computing philosophy

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 episode of John Vervaeke's lecture series on the modern meaning crisis, tracing its history through philosophy, cognitive science, religion and psychology. It introduces the series and its themes.

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.

The second talk in the Mill CPU series by Mill Computing, covering the Belt, the Mill's operand-passing model that replaces general registers. It explains the cost of register renaming in conventional wide CPUs and how the Belt reaches high instruction-level parallelism.

The first episode of Michael Sandel's Harvard course on moral reasoning, opening with the trolley problem and the choice between killing one to save five. Sandel draws out student arguments and introduces utilitarian and other approaches to justice.

A lecture by Richard Feynman on how computers work, using the analogy of a filing clerk that becomes progressively dumber and faster. It also covers heuristics and how computers handle data and solve problems in finite time.

Part two of Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture on inventing the future. He draws on his time at Xerox PARC and elsewhere to discuss how to think about new technology and what makes ideas useful.

Daniel Dennett's Royal Institution lecture on whether the brain is a computer and where its software comes from. He argues that minds are built by evolution and culture, with competence arising without comprehension.

A Royal Institution lecture in which Nicholas Humphrey presents his theory of phenomenal consciousness and its evolution. He draws on the book Sentience and discusses evidence for animal sentience.

John Gustafson presents posits, a proposed drop-in replacement for IEEE 754 floats that is simpler in hardware and more flexible in precision. The seminar includes a live demo and machine learning results.

Noam Chomsky's 2011 University of Oslo lecture on Newton's contributions to the study of mind. He argues Newton abandoned mechanical explanation and lowered the bar for scientific intelligibility, with consequences for the limits of human understanding. Q&A starts at 45:33.

Philosopher Jeffrey Kaplan summarizes Peter Singer's 1972 essay 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality', arguing that failing to give to save lives is morally comparable to letting a child drown. It is a short lecture on the argument's structure.

A one-minute clip of Richard Feynman describing the scientific method: guess a law, compute its consequences, and compare with experiment. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.

A lecture by Swami Sarvapriyananda at IIT Kanpur on the Mandukya Upanishad and the question 'Who am I?'. It explains the four states of consciousness in Advaita Vedanta.

Part one of Capt. Grace Hopper's 1982 NSA lecture on the future of data, hardware, software and people. It includes her humor, her nanosecond demonstration and views on scaling and resisting old ways of doing things.

A three-minute clip of Richard Feynman using the rules of chess as an analogy for how science works, discovering rules by observation and sometimes meeting surprises like castling. It touches on incremental progress versus revolutions.

Hennessy and Patterson's 2018 Turing Award lecture at ISCA, A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture. It covers domain-specific hardware, security, open instruction sets and agile chip development.

Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker gives the 2018 Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lecture at Illinois. He discusses the gap between academic research and industry problems, publishing incentives, and the influence of large industry users on research.

A clip of psychologist Jordan Peterson lecturing on intelligence and IQ, covering how it is defined and its correlation with academic and work success.

A short clip of Jordan Peterson explaining Pareto distributions, using Soviet farm collectivization and the resulting famine as context. It also covers how outcomes concentrate in a few people.

Peter Thiel's lecture from the How to Start a Startup course on business strategy and monopoly theory, arguing that competition destroys profits and that startups should aim to build monopolies. It covers the ideas of Zero to One.

The first lecture in Martin Kleppmann's 8-lecture distributed systems series from the University of Cambridge undergraduate course. It introduces the subject, and accompanying lecture notes are available.

Admiral Grace Hopper holds up a length of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond, about 11.8 inches. She explains how she made the idea concrete to people who could not picture a billionth of a second.