low-power computing

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.

Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, presents GreenArrays' 144-core asynchronous chip at Strange Loop 2013. He explains how idle cores draw almost no power and how tight code minimizes energy use.

Chris Lattner and Brennan Saeta present Swift for TensorFlow at the TensorFlow Dev Summit 2019, covering language-integrated automatic differentiation and tooling for machine learning in Swift.

A 29C3 panel with whistleblowers Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake and William Binney. They talk about what happens when exposing secret government power becomes a crime, and about surveillance abuses.

Disney Research's demo of quasistatic cavity resonance, which uses a purpose-built room or cabinet to generate magnetic fields that deliver kilowatts of power wirelessly to mobile receivers inside.

A 1973 AT&T training film made for new employees at Bell Labs' Holmdel Computing Center, when Unix was in its third version and running at 16 computer centers in the Bell System. It shows how users submitted jobs and used the center's machines.

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.

Isaac Arthur explores space-based solar power, in which satellites beam energy down via microwaves to rectennas on Earth. He discusses feasibility, profitability and its role in spurring space colonization.

IBM's Dr. Talia Gershon explains quantum computing to five people of increasing expertise: a child, teen, college student, grad student and professional. The WIRED series format moves from simple analogies to technical detail.

Olympic track cyclist Robert Forstemann tries to pedal hard enough to power a 700 W toaster and toast a slice of bread. The film frames it as a comparison of how much energy people consume versus how much they can generate.

Soup Emporium's deep dive argues that Yellowstone is not a ticking timebomb. It goes through uplift and subsidence, earthquakes and what the caldera really is, to rebut supervolcano doom claims.

A short clip of the Snowbird, a human-powered ornithopter built by University of Toronto students. On August 2, 2010 it sustained altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds, the first such flight.

Jon Gjengset's 2020 PhD dissertation presentation at MIT on partial state in dataflow-based materialized views, the idea behind the Noria database. The Q&A is cut out.

Joel Spolsky's 2009 Google Tech Talk on why StackOverflow was built, how it addresses the mess of searching for programming help, and the community design behind it. He also takes jabs at paywalled answer sites.

A four-minute 2006 explainer on trusted computing, describing what it is and whether users should support it, with a skeptical DRM angle.

Alan Kay's 2015 talk on the power of simplicity, arguing that systems become simpler by building on more sophisticated fundamental building blocks and that big research horizons drove invention at Xerox PARC. It ranges across computing, tools and scaling software.

A short SIGBOVIK 2017 presentation by Tom Wildenhain showing that PowerPoint animations are Turing complete, with a working Turing machine built in slides. The talk is delivered deadpan as a serious research result.

Martin Gorner's Devoxx talk introduces deep learning with TensorFlow, walking through neural networks for MNIST, how to choose an architecture and how to diagnose networks that fail to train.

Dave Ackley demonstrates the Demon Horde Sort, an inherently robust sorting machine running in his Movable Feast Machine simulator. This is the uncut version with all details and side thoughts.

Practical Engineering explains what a black start is: restarting a power grid after total collapse. It shows why most plants need outside power to start and why rebuilding a synchronized grid is delicate and high-stakes.

Imphenzia's 83-minute tutorial covers the low poly modeling techniques he learned over five years of Blender use, with timestamps from navigation and extrusion onward. It uses Blender 2.83 with default keys.

Kenneth Finnegan shows how USB-C Power Delivery trigger boards like the ZY12PDN negotiate 5V to 20V so you can power projects from a USB-C charger, including the color coding for each voltage.

Robert Smith of Rigetti Computing talks at a Bay Area Lisp and Scheme meetup about using Common Lisp for quantum computing. He covers the technical, sociological and psychological sides of working across disciplines.

A QCon London 2020 talk by Tesla engineers on the architecture of Tesla's Virtual Power Plant. It covers aggregating distributed batteries and solar with vertically integrated hardware and software across cloud and edge.

The first episode of the BBC's 1982 television series The Computer Programme, introducing home computing to a general audience. It surveys mainframes, early personal computers such as the BBC Micro and Commodore PET, and the changing computer market of the time.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on the state of the US power grid, why it needs fixing, and the risks of aging infrastructure.

Footage of Richard Box's art installation in which fluorescent tubes light up in the ground under high voltage power lines, showing the electric fields they produce.

A short 2000s Apple commercial for the PowerMac G4 that plays on the computer being classed as a weapon under US export restrictions, with tanks as imagery.

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

The Slow Mo Guys film a TV and screens with a high-speed camera to show how displays build an image. The footage includes CRT-style scanning and how pixels light up over time.

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.

In this TEDxBerlin talk, environmental activist Michael Shellenberger explains why he changed from opposing nuclear power to advocating it, after looking at the evidence on Chernobyl, Fukushima and air pollution.

Tom Wildenhain's guest lecture for CMU's Esoteric Programming Languages course shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing complete without macros, building up to a mind-bending fractal ending.

Dave Ackley gives a high-level introduction to robust-first computing, which prioritizes robustness over efficiency in computer architecture. A sorting demo illustrates the idea.

An Al Jazeera English People & Power investigation from 2010 into safety problems with the Boeing 737NG, featuring whistleblowers on cracking parts, hand-made structural components and an alleged cover-up.

Derek Sivers annotates a short clip of a lone dancer at a festival, showing how a first follower turns a ridiculous act into a movement. He draws out lessons about leadership and making it easy to follow.

Jonathan Blow's LambdaConf 2025 keynote demonstrates the Jai programming language and explains its design. It includes demos of metaprogramming and tools that visualize programs.

Technology Connections explains the difference between power (watts) and energy (watt-hours) and why confusing them leads to errors. It runs about 52 minutes and uses everyday examples.

Matt Risinger demonstrates a blower door test on a house, using a fan to measure air leakage and find where air gets in and out. It shows how the test reveals the quality of the build.

Jonathan Blow's Reboot Develop 2017 talk on making game programming less terrible, discussing software bloat, slowness and the design goals behind his own programming language.