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A speech by comedian Konstantin Kisin at an Oxford Union debate on whether woke culture has gone too far. He argues the case in a short segment of the debate.

Sam Altman accepts the 2023 Hawking Fellowship at the Cambridge Union and speaks about OpenAI, AGI and AI safety, recorded November 1, 2023. It includes his comments on what is left for AGI and on discovering new physics.

A TEDx talk arguing that battery electric vehicles are not as environmentally friendly as commonly believed and that the rush to adopt them is misguided. TED flagged it as containing claims that lack scientific support.

Shashi Tharoor's Oxford Union speech arguing that Britain owes reparations to its former colonies, focused on the effects of British rule in India. It lists economic and political damage done by colonialism.

Freya Holmer's Dutch Game Day 2023 talk asking why vectors can't be multiplied, building from complex numbers to a single axiom and arriving at geometric algebra, quaternions and multivectors.

Sociologist and comedian Harald Eia argues in a TEDxOslo talk that Nordic social democracies produce more rich people per capita than the US or UK. He credits high taxes, welfare and strong unions for creating a safety net that enables risk taking.

Anand Giridharadas presents his book Winners Take All at Google, arguing that the global elite's philanthropy and 'win-win' framing preserve the systems that create inequity. He challenges the audience, including Google employees, to examine their own role in that system.

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.

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.

Doug Zongker's deadpan conference presentation of his famously chicken-filled paper, given at the 2007 AAAS humor session. It satirizes academic talks while showing the pitfalls of bad presentation.

Will Stephen's humorous six-minute TEDx talk shows presentation techniques that make you sound brilliant while saying essentially nothing.

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.

Mike Rowe, host of Dirty Jobs, shares stories from messy real-world jobs in this TED talk. He argues that hard work has been unjustly degraded in society.

James Mickens delivers his comedic rant about JavaScript and web programming, in his usual dry, hyperbolic style. It includes his account of learning the language from the O'Reilly Definitive Guide.

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.

Scott Galloway's TED talk uses data to argue that young Americans are financially worse off than earlier generations, calling it a great intergenerational theft. He covers root causes and what could change it.

Andrew Ng speaks at the Stanford MSx Future Forum about how AI is transforming industry after industry, comparing its impact to electricity. The talk also touches on evil-AI worries, jobs and basic income.

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.

Megan McArdle's AEI Vision Talk 'Capital and Poverty' argues that social and financial capital work differently in low-income communities, and that this explains barriers to reaching the middle class.

A TED talk by entrepreneur Nick Hanauer arguing that decades of 'greed is good' economic theory drove inequality and instability. He proposes an economics built on reciprocity and cooperation.

Nick Hanauer's short TED University talk on economic inequality, which was famously not posted on TED's main site at first. He argues that rich people are not the job creators.

Richard Wilkinson presents data showing that societies with larger income gaps do worse on health, lifespan, trust and other measures. He argues the effects track inequality itself rather than average income. It is a 17-minute TED talk.

Billionaire Nick Hanauer warns fellow wealthy people in a TED talk that growing inequality could lead to social upheaval like pre-revolutionary France. He argues a higher minimum wage would grow the middle class and prosperity.

Hans Rosling makes the case that the washing machine was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution. Using Gapminder graphics, he shows how electricity and economic growth free up time for reading and learning.

Tef's EMF 2012 talk on lessons from a career in programming, a candid and humorous look at why programming is so often terrible. Slides and a draft script are available online.

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.

Rich Hickey's keynote at RailsConf 2012, a close sibling of his 'Simple Made Easy' talk. He distinguishes simple (not intertwined) from easy (familiar), and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things, with Rails-specific examples including large gem collections.

Conal Elliott presents his paper on automatic differentiation, deriving a simple, generalized AD algorithm from a natural specification. Varying the representation of derivatives yields forward and reverse mode algorithms that avoid the complexity and statefulness of backpropagation.

The 1965 Cambridge Union debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on race, justice and history in America. Baldwin argues that the American dream came at the expense of Black Americans.

Matthew Griffith, creator of elm-ui, presents a toolkit for designing layouts in Elm as an alternative to CSS. He explains the opinionated approach to layout and styling.

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.

Brandon Sanderson's keynote on AI-generated art, arguing that the artistic process and the journey matter more than the finished product. He explains why he rebels against generative AI in creative work.

Psychologist Robert Epstein presents a Stanford EE380 colloquium on how internet algorithms such as search rankings can manipulate opinions, purchases and votes at massive scale. He also describes a new monitoring system for tracking such influence.

Connor Krukosky, an 18-year-old college student and vintage computer collector, tells how he bought an IBM z890 mainframe and got it running at home. The talk was given at SHARE in San Antonio in March 2016.

A Google Tech Talk arguing that the best interface requires the fewest clicks and choices, with Google search, Facebook, the iPod and Firefox as examples. It shows how minimizing interaction makes interfaces easier to learn.

Bryan Cantrill's talk on corporate open source anti-patterns, first given at FISL 2012 and again at the Liferay Symposium. He lays out the mistakes companies make when open sourcing code, such as announcing future open sourcing, and discusses licenses.

Jessie Frazelle's DockerCon SF 2015 talk on running Docker containers for desktop applications, with fun container hacks and images. It shows how far containers can be pushed beyond servers.

Michael Levin's keynote at the ALife 2020 conference, 'Robot Cancer', on how bioelectric signaling in embryogenesis and regeneration informs unconventional computing, cognition and the 'software of life'. He argues biology offers lessons for building adaptive machines.

Lieutenant General Mark Hertling gives a TEDx talk arguing that obesity and poor youth fitness are a national security problem because too few young Americans can meet military physical requirements.

Brian Kernighan's 2009 talk at Princeton on the Elements of Programming Style, discussing readable code, avoiding cleverness and flawed examples in programming tutorials.