limits

Not Just Bikes explains how North American speed limits are set and why posted limits matter far less than street design. It argues that drivers follow the road's cues, so safe speeds have to be built into the street.

A documentary on the 1972 Club of Rome study Limits to Growth, which questioned the pursuit of endless economic growth. It covers the study's findings and whether anyone acted on them.

Noam Chomsky's 2011 University of Oslo lecture on Newton's contributions to the study of mind. He argues Newton abandoned mechanical explanation and lowered the bar for scientific intelligibility, with consequences for the limits of human understanding. Q&A starts at 45:33.

Lex Fridman's long podcast interview with Yann LeCun on Meta AI, open source, the limits of LLMs, AGI and the future of AI.

Kurzgesagt explains why, even with science-fiction technology, most of the universe is permanently out of reach because of cosmic expansion and finite resources.

An animated short on limits to growth, covering oil formation, peak oil, energy, economic growth and resource depletion. Its central section deals with exponential growth, and the author notes some statistics are dated.

David MacKay's TEDxWarwick talk uses basic arithmetic to show how much land and energy renewables would need to power a country like the UK. It explains the limits of sustainable options and why they should still be pursued.

Yann LeCun on the Big Technology Podcast discusses why current AI models cannot make discoveries despite their knowledge. He argues systems need abstract world models and also covers limits of AI research, investor expectations, and open source after DeepSeek.

Jon Moore's Strange Loop 2017 talk argues that rate limiting is the wrong tool for protecting services from noisy clients. He proposes concurrency-based capacity management and quotas instead.

A Stanford EE380 seminar by Michael P. Frank of Sandia National Laboratories on generalized reversible computing. It surveys unconventional computing approaches as transistor scaling nears its limits and energy efficiency stops improving.

Physicist and YouTuber Angela Collier argues in this hour-long video that AI as commonly described does not really exist. She covers the limits of the tools, biased datasets, and why they should not be used to make decisions.

The preface to Herb Gross's MIT OpenCourseWare 'Calculus Revisited: Single Variable Calculus', an older black-and-white lecture series. It introduces his approach to teaching calculus from the basics.

Alex O'Connor shows that ChatGPT cannot draw a wine glass filled to the brim, and ties the failure to David Hume's missing shade of blue. It asks what the failure says about how image models learn.

Stuff Made Here builds a device that lets a blind person perceive their surroundings by touch, using an iPad's lidar and a mechanical tactile display driven by motors. The video walks through the build and the limits he hit.

Associate Professor Simon Michaux presents estimates of the metals needed to build one generation of renewable technology to replace fossil fuels. He argues current production and reserves fall far short, with copper a key shortfall.

Robert Sapolsky's Stanford lecture on chaos and reductionism, which he calls one of the hardest of the course. It examines the limits of breaking systems into parts to understand them and introduces chaotic systems.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Richard Sutton, reinforcement learning pioneer, Turing Award winner and author of The Bitter Lesson. Sutton argues LLMs are a dead end because they cannot learn on the job, and that continual learning from experience will require a new architecture.

Michael Steil's 33c3 talk explains essentially everything about the Game Boy: CPU, video hardware, peripherals, and the tricks used by games and demos. It revives the era of counting clock cycles around hardware limits.

Mike Acton of Insomniac Games argues that a program's purpose is transforming data, and shows how common C++ approaches work against that in performance-critical game development. He covers cache behavior, data layout and the limits of compilers.

Jeremy Howard's 90-minute practical tour of language models. It covers how they work, GPT-4's capabilities and limits, using the OpenAI API, code writing, data analysis and fine-tuning.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, examines how programming languages are funded. He looks at where compiler engineers' salaries come from, why Go has about 5 engineers while Dart has about 30, and how this limits language design.

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.

Christopher Domas presents at Black Hat 2017 how page fault analysis and processor fuzzing can exhaustively search the x86 instruction set. The talk uncovers undocumented instructions and hardware bugs and shows limits of disassemblers.

Veritasium's explainer on Godel's incompleteness theorems and the limits of mathematical proof, tracing set theory, Hilbert's program and the road to Turing and modern computing.

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.

Morphcat Games explains how they fit Micro Mages, a full-featured NES game, into 40 kilobytes. It covers compression of sprites and level layouts and other space-saving tricks.

Bryan Cantrill's Papers We Love talk on FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones, tracing how OS-level virtualization grew out of chroot and the limits of the traditional UNIX security model.

Jean-Marc Jancovici lectures at ENS Paris on whether energy use, jobs and growth can all be preserved. He argues for a physical approach to economics, since resource depletion and climate limits make perpetual GDP growth unrealistic.

A 1983 BBC interview in which Richard Feynman is asked how magnets work and explains why 'why' questions are hard to answer in everyday terms. He reflects on what counts as an explanation and the limits of analogy.

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.

Admiral Grace Hopper holds up a length of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond, about 11.8 inches. She explains how she made the idea concrete to people who could not picture a billionth of a second.

Veritasium explains why analog computing may suit AI workloads, covering old analog computers, The Analog Thing and Mythic's analog chips that use flash memory for neural network inference. It argues digital hardware is hitting limits.

A recording of physicist Albert Bartlett's well-known lecture on the arithmetic of exponential growth, applied to population and energy use. He argues that steady percentage growth in a finite world cannot continue and sneaks up suddenly.

An Alan Kay talk on programming and scaling, covering theoretical limits of code size, engineering versus tinkering, and biological cells as inspiration for object-oriented design.

A short clip of Richard Feynman answering an interviewer's question about why magnets repel, explaining that a 'why' question depends on a shared framework of understanding. It illustrates how hard it is to explain fundamentals to a layperson.

Technology Connections gives first impressions of using an Onyx Boox Max2 e-ink tablet for productivity, including using it as an external display. He shows what the device can and cannot do.

X.Org developer Daniel Stone explains the history and technical limits of the X Window System and why Wayland was created, debunking myths from forum comments. He covers topics such as network transparency and blocking calls.

In an Ars Technica War Stories episode, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner describes how he made the game on the Apple II, fighting hardware memory limits and the platform's decline. It covers the rotoscoped animation and the engineering tricks involved.

Practical Engineering explains pumped storage hydropower, which makes up most grid-scale electricity storage. It covers how it works and why it fits only certain geographies.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Pokemon Yellow by MrWint that uses arbitrary code execution to push Game Boy hardware to its limits. Through crafted inputs it injects code and ends up running other programs, such as Tetris, inside the game.