function composition

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.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science demonstrates an X-ray fluorescence gun that measures chemical composition, tears it down, analyzes its failure, and discusses a new XRF technology appearing on eBay.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jon Stewart interviews Ezra Klein about his book Abundance and why progressive goals get stuck in procedure and regulation. They discuss how to streamline government and what could be built without bureaucratic obstacles.