led longevity

Theo de Raadt presents pledge, a new OpenBSD security mechanism that kills processes which exceed the system calls they declared they need. The talk was given late at night at Hackfest 2015.

Jonathan Blow's DevGAMM 2019 talk argues that software knowledge is being lost between generations and that growing layers of abstraction could lead to a decline in technological civilization.

Alan Watson Featherstone, founder of Trees for Life, describes nearly 30 years of work restoring the ancient Caledonian Forest in the Scottish Highlands, illustrated with his photography.

Dropbox engineer Kevin Modzelewski gives a Stanford colloquium on Dropbox's history and the technical problems it faced scaling, including detailed database schema decisions.

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.

Harvard geneticist David Sinclair discusses his book Lifespan at Google. He covers the biology of aging, lifestyle interventions and possible future ways to slow or reverse it.

Christian Schafmeister presents CANDO at the 2016 European Lisp Symposium. It is a compiled Lisp-based language for designing macromolecules and nanoscale materials, built on the Clasp implementation of Common Lisp.

A ten-minute clip from Jonathan Blow's talk on preventing the collapse of civilization, arguing that software quality and the knowledge to build it are in decline.

David Deutsch's TED talk arguing that humanity's survival depends on solving problems through knowledge growth. He frames people as improbable "chemical scum" capable of understanding distant quasars.

Robert Martin's RailsConf 2009 talk looks at why Smalltalk lost out despite its technical strengths. He draws lessons about language communities and arrogance that he argues could hurt Ruby too.

Cardiologist James O'Keefe argues in a TEDx talk that moderate running confers the best longevity benefits, while extreme endurance training can damage the heart. He draws on data and his own experience as a lifelong runner.

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.

David Rock gives a Google Tech Talk based on his book Your Brain at Work, using neuroscience to explain why focus and productivity are hard at the office. He gives strategies for managing mental energy and distraction.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues in this TED talk that perception is a controlled hallucination: the brain constantly predicts the world and our shared agreement is what we call reality. He also touches on the construction of the self.

TED talk by biochemist Cynthia Kenyon on how a simple genetic mutation can double the lifespan of the worm C. elegans, and what that suggests about extending healthy human life.

Rhonda Patrick gives an IHMC talk on how genetic variation affects micronutrient absorption and metabolism, and how diet changes gene expression. It also covers epigenetics, including heritable changes, and stress tolerance.

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.

Spencer Lisenby explains dynamic soaring, a technique that lets unpowered radio-controlled gliders reach speeds above 835 kph. He covers the physics and the design, build and flying challenges.

Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Conservancy speaks at the 2009 Law of the Commons Conference about free and open software as a model for a new intellectual commons. The talk covers the legal and social case for sharing knowledge.

The fail0verflow 27C3 talk on breaking PS3 security, covering how Sony's implementation failed, including its ECDSA mistakes.

A PyCon 2012 talk by early YouTube engineer Mike Solomon on how YouTube scaled its architecture, which is mostly Python.

Uber Engineering's Joseph Gilley explains why Uber uses hexagons for geospatial indexing and introduces H3, its open source hierarchical grid system. He covers use cases and how distortion is handled.

Donald Knuth gives a talk at Stanford, recorded by Zeeba TV for the TeX Users Group, titled An Earthshaking Announcement.

Peter Norvig's 2007 Google talk on theorizing from data, covering what huge datasets can do for language understanding, translation, information extraction and inference. It argues that more data often beats cleverer models.

Alex Martelli's Google Developers Day talk on classic design patterns (creational, structural and behavioral) and how they appear in Python. He stresses that patterns must be studied in the context of the implementing language.

Ali Rahimi accepts the NIPS 2017 Test of Time Award and argues that machine learning has become alchemy, with practice running ahead of understanding.

Ed Catmull of Pixar speaks at Stanford's 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference on running a creative company. He argues for surfacing small problems early and building good teams, with stories like the Toy Story 2 crunch.

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.

Robert C. Martin's Ruby Midwest 2011 keynote argues that software architecture should express the application's intent rather than its framework. He covers separating entities, interactors and boundaries so the web, database and framework are details.

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.

Pete Hunt of Facebook and Instagram introduces React at JSConf EU 2013 and explains its design principles. He argues that separating templates from logic only separates technologies, not concerns, and makes the case for components.

Deviant Ollam's two-hour conference talk explains how elevators work, from the pit and buffers to the car top, controller logic and access-control features. It shows how this knowledge can be used for optimization and for bypassing building security.

Andrew Ng presents unsupervised feature learning and deep learning, showing how algorithms can learn representations from unlabeled data instead of hand-designed features. He gives examples in vision and audio, including visualizations of features learned by successive layers.

Michael Steil and Christian Hessmann's 34C3 talk explaining the Apollo Guidance Computer end to end: hardware design, operating system, and mission software.

Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, gives a funny and opinionated Strange Loop talk on the tangled state of software: build tools, package managers, entropy and the physical limits of computation. He argues for ideas like naming things by content hash and throwing away your first version.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day gives a talk to an aerospace audience, comparing how Apollo was engineered and managed with NASA's Artemis program. He raises concerns about unresolved details, the number of launches and in-orbit fuel transfer needed to reach the Moon, and the loss of institutional knowledge.

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.

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.

David Beazley's PyCon India closing keynote, in which he live-codes a stack machine and grows it into an interpreter that runs WebAssembly, then uses it to play a Rust-written game. It requires no prior WebAssembly knowledge.

Chris Toomey of thoughtbot explains Vim as a language of commands, motions and text objects that combine into precise edits. He shows how to master the built-in pieces and extend them.