lost knowledge

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.

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.

Lawrence Lessig's Talks at Google presentation based on his book Republic, Lost, arguing that money in politics corrupts Congress and eroded public trust, and outlining what could be done about it. It supports the argument with data on political donations.

Lawrence Lessig's 2011 Berkeley book talk based on Republic, Lost, arguing that money in politics creates institutional corruption in Congress. He calls it his favorite version of the talk.

Dan Holohan, author of The Lost Art of Steam Heating, talks about the old steam heating systems he learned about from veteran tradesmen. He shares stories and practical lessons on how these systems work, including running steam at low temperatures.

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.

Bryan Cantrill's GOTO Chicago 2017 talk on debugging production systems under pressure, centered on the incident where an operator's mistyped command rebooted an entire Joyent datacenter. It covers human factors, automation and architecture.

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.

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.

Zoz's DEF CON 23 talk explores practical, often explosive ways to destroy data and hard drives quickly. It tests methods such as thermite and other physical techniques for rapid destruction.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Dave Thomas, a co-author of the Agile Manifesto, argues at GOTO Amsterdam 2015 that Agile as a branded industry has lost its meaning. He says agile is an adjective, not a noun, and urges developers to reclaim agility.

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.

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.

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.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2016 talk on how software engineers pass knowledge down through oral tradition, from folk rhymes to programmer lore and stories like why C lacks a logical XOR. He argues for writing software with future generations in mind.

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.

Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote, preserved on YouTube after being lost from Google Video. He discusses what object orientation was meant to be, messaging, system design, and the state of computing practice.

Ruben Meerman presents a TEDx talk on the stoichiometry of weight loss, showing with lab demonstrations where fat goes when it is lost. He argues that most of it is exhaled as carbon dioxide.

David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, about the default settings of the mind, choosing what to pay attention to, and what we end up worshipping.

A short conference talk from !!Con 2017 in which Kevin Chen explains the HDR imaging algorithm from a foundational paper, framing it as a system of linear equations, and implements it in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. No prior image processing knowledge is needed.

Nickolas Means tells the story of United Airlines Flight 232, which lost all flight control yet saved more than half its passengers. He draws lessons on teamwork, crew resource management and leadership for software teams.

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.

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.

David Schachter describes how he made a data-collection Python program run 114,000 times faster, drawing on decades of experience. The talk covers pipelining, cache effects and other optimization lessons.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, and Jeremy Ruston, creator of TiddlyWiki, discuss hypertext, Ted Nelson's idea of intertwingled knowledge, and a way to combine TiddlyWiki with Erlang. It is a Code Mesh LDN 2018 talk.

Greg Wilson surveys what empirical research actually shows about software development, why we believe it, and how to share that knowledge more widely. It covers evidence on practices such as TDD and design patterns.

Glenn Vanderburg argues at the O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference that software development is an engineering discipline, even if immature. He contends the discredited body of knowledge called software engineering has led people to wrongly reject the label.

Sal Khan of Khan Academy argues that schools push students forward with gaps in their foundations, and that students should instead master concepts at their own pace. He compares it to building a house on an unfinished foundation.

Rich Hickey presents an extensive introduction to Clojure at the Boston Lisp meeting, assuming prior Lisp knowledge. It covers the language's design decisions relative to other Lisps.