instant messaging

A PBS NewsHour report on a viral compilation of local TV anchors reading identical scripts, which raised concerns about Sinclair Broadcasting mixing partisan opinion into local news. It also covers Sinclair's reach and its bid to grow larger.

A short upload of the classic ICQ notification sounds, such as the 'uh-oh' message alert.

A short compilation of dozens of local news anchors at Sinclair-owned stations reading the same scripted promo about biased and fake news. It went viral in 2018 as an example of centralized media messaging.

A short CGP Grey explainer on the alternative vote (instant runoff voting) versus first past the post, made around the 2011 UK referendum. It shows how ranked ballots are tallied and why they avoid spoiler effects.

The Center for Election Science explains favorite betrayal in instant-runoff voting: in some elections, ranking your favorite first can cause your least favorite to win. It contrasts this with plurality voting's spoiler problem.

Moxie Marlinspike speaks at Next Generation Threats 2014 about the challenges of encrypted communication and how Signal addresses them. He also draws on American action movies as narrative for secure communications.

Bret Victor's talk from Dropbox's DBX conference about living by a guiding principle, in his case that creators need an immediate connection to what they are making. He shows live-coding and time-manipulation demos that let ideas take form at the speed of thought.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp speaks at MeetBSD about running a messaging service on FreeBSD and Erlang at huge scale. He covers the stack, tuning and the challenges of millions of connections per host.

Marques Brownlee explains why iMessage's blue and green bubbles matter, covering the technical, commercial and social side of Apple's messaging lock-in. It also discusses RCS and what could be done about it.

A short TheStreet clip in which Dr. Anthony Fauci explains the purpose of masks and why guidance on them shifted during early COVID-19. He says masks protect others and offer some protection to the wearer.

A standing whiteboard conversation at Lang.NEXT 2012 among Carl Hewitt, Erik Meijer and Clemens Szyperski about the actor model. Hewitt, who originated the model, explains its foundations.

Moxie Marlinspike's 36C3 talk examines why distributed and decentralized technology is hard to build into consumer products, from the perspective of developing Signal. It argues that ecosystems move slowly and federation causes problems.

A FOSDEM 2023 talk from the Matrix team on Matrix 2.0, covering sliding sync, the Element X client rewrite and next-generation calling. It explains how Matrix aims to match the speed of proprietary messengers.

A short 60 Minutes clip from March 2020 in which Dr. Anthony Fauci tells Jon LaPook there is no reason to walk around wearing a mask. The full interview includes his concern about mask shortages for healthcare workers.

Martin Fowler's GOTO Chicago 2017 talk on the different things people mean by event-driven architecture. He identifies four patterns, including event notification and event-carried state transfer.

Bret Victor's talk at CUSEC 2012 in which he argues that creators need immediate feedback and should organize their work around a guiding principle. He demonstrates live-coding and animation tools that show results as you type, and describes his own principle that creators must see what they are making.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp explains at Erlang Factory 2014 how the service scaled to billions of messages with a very small engineering team. He covers the FreeBSD and Erlang stack, Mnesia usage, server counts and bottleneck work.

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.

Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente explains immutable and persistent data structures in C++ and how they support value semantics. He presents the Immer library, rrb-trees, and a prototype text editor that opens a huge file instantly.

Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote, preserved on YouTube after being lost from Google Video. He discusses what object orientation was meant to be, messaging, system design, and the state of computing practice.

Simon Sinek's TED talk presents the 'golden circle' model: great leaders and companies inspire action by starting with why they do something, before how or what. He illustrates it with Apple, Martin Luther King, the Wright brothers and, as a counterexample, TiVo.

An animated simulation comparing single-winner voting methods such as plurality, instant runoff and STAR. Colored regions show which candidate wins as a randomized electorate shifts across a two-dimensional political space, building on Ka-Ping Yee's earlier diagrams.

Scott Wlaschin shows how statically typed functional languages, using F# examples, can model a business domain so that invalid states cannot be represented. The type system acts almost like an instant unit test at compile time.

A short supercut showing many Sinclair-owned local news anchors reading the same scripted warning about biased news, word for word.

A Deadspin compilation of local news anchors at Sinclair-owned stations reading the same scripted message about irresponsible one-sided news. It was assembled by Timothy Burke.

A long recorded seminar in which Alan Kay discusses object-oriented programming, probably from the mid-1980s. He covers the original idea of objects, messaging and the work done at Xerox.

A five-minute demo of a live ClojureScript game editor by Chris Granger. It is based on Bret Victor's demo from the Inventing on Principle talk, with code changes reflected instantly in the running game.

A one-minute 2012 Microsoft television commercial for Internet Explorer 9, set to Alex Clare's 'Too Close'. It pitches a 'more beautiful web' with fast one-click access to favorite sites.

James Hoffmann runs caffeine analyzer tests comparing filter versus espresso, extraction over time, steep time, instant coffee and light versus dark roast.

Short footage from a NASA space suit test in which a technician is exposed to near-vacuum after an accidental depressurization. It shows the instantaneous effects on a human body.

Grandmaster David Howell tests Magnus Carlsen by showing him chess positions and asking which famous games they come from. Carlsen recognizes many almost instantly.

A one-minute UK road safety advert showing a family car crash in which an unbelted rear passenger kills his mother in a head-on collision. It is a notoriously graphic public information film.