head on

Luke Miani removes the screen from a MacBook Air and tests using it headless as the host for an Apple Vision Pro virtual display.

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.

Strange Parts spends four months, seven custom circuit boards and several disassembled iPhones adding a working headphone jack to an iPhone 7 in China. The build is documented in detail.

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.

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.

Johnny Lee demonstrates head tracking with a Wii remote and a head-mounted pair of IR LEDs, so a screen acts like a window into a 3D scene as your head moves.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2019 talk on the split in the C++ community over exceptions and RTTI. He proposes making exceptions cheaper and more usable, including a zero-overhead, Result-like design.

Technology Connections explains why American cars all had the same standardized sealed-beam headlights until 1957. It covers the regulations behind the design and the effect on night visibility.

A one-minute Rheinmetall promotional demo of Oerlikon Ahead air burst ammunition, which throws a cloud of sub-projectiles to destroy small air targets.

A binaural audio demo, the 'Virtual Barber Shop', that places a barber moving around your head. It works best with headphones and closed eyes.

A TiVo-captured clip of the notoriously repetitive 2006 Head On headache remedy commercial, with its 'apply directly to the forehead' jingle.

A one-minute clip of Steve Jobs at the D3 conference in 2005 discussing virtual reality. He compares VR headsets to headphones for video, an analogy later applied to Apple's Vision Pro.

John Carmack's long QuakeCon 2012 keynote, a free-ranging talk covering software engineering, game platforms, game streaming, and his early head-mounted display and VR work.

Adam Savage's Tested spends a week with the Magic Leap One developer kit. They dig into the hardware, display technology, user experience and launch apps.

Eric Idle performs Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, the song from Monty Python's Life of Brian, in a stereo recording.

Rational Animations explains Robin Hanson's grabby aliens model, which argues that humanity looks suspiciously early in cosmic history. Expanding civilizations set a deadline that explains our timing and bears on the Fermi paradox.

A subtitled edit of the 1987 Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion, in which hijackers interrupted Chicago stations WGN and WTTW.

The 1985 Channel 4 TV film 'Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future', the origin of the computer-generated TV host Max Headroom, with a soundtrack by Midge Ure and Chris Cross.

Ben Alpert of the React team talks at React.js Conf 2016 about where React is heading. He covers performance and stability work, challenges at Facebook, and opportunities such as bringing React Native ideas to the web.

The official 1986 music video for Paranoimia by Art of Noise featuring the computer-generated TV personality Max Headroom. It is a synth-pop and sampling-era piece of 80s pop culture.

A one-month review of the Xreal (formerly Nreal) Air AR glasses by The Tech Chap, covering unboxing, setup, what the display looks like, and how mixed reality differs from AR. It ends with the reviewer's overall thoughts. The video is sponsored.

Henry Segerman and collaborators demonstrate virtual reality experiences in non-Euclidean spaces, including hyperbolic and mixed hyperbolic-Euclidean geometry. The browser-based demos let viewers move through these spaces and show how strange the geometry feels from inside.

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.

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.