limits

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Benno Rice's linux.conf.au 2020 talk asks whether UNIX was the best design we could have had. He looks at what alternatives existed, what was gained and lost, and what could be re-learned, including the limits of treating everything as a file.

Armin Ronacher's EuroPython 2017 keynote examining how the CPython interpreter's leaky abstractions affect language design and how Python could evolve, drawing on JavaScript and Rust experience.

George Hotz of Comma AI gives a 2017 conference talk on lessons from building a self-driving system. He argues about how driving should be defined and why the common approach to autonomous vehicles is flawed.

Tantacrul walks through how the MuseScore 4 team was built and how design decisions were made for the overhaul of a huge legacy notation app. It covers playback and engraving quality improvements.

Veritasium investigates PFAS forever chemicals, from Teflon's history to pollution of the global water system and their presence in the US population. It covers the corporate cover-up and the host's own blood tests.

An Isaac Arthur episode on arcologies, self-sufficient habitats that could house whole cities, on Earth or on harsh worlds. It covers how such structures might work and what limits their size.

The first episode of Adam Curtis's 1992 BBC series Pandora's Box, on the engineers' plot, examining communism in the Soviet Union and the rise and limits of technocratic central planning.

Kelsey Hightower introduces Kubernetes to sysadmins at PuppetConf 2016, with a demo. He explains the declarative model and how it changes the contract between infrastructure and applications.

Sabine Hossenfelder weighs the arguments for and against nuclear power, covering waste, fuel supply and newer reactor designs. She is skeptical that fast breeders and thorium solve the problems.

Jonathan Blow's GDC talk explains how the time-rewind mechanic in Braid was designed and implemented, including the technical hurdles such as memory limits and state history. It covers both design and engineering concerns.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains that waste heat from ever-growing energy use could eventually boil the oceans in a few centuries, whatever the energy source. She discusses proposed ways to cool the planet.

debuglive makes a 1990-style dance track on an Amiga 500 with a Stereo Master sampler and cheap secondhand records, showing how sampling and trackers worked within tight memory limits.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 talk on how AWS limits the blast radius of failures. It covers design techniques such as cell-based architecture and shuffle sharding.

PBS Space Time considers whether life could be based on silicon instead of carbon, comparing the two elements' chemistry and why silicon is the most plausible alternative.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2018 keynote on preventing, finding and fixing bugs under a time budget. He covers testing practice, type annotation tradeoffs and the limits of coverage metrics.

Daniel Dunbar of Apple presents llbuild, a framework for building build systems, at the 2016 LLVM Developers' Meeting. He argues that the traditional way C compilers integrate with build systems limits compile speed, and proposes a new architecture.

Jim Keller, CTO of Tenstorrent, gives a keynote at Stanford's System X conference on change, understanding and the future of computing. He touches on Moore's Law, how far transistors are from physical limits, and ideas like DNA origami.

Allan Jude of Klara presents work on making ZFS scale on fast NVMe storage, covering fixes to the TaskQueue interface and removal of bottlenecks. The talk was given at EuroBSDcon 2022 and describes raising write throughput from about 3 to over 7 GB/sec.

Ilya Grigorik of Google's Make the Web Fast team explains how to build a mobile site that appears on screen within one second. He covers the network and rendering constraints on mobile.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever on time to AGI, what comes after generative models, data limits, alignment, and competing with Google. The title centers on whether next-token prediction could surpass human intelligence.

LegalEagle analyzes Katko v. Briney, the Iowa case about a homeowner whose shotgun booby trap injured a burglar, and the limits on deadly force in defending property.