executive function

Richard Feldman explains how pure functional languages can match or beat imperative ones on performance. Compilers can turn immutable code into in-place mutation, avoiding naive copying. The talk draws on his work on the Roc language.

A Lambda Days keynote by Simon Peyton Jones and Tim Sweeney introducing Verse, Epic's functional logic language for the metaverse. It covers existential variables, unification and expressions yielding multiple values.

Martin Donald explains the Wave Function Collapse algorithm using Sudoku-like constraint solving and shows how he implemented it with Blender and Godot. It links demos and reference articles.

Physicist Jacob Barandes discusses his view that quantum mechanics can be formulated without wave functions, using a stochastic, probabilistic approach. The long interview covers measurement, the foundations of quantum theory and the history of the field.

A step-by-step animated explanation of how SHA-256 works, from padding and message schedule to the compression function and final hash, with source code for the animations.

Kaze Emanuar searches for the best sine approximation for the Nintendo 64, comparing the lookup tables in Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time with polynomial alternatives. It walks through numerics and 3rd, 4th and 5th order approximations.

A short clip, published by The Sun, of a Russian surface-to-air missile that appears to turn around after launch and hit its own launch site. It was reportedly filmed in Alchevsk during the 2022 war in Ukraine.

Bret Weinstein and Yuri Deigin discuss the evidence for the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab, including the furin cleavage site and gain-of-function research. The conversation draws on Deigin's Medium article.

Gabriella Gonzalez argues that developers misunderstand marketing as deception or hype, and applies the technology-adoption ideas of Crossing the Chasm to Haskell. She looks at what keeps Haskell from reaching mainstream programmers and what a community can do about it.

Zig creator Andrew Kelley's RedisConf 2020 talk on modeling data flow with asynchronous I/O in Zig. It explains how Zig's async/await avoids function coloring, and Loris Cro demonstrates OkRedis, a zero-allocation Redis client.

A short comedic complaint by ProZD about YouTube search failing to surface his own video even when searching its exact title. It illustrates how poor search results have become.

A two-hour Huberman Lab podcast episode on the physiological effects of alcohol on the brain and body at different levels of consumption. It covers genetic predisposition to alcoholism, alcohol metabolism, and how it causes cellular stress and changes thinking and behavior.

A 70-minute video essay by Jimmy McGee on gambling, addiction and game design, tracing horse racing, slot machines and collectible card markets. It is the first in a series on making money from games.

A roughly 10-minute guided Non-Sleep Deep Rest session voiced by neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. It is meant to reduce daytime fatigue, improve focus and aid sleep.

Andrew Huberman discusses ADHD, its biology and myths, behavioral and pharmacologic treatments, and training protocols to improve focus for people with or without ADHD. It covers dopamine and the coordination of brain networks.

Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG argues that gifted kids can be seen as special needs, tracing a path from the gifted label to burnout and perfectionism.

Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG explains why people feel unmotivated and unable to start tasks after hours of YouTube or similar distractions. He frames it as a result of how social media is designed to capture attention, and says not to blame yourself.

A 60 Minutes report on neurosurgeon Ali Rezai using focused ultrasound on the brain to treat Alzheimer's and addiction. It shows experiments opening the blood-brain barrier and targeting addiction-related regions.

Andrew Huberman interviews Stanford addiction psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke about the biology and psychology of addiction to drugs, food, gambling, screens and more. They discuss dopamine, the opioid crisis, and her book Dopamine Nation.

Andrew Huberman interviews Harvard psychiatrist Chris Palmer about nutrition, metabolism and mental health, including the ketogenic diet as a treatment for depression and schizophrenia.

A health update from the Physics Girl channel explaining that Dianna Cowern has been seriously ill with long COVID and ME/CFS, and that new science videos are postponed.

Robert Miles gives a remastered introduction to AI safety, adapted from a talk in London. It lays out why advanced AI could go wrong and answers common objections.

James Trunk introduces Clojure syntax and thinking, covering its core data structures, immutability, the thread-last macro and live data analysis in the REPL.

Alexis King's ZuriHac 2020 talk on how effect systems in Haskell can be implemented efficiently. It looks at the performance cost of effect libraries and how to reduce it.

A one-hour OCaml Workshop 2020 talk on the state of the OCaml Platform, covering IDE support, next steps for the tooling and plans for 2020-2021.

Guy Steele's Strange Loop 2010 talk argues that programmers should not have to think about parallelism, and that languages should support algorithms built on independence and divide-and-conquer. He also recounts fitting a program onto a single punch card.

A short satirical video, originally titled Broccoli Man, in which an engineer who only wants to serve 5 terabytes gets tangled in Google's internal resource and production processes. It is the source of the phrase about forgetting how to count that low.

Tom 7 (suckerpinch) delivers a long, comedic digression on gradient descent and floating-point imprecision. He shows how rounding behavior can supply the nonlinearity needed to build a neural network.

Veritasium explains the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, drawing heavily on Sean Carroll's book. It walks through the Schrodinger equation and why wave collapse may be unnecessary if the universe keeps splitting.

Jon Stewart on The Daily Show satirizes the AI industry's promises of a better future while it builds technology to replace workers. It mocks executives and AI hype.

A reupload of Joel Spolsky's talk teaching spreadsheet users the Excel features they are probably missing, such as keyboard navigation, named ranges, tables and lookups. The original disappeared and this copy comes from the Wayback Machine.

Linus Akesson demonstrates the Commodordion, a fully functional 8-bit accordion built around Commodore 64 hardware with bellows made of floppy disks. He performs Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag and tells the story of the build.

Konrad Malawski's Strange Loop 2023 talk shows how the FoundationDB team adopted Swift incrementally in a C++ codebase. It covers Swift's C++ interoperability, which let them move single functions or entire types over one at a time.

Huygens Optics explores the idea that space is a non-linear elastic medium, and uses simulations to show how wave energy might be confined locally into particle-like objects. It touches on inertia, the Schwinger limit and the vacuum as a medium.

A short cartoon explaining how language models like ChatGPT work, from autocomplete and conditional probabilities to neural networks, gradient descent and backpropagation. It shows how networks act as universal function approximators.

Neurologist Dr. Matthew Phillips talks at Low Carb Gold Coast 2022 about fasting and ketogenic diets as therapies for cancer and neurodegenerative disease. He focuses on mitochondrial dysfunction and brain energy metabolism.

WSJ's Joanna Stern interviews Apple's Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak at WWDC 2025 about Siri's delays, AI strategy, the Liquid Glass redesign in iOS 26, iPad versus Mac, and tariffs.

Scott Aaronson's Harvard CMSA talk traces what mathematical truths are knowable, from Godel and Turing to the Busy Beaver function. He covers recent work on Busy Beaver values.

A five-minute demo of the Common Lisp debugger fixing a bug, recompiling a single function, and resuming execution from the failed stack frame. It shows how to avoid re-running long computations.

Pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig talks at Low Carb Denver 2020 about sugar, metabolic syndrome and cancer. He lays out the case that metabolic dysfunction drives disease.