everything is a file

Marshall Kirk McKusick gives a talk at EuroBSDCon tracing filesystem and storage development from 1979 to today, using the BSD Fast Filesystem as the focus. It covers early disk-geometry optimization through later contiguous layout and small-file performance work.

Benno Rice's linux.conf.au 2020 talk asks whether UNIX was the best design we could have had. He looks at what alternatives existed, what was gained and lost, and what could be re-learned, including the limits of treating everything as a file.

An Empire Files episode giving a timeline of Zionist settlement, the Nakba and Israel's expansion over Palestinian land, presented from a critical, anti-colonial viewpoint. It previews Abby Martin's reporting in Palestine.

An Empire Files documentary by Abby Martin presenting a critical account of the Afghanistan War, from the CIA's role in the 1980s to the stalemate of the 2010s and 2020. It argues the war was driven by imperial interests.

Musician Benn Jordan explains and demonstrates adversarial noise that poison-pills music files against AI training and scraping.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment arguing that political motives, including Nixon's, lay behind making marijuana illegal. It mixes comedy with history.

Kurzgesagt's animated explainer on CRISPR gene editing, covering how the technology works and what it could mean for curing disease, designer babies and aging. It frames genetic engineering as an irreversible change coming to humanity.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment arguing that US cannabis prohibition grew out of racially and politically motivated agendas under Nixon and earlier, rather than scientific evidence.

A clip of Louis CK on Conan riffing that everything is amazing and nobody is happy, about people complaining over airplane wifi and taking modern technology for granted.

A Medlife Crisis video by cardiologist Rohin Francis on overdiagnosis and over-screening. It explains how detecting more disease does not necessarily mean saving more lives, and covers harms such as unnecessary treatment.

Steve Blank's Computer History Museum lecture argues that Silicon Valley's roots lie in WWII radar and electronic warfare work, Stanford's Fred Terman and Cold War military funding rather than the semiconductor alone.

Adam Curtis's 2016 BBC documentary HyperNormalisation, about 160 minutes long. It cuts together roughly forty years of politics, finance and technology to argue that people have retreated into a simplified fake world.

A Computer History Museum oral history with Avie Tevanian covering his math talent, work on the Mach microkernel at CMU, joining NeXT, leading NEXTSTEP development and the 1996 Apple acquisition.

A 29C3 panel with whistleblowers Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake and William Binney. They talk about what happens when exposing secret government power becomes a crime, and about surveillance abuses.

A neural-network upscaled 4K, 60 fps version of the 1906 film of a trip down Market Street in San Francisco, shot four days before the earthquake. It shows cable cars, horse carriages, early automobiles and pedestrians sharing the street.

A playful music video promoting the book Land of Lisp, with a song about Lisp programming.

A 2007 Computer History Museum conversation in which Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang interviews TSMC founder Morris Chang. Chang recounts his career and the creation of the dedicated silicon foundry model.

The American Museum of Natural History's film flies from the Himalayas out through the atmosphere and solar system to the afterglow of the Big Bang, using its Digital Universe Atlas four-dimensional map.

Gaming Historian recounts how Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris in the Soviet Union and how a fight over publishing rights spanned the West, Mirrorsoft, Nintendo and the Cold War. It runs about an hour with chaptered parts.

Chris Celio of UC Berkeley compares the RISC-V, ARM and x86 instruction sets, with quantitative data on instruction counts and code density. It examines how the compressed extension fares against Thumb and x86.

Historia Civilis explains the origins and governing system of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy. It covers the Great Law and the league's surprisingly intricate legal and political structure.

Ten hours of uninterrupted pink noise, intended for relaxation and masking background sound. It is a long ambient audio loop rather than a spoken video.

A Computer History Museum oral history of Chuck Peddle, the engineer behind the 6502 and the Commodore PET, covering his career from GE through Motorola and MOS Technology. It runs nearly four hours.

An episode of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj on the cruise industry. It looks at worker exploitation, safety shortcuts, and how cruise lines sweep crime at sea under the rug.

Chris Crawford's 'Dragon Speech' from the first Game Developers Conference, in which he reflects on his dream for game design as an art form. This is a cleaned-up version of the old recording.

Bill Atkinson shows and explains his binder of Polaroids taken during Lisa development, documenting how its graphical interface evolved. Recorded at the Computer History Museum.

David Ditzel of Esperanto Technologies presents their massively parallel, energy-efficient RISC-V processors at the 7th RISC-V Workshop in 2017. It covers the high-performance many-core design aimed at machine learning.

The 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, in which a panel of physicists and philosophers debates whether the universe is a simulation. Participants include David Chalmers, Zohreh Davoudi and James Gates.

A University of Tokyo demo of a rock-paper-scissors robot that always wins, using high-speed vision to read the human hand and respond faster than people can perceive.

Sam Harris interviews linguist John McWhorter about race, racism and what McWhorter calls the new religion of anti-racism. Topics include identity politics, police violence and affirmative action.

A short promotional video of a 5-axis CNC machine milling an elaborate helmet, made by DAISHIN SEIKI with a DMG machine and hyperMILL CAM software. It shows what 5-axis machining can produce.

A compilation of Terry A. Davis, creator of TempleOS, ranting about Linus Torvalds and operating systems. It is an archived video from his old channel.

Finnish comedian Ismo riffs on how the English word for shit is the most complicated word in the language, with its many meanings and uses. It is a four-minute comedy bit.

A short documentary by Christopher Rufo presenting a conservative account of homelessness, addiction and public disorder in San Francisco.

Mark Rober visits Zipline and looks at its autonomous delivery drones, including medical and blood deliveries in Rwanda. He demonstrates how the drones' propeller design and cable-lowered delivery pod make them quiet and precise.

The author of copyparty introduces the FOSS file server he has built over five years, demoing its features such as resumable uploads, WebDAV and deduplication. The video itself is shown running on a demo server.

A short clip of Louis CK on Conan riffing that everything is amazing and nobody is happy, about complaining over modern wonders like air travel and wifi. The uploader added a note about the comedian's later misconduct.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment claiming that jaywalking became a crime through campaigns by the auto industry. It is a short, comedic history of how streets were reclaimed for cars.

Physicist and YouTuber Angela Collier argues in this hour-long video that AI as commonly described does not really exist. She covers the limits of the tools, biased datasets, and why they should not be used to make decisions.

Tom Scott makes a short descriptivist argument that language keeps changing and that casual internet writing conventions, like lowercase typing and dropped full stops, are legitimate. It is part of his Language Files series, written with Gretchen McCulloch.