computing philosophy

Devine Lu Linvega of Hundred Rabbits talks about low-power, offline computing, esoteric languages and the Uxn virtual machine, informed by years of sailing the Pacific. The talk frames computing sustainability through a permaculture lens.

A 1973 AT&T training film made for new employees at Bell Labs' Holmdel Computing Center, when Unix was in its third version and running at 16 computer centers in the Bell System. It shows how users submitted jobs and used the center's machines.

A Stanford EE380 seminar by Michael P. Frank of Sandia National Laboratories on generalized reversible computing. It surveys unconventional computing approaches as transistor scaling nears its limits and energy efficiency stops improving.

IBM's Dr. Talia Gershon explains quantum computing to five people of increasing expertise: a child, teen, college student, grad student and professional. The WIRED series format moves from simple analogies to technical detail.

A four-minute 2006 explainer on trusted computing, describing what it is and whether users should support it, with a skeptical DRM angle.

Dave Ackley demonstrates the Demon Horde Sort, an inherently robust sorting machine running in his Movable Feast Machine simulator. This is the uncut version with all details and side thoughts.

Dave Ackley gives a high-level introduction to robust-first computing, which prioritizes robustness over efficiency in computer architecture. A sorting demo illustrates the idea.

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.

The first episode of the BBC's 1982 television series The Computer Programme, introducing home computing to a general audience. It surveys mainframes, early personal computers such as the BBC Micro and Commodore PET, and the changing computer market of the time.

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

A Philosophy Tube video essay on data, surveillance and the algorithms built on personal information, touching on Cambridge Analytica and the 'nothing to hide' argument.

Alan Kay's 2009 UIUC talk arguing that computing is more a pop culture than a science and that ignoring history and fundamentals leads to inferior solutions. He touches on the history of interactive environments and what the web should have been.

Veritasium explains why analog computing may suit AI workloads, covering old analog computers, The Analog Thing and Mythic's analog chips that use flash memory for neural network inference. It argues digital hardware is hitting limits.

A School of Life short introducing Michel Foucault, who questioned assumed progress in how society treats madness, medicine and sexuality.

A 2013 lecture in which Vitalik Buterin explains what quantum computers are and what they can and cannot do. He then discusses what they could mean for Bitcoin's cryptography.

An 88-minute Microsoft Research talk that explains how quantum computers beat classical ones using basic linear algebra, qubits, superposition and gates. It works through the Deutsch oracle problem and ends with entanglement, teleportation and a live demo.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli gives a public lecture at the Royal Institution on how our understanding of time has changed, from Boltzmann and Einstein to quantum theory and loop quantum gravity. He blends physics, philosophy and art to argue that time is stranger than everyday intuition suggests.

Cory Doctorow's Talks at Google lecture on the coming civil war over general-purpose computing. He argues that locked-down devices, DRM, and surveillance threaten user control of computers.

The Thought Emporium grows living rat neurons on an electrode array and tries to train them to play Doom. It is part of a series on biological computing.

Bryan Cantrill presents Manta, an object store with in-situ compute that lets tools like grep, awk, and sed run map-reduce style over huge data. He frames it as bringing the Unix philosophy to big data.

CuriousMarc runs the program 'Edith' on a 1959 IBM 1401 mainframe at the Computer History Museum. The program prints a famous line-printer image on the vintage machine. The video is part retro-computing demo and part joke.

A short clip of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, speaking to financial analysts in September 2008, questioning what cloud computing even means. He calls it a fashion-driven buzzword.

A lecture by Commodore Grace Hopper on the future of computing, posted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. It includes her well-known nanosecond wire demonstration and humorous comparisons of device latencies.

A short Google video introducing the Quantum AI Lab, a partnership between Google, NASA, USRA and a 512-qubit D-Wave Two quantum computer. It covers the lab's early goals and some potential applications of quantum computing.

A short clip of Steve Jobs describing the computer as a bicycle for the mind. He compares human efficiency of travel to what computers do for mental work.

A 1982 AT&T Bell Labs film for students about the Unix system and how it can be used practically. It includes Lorinda Cherry building a talking calculator by piping together Unix commands, and a spell checker made from Unix utilities.

Michael Sugrue's lecture on Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and the Stoic ideal, covering the text and its philosophy. It is one of his humanities lectures known for their clarity.

The opening episode of Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics series, in which he casts doubt on conventional accounts of computer basics. He argues that conventions and packaging are mistaken for technology.

A philosophy lecture by Professor Moeller on the philosophy of identity. It builds on a discussion of Abigail Thorn's video and covers authenticity, sincerity and how online profiles reshape identity.

A one-minute clip from Richard Feynman's 1979 Auckland lecture in which he answers whether you see an object or only its light. It is a short, playful take on perception and on the use of philosophy.

A School of Life animated overview of Albert Camus, covering his existentialism and absurdism and his answer to the question of meaninglessness.

Gregory Chaitin is interviewed on Closer To Truth about whether mathematics is invented or discovered. He gives a nuanced view that ties the question to the nature of reality.

A 1979 CBC radio interview in which Ted Nelson tries to explain how computers could serve as tools for thinking and visualizing. The interviewer keeps failing to grasp the idea, and Nelson patiently answers again and again.

Alain de Botton gives a TED talk questioning how we define success and failure. He argues that snobbery and the assumption that outcomes are fully earned make career anxiety worse.

Dragan Djuric presents Clojure libraries for GPU and numerical computing, including ClojureCL, ClojureCUDA and Neanderthal. He shows how a dynamic REPL workflow can be combined with low-level hardware acceleration for machine learning and data science.

A philosophy video critiquing the concept of human rights from a Marxist perspective, drawing on Locke, Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel and Rawls. It examines what human rights actually mean and presuppose.

John Ousterhout, Stanford professor and creator of Tcl, presents the ideas of his book A Philosophy of Software Design in a Talks at Google session. He covers managing complexity, deep modules and interfaces, and what he teaches in his Stanford software design course.

The first lecture in Bartosz Milewski's category theory series for programmers. It covers the motivation and philosophy behind category theory and why composition matters for handling complexity.

A full upload of Alan Kay's 1987 talk, with demos of several Smalltalk-era software systems and ideas about visual, kinesthetic and symbolic reasoning. It includes a Smalltalk program written by a 12-year-old and footage of the Rand tablet.

A 1982 Bell Labs film hosted by Victor Vyssotsky on the origins and design philosophy of the UNIX operating system, with appearances by Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie. It shows pipes, filters and a shell one-liner spell checker being built.