future tech

A 2012 debate between Peter Thiel and George Gilder on whether technological progress and economic growth are accelerating or decelerating, moderated by William Davidow.

Adam Tornhill's GOTO Copenhagen 2019 talk on how to prioritize technical debt in large codebases. It argues for combining code complexity with change frequency (hotspots) from version control data, rather than trying to quantify debt in the abstract.

A conference presentation by Bert Hubert on how companies lose their technological edge and become outsourcing hubs. It argues the same dynamic applies to whole countries and continents, and ends with suggestions for reversing it.

Charles Stross's 34C3 talk on how science fiction gets the future wrong. He argues that corporations are slow, human-powered AIs that optimize for profit, and that regulation lags behind accelerating technology.

A DevGAMM talk by Jonathan Blow arguing that civilizations can lose technological capability and that software quality is already deteriorating. He discusses how knowledge fails to transfer between generations.

Mark Fisher's 2014 talk in Zagreb on the slow cancellation of the future, about cultural stagnation and the sense that popular culture has stopped producing the new.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2017 talk on leadership and organizational principles, ranging from the Gettysburg Address to Uber and Amazon. He argues for the difference between principles and values and criticizes vague corporate principles.

Andreas Antonopoulos explains how to tell Bitcoin-style blockchains from corporate blockchain hype. He argues the goal should be de-banking everyone rather than banking the unbanked.

A 2012 Fortune dinner debate between Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt over whether technological progress is healthy or stalling and whether Google can still innovate.

An excerpt from an RSA event in which physicist David Deutsch makes the case for optimism as a driver of progress in the 21st century. It is a short highlight of a longer discussion.

Scott Galloway's TED talk uses data to argue that young Americans are financially worse off than earlier generations, calling it a great intergenerational theft. He covers root causes and what could change it.

Psychologist Robert Epstein presents a Stanford EE380 colloquium on how internet algorithms such as search rankings can manipulate opinions, purchases and votes at massive scale. He also describes a new monitoring system for tracking such influence.

A five-minute C-SPAN clip of Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath testifying to a US Senate committee that screen time, including in schools, harms children's learning and cognitive development.

Christian Schafmeister's Google Tech Talk on designing spiroligomer molecules and building Clasp, a Common Lisp on LLVM that interoperates with C++, to program molecular design. It covers the chemistry, automatic differentiation for force fields, and how the compiler is built.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk making the case for the liquid fluoride thorium reactor as an abundant, safe source of electrical power. It covers the technical motivations and design of thorium molten-salt reactors.

Google engineers describe Google's internal build system, a unified, language-agnostic system used across the company. It was presented as a 2012 NYC tech talk.

A Google Tech Talk by Raymond Blum on how Google backs up massive amounts of data such as Gmail and Picasa. It covers scaling challenges, failure types, and approaches that did not work, including tape.

Bret Victor's DBX 2013 talk, delivered in the guise of a 1973 IBM engineer with an overhead projector. It surveys forgotten ideas from 1960s and early 70s computing and warns against assuming you know what you're doing.

Pete Hunt explains why React's virtual DOM was built, how it compares with databinding-style systems, and what it means for future browser technology. Recorded at FutureJS 2014 in Barcelona.

Tanya Reilly's LeadDev talk on glue work, the invisible coordination and support tasks engineers do that keep teams successful but can hurt careers.

Stuart Armstrong of the Future of Humanity Institute gives an Oxford physics talk on what exploratory engineering suggests about the Fermi paradox. He argues that von Neumann probes and Dyson spheres are plausibly buildable and asks what traces advanced civilizations would leave.

Tony Seba's 2016 keynote argues that batteries, electric vehicles, self-driving cars and solar will converge to disrupt energy and transportation. He predicts by 2030 all new vehicles will be electric and autonomous and that oil and other fossil fuels will be obsolete.

Salman Khan explains why he created Khan Academy, a structured library of video lessons with interactive exercises. He calls on teachers to flip the classroom, with lectures watched at home and homework done in class with teacher help.

A 2006 Google TechTalk in which Luis von Ahn introduces human computation, using people's effort to solve problems like image recognition that computers cannot yet handle. It covers games with a purpose and related ideas such as CAPTCHAs.

Stanford futurist Tony Seba argues that electric vehicles, battery storage, solar and autonomous vehicles form a 10x exponential disruption that will make fossil fuels obsolete within about a decade. It draws on his Clean Disruption book.

Balaji Srinivasan's Startup School 2013 talk on Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit, arguing for building alternatives outside existing institutions. It is the primary source for a much-retold and much-distorted idea.

Full-day livestream of the 2016 Decentralized Web Summit at the Internet Archive, with speakers including Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Brewster Kahle, Cory Doctorow and Mitchell Baker. It explores the technology and impact of a decentralized web.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) traces the history of software from 1948 to today, looking at the problems programmers faced, how they were solved, and what mistakes the profession made. He then projects where the field is going, including professionalism and regulation.

A Google Tech Talk by Steve Weis that introduces modern cryptography and its use in practice and at Google. It covers proofs of security and security definitions and a special topic. HN commenters treat it as a talk on verifiable electronic voting.

Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of the Center for Humane Technology present why current AI capabilities pose catastrophic societal risks. They argue companies are racing to deploy without adequate safety, and that institutions must adapt. It was given before GPT-4's launch.

A 2009 Google Tech Talk by Nicholas Zakas on the hidden performance pitfalls of JavaScript. It covers what is fast and slow in the language and how to avoid common bottlenecks.

Sean Parent of Adobe argues that object-oriented frameworks ultimately fail to deliver scalable, high quality software and proposes combining generic and declarative programming instead. It draws on Stepanov's Elements of Programming.

A Google Tech Talk arguing that the best interface requires the fewest clicks and choices, with Google search, Facebook, the iPod and Firefox as examples. It shows how minimizing interaction makes interfaces easier to learn.

Geoff Hinton's 2010 Google Tech Talk on deep belief networks, learning layers of representation one at a time from unlabeled data, and extending them with multiplicative interactions.

A 2006 Google Tech Talk by Robert Bussard on inertial electrostatic confinement (polywell) fusion as a cheap, clean alternative to conventional thermonuclear reactors. He argues it could be made viable with modest funding.

A 2006 Google TechTalk in which SQLite's author Richard Hipp introduces the embeddable, zero-configuration C database library. He covers its history, strengths and weaknesses, and where it beats client/server databases.

Linus Torvalds gives a Google tech talk on git, the source control system he created two years earlier. He argues for distributed version control over centralized systems such as CVS and Subversion.

In this 2019 GDC session, Petri Purho of Nolla Games explains the technical side of Noita's physics engine, including scaling a falling-sand simulation to large continuous worlds and adding destructible rigid bodies. It also shows how the emergent physics drives the gameplay.

Mathematician Kevin Buzzard explains why he believes the Lean theorem prover will shape the future of mathematics, and describes digitizing his university curriculum in Lean with undergraduates, plus the cultural challenges.

Herbert Wolverson's Roguelike Celebration 2020 talk surveying procedural map generation techniques, including integration of hand-crafted prefabs and vaults.