error correction

3Blue1Brown's discovery-oriented introduction to error correction codes, building up Hamming codes from the puzzle of locating a flipped bit. It explains the parity-check idea and why it is so efficient.

Joe Armstrong, inventor of Erlang, gives a GOTO Chicago 2018 talk on building fault-tolerant systems. He covers what to do and avoid when handling errors, arguing for letting processes fail and recover.

Peter Shor tells the story of how he discovered Shor's Algorithm, from his early mathematics days to the quantum factoring breakthrough. It was recorded at MIT at the Physics of Computation conference.

Nassim Taleb argues that evidence on terrorism risk presented in media is statistically naive, using extreme value theory without math to separate fat-tailed risks like Ebola and terrorism from thin-tailed ones.

Veritasium builds a QR code by hand to explain how it works. It covers the history of Morse code and barcodes, how QR codes encode data, why damaged codes still scan, and how safe they are.

Tom Scott's correction video on his earlier claim that 18th-century insurance firefighters let uninsured buildings burn. After a historian looked into it, he concludes the story was wrong and explains how the error happened.

Chris Houser's Clojure/conj talk on why Clojure's exceptions destroy information as the stack unwinds, unlike Common Lisp's condition system, which can resume from the error site. He surveys the existing libraries that approximate conditions, explains why they don't compose with each other, and considers what a better design would look like.

Matt Might's Curry On talk on ending errors in code, both software and the human genome. He covers conservative approximation of the halting problem via static analysis and a computational approach to precision medicine.

Matt Parker's Royal Institution talk based on his book Humble Pi, covering everyday mathematical mistakes and spurious patterns that went wrong in engineering and software. It mixes stand-up comedy with stories of coincidence and error.

Veritasium explains how cosmic rays and other particles flip bits in computer memory, with examples including a Belgian election count error, plane incidents and game glitches. It is inspired by a RadioLab episode on bit flips.

The short printer-destruction-adjacent clip from Office Space built around the cryptic 'PC LOAD LETTER' error message. It pokes fun at unhelpful printer errors.

Kurzgesagt addresses whether viewers can trust its videos, describing its research process and how it handles older videos with errors or overstated claims.

MinutePhysics explains that computers store brightness nonlinearly, so blurring and blending colors in raw RGB gives wrong, dark results. It shows why mixed colors, such as in gradients, look off.

Nickolas Means recounts the 1979 Three Mile Island accident minute by minute, from the control rod insertion to the operator's decision to switch off emergency cooling. He argues that finding systemic causes is more useful than blaming individuals.

NASA JPL engineers explain the final minutes of the Curiosity rover's entry, descent and landing on Mars, which combined aerobraking, a parachute and a skycrane. It lays out the tight sequence of events that all had to work automatically.

Max Brunsfeld introduces Tree-sitter, a parsing system for developer tools that offers incremental parsing and robust error recovery through a uniform C API. The talk explains the design, based on LR extended to GLR parsing.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2019 talk on the split in the C++ community over exceptions and RTTI. He proposes making exceptions cheaper and more usable, including a zero-overhead, Result-like design.

NASA's animated explanation of the Curiosity rover's Mars landing, which relied on a complex automated sequence taking about seven minutes. It features NASA engineers discussing the risks before the 2012 landing.

Luca Sas's ACCU 2021 talk on Modern C, a style of C and C-like C++ aligned with data-oriented design. It covers centralized memory management, zero-is-initialization, error handling and API design.

Michael Feathers' GOTO Chicago 2018 talk on reducing error checks and conditional logic in code. He offers a framework for handling errors and decisions at the level of code and architecture.

A Second Thought video arguing that the CIA is responsible for serious crimes, coups and unrest around the world, with historical examples and further reading.

Real air traffic control audio of the Air Astana flight whose flight controls had been wired in reverse by a maintenance error. The pilots struggle to keep control while ATC tries to help.

A short clip based on Zbigniew Brzezinski's views about the erosion of national sovereignty and his criticism of the war on terror. It is titled Political awakening.

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.

A PBS Infinite Series episode explaining the mathematics of quantum computers, including how qubits store complex numbers and how quantum computation differs from classical computation. Hosted by Kelsey Houston-Edwards.

Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange survey recent highlights in post-quantum cryptography at 35C3, covering the NIST competition, network protocol experiments, and broken candidates.

MinutePhysics explains Shor's algorithm, showing how a quantum computer factors large integers by finding the period of a number modulo N. It walks through the modular arithmetic and number theory that give the exponential speedup over classical factoring, and why this threatens encryption.

PBS Infinite Series explains how Shor's algorithm lets a quantum computer break RSA encryption, building on earlier episodes about cryptography and the math of quantum computers. It works through the idea step by step.

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.

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.

Quanta Magazine explains the 2022 experiment that claimed to create a holographic wormhole on Google's quantum computer. The description now notes that a later independent analysis questioned whether any wormhole was created.

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 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.

Tom Scott recounts the worst typo he ever made, a subtle mistake in code with destructive consequences at a previous job. It is a cautionary tale about irreversible operations.

A short documentary clip of Japanese railway workers and Toyota staff using pointing-and-calling, a safety practice of physically pointing at and naming things while working. It includes examples from several railway companies.

Cockpit footage of an approach to the Megeve altiport in France that ends in a gear-up landing, with the warning horn audible throughout. Everyone aboard survived and the crew had thousands of flight hours.

Chess YouTuber agadmator reports that YouTube took down his podcast with Hikaru Nakamura as harmful or dangerous content. It was later restored.

Casey Muratori argues against smart pointers and RAII, advocating grouped-element thinking, zero-is-initialization and stubs as better ways to structure memory and handle errors.

Hans Rosling's TEDxSummit talk asks whether some religions have higher birth rates and how that affects population growth. He charts data across time and religions and reaches a surprising conclusion about fertility.

Ward Cunningham explains the history and intent of the debt metaphor, which he coined while refactoring the WyCash product. He says debt means code reflecting an incomplete understanding of the problem, not sloppy programming.