difference engine

A reverse engineer walks through fixing a ten-year-old bug in Guitar Hero III without access to its source code, using a disassembler and decompiler. It is technical but explained step by step.

Aaron Boodman of Replicache asks why sync engines have not yet fixed web app complexity and what is missing for them to go mainstream. The talk lays out the ideas that led to the Zero sync engine.

Mario Zechner explains why he built pi, a minimal coding agent, out of frustration with existing agent harnesses. He also discusses how AI agents are straining open source projects and argues for slowing down.

Yegor Denisov-Blanch of Stanford presents a study of nearly 100,000 developers at hundreds of companies, measuring how AI affects productivity from commit data. It finds an average boost of about 20% with wide variance by codebase, task complexity and stack.

An excerpt from a Bay Area Rust meetup on Servo's WebRender, which renders CSS display lists on the GPU at very high frame rates. It explains the approach and demos rendering at around 500 FPS.

Bryan Seely tells how he used fake Google Maps business listings to intercept phone calls meant for the Secret Service and FBI. He then turned himself in, and the talk explains the verification gaps that made it possible.

Part 2 of the IROS 2011 keynote by Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson on Google's self-driving car. It shows how the car perceives its surroundings with a lidar point cloud and recognizes traffic lights and pedestrians. The audio is poor because it was recorded on a pocket camcorder.

In an 11-minute TED talk, Ralph Langner explains how his team reverse-engineered the Stuxnet worm and worked out that it targeted industrial control systems, with a covert state origin. It is a compact look at cyber-forensics.

A JuliaCon talk by a NASA Launch Services Program engineer on modeling spacecraft separation dynamics in Julia. He describes replacing a Simulink-based workflow for checking launch vehicle separation requirements with Julia and ModelingToolkit, with large speedups and much shorter code.