limits of knowledge

A four-minute extract from the documentary The Fog of War in which Robert McNamara discusses the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He acknowledges that the second reported attack did not happen.

A short compilation of Steve Jobs giving his opinions on Microsoft, including calling it opportunistic and lacking taste. It also touches on the role of big tech companies in showing what is possible.

A short clip in which Carl Icahn tells the story of his first activist investment and of firing 12 floors of people, arguing activism need not be short term.

A one-minute clip from the All Things D conference in which Steve Jobs says Apple is fundamentally a software company, with iPod, Mac and iPhone all being software. He says the hardware is where the money is but the value is in the software.

Computer History Museum oral history of Steve Naroff, an engineer at Stepstone, NeXT and Apple who worked on Objective-C. This first session covers his childhood, music background and early career.

A 2023 University of Toronto conversation between Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li on responsible AI development. They look back at the history of deep learning and ImageNet and discuss the ethics and risks of AI.

A full FRONTLINE interview with journalist Julia Ioffe on Putin and alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election.

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.

A short clip of Steve Jobs saying Microsoft has no taste, from an interview about Windows. It is an excerpt reposted by a fan channel.

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.

Physicist Roger Penrose and philosopher William Lane Craig discuss the origin of the universe on the Unbelievable? show. Topics include Penrose's three realms of reality, conformal cyclic cosmology and whether fine tuning points to a creator.

A Startup School 2013 session where Paul Graham and Sam Altman hold live office hours with startups including CodeCombat, Flexport and others. The founders pitch and get on-the-spot feedback.

Grady Booch interviews John Backus, who led the IBM team that created FORTRAN in 1957, for the Computer History Museum in 2006. Backus describes the development of the first successful high-level language and its compiler. The interview runs 88 minutes.

John Conway talks in a short Numberphile interview about his mixed feelings toward the Game of Life, his most famous invention. He says he is not especially pleased that it overshadowed his other work.

A Computer History Museum interview in which John Markoff of the New York Times talks with Douglas Engelbart about his life and research. It covers the influences and struggles behind his work on the mouse, hypertext and collaborative computing, and his aim of helping humanity tackle complex problems.

Adafruit's Ladyada interviews Paul Horowitz, co-author of The Art of Electronics. He discusses how the book came about and the third edition.

A two-hour Computer History Museum oral history interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, conducted by Paul McJones in 2015. It covers his youth, education at Aarhus and Cambridge, his career at Bell Labs and elsewhere, and the design and evolution of C++.

Chamath Palihapitiya's Stanford GSB View From The Top talk on money as an instrument of change. HN mostly knows it for his remarks on social media's dopamine-driven feedback loops and regrets about Facebook.

Noam Chomsky talks with the University of Washington's Upon Reflection about how languages change over time, why a national language is a modern idea, and how language is a system of communication rooted in human nature.

A roughly three-hour Computer History Museum oral history interview of Donald Knuth by Edward Feigenbaum, recorded in 2007. Knuth covers his family, music, early programming, his thesis, The Art of Computer Programming, and the detour into TeX and METAFONT.

A 42-minute CBS interview with Geoffrey Hinton at the Vector Institute in 2023, covering the history of neural networks and the present and future of AI. He discusses AGI timelines and whether language models truly understand.

A short excerpt from a 1973 Yorkshire TV film in which Richard Feynman explains that knowing the name of something is not the same as knowing it.

Freeman Dyson recounts how Enrico Fermi rejected his team's meson scattering model, noting that it had too many free parameters. It is the source of the quote about fitting an elephant.

An open Q&A with Python creator Guido van Rossum hosted by Microsoft Reactor, covering his career, PyCon's origins and his opinions on other languages.

The full 1984 interview with Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB operative, in which he lays out four stages of ideological subversion. It is a long interview with G. Edward Griffin.

A short excerpt of Jon Stewart interviewing former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers about the causes of inflation and whether workers or corporate profits are to blame. It comes from an episode of The Problem With Jon Stewart.

A long Team House podcast interview with James Lawler, a former CIA operations officer who led counterproliferation work against the A.Q. Khan nuclear network. He discusses HUMINT, WMD and how such operations were run.

A 2012 Harvard Institute of Politics conversation between Peter Thiel and historian Niall Ferguson. Thiel discusses technology, politics and his stagnation hypothesis.

A three-minute excerpt of a Steve Jobs interview in which he describes how monopolies let sales and marketing people displace product people, rotting a company's product sensibility, with Xerox as the example.

A 1974 talk-show-style interview with the original developers of APL, including Iverson, Falkoff and Breed. They discuss how the language originated.

Second half of a 2017 Computer History Museum live event in which former Apple software chief Scott Forstall is interviewed by John Markoff about creating the original iPhone. He tells stories about Steve Jobs and the team and the origins of the iPhone software.

Lucas Pope, creator of Return of the Obra Dinn, explains in Ars Technica's War Stories how localizing the game's logbook nearly sank the project.

A Computer History Museum oral history with Bill Mensch, designer of the 6502 and 65816, covering his path from a Pennsylvania farm through Motorola and later work.

Former CIA officer Frank Snepp describes how, working in Vietnam from 1969 to 1975, he planted stories in major newspapers to support Agency goals. He notes that some younger reporters refused to take the bait.

An OpenZFS office hours session with ZFS co-creator Matt Ahrens answering questions on topics such as hole birth time, send/receive buffers, device removal, block pointer rewrite and performance with many snapshots.

A two-minute 1981 interview clip in which Richard Feynman answers an artist friend who claims science takes the beauty out of a flower. Feynman argues that understanding adds to beauty and mystery.

A very long livestream in which Ron Gilbert and Frank Cifaldi look at the making of The Secret of Monkey Island, including its SCUMM source code, which they edit and recompile live.

ThePrimeagen interviews Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM, Clang, Swift and Mojo, with TJ DeVries, in a long live-streamed conversation. They discuss language design and Lattner's experience building Swift.

The 2007 D5 conference joint interview of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, discussing the history of Apple and Microsoft, partnership, competition and computing's future.

A five-minute clip from Donald Knuth's Web of Stories interviews in which he gives advice to young people, including being wary when too many people adopt an idea.