logic

Chris Domas's DEF CON 23 talk on psychological warfare against reverse engineers. He builds code whose disassembly and control flow graphs mislead, intimidate and demoralize anyone analyzing it.

Philip Wadler's Strange Loop talk on Propositions as Types, the link between logic and computation (the Curry-Howard correspondence). He traces its history through Church, Godel and Turing and shows how it shaped theorem provers and programming languages.

Philip Wadler's Lambda Days talk on propositions as types, the link between logic and computation that underlies theorem provers and programming language design.

A 2012 debate between Peter Thiel and George Gilder on whether technological progress and economic growth are accelerating or decelerating, moderated by William Davidow.

A Clojure/conj 2016 talk demoing Barliman, a prototype smart editor that does program synthesis. Given a partial program and tests, it completes the program using a relational interpreter written in miniKanren.

A 2012 Fortune dinner debate between Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt over whether technological progress is healthy or stalling and whether Google can still innovate.

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.

Meredith Patterson and Sergey Bratus argue that networked software stays insecure because protocols and inputs are too complex to recognize safely. They propose using formal language theory and grammars to build secure, verifiable input handling.

Mathematician Kevin Buzzard explains why he believes the Lean theorem prover will shape the future of mathematics, and describes digitizing his university curriculum in Lean with undergraduates, plus the cultural challenges.

Leslie Lamport argues that programmers, like architects, should write rigorous specifications before coding, especially for concurrent and distributed systems. The talk introduces the case for writing specs (the TLA+ mindset) as a way of thinking above the code.

Jay Parlar's Strange Loop talk shows how model checkers such as Alloy can find complex bugs in a system's design without running or reading any code. He walks through modeling architectures and checking every possible sequence of operations, including a real security bug and a UI feature-interaction bug.

Edwin Brady, creator of Idris, presents Idris 2 and demonstrates type-driven development, where the compiler assists by filling holes and suggesting implementations from types.

Guy Steele's PPoPP 2017 keynote surveying the history of computer science metanotation, including BNF, inference rules, and overline notation. He argues the field's notations are inconsistent and fragmented.

Edwin Brady presents Idris 2, a rewrite of the Idris dependently typed language, and shows type-driven development in practice. The demos show the compiler filling in whole functions from their types.

Aditya Siram introduces ATS, a statically typed ML-like language that compiles to C and offers type-safe pointer arithmetic and a full proof language. The Strange Loop talk shows off C interop, concurrency and verification features with non-trivial examples.

Hillel Wayne's PyCon 2018 talk on testing beyond pytest and mypy. It introduces property-based testing with the Hypothesis library and design-by-contract with dpcontracts, and shows how to combine them with an existing test suite.

Hillel Wayne's Strange Loop talk introducing TLA+ as a specification language for finding concurrency bugs in designs. It covers stalling, race conditions and dropped messages, with PlusCal examples.

Dan Friedman and William Byrd demonstrate miniKanren, a logic programming system for Scheme, in an unconference talk. It includes generating programs by running relations in reverse.

Nadia Polikarpova's Strange Loop talk on program synthesis driven by refinement types, as in Synquid. It shows how rich type specifications can be turned into verified, executable code.

A Lambda Days keynote by Simon Peyton Jones and Tim Sweeney introducing Verse, Epic's functional logic language for the metaverse. It covers existential variables, unification and expressions yielding multiple values.

David Christiansen gives a Strange Loop 2018 introduction to dependent types, where one language serves for both compile-time and run-time code and programs unite with proofs. It draws on his book The Little Typer.

Tikhon Jelvis's Compose Conference talk on using the Z3 SMT solver to analyze and verify programs, including checking invariants with bounded loops. He demonstrates verifying programs in a small language by compiling them to Z3.

Robert Moss's JuliaCon 2015 talk describes using Julia as a specification language for ACAS X, the next-generation airborne collision avoidance system that succeeds TCAS.

An AdaCore webinar in which NVIDIA engineers explain why and how they adopted Ada and SPARK for security-critical firmware. It covers the business case and the engineering experience of the transition.

Edwin Brady, creator of Idris, introduces type-driven development in a dependently typed language. He shows types being written first and programs derived with interactive editing, then extends beyond simple examples to programs that interact with users and networks.

Gernot Heiser presents seL4, a microkernel with a mathematical proof connecting security properties to the binary code, and explains what its open-sourcing means for users. It covers its roles as a microkernel, separation kernel and hypervisor.

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.

Ray Kurzweil presents his book How to Create a Mind at Google, on reverse engineering the brain and using that understanding to build intelligent machines. He shows his graphs of exponential technological progress.

Michael Hendricks of PriceCharting shares tricks and pain points from running Prolog in production for 18 months at Strange Loop. It argues Prolog is a productive modern language beyond logic puzzles, and includes a demo of changing code mid-execution.

Gerald Sussman's 2011 Strange Loop keynote argues we still do not know how to compute, comparing biological systems with how we program machines. It touches on propagators, constraint programming and robustness.

A conference presentation by Bert Hubert on how companies lose their technological edge and become outsourcing hubs. It argues the same dynamic applies to whole countries and continents, and ends with suggestions for reversing it.

Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues that the machine-learning systems used to serve ads also decide what political and social information people see. She explains how opaque algorithms can nudge, segment and manipulate users, and warns that the real danger is powerful people using AI to control populations.

Jon Ronson's TED talk on public shaming on Twitter, centered on Justine Sacco and others whose lives were upended by online mobs. He argues we have become a baying crowd and should rethink how we treat each other online.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, explains how small contributions from many people online can digitize books. He then introduces Duolingo as a way to translate the web while people learn languages.

Skateboarding pioneer Rodney Mullen talks about how the open skate community and its environments drive the invention of new tricks out of pure passion. He draws parallels to collaboration and open source.

Charles Stross's 34C3 talk on how science fiction gets the future wrong. He argues that corporations are slow, human-powered AIs that optimize for profit, and that regulation lags behind accelerating technology.

Bret Victor's talk proposing a new kind of maker space built for seeing and understanding a project's behavior: inside it, across time and across possibilities. It argues for scientific understanding over recipes and rules of thumb.

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.

Andreas Antonopoulos explains how to tell Bitcoin-style blockchains from corporate blockchain hype. He argues the goal should be de-banking everyone rather than banking the unbanked.

Devine Lu Linvega of Hundred Rabbits talks about low-power, offline computing, esoteric languages and the Uxn virtual machine, informed by years of sailing the Pacific. The talk frames computing sustainability through a permaculture lens.