hands-on

Tested gets hands-on with four Meta Reality Labs research VR headset prototypes testing resolution, brightness, focus shifting and form factor, plus an interview with Mark Zuckerberg on display technology.

The Verge's documentary on Handspring and its Treo, a smartphone that came a decade before the iPhone. It tells how a small team tried to build the modern smartphone and was held back by carriers and timing.

Marques Brownlee shares his hands-on impressions of Apple's $3500 Vision Pro headset after trying it. He covers the spatial computing experience, eye tracking, and how it compares to other devices.

A SAAMI-produced training video for firefighters explaining what happens when sporting ammunition burns, including that unchambered cartridges lack the energy to penetrate much. It includes test footage of ammunition in fires.

Alexander Rose of the Long Now Foundation describes the design and construction of the 10,000 year clock conceived by Danny Hillis. He covers the project's history, methods, and how different cultures built things to last millennia.

Matt Parker gives a hands-on Royal Institution talk on how four-dimensional shapes appear in a 3D world, with props like straw frames, Mobius strips and a knitted hat. It is a playful general-audience tour of the fourth dimension.

A YouTuber explores the Chernobyl zone in 2013, takes a gamma spectrum of a hot reactor fuel fragment, and jokes about a radioactive ant bite. It is a hands-on amateur look at radiation in the exclusion zone.

Boston Dynamics shows the electric Atlas autonomously moving engine covers between containers and a sequencing dolly. It uses an ML vision model and grasping policy with no teleoperation or prescribed motions.

A short silent video from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission warning consumers to stop using the Peloton Tread+. It shows a child being pulled under the treadmill, and it preceded Peloton's recall.

Zach Hartwig of MIT introduces the key concepts of magnetic fusion energy and the state of fusion research. He then presents MIT's proposed pathway of using high-field superconducting magnets to build smaller, cheaper tokamaks on a climate-relevant timescale.

Explains the proposed NASA JPL plan to use the Sun as a gravitational lens, sending solar sail craft to its focal region to image an exoplanet's surface. It covers the distances involved, how imaging with the Sun would work and the mission design.

Microsoft's Brian Beckman gives an hour-long, whiteboard-style walk through monads, building from function composition and monoids using school-level math. It is aimed at practicing programmers rather than category theorists.

Jason Turner's CppCon 2016 talk builds a simple Commodore 64 game using C++17, showing how constexpr and const let a modern compiler produce tight 6502 code. He walks through assembly output to show abstractions being optimized away.

Python core developer Raymond Hettinger explains how Python's dictionary implementation evolved into the compact, ordered dict in Python 3.6. He uses pictures and small bits of pure Python, and covers key-sharing, compaction and versioning.

Philip Wadler's Strange Loop talk on Propositions as Types, the link between logic and computation (the Curry-Howard correspondence). He traces its history through Church, Godel and Turing and shows how it shaped theorem provers and programming languages.

Martin Kleppmann's GOTO Berlin 2016 talk on how collaborative editors, offline apps, and multi-datacenter databases handle concurrent updates. It covers conflict resolution approaches including operational transformation and CRDTs, with a worked look at text CRDTs.

ContraPoints' 35-minute video essay on incels, examining the community, its worldview and how people get radicalized. It is delivered with theatrical style and an empathetic tone.

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.

Scott Wlaschin's NDC talk on using statically typed functional programming, F# in particular, to model a business domain. Types are used to represent the domain precisely and to encode business rules so that illegal states cannot be built, with the compiler acting as an instant unit test.

Chandler Carruth argues in a CppCon 2019 talk that C++ has no truly zero-cost abstractions. Using examples like unique_ptr, ABI constraints and compile-time costs, he shows that abstractions cost runtime, compile time or human effort.

Adam Conover's talk at a millennial marketing conference argues that generations are an unscientific, condescending idea and that millennials do not exist as a real category. The description notes that researcher Jean Twenge later said he misrepresented some of her work.

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.

Titus Winters' CppCon 2017 talk argues for C++ and Google's Abseil to be maintained as a live at head language, relying on testing and automated tooling rather than never changing or promising no compatibility. It covers Hyrum's law and the limits of semantic versioning.

Mark Seemann argues that functional programming naturally yields many of the best practices object-oriented developers learn painfully. He shows how functional architecture leads to a pit of success, with a pure core and impure shell.

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.

Bret Victor's closing keynote at UIST and SPLASH 2014 argues that our tools for thinking ignore most of human sensory and motor capability. He sketches representations that engage more modalities beyond screens and keyboards.

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.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2022 talk on whether C++ can become ten times simpler and safer. He introduces his experimental Cpp2 syntax and the cppfront transpiler, explaining the limits on incremental improvement.

Mike Monteiro's Creative Mornings talk "Fuck You, Pay Me" with his lawyer Keith Levine, on contracts, scope creep and making sure designers and freelancers get paid. This copy has Portuguese subtitles.

Wendover Productions examines why carbon offsets so often fail to reduce emissions, covering specific examples and the perverse incentives in offset schemes.

Utah State plant scientist Bruce Bugbee presents his analysis of the energy and environmental costs of vertical and indoor farming. He argues artificial lighting cannot compete with sunlight in fields or greenhouses.

Wendover Productions explains why Boeing's efficient 787 beat Airbus's giant A380, contrasting hub-and-spoke with point-to-point routes. It covers the economics of long-haul flights.

Larry Hastings explains what Python's GIL is, what problems it solves and how it works, and presents his Gilectomy project to remove it, including the performance and C-extension obstacles.

A three-minute clip of Jeff Bezos describing his Regret Minimization Framework: imagining yourself at 80 to decide whether to leave a Wall Street job to start Amazon.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth gives a Royal Institution lecture on the science of consciousness. He separates conscious level, content and self, and argues that experience arises from the brain's predictive inference.

Sacha Baron Cohen's speech accepting the ADL International Leadership Award, in which he criticizes social media companies for amplifying hate and propaganda. He argues that freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.

The opening lecture of Steve Brunton's Control Bootcamp, covering the kinds of control and why closed-loop feedback matters. It starts a series that follows the control chapter of the Brunton and Kutz data-driven science book.

Gerald Sussman's 2011 Strange Loop keynote argues we still do not know how to compute, comparing biological systems with how we program machines. It touches on propagators, constraint programming and robustness.

Liz Rice builds a container from scratch in about 100 lines of Go, showing that a container is not a lightweight VM but a set of Linux kernel features and flags.

A New York Times Opinion documentary tracing Soviet and KGB disinformation, from the 1980s AIDS origin hoax to modern campaigns like Pizzagate. It features former KGB officers and the people who tried to counter the lies.