off grid

Morten Rand-Hendriksen's WordCamp Europe 2017 talk presents CSS Grid Layout as a native two-dimensional layout system that changes how web pages are structured, including responsive layouts independent of source order. It was given as browsers began shipping support.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen argues that CSS Grid changes web layout, showing how to place content in cells independent of HTML source order and reshape layouts with media queries. It makes the case for using Grid now that browsers support it.

Physicist Geoffrey West speaks at an FQXi conference on time about complexity and scaling laws. He covers how metabolism, growth and lifespan scale across organisms and how the same mathematics applies to cities and companies.

MIT's Donald Sadoway presents the liquid metal battery as a design for grid-scale stationary electricity storage, at an Imperial College London event in 2018. He covers the grid benefits of massive-scale storage.

A 1994 talk by systems thinker Russ Ackoff, who knew W. Edwards Deming, on continuous versus discontinuous improvement. It ends with an unexpected lesson.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues in this TED talk that evolution shaped perception to track fitness rather than truth. He uses evolutionary simulations and the Australian jewel beetle as examples.

A CppCon 2014 talk from Microsoft engineers on using portable single-source C++ to deliver Office across iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. It covers architectures, techniques and lessons from real cross-platform projects.

A MIX08 session from Microsoft's Office team on how the Office 2007 ribbon was designed. It explains the user-feedback and telemetry behind it and the alternatives that were rejected.

A CppCon 2014 talk by Microsoft engineers on how Office delivers a single-source C++ codebase across iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. It covers architectures, techniques and lessons from shipping cross-platform products.

Chris Stucchio presents the ethical principles behind algorithmic decision making and shows with examples from lending, criminology and education that they cannot all be satisfied at once. The talk frames AI fairness as a set of quantitative tradeoffs.

Jensen Harris of the Office 2007 design team tells the behind-the-scenes story of the Ribbon at MIX08. He covers early prototypes, mistakes, and the UX principles used to design and validate it.

Alex Ionescu's OffensiveCon 2019 keynote on how reverse engineering is done on Windows without conventional reversing. It covers legal ways to obtain names of variables, exported functions and structures.

Justice Antonin Scalia's opening statement at a 2011 Senate Judiciary hearing on the role of judges. He argues that the Constitution's separation of powers is what protects liberty, and that gridlock is by design.

Valve's John McDonald presents at GDC 2018 on how Valve uses deep learning (VACnet) to detect cheaters in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. He covers training on human-reviewed replays and how model output is confirmed by manual review.

Gabe Newell, founder of Valve, gives a talk at the LBJ School on productivity, economics, political institutions and the future of corporations. He discusses Valve's hiring and pay, its flat structure and an open-office anecdote.

MIT professor Donald Sadoway argues that grid-scale storage is the missing piece for renewable energy. He sketches at the blackboard how large, cheap liquid-metal batteries could store wind and solar power.

Ahmon Dancy of Franz Inc explains low-level programming in Common Lisp, including off-heap data structures used in AllegroGraph to manage memory outside the garbage collector.

Uber Engineering's Joseph Gilley explains why Uber uses hexagons for geospatial indexing and introduces H3, its open source hierarchical grid system. He covers use cases and how distortion is handled.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session diving into the Nitro system, a set of hardware offload and security building blocks behind next-generation EC2 instances. It covers the design and architecture and how Nitro enables new instance types.

Gleb Smirnoff explains why Netflix built its own CDN on FreeBSD and NGINX, and how Netflix and NGINX Inc. collaborate on the software. It is a conference talk about open-source choices for video delivery.

Geoffrey Hinton's Google Tech Talk linking machine learning to biology, explaining dropout as a form of model averaging and why sexual reproduction and stochastic spiking neurons may prevent overfitting.

James Long's dotJS 2019 talk on how CRDTs enable local-first apps and how simple they can be to implement. He shows how to use them to build robust offline-capable frontends.

Tracy Young, a former construction engineer and cofounder of PlanGrid, speaks at the 2015 Y Combinator Female Founders Conference. She talks about building software for construction superintendents and about customer success.

Geoff Hinton's 2010 Google Tech Talk on deep belief networks, learning layers of representation one at a time from unlabeled data, and extending them with multiplicative interactions.

A DEF CON 23 talk on researching whether a commercial quadcopter could be forced to land by interfering with its GPS signal, inspired by a neighbor's kid's drone. It covers the research and the legal and technical issues encountered.

The ElixirConf 2019 day 1 morning keynote, including the announcement of Lumen, an alternative BEAM implementation designed for WebAssembly. It features DockYard's team presenting the project and a demo.

Netflix engineer Drew Gallatin's EuroBSDcon 2022 talk quantifies the older FreeBSD optimizations that let Netflix serve web traffic at 800Gb/s, including TSO, LRO, VM page cache zones, asynchronous sendfile and unmapped mbufs.

A Google I/O 2011 talk by Andrew Gerrand and Rob Pike on building and deploying a web application in Go. It argues that Go offers speed, reliability and simplicity together.

John Carmack's long QuakeCon 2012 keynote, a free-ranging talk covering software engineering, game platforms, game streaming, and his early head-mounted display and VR work.

John Carmack's keynote at QuakeCon 2011, an hour and a half of wide-ranging talk about id Software, Rage, engine open-sourcing, patents and programming practices.

Michael Jordan's 2009 Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame enshrinement speech, in which he thanks and also airs grievances about people who doubted him. It is known for his stories of using slights as motivation.

A long talk by rancher Gabe Brown on turning his North Dakota farm into a regenerative ecosystem using no-till, cover crops and integrated livestock. It covers the five principles of soil health and how they pay off financially.

Matt Kulukundis explains how Google designed SwissTable, a fast, cache-friendly hash table, step by step from std::unordered_map. The talk covers open addressing, SIMD probing and the tradeoffs of changing a fundamental data structure.

Christopher Hitchens delivers a speech defending freedom of speech, including the right of audiences to hear offensive speakers and a take on the fire-in-a-crowded-theatre line. It is framed around the Charlie Hebdo attack.

Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote separates 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand) and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things. It offers a vocabulary for judging designs and abstractions.

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.

John Sotos, a physician and former Intel chief medical officer, argues at DEF CON 25 that genetic diseases are exploitable vulnerabilities in the genome. He warns that CRISPR and related tools will make malicious genome hacks and targeted bioweapons feasible.

Martin Kleppmann's GOTO Berlin 2016 talk on how collaborative editors, offline apps, and multi-datacenter databases handle concurrent updates. It covers conflict resolution approaches including operational transformation and CRDTs, with a worked look at text CRDTs.

Dan Geer's Black Hat 2014 keynote argues that cybersecurity is a matter of power and policy rather than wishful thinking. He covers surveillance, the vulnerability market, software liability and privacy as the capacity to misrepresent yourself.

Jonathan Blow's 2010 Rice University talk argues that game designers refine their techniques in ways that can manipulate players, as with A/B-tested social games. He discusses the ethical responsibility of designers and what games can offer beyond addiction.