mocking

James Mickens's humorous USENIX Security keynote argues that improving security and trusting opaque technology like machine learning is far harder than the industry admits.

Tom Scott-style absurdist tour by Tom7 of SIGBOVIK chess projects: a tournament of 30 weird chess algorithms used to rate a color- and piece-blind chess program. Topics include mirrors, arithmetic encoding, perverted game tree search and a diluted Stockfish.

Tom Scott-style absurdist research by tom7 for SIGBOVIK 2021, using machine learning to discover letterforms that are 'uppercaser' than uppercase A and lowercaser than lowercase. It is a comedic, technically inventive deep dive with fonts and a paper.

Stuart Halloway's satirical talk describes how to protect yourself from industry change by spreading complexity through systems while following idiomatic practice. It uses this inversion to catalog software design anti-patterns.

The pilot of the British comedy series Look Around You, a deadpan parody of 1970s and 80s school science programmes, in which the scientists examine calcium.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on the NCAA, arguing that the organization profits enormously from college athletes while insisting they remain unpaid amateurs. It covers the money in college sports, including big-school athletic spending, and the case for paying athletes.

Tom 7's pilot episode of a series that plays with type systems and absurd programming, presented as a parody of the GPL v3 license. It mixes a typesetting experiment with a long, story-driven intro on the origin of TeX. Source code and papers are linked from the author's site.

An episode of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj exposing how tax-prep companies like TurboTax make filing confusing and costly even though many Americans can file for free. It combines comedy with reporting on lobbying and dark patterns.

A full-length recording of Tom Lehrer's 1967 concert in Copenhagen, mixing his satirical songs with spoken comedy between numbers. It runs about 51 minutes with good audio for its age.

The first episode of Nathan Barley, Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker's British sitcom satirizing hip media and startup scenesters in mid-2000s Shoreditch. Cynical writer Dan Ashcroft finds himself idolized by the moronic Nathan Barley.

The 1997 novelty song by Komar and Melamid with composer Dave Soldier, built from survey results on what listeners dislike most in music. It features bagpipes, an opera singer rapping, and a children's choir urging shopping at Wal-Mart.

Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk presents a fictitious NSA program called ORCHESTRA, satirizing how intelligence agencies could influence startups and open source. It is a humorous but pointed look at surveillance and subverted software.

A John Oliver Last Week Tonight segment on America's crumbling infrastructure and why maintenance is neglected and underfunded. It mixes comedy with real examples such as aging bridges and dams.

A long video essay arguing against the claim that Blazing Saddles could not be made today. It looks at the film as satire of the sanitized Western genre and what it did to that genre.

An episode of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj on the cruise industry. It looks at worker exploitation, safety shortcuts, and how cruise lines sweep crime at sea under the rug.

The Brass Eye special 'Paedogeddon!' by Chris Morris, a black-comedy satire of British media moral panic that duped celebrities and politicians into endorsing nonsense. It is the final episode of the series.

A Last Week Tonight segment on organ and body donation, covering where donations actually go, how donated bodies are used and sold, and problems in organ transplant programs.

Kung Fury is a 30-minute crowd-funded 80s action comedy about a kung fu cop who travels back in time to kill Hitler, packed with retro tropes.

A John Oliver Last Week Tonight segment on homeowners associations, covering the surprising power they hold over residents and how arbitrary their rules can be. It mixes investigative comedy with examples of HOA overreach.

A Last Week Tonight segment on union busting that explains the tactics employers use and why they face few consequences. It is delivered as comedic commentary.

Gary Bernhardt's RubyConf 2012 talk on testing in isolation without mocking everything. It goes through behavior versus data, mutation versus immutability, and how a functional core with an imperative shell yields natural isolation and parallelism.

Brandon Rhodes' PyOhio 2014 talk on applying the Clean Architecture in Python. He shows how this high-level design pattern fits Python's features and addresses maintainability problems in large applications.

A Thoughtworks conversation among Martin Fowler, Kent Beck and David Heinemeier Hansson on whether TDD is dead. They discuss the tradeoffs of test-driven development, mocking and where TDD helps or hurts design.