code structure

The first lesson of Uncle Bob (Robert C. Martin)'s "Coding Better World Together" series. It makes the case for clean code and for treating software craftsmanship as an ethical and professional responsibility. It runs about 109 minutes.

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.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum lectures at the Royal Institution on the invention and decipherment of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, and why it is so hard to translate.

Kurt Vonnegut's 2004 Case College lecture, with Spanish subtitles, in which he sketches the shapes of stories on a blackboard. He plots story arcs as good and bad fortune against time.

A short lecture in which Kurt Vonnegut graphs the simple shapes of stories, such as Man in Hole and Boy Gets Girl. He sketches how fortune rises and falls over a narrative.

Milton Friedman explains why the US tax code is enormously complex and why meaningful reform is unlikely. He argues that politicians profit from the complexity, since tax breaks are products they sell and the code works as a tool of reward and punishment. The clip is about 14 minutes from his lecture series.

Dr. Jason Fung lectures on why obesity became an epidemic since the 1970s, arguing insulin and hormones rather than calories drive weight gain. He explains why calorie counting fails and touches on low-carb eating and fasting.

Brian Will critiques object-oriented programming and rewrites a roughly 3800-line OO program in a procedural style, cutting code and complexity. It is part of a series of OOP critiques.

A guest lecture Jon Gjengset gave at Two Sigma on using Rust for large, high-performance systems. It covers why Rust suits such projects, the Noria research database, a concurrent data structure used in it, and practical experience.

Douglas Crockford's first Yahoo lecture puts JavaScript in historical context. He traces the language's structure and quirks back through the early decades of computer science and programming language history.

The first lecture of Jordan Peterson's 2017 Maps of Meaning course, setting out the Cold War context for his theory of belief and culture. He introduces the narrative structure of culture and archetypal characters for the individual, the known and the unknown.

Leo Dirac explains how transformer models have replaced LSTMs in NLP. He gives background from bag of words through RNNs and LSTMs, then a technical deep dive into multi-headed self-attention and positional encoding, with sample code.

Jeff Dean of Google describes his experiences building Google's systems and how its infrastructure evolved over time. The Stanford talk covers search, scaling tipping points and lessons from building large-scale software.

Erik Demaine's MIT 6.006 lecture introducing dynamic programming through Fibonacci numbers and shortest paths. It covers memoization, subproblems and optimal substructure.

A recording of Andres Duany's 1991 'San Antonio By Design' seminar on suburban sprawl. He lays out how codes, zoning and policy produce sprawl and makes the case for new urbanism.

The final part of Dan Gelbart's 18-part Building Prototypes series, focused on mechanical design. It opens with a demonstration of stiffness and covers practical design principles for prototype machines.

A long Mill Computing lecture on the Mill CPU's compiler toolchain, covering the specializer that targets family members, scheduling and latency passes, and the belt. It explains how the compiler handles a wide-issue, exposed-pipeline design.