common knowledge

Christian Schafmeister's Google Tech Talk on designing spiroligomer molecules and building Clasp, a Common Lisp on LLVM that interoperates with C++, to program molecular design. It covers the chemistry, automatic differentiation for force fields, and how the compiler is built.

Peter Seibel's 2006 Google TechTalk on Practical Common Lisp, framed by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Paul Graham's Blub paradox. It shows Lisp features such as condition restarts and its generic-function object system.

Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Conservancy speaks at the 2009 Law of the Commons Conference about free and open software as a model for a new intellectual commons. The talk covers the legal and social case for sharing knowledge.

Ahmon Dancy of Franz Inc explains low-level programming in Common Lisp, including off-heap data structures used in AllegroGraph to manage memory outside the garbage collector.

Christian Schafmeister presents lessons from six years of implementing Clasp, a Common Lisp compiler using LLVM as its backend that interoperates with C++. He explains handling a dynamic, memory-managed language on LLVM.

Jonathan Blow's DevGAMM 2019 talk argues that software knowledge is being lost between generations and that growing layers of abstraction could lead to a decline in technological civilization.

Christian Schafmeister's Google Tech Talk on Clasp and CANDO, a Common Lisp implementation on LLVM and C++ used to design molecules, including energy minimization and force-field calculations.

Elias Martenson presents his Emacs-based workflow for building a web application (the Potato chat platform) with Common Lisp on the backend and ClojureScript on the frontend. He demonstrates SLIME, Paredit, CIDER and debugger-driven interactive development. The talk is 79 minutes and was given at Emacs SG.

A DevGAMM talk by Jonathan Blow arguing that civilizations can lose technological capability and that software quality is already deteriorating. He discusses how knowledge fails to transfer between generations.

Retired Boeing Technical Fellow Doug McLean walks through common misconceptions in aerodynamics, drawing on his book Understanding Aerodynamics. He critiques popular explanations of wing lift and rocket thrust and argues for arguing from the real physics.

David Deutsch's TED talk arguing that humanity's survival depends on solving problems through knowledge growth. He frames people as improbable "chemical scum" capable of understanding distant quasars.

Timothy Daly, an original author of the Axiom computer algebra system, talks about turning a large Common Lisp codebase into a literate program. He argues code should be written as readable manuals, and the talk was given at Write the Docs 2013.

Alexander Rose of the Long Now Foundation describes the design and construction of the 10,000 year clock conceived by Danny Hillis. He covers the project's history, methods, and how different cultures built things to last millennia.

David Rock gives a Google Tech Talk based on his book Your Brain at Work, using neuroscience to explain why focus and productivity are hard at the office. He gives strategies for managing mental energy and distraction.

Robert Smith of Rigetti Computing talks at a Bay Area Lisp and Scheme meetup about using Common Lisp for quantum computing. He covers the technical, sociological and psychological sides of working across disciplines.

Christian Schafmeister presents CANDO at the 2016 European Lisp Symposium. It is a compiled Lisp-based language for designing macromolecules and nanoscale materials, built on the Clasp implementation of Common Lisp.

A ten-minute clip from Jonathan Blow's talk on preventing the collapse of civilization, arguing that software quality and the knowledge to build it are in decline.

A TEDxBangalore talk by The Ugly Indian, an anonymous collective, asking why Indians tolerate filthy public spaces. It describes their volunteer approach of quietly cleaning up spots and turning the tragedy of the commons into a victory.

Chris Houser's Clojure/conj talk on why Clojure's exceptions destroy information as the stack unwinds, unlike Common Lisp's condition system, which can resume from the error site. He surveys the existing libraries that approximate conditions, explains why they don't compose with each other, and considers what a better design would look like.

Larry Lessig's TED talk argues that copyright law chokes creativity, drawing on John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights and the ASCAP cartel to make the case for reviving remix culture.

A HOPE conference talk by Howard Payne and Deviant Ollam on common keys, such as elevator and fire service keys, that open many buildings. It covers physical security weaknesses from shared key standards.

An excerpt from an RSA event in which physicist David Deutsch makes the case for optimism as a driver of progress in the 21st century. It is a short highlight of a longer discussion.

Ali Rahimi accepts the NIPS 2017 Test of Time Award and argues that machine learning has become alchemy, with practice running ahead of understanding.

Gil Tene of Azul Systems explains common pitfalls in measuring latency and response time, including why averages mislead and the problem of coordinated omission. He introduces open source tools like HdrHistogram for better measurement and reporting.

Mike Acton of Insomniac Games argues that a program's purpose is transforming data, and shows how common C++ approaches work against that in performance-critical game development. He covers cache behavior, data layout and the limits of compilers.

Deviant Ollam's two-hour conference talk explains how elevators work, from the pit and buffers to the car top, controller logic and access-control features. It shows how this knowledge can be used for optimization and for bypassing building security.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day gives a talk to an aerospace audience, comparing how Apollo was engineered and managed with NASA's Artemis program. He raises concerns about unresolved details, the number of launches and in-orbit fuel transfer needed to reach the Moon, and the loss of institutional knowledge.

David Beazley's PyCon India closing keynote, in which he live-codes a stack machine and grows it into an interpreter that runs WebAssembly, then uses it to play a Rust-written game. It requires no prior WebAssembly knowledge.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2016 talk on how software engineers pass knowledge down through oral tradition, from folk rhymes to programmer lore and stories like why C lacks a logical XOR. He argues for writing software with future generations in mind.

A short !!Con 2016 talk by blind developer Sina Bahram on how he uses a computer and writes code with a screen reader at about 1,000 words per minute. He plays how common interfaces sound and challenges the audience to go a day using only the keyboard.

Robert Miles gives a remastered introduction to AI safety, adapted from a talk in London. It lays out why advanced AI could go wrong and answers common objections.

A short conference talk from !!Con 2017 in which Kevin Chen explains the HDR imaging algorithm from a foundational paper, framing it as a system of linear equations, and implements it in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. No prior image processing knowledge is needed.

Skateboarding pioneer Rodney Mullen talks about how the open skate community and its environments drive the invention of new tricks out of pure passion. He draws parallels to collaboration and open source.

Hans Rosling's TEDxSummit talk asks whether some religions have higher birth rates and how that affects population growth. He charts data across time and religions and reaches a surprising conclusion about fertility.

Louis Brandy presents the most common and infamous recurring C++ bugs seen in Facebook's huge codebase, including shared_ptr data races and operator[] pitfalls. He explains the surprising complexity behind seemingly simple code.

George Hotz of Comma AI gives a 2017 conference talk on lessons from building a self-driving system. He argues about how driving should be defined and why the common approach to autonomous vehicles is flawed.

David Schachter describes how he made a data-collection Python program run 114,000 times faster, drawing on decades of experience. The talk covers pipelining, cache effects and other optimization lessons.

Derek Slager's Clojure/conj talk argues that ClojureScript is a pragmatic choice for web development. He addresses common objections, recent improvements, tooling and use cases where it shines.

Dr. Jason Fung's talk at the 2018 CrossFit Health Conference on therapeutic fasting for weight loss. He explains why long-term weight loss is hard and tackles common myths.

Rob Pike's GopherCon 2016 talk on the design of the Go assembler, explaining why Go uses a common assembly language translated to each architecture.