eastern front

MC Frontalot's nerdcore rap about the text adventure Zork, made for Jason Scott's Get Lamp documentary and featuring a cameo by Steve Meretzky. It was filmed over an evening in a basement.

A FRONTLINE documentary on whether efforts to fix plastic pollution made it worse. It looks at the battle over plastics and recycling and how little plastic is actually recycled.

The full, long-form FRONTLINE interview with Steve Bannon, recorded in 2019 for the documentary series on the Obama-to-Trump era. He discusses his populist politics, the Trump campaign and White House, and his view of the establishment.

A full FRONTLINE interview with journalist Julia Ioffe on Putin and alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election.

A local TV news investigation showing that many SUVs and trucks have a large blind zone directly in front, hiding children from the driver. It includes a demonstration lining kids up in front of a vehicle.

MC Frontalot's nerdcore song "Secrets From The Future" (2007), about secrets not staying hidden once future technology can break today's encryption.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2022 talk on whether C++ can become ten times simpler and safer. He introduces his experimental Cpp2 syntax and the cppfront transpiler, explaining the limits on incremental improvement.

A panel at The National WWII Museum on the Battle of Kursk, moderated by Keith Huxen with historians Robert Citino and John Parshal. The discussion covers the armored engagement and the German, Soviet and US approaches to tank production.

A Google Tech Talk on Yahoo's 14 rules for faster web pages and the YSlow tool. It covers front-end practices like avoiding @import and fixing ETags, with live analysis of popular sites.

A Welch Labs explainer on neural scaling laws and the compute-efficient frontier, asking why model loss seems to hit a line it cannot cross. It draws an analogy to an ideal gas law for AI.

Nicholas Zakas of Yahoo discusses architecture for large, modular JavaScript web applications. He lays out the theory behind building front ends that scale in complexity.

A clip from the 2015 film The Big Short in which FrontPoint Partners investigate mortgage lending in Florida and place their first trade. It shows brokers and a stripper-adjacent loan scene illustrating subprime lending to unverified borrowers.

An IIHS crash test pitting a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air against a 2009 Malibu in a frontal offset collision for the institute's 50th anniversary. The old car's occupant space collapses while the modern car's protects its driver.

JJRicks rides in Waymo's fully driverless Level 4 cars in Phoenix with nobody in the front seats, across two long rides. It is the first in a series of such ride videos.

A clip from The Simpsons episode 'Krusty Gets Kancelled' showing 'Worker and Parasite', an Eastern European take on Itchy and Scratchy. It is reportedly one of Matt Groening's favorite moments from the show.

A classic Clarke and Dawe sketch from 1991 in which an Australian senator evasively discusses an oil spill, famously saying the front fell off.

Music YouTuber Rick Beato describes confronting the people behind copyright blocks on one of his videos. The video is a rant about how takedowns and demonetization hit music education channels.

The People's Front of Judea scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian, a sketch about rival revolutionary groups.

The People's Front of Judea scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian, a satire of squabbling revolutionary factions.

A five-minute clip from The Big Short (2015) in which FrontPoint Partners confront Morgan Stanley risk assessors and an S&P ratings representative about inflated mortgage bond ratings.

IIHS frontal crash test footage showing what happens to an unbelted rear-seat passenger. It illustrates that buckling up in the back matters for the passenger and for front occupants.

Svelte creator Rich Harris explains moving reactivity into the compiler and language rather than tracking state at runtime, with a history of spreadsheets as reactive systems and comparisons to React.

Cheng Lou's react-europe 2016 talk lays out a mental framework for thinking about abstraction levels in JavaScript tooling, from Angular and Grunt to Webpack and React. It uses that framework to reason about the cost of abstractions and how to choose between competing solutions.

Wes Bos breaks down the techniques behind the McMaster-Carr website's speed: server-rendered HTML, prefetching, CDN and service worker caching, preloading, critical CSS and fixed-size images. He also notes its old-school jQuery and YUI JavaScript.

A JSConf 2014 talk visually breaking down algorithms behind everyday UI patterns, such as dropdown menus that vanish when the mouse drifts and picking the nearest target to the cursor. It shows how these are implemented in JavaScript.

A short unofficial NASA-style spot from Reid Gower's Sagan Series, setting Carl Sagan's words about humanity spreading through the Solar System to visuals and music.

LearnCode.academy presents a roadmap of web development technologies to learn in 2016 and 2017, spanning front-end, back-end and DevOps tools.

Huygens Optics shows how DIY photon sieves shape a laser's wave front, explaining how they differ from zone plates and how aperture count affects the focal point, with time-resolved visualizations of the diffraction.

Richard Feldman describes introducing Elm into a mixed React and jQuery front-end in production, and why the result was reliable, clean and fast enough to make the back-end team jealous.

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.

A demonstration of loading Altair 4K BASIC on an Altair 8800 clone, using a front-panel bootloader and an ASR-33 Teletype. It shows the full sequence of entering boot code, loading BASIC and running a program.

A scene from The Big Short in which Jared Vennett pitches credit default swaps on mortgage bonds to a hedge fund team, using a Jenga tower to illustrate collateralized debt obligations.

Pete Hunt of Facebook and Instagram introduces React at JSConf EU 2013 and explains its design principles. He argues that separating templates from logic only separates technologies, not concerns, and makes the case for components.

Austin Meyer, developer of the X-Plane flight simulator, explains how he was sued by a patent troll over a trivial claim about an app's license server. He walks through how the shell-company litigation works and why ignoring the suit makes things worse.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, talks at Curry On 2015 about user-focused language design. He explains the principles behind Elm and how to make a functional, typed language as approachable as JavaScript.

The first class of Timothy Snyder's Yale course on the making of modern Ukraine. It introduces the course and asks what it means for a nation to exist in light of the Russian invasion.

FortNine looks at the data on why newer pickup trucks with tall, blunt grilles kill so many pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists. It argues that lowering hood height would substantially cut fatalities.

The first three talks from React Conf 2018, by Sophie Alpert, Dan Abramov and Ryan Florence. They introduce React Hooks and explain the problems with classes that hooks solve.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen's WordCamp Europe 2017 talk presents CSS Grid Layout as a native two-dimensional layout system that changes how web pages are structured, including responsive layouts independent of source order. It was given as browsers began shipping support.

Matthew Griffith, creator of elm-ui, presents a toolkit for designing layouts in Elm as an alternative to CSS. He explains the opinionated approach to layout and styling.