context managers

James Powell's nearly two-hour PyData talk builds up Python's data model, decorators, generators and context managers, coding live in Vim. It aims to take intermediate programmers toward real Python expertise.

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.

Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, gives a funny and opinionated Strange Loop talk on the tangled state of software: build tools, package managers, entropy and the physical limits of computation. He argues for ideas like naming things by content hash and throwing away your first version.

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.

A short clip of Steve Jobs arguing that the best people are self-managing and that professional managers who cannot do the work add little. He says leadership is about a shared vision.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS231n Winter 2016 course on convolutional neural networks for visual recognition, introducing the course and the historical context of computer vision.

Washington Post video of the experiment in which violinist Joshua Bell played incognito at a D.C. metro station. It asks whether commuters would notice a world-class musician in an ordinary setting.

A design essay on why products designed in Western contexts often fail when deployed in developing countries. It covers expert blindness and cultural assumptions, with examples such as malaria nets and the One Laptop Per Child project.

Rory McCune's AppSec EU 2015 talk on security risks in modern software deployment. It covers weaknesses in package ecosystems like npm, RubyGems and PyPI, and repository compromise.

A re-upload of American Airlines captain Warren Vanderburgh's 1997 presentation warning that pilots who over-rely on cockpit automation lose manual flying skills and awareness. The uploader adds context from his own flying.

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.

Technology Connections explains why brown is not a spectral color but a context-dependent perception, essentially dark orange seen against brighter surroundings.

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.

BobbyBroccoli's first of three parts on Jan Hendrik Schon, the Bell Labs postdoc whose fabricated organic semiconductor results nearly won a Nobel Prize. It covers his rise and the context around Bell Labs.

An excerpt of Simon Sinek on Inside Quest discussing millennials in the workplace. He covers parenting, technology, social media dopamine and what that means for managers.

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.

Kurzgesagt compares how many people nuclear accidents have killed against other energy sources. It walks through the worst nuclear accidents and puts their death tolls in context per unit of energy.

David Beazley's PyCon 2010 talk explains how the Python Global Interpreter Lock works and shows experiments where multithreaded code runs slower, even on more cores, due to lock contention and context-switching overhead.

Bret Victor's talk proposing a new kind of maker space built for seeing and understanding a project's behavior: inside it, across time and across possibilities. It argues for scientific understanding over recipes and rules of thumb.

Raph Koster's 2014 GDC Next talk on what science says about creativity, with practical steps game designers and developers can use to be more creative. It frames creativity as applying existing patterns in new contexts.

A roughly 75-minute video essay from Ahoy's RetroAhoy series on the making and history of The Secret of Monkey Island. It covers the small LucasArts team, the game's development and its sequel.

Modern Vintage Gamer examines the claim from the Super Mario 64 decompilation project that the game shipped unoptimized, and puts it in the context of 1996 N64 development.

A short excerpt from Werner Herzog's film Lo and Behold in which Ted Nelson lays out his ideas about hypertext and interconnection. Herzog concludes that Nelson is the only sane person in computing.

Looking Glass Universe explains de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory (Bohmian mechanics) as an alternative to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. The video lays out the pros and cons of the theory and links to related videos on contextuality and entanglement.

Alex Martelli's Google Developers Day talk on classic design patterns (creational, structural and behavioral) and how they appear in Python. He stresses that patterns must be studied in the context of the implementing language.

Musician Adam Neely examines whether certain keys sound sadder than others, looking at the history of tuning systems and temperaments and at how instrument timbre shapes the emotional character we hear. It draws on historical aesthetics writing and audio examples.

The first part of a four-part Channel 4 (UK) documentary series presented by Howard Goodall, this episode covers melody and why tunes affect us so deeply. It explains how melody works in Western music with historical background and music theory.

Historia Civilis tells the story of 46 BCE, the 445-day year in which Julius Caesar reformed the Roman calendar. It covers the political context, including the civil war, Cato and Cicero.

Deviant Ollam gives a long talk on risk and preparedness: get a lawyer, passport, locksmith and other resources before you need them. It covers practical steps to build defenses against serious problems in life.

The Real News Network interview between Aaron Mate and Guardian reporter Luke Harding about Russiagate and Harding's book on alleged Russian collusion.

Tod's Workshop fires full-weight medieval arrows from a 160lb English warbow at reproduced medieval armour. Armour curator Dr Tobias Capwell, an archer and bowyer give historical context and discuss the results.

SoundHound's CEO demos Hound, a voice assistant, handling fast compound natural language queries with context and detailed criteria. The video leaked before the product's official launch.

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.

The first episode of Caltech's The Mechanical Universe, a 52-part introductory university physics series. David Goodstein introduces ideas from Copernicus to Newton, linking the physics of the heavens and the earth with computer animation.

Dan Britt lectures on the history of climate, covering orbital cycles, ice ages and conditions millions of years ago. It frames current climate debate with deep-time context.

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.

A Clojure/conj 2019 talk by Wilker Silva on how namespace-qualified keywords and context-free federated names can be used pragmatically for data modeling, drawn from his experience at Nubank. It builds toward a graph-based view of connecting data from many sources.

Anders Puck Nielsen clears up common misunderstandings about what legally counts as genocide, then compares the situation in Gaza with the genocide case against Putin. The chapters cover the definition, individual intent, and the two case comparisons.

An animated adaptation of Captain David Marquet's talk on greatness, based on his book Turn the Ship Around!. It argues for pushing decision-making down to the people doing the work instead of controlling everything from the top.

Veritasium visits Chernobyl, Fukushima and other places to find who on Earth is exposed to the most ionizing radiation. The answer turns out to be surprising and puts radiation risk in context.