first person

Martin Kleppmann's Local-First Conf talk reviewing where the local-first idea came from, where it stands five years after the essay, and what the community should work toward. He argues for generic sync infrastructure.

A short excerpt of Elon Musk, interviewed by Kevin Rose, explaining first-principles reasoning with the example of the car versus improving horse carriages. He warns it takes much more mental energy than reasoning by analogy.

The opening lecture of Jordan Peterson's 2017 University of Toronto personality course. He defines personality from historical, constructivist, psychoanalytic, behavioral and neuropsychological angles.

A short clip from Person of Interest season 2 where Root and John gain full access to The Machine and its resources. It shows the AI guiding people with targeting data.

An hour-long, carefully sourced video essay from Ahoy asking what counts as a video game and which one was truly first. It examines Tennis for Two, Spacewar, Pong, the Brown Box and a 1947 CRT device.

Dave Ackley gives a high-level introduction to robust-first computing, which prioritizes robustness over efficiency in computer architecture. A sorting demo illustrates the idea.

UCLA professor Dario Nardi presents brain-imaging research suggesting that different Myers-Briggs personality types use their brains in different ways. He discusses how each type can reach a state of creative flow. It is aimed at a general audience.

A deepfake in which Bill Hader, impersonating Arnold Schwarzenegger on a talk show, visibly morphs into Schwarzenegger. It was made with DeepFaceLab by Ctrl Shift Face.

Dan Callahan presents Mozilla Persona, a decentralized, cross-browser authentication system that removes site passwords, at PyCon 2013. He explains how the protocol works and how to add it to a Python site.

A one-minute clip from the film Minority Report showing digital signage that recognizes a passerby and personalizes ads to him by name. It depicts a vision of targeted advertising driven by biometric identification.

A clip from the movie Minority Report showing personalized advertising that recognizes a person as they walk through a mall.

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.

Dave Ackley demonstrates the Demon Horde Sort, an inherently robust sorting machine running in his Movable Feast Machine simulator. This is the uncut version with all details and side thoughts.

John Scholes builds a depth-first tree-search operator step by step in a Dyalog APL session. It covers higher-order functions and runs the search on the N-Queens problem.

Part one of Errol Morris's First Person interview with Murray Richman, a New York lawyer who defends mob figures. He talks about how he sees the law and his clients.

Derek Sivers annotates a short clip of a lone dancer at a festival, showing how a first follower turns a ridiculous act into a movement. He draws out lessons about leadership and making it easy to follow.

CGP Grey explains how the 2015 UK general election showed the flaws of first-past-the-post voting, with parties like UKIP winning many votes but few seats.

A Jordan Peterson university lecture on the Big Five trait openness to experience, covering creativity and intelligence. It explains how IQ is measured, how well it predicts life success, and the Pareto distribution of creative output.

Gary Vaynerchuk's Web 2.0 Expo keynote on building a personal brand in social media. He urges keeping a day job while building something on the side, with passion and persistence, in a loud and profane style.

Dave Ackley presents robust-first computing and the ULAM programming language for the Movable Feast Machine, a cellular-automata-like architecture. It was a short video for the Future Programming Workshop 2015.

A Startup School talk by YC partner and former Airbnb growth head Gustaf Alstromer on how startups get their first customers. It covers doing things that don't scale, founders learning sales, the sales funnel, and charging your first customer.

Sped-up onboard camera footage of the Falcon 9 first stage landing on a drone ship during the THAICOM 8 mission on May 27, 2016. It shows the descent from grid fin deployment to touchdown.

The famous ladder fight scene from Jackie Chan's First Strike (Police Story 4), an action sequence that won the Hong Kong Film Award for best action choreography.

The first video ever uploaded to YouTube, in April 2005. Co-founder Jawed Karim stands in front of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo for about 19 seconds.

A dramatization of a hypothetical Soviet first strike that destroys US bombers and Minuteman missiles, filmed with US Air Force cooperation. It is a short version of the 1979 documentary First Strike.

Episode 8 of the Fall of Civilizations podcast, a roughly two and a half hour history of the Sumerians. It covers their mysterious origins, invention of writing and mathematics, great early cities and eventual collapse, with myths, proverbs and recreated music.

Ted Nelson, the originator of hypertext and Project Xanadu, gives a personal account at age 80 of his ideals, his career, and how a poor career plan led to discoveries and adventures. It works as an alternative history of personal computing and hypertext.

A student interviews Kirsten Carlson, who does not have an internal monologue, and she answers questions about how she thinks. The video grew out of a viral article about people lacking inner speech.

Amateur footage from the 2009 Sasquatch music festival in which one person starts dancing alone and a crowd gradually joins in, turning it into a dance party.

James Gosling gives a personal talk at the 50th anniversary seminar of Simula about using the language from 1974 and how it shaped his thinking. He explains how Simula's object model and coroutines influenced the design of Java.

A long personal account by a former NixOS contributor of his experience in the community, his ban and the governance events. He aims to correct what he sees as a false narrative about the NixOS drama.

The BotHack NetHack bot wins the game for the first time with no cheats or human intervention, in a run lasting about 3.5 hours. The description links the source code and the dumplog.

SpaceX footage of the Grasshopper vertical takeoff and landing test vehicle making its first roughly 6-foot hop in McGregor, Texas, on September 21, 2012. It was an early step toward a reusable Falcon 9 first stage.

Lex Fridman interviews legendary chip architect Jim Keller about Moore's Law, microprocessor design, and first-principles thinking. Keller draws on his work at AMD, Apple, Tesla and Intel, discussing instruction sets, transistor budgets, and self-driving.

David Graeber's Talks at Google presentation on his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, covering the history of debt, the myth of barter and the Jubilee tradition.

The first episode of Clickspring's series on reproducing the Antikythera Mechanism by hand, laying out the plan and the history. The series follows a machinist building the ancient Greek device with traditional tools and methods.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day undergoes hypoxia training and experiences his own impaired thinking as oxygen is withdrawn. The video shows how quickly and unnoticeably oxygen deprivation degrades judgment, illustrating why you put your own mask on first.

The first 3.5 hours of Tony Alicea's Udemy course on JavaScript's inner workings, covering topics such as first-class functions, closures, prototypal inheritance and how the language behaves under the hood.

James Long's dotJS 2019 talk on how CRDTs enable local-first apps and how simple they can be to implement. He shows how to use them to build robust offline-capable frontends.

Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes watching her own brain functions shut down during a massive stroke. She gives a first-person account of losing speech, motion and self-awareness.