ground effect

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.

Richard Feldman argues that functional programming is not the norm largely because of historical accidents, such as C++ popularity, platform exclusivity, marketing spend and network effects, rather than merit. He traces the history of how languages become mainstream.

Moxie Marlinspike's DEF CON 18 talk on changing threats to privacy argues that surveillance arrived through convenient services and network effects, so opting out is not a real solution. It also includes his framing of getting social democracy rather than the fascism people feared.

Rich Hickey's talk at Clojure's tenth anniversary on the kind of programs Clojure is designed for. He argues for situated programs that deal with changing requirements, and for dynamic typing and data over static types.

Paul Chiusano's Strange Loop 2019 talk introduces Unison, an open-source functional language for distributed, elastic systems. It covers content-addressed code identified by hashes of the syntax tree, a codebase manager, and algebraic effects called abilities.

Vim creator Bram Moolenaar's 2007 Google Tech Talk on habits for efficient text editing. He explains how to spot repetition and inefficiency, then use editor features to fix it.

Julia co-creator Stefan Karpinski explains why multiple dispatch makes Julia code and types reusable across packages with so little friction. He covers sharing basic types and sharing generic algorithms.

Carl Sagan's December 1985 testimony to Congress on the greenhouse effect, about 15 minutes long. He lays out CO2 warming, the risk of runaway effects and the danger of continued coal burning.

Moral philosopher James Flynn explains the Flynn effect, the steady rise of IQ scores across the 20th century. He argues the shift reflects a move toward abstract, hypothetical thinking as cognitively demanding professions grew.

Sasa Juric's EMPEX talk demonstrates Elixir and Erlang's process model and what makes the BEAM runtime distinctive, such as fault-tolerant parallelism by design.

A long information session where The Boring Company presents its vision for Loop, an underground high-speed transit system, and the traffic problems it aims to solve. It includes discussion of faster tunnel boring and electrification.

Vim author Bram Moolenaar's 2007 Google Tech Talk on habits for efficient text editing: find inefficiencies in your own editing, then learn the Vim commands that fix them.

Gary Bernhardt's RubyConf 2012 talk on testing in isolation without mocking everything. It goes through behavior versus data, mutation versus immutability, and how a functional core with an imperative shell yields natural isolation and parallelism.

Emery Berger argues that performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern systems, showing how code layout and link order can swamp optimization effects. He presents tools that evaluate performance more reliably.

Mark Ferrari, the LucasArts background artist, explains in a GDC 2016 talk how he draws 8-bit graphics. He covers color cycling and palette shifting to create complex animated scenery without frame animation.

Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho take a bland Breakout clone and add layer after layer of 'juice' such as easing, particles, screen shake and sound until it feels alive. A live demo makes the effect of small feedback details obvious.

Rob Pike shows how the Go text/template lexer is built, using state functions, goroutines and channels. The talk was given at a Google Technology User Group in Sydney in 2011.

Vlambeer's Jan Willem Nijman shows how to make an action game feel great by stacking small effects like screenshake, recoil and particles onto a basic shooter. It was presented at INDIGO Classes 2013.

Emery Berger explains why performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern hardware, showing how code layout and alignment can swamp optimization effects. He presents Stabilizer for statistically sound evaluation and Coz, a causal profiler.

Rich Hickey's philosophical talk from the first Clojure Conj in 2010. He argues that good design comes from deliberate, away-from-keyboard thinking, and describes how to feed the background mind so it solves problems.

MIT's Prof. Dennis Whyte explains the ARC/SPARC compact tokamak approach, in which new high-temperature superconducting magnets allow smaller and cheaper fusion reactors. He covers fusion physics, performance trends and the engineering path to net energy.

In this TED talk, Lawrence Lessig argues that American politics is corrupted by Congress's dependence on funding from a tiny fraction of citizens. He uses rapid-fire visuals and calls for a bipartisan push to reclaim the Republic.

Vaclav Smil's talk on historic energy transitions and what they imply for climate investment. He argues that transitions are slow, technology improves gradually, and only absolute cuts in energy use would truly work.

Chris McCord's ElixirConf EU 2019 keynote introducing Phoenix LiveView, which builds interactive server-rendered apps without writing JavaScript. It explains how only changed dynamic parts are sent over a websocket.

Shashi Tharoor's Oxford Union speech arguing that Britain owes reparations to its former colonies, focused on the effects of British rule in India. It lists economic and political damage done by colonialism.

Liz Rice live-codes a minimal container runtime in a few lines of Go at GOTO Amsterdam 2018. She explains namespaces, control groups and what a host knows about its containers.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang examines how realistic hardware supply chain attacks are, from rogue insiders to nation states, in the wake of the Bloomberg Businessweek report. He explains how undocumented components could be hidden on boards and how hard they are to spot.

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig argues that US democracy is corrupted by money, since a tiny fraction of the population effectively funds who gets elected. He says fixing this must come before addressing issues like climate change or student debt.

David Heinemeier Hansson explains what he learned about indoor air quality after his new house made his family sick. He covers CO2, VOCs, off-gassing, HVAC and ventilation, and cognitive effects, presented at a Basecamp meetup.

Travis Kalanick's talk at FailCon 2011 about his earlier failed startups, given as a case study before Uber's rise. It describes lessons from those ventures.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2019 talk on the mental habits behind effective programming, drawn from coaching, teaching and StackOverflow. He covers problem decomposition, chunking, managing working memory and getting unstuck.

Scott Meyers explains how CPU caches work and why they matter for performance, covering cache levels, access speeds, associativity, and effects in multithreaded code. The focus is C++ and cache-aware, data-oriented programming.

David Schachter describes how he made a data-collection Python program run 114,000 times faster, drawing on decades of experience. The talk covers pipelining, cache effects and other optimization lessons.

Jonathan Blow talks at Gamelab 2018 about the design decisions behind Jai, the programming language he is building for game programmers. He covers low-friction development, quality of life and the effects of compile times.

Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games explains at GDC 2016 how an indie developer survived eleven years without a hit by building a long tail of games and redefining success.

Rob Pike's GopherCon 2016 talk on the design of the Go assembler, explaining why Go uses a common assembly language translated to each architecture.

Matt Ranney of Uber talks at GOTO Chicago 2016 about what Uber learned from growing past 1,000 production microservices. He covers regrets, sprawl and organizational effects.

Rich Hickey introduces Clojure to the NYC Java Study Group in the first of a two-part talk. It covers reader syntax, core data structures, code-as-data, evaluation, special operators, functions, macros and sequences, assuming no Lisp background.

Gary Yourofsky's 2010 lecture at Georgia Tech arguing for veganism on ethical, health and environmental grounds. It is a long, forceful animal-rights speech.

Retired Major Brian Shul tells the story of a ground speed check with LA Center while flying the SR-71 Blackbird. He recounts it live at the Hiller Aviation Museum.