevin Fang comically retells GitLab's 2017 incident in which an engineer deleted the production database, based on the company's postmortems. It walks through the confusion and failed backups.

A WSJ investigation by Joanna Stern into iPhone thieves who watch victims enter their passcode, then use it to lock them out of Apple accounts and drain bank and payment apps. It explains how the thefts work and how to protect yourself.

Benn Jordan investigates infrasound and low-frequency noise from data centers, including xAI's Colossus and a crypto mine, and reports his own experiments on the effects. The video covers the health and community impacts on nearby residents.

Mark Raasveldt of CWI presents DuckDB, an embeddable analytical database described as the SQLite for analytics, in a CMU Database Group talk. He explains why it was built, what it is for, and how it works.

A short Tesla promotional video touring the company's Crash Lab. It describes using data from the fleet and replicated real-world crash scenarios to engineer vehicle safety.

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.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment explains how data brokers collect and sell personal information, including a stunt in which his team bought data to identify members of Congress.

Veritasium builds a QR code by hand to explain how it works. It covers the history of Morse code and barcodes, how QR codes encode data, why damaged codes still scan, and how safe they are.

Casey Muratori shows how typical 'clean code' object-oriented patterns can cost large factors in performance. He benchmarks them against simpler data-oriented code.

8-Bit Show And Tell walks through the BASIC source code of the original Commodore 64 Sid Meier's Pirates!. It covers bugs, quirks and traces of abandoned features and scenarios left in the code.

A Business Insider investigation into the US boom in AI data centers, mapping where they are, who owns them, and how much power and water they consume. It looks at the costs borne by communities, with a focus on Virginia.

Scott Manley analyzes the idea of putting data centers in orbit, prompted by Lumen Orbit's funding. He examines the claimed advantage of constant solar power against launch cost, cooling and mass.

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.

MattKC fits a playable Snake game into a QR code by writing tiny x86 machine code and patching the ZBar scanner so it can run the decoded data.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Ocarina of Time at Summer Games Done Quick 2022, using TASBot and arbitrary code execution to reach an alternate ending in about 53 minutes. The run is introduced by its creators and followed by an interview.

A short video that reads out comments from the leaked Team Fortress 2 source code to show the frustration of Valve's programmers over time.

Eager Space examines the practicality of putting data centers in orbit, walking through three scenarios with cost calculations and the launch cost reductions that would be required.

Scott Manley examines why SpaceX, Google and others are looking at orbital data centers. He walks through the economics, heat rejection and solar power arguments, with links to the Lumen/Starcloud and Google Suncatcher papers.

Andreas Kling live-codes a prototype JavaScript JIT compiler for the LibJS engine used in SerenityOS and Ladybird. He builds a standalone bytecode VM, a simple interpreter, and then a simple JIT in about 80 minutes.

Douglas Crockford's code::dive 2022 talk on what the next programming language should look like. He presents ideas behind his Misty language, including message-passing actors.

Technology Connections tests how quickly gas, induction and standard electric stoves boil water, with CO2 measurements and a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each.

CGP Grey explains that postal codes are routing instructions for mail rather than geographic regions. He looks at the quirks and problems this causes.

Dan Abramov's talk on the wet codebase, using visualizations to show how removing all duplication too early produces wrong abstractions that are hard to unwind.

John Ousterhout's Netdev 0x16 keynote arguing that nearly every aspect of TCP is wrong for the datacenter, from connections and streams to reliable delivery and congestion control. He presents the case for a replacement protocol.

Scott Manley explains the thermal balance of spacecraft and how a satellite could be configured to radiate away the heat from datacenter-scale computing in space. His rough numbers suggest it is feasible.

Casey Muratori's invited lecture on where bad code comes from, rebroadcast from a Twitch stream. He critiques conventional wisdom such as SOLID and Clean Code and argues about how those habits lead to slow, poorly structured software.

Overclocker der8auer tours Hetzner's Falkenstein data center in Germany, showing custom racks, own mainboards, passively cooled servers and ATX-style cases on shelves.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on PFAS, the 'forever chemicals' linked to health problems. It covers their widespread use in products like nonstick coatings and repellent fabrics and the limits of regulation.

A talk by Yuri Iozzelli at a WebAssembly meetup on CheerpX, an x86 virtual machine running in the browser. It uses a JIT compiler that emits WebAssembly at runtime to run real native applications. It covers the architecture and demos such as porting a multiplayer C++ game.

Matthias Wandel tests old and new code on a range of PCs, including a new mini PC, to measure how much faster modern hardware really is. He also shows optimization techniques such as branchless code, with benchmark programs on GitHub.

Everyday Astronaut's guide to visiting Starbase, Texas to see Starship, covering what and where it is, which areas close during launches, where to watch from, where to fly into and stay, and things to do.

Asianometry examines how East Germany tried and failed to build a native semiconductor industry despite heavy investment, including the espionage involved in acquiring Western microelectronics technology.

A Veritasium video on the asteroid threat, with UCLA's Dave Jewitt explaining detection efforts and how different asteroid sizes compare in damage.

John Oliver explains how plastics harm the planet and why recycling is not the solution consumers have been led to believe. He argues corporations and policymakers must act, not just individuals.

3Blue1Brown's discovery-oriented introduction to error correction codes, building up Hamming codes from the puzzle of locating a flipped bit. It explains the parity-check idea and why it is so efficient.

Climate Town gives a comedic, fast-paced account of how the plastics industry promoted recycling, including the resin-code recycling symbol, while knowing most plastic could not be economically recycled. It points viewers to the Frontline documentary Plastic Wars for a deeper treatment.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths asks whether a country's reported land area accounts for hills and mountains, working through how surface area depends on the resolution of elevation data. It follows up on a question from a viewer and work by researchers who measured it.

OpenAI's 2021 live demo of Codex translating natural language into code, from Hello World to building a game and a Microsoft Word plugin.

Alex O'Connor shows that ChatGPT cannot draw a wine glass filled to the brim, and ties the failure to David Hume's missing shade of blue. It asks what the failure says about how image models learn.

A Lex Fridman podcast conversation with the four creators of Cursor, the AI-assisted code editor. They discuss how the editor integrates models into programming workflows, including custom completion models and techniques like speculative decoding to speed up applying edits.