complex systems

Jon Gjengset spends about three hours livecoding complex changes in a Rust codebase with agentic AI tools, testing his hypothesis that AI is weak at non-pattern work. He documents where Claude Code helps and where it struggles.

An overview of the Quiet Logistics warehouse using Kiva Systems robots, narrated by company executives. The robots bring storage racks to human pickers at stations.

A 1995 Sun Microsystems film about the Self programming language, a prototype-based Smalltalk relative, showing its live, graphical programming environment.

Smarter Every Day host Destin Sandlin tries to hover a helicopter and finds it very hard. The video shows how the constant coordinated corrections across several control axes feel at first and how learning makes them automatic.

A TU Vienna demo of a double inverted pendulum on a cart, using constrained feedforward and optimal feedback control for swing-up and point-to-point motion.

A short demo of Sun Microsystems' Looking Glass, a 3D desktop GUI concept for a future operating system.

A short clip of a 2014 Mercedes S-Class driving itself with adaptive cruise control and Active Lane Assist, with the hands-on-wheel timeout defeated.

Symbolics developer Kalman Reti gives a short introductory demo of a Symbolics Lisp Machine running Genera in an emulator. It shows the context-aware command line, typed on-screen objects, and the live-editable system, including swapping in a C-compiled JPEG decoder.

A 1991 NeXT promotional video that stages a head-to-head programming contest between a NeXT computer and a Sun workstation. It shows NeXT's interface builder and object-oriented tooling producing an application far faster than traditional UNIX development.

Kyle Hill of Because Science explains and demonstrates, using real cards, how Magic: The Gathering can be used to build a Turing machine, a computer inside the card game.

Classical guitarist Brandon Acker shows how guitars with tied-on gut frets, as used 300 years ago, can play more in tune than modern fixed metal frets. He demonstrates microtonal and meantone tunings on a guitar with movable frets.

A short film about the Erlang language, showing telecom systems built from lightweight processes and demonstrating hot code swapping. It is an edited version of the original Ericsson video.

A demonstration of SymbOS, a multitasking operating system for 8-bit Z80 machines, running on a real MSX turboR with an MP3MSX card and a CF IDE interface. It shows the OS playing audio and running a graphical desktop on very old hardware, captured from the real machine and not an emulator.

A short demonstration comparing just intonation with equal temperament, played so you can hear how the tuning compromise changes intervals and chords. It includes a Bach prelude played in both tunings.

The official demo video from Be, Inc. showing BeOS running multiple videos, media applications and a responsive desktop on 1990s hardware.

Yuta, a Japanese YouTuber, tests how much simplified Chinese a Japanese person can read, working with a Mandarin speaker. The video shows where shared kanji help and where meanings differ.

Footage of an unmanned Apollo boilerplate capsule launched on a Little Joe II booster to test the launch escape system. The booster went out of control and broke up, but the escape system worked and the capsule was recovered undamaged.

A FIDO Alliance demo with Google and Microsoft engineers showing passkeys working across operating systems, browsers, and devices. It walks through registering and signing in on new devices.

A short MIT Aerospace Controls Lab demo from 2011 of a variable pitch quadrotor flying.

Jonathan Blow gives a formal, hour-long demo of his Jai compiler focused on the implicit context feature. The context carries things like allocators through a program without explicit parameter passing, and the talk walks through the code.

A vintage demo video of the BeOS operating system running on mid-90s hardware. It shows media playback and window manipulation staying smooth at the same time.

Excerpts from W. Edwards Deming's Red Bead Experiment, where workers draw beads from a bowl and are judged on red ones that are largely down to chance. It shows how system variation, not individual effort, drives results.

ETH Zurich researchers demonstrate a quadrocopter that keeps flying stably after losing a motor and propeller entirely, with the algorithm running onboard while a pilot flies it.

A one-minute Volvo Trucks demo of the Collision Warning with Emergency Brake system on a fully loaded 40-ton tractor-trailer, avoiding a rear-end collision on a test track.

A Fifth Gear segment in which Tiff Needell tests autonomous emergency braking systems in the Mercedes S Class, Volvo V40 and VW up!. The cars are driven toward an inflatable dummy car to see how each system performs.

Out of Spec Reviews takes a one-hour drive in an Avatr 11 running Huawei's Qiankun ADS 3.2 driver assistance system in China, billed as the best FSD-like system there.

Footage of the US Navy's Phalanx CIWS, a radar-guided 20 mm Gatling gun, firing in live target practice. The Phalanx serves as terminal defense against anti-ship missiles.

Dashcam footage of a Tesla Model S on adaptive cruise control hitting a stopped van, with the driver listing the safety systems that failed to react. The uploader still calls the Model S the best car in the world.

Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at the Intertwingled festival, presented using a revived Smalltalk-78 system running on emulated 1970s Xerox PARC hardware. It shows live, user-programmable software from that era.

An award-winning 3D animation by XVIVO for Harvard's BioVisions showing the molecular machinery inside a cell as a white blood cell responds to a stimulus.

Eric Bier, a PARC research scientist, demonstrates the Cedar integrated programming environment and language, an evolution of Mesa from Xerox PARC. The demo shows the Tioga editor, garbage collection, and a full graphical workstation environment.

A visualization and sonification of 15 sorting algorithms, from selection sort to bogo sort, run on shuffled integers in six minutes. Each algorithm gets a size and speed scaled to its complexity.

Cosmo's 22:38 Ocarina of Time speedrun, performed live at AGDQ 2013. The runner uses a complex exploit to skip much of the game.

Disney Research presents Touche, a swept frequency capacitive sensing technique that recognizes complex hand and body configurations, and adds touch sensitivity to humans, liquids and everyday objects.

ASML's short promotional fly-through of its High NA EUV lithography platform, the TWINSCAN EXE, which supports 8-nanometer resolution. It shows the machine's internals including advanced anamorphic optics.

OpenAI's short demo of agents playing hide-and-seek in a simulated environment. Through self-play, the agents develop six progressively more complex strategies and counter-strategies, including tool use.

Researchers from the Artificial Life Lab Graz introduce the Primordial Particle System, where a simple motion law for self-propelled particles produces cell-like structures that self-reproduce and show life cycles.

A short MIT Math Lab video showing millimetric droplets bouncing and walking across a vibrating fluid bath, guided by their own pilot waves. These droplets show diffraction, tunneling and quantized orbits, which were once thought to belong only to quantum systems.

An animated, musical visualization of Conway's Game of Life showing patterns made in the Golly program.

A TU Wien control-systems demo in which a triple pendulum on a cart is swung up and stabilized using constrained feedforward plus optimal feedback control. It accompanies a 2013 Automatica paper.