no-code

Ten hours of uninterrupted pink noise, intended for relaxation and masking background sound. It is a long ambient audio loop rather than a spoken video.

Erlang co-creator Joe Armstrong's Code BEAM SF 2018 keynote revisits good ideas from the history of computing that were dropped, and asks which should be revived. It also touches on Erlang and Elixir.

CGP Grey explains that postal codes are routing instructions for mail rather than geographic regions. He looks at the quirks and problems this causes.

3Blue1Brown's discovery-oriented introduction to error correction codes, building up Hamming codes from the puzzle of locating a flipped bit. It explains the parity-check idea and why it is so efficient.

A short 1966 propaganda interview clip in which Jeremiah Denton, a US prisoner of war in Vietnam, blinks the word TORTURE in Morse code. Naval Intelligence later decoded the message.

Veritasium builds a QR code by hand to explain how it works. It covers the history of Morse code and barcodes, how QR codes encode data, why damaged codes still scan, and how safe they are.

Technology Connections follows up on his analog TV video to clear up the debate over whether CRT phosphor dots are pixels. He explains the shadow mask, color triads and how they relate to the scanned picture.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.

A short 'How It's Made' television segment showing the industrial process of turning canola seed into cooking oil. It walks through pressing, solvent extraction and refining steps.

SethBling uses Super Mario World glitches to inject and run Flappy Bird code on an unmodified SNES, entering it purely with controller inputs. It was the first time a human completed this kind of exploit by hand.

Fons van der Plas introduces Pluto.jl, a reactive notebook for Julia that tracks references between cells and re-runs affected cells when code changes. The talk was given at JuliaCon 2020.

Rachel Potvin describes the scale of Google's codebase and its custom monolithic source repository. She explains the reasons for the monorepo model, the tooling that makes it workable, and its tradeoffs.

A one-minute clip from Tom Sachs's Ten Bullets series on the rule "Always Be Knolling", which means constantly arranging and putting away unused objects.

A sketch from the Seattle comedy show Almost Live! in which Pat Cashman plays a US Bell rep explaining the new 425 area code. It first aired in 1997.

A professor from Illinois compares the cost of building, fueling and operating a nuclear plant against a natural gas plant, using visual charts. It shows how construction time and interest rates dominate, when the investment pays off and when costs cross over.

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.

Ray Dalio's 30-minute animated video explains how the economy works through credit, debt, interest rates, and short- and long-term cycles. It is based on his template for understanding the economy.

Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains in this 2017 GDC session how Overwatch uses an Entity Component System architecture for layered gameplay. He also covers its server-authoritative netcode with client-side prediction and how they keep the game responsive and fair.

The first lesson of Uncle Bob (Robert C. Martin)'s "Coding Better World Together" series. It makes the case for clean code and for treating software craftsmanship as an ethical and professional responsibility. It runs about 109 minutes.

Martin Fowler's GOTO 2012 introduction to NoSQL databases: where they came from, their data models, how consistency thinking differs, and when to use them. He argues they won't make relational databases obsolete and introduces polyglot persistence.

Tantacrul's 76-minute deep dive into the history of western music notation and the many proposed replacements, such as piano rolls, colored notes and the jubilate. He explains why none have displaced the current system.

Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js, introduces the event-driven I/O framework built on V8 with examples, and discusses the v0.4.0 release and its new APIs.

Neil Postman's 1997 lecture at College of DuPage, based on his book, argues that Americans treat technology as a national religion and depend on it to solve larger human problems. It includes audience questions.

PBS Space Time explains Noether's theorem: conservation laws such as energy and momentum are consequences of deeper symmetries. It also covers why those laws hold only under certain conditions.

Casey Muratori shows how typical 'clean code' object-oriented patterns can cost large factors in performance. He benchmarks them against simpler data-oriented code.

Node.js creator Ryan Dahl discusses ten design mistakes he made in Node, including package.json, npm, and module resolution. The talk sets out the motivations behind his later project, Deno.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Pokemon Yellow by MrWint that uses arbitrary code execution to push Game Boy hardware to its limits. Through crafted inputs it injects code and ends up running other programs, such as Tetris, inside the game.

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.

A DEF CON 29 talk by Richard Henderson about encoding the EICAR antivirus test string into QR codes and barcodes and scanning them at real systems. Many systems that do not expect such input misbehave or collapse, including a parking garage system.

A clip of Louis CK on Conan riffing that everything is amazing and nobody is happy, about people complaining over airplane wifi and taking modern technology for granted.

A Ukrainian documentary about the liquidators who cleaned radioactive debris off the Chernobyl reactor roof in two-minute shifts. It presents their firsthand accounts and footage of the work.

Ryan Dahl's first presentation of Node.js at JSConf 2009. He pitches event-driven, non-blocking I/O as the motivation, rather than JavaScript itself.

MIT 22.01 lecture by Michael Short explaining the Chernobyl accident technically, including RBMK reactor positive feedback, xenon poisoning and the cascade of human errors during the test.

Yanis Varoufakis talks at a festival in Zagreb about his book The Global Minotaur. He argues the postwar global economy and the 2008 crisis stem from deeper structural causes than greed or weak regulation.

Ryan Dahl tells the history of Node.js and why he created it at a Phoenix meetup. He explains the push for non-blocking IO on a clean slate rather than extending an existing ecosystem.

Economist-comedian Yoram Bauman delivers a humorous translation of Mankiw's ten principles of economics for the uninitiated. It was presented at the AAAS humor session in 2007.

A player piano is made to reproduce human speech, here reciting a European Environmental Criminal Court proclamation in German at the 2009 World Venice Forum. This upload adds subtitles so the words become understandable.

A Berkeley lecture by psychologist Christina Maslach, a leading burnout researcher, on what burnout is and what causes it. It covers common misunderstandings and the job and workplace factors involved.

A Hagerty documentary on a 1979 Lamborghini Countach LP400 S and how it ended the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. It tells the story of the illicit race started by Brock Yates and its Hollywood adaptation.

MattKC fits a playable Snake game into a QR code by writing tiny x86 machine code and patching the ZBar scanner so it can run the decoded data.