pen plotter

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the hard parts of running an open source project: online community conflict, why its patterns arise, and a cultural history of open source. He offers ideas for more civil, productive communication.

Deviant Ollam, head of a physical penetration testing team, presents tactics for getting into buildings, from bypassing door levers with a wire to defeating bank doors. He argues that physical security is often surprisingly weak.

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.

A dotJS 2012 conference talk by Fat (of Twitter Bootstrap fame) on what open source really means and why maintainers feel guilty about it. It covers the obligations, expectations and burnout that come with releasing popular open source software, delivered with humor.

David Christiansen gives a Strange Loop 2018 introduction to dependent types, where one language serves for both compile-time and run-time code and programs unite with proofs. It draws on his book The Little Typer.

Bryan Cantrill's OSCON 2015 talk on moving a proprietary product to open source, drawing on Sun's history with Solaris and illumos, licensing choices and the relicensing after Oracle's acquisition.

Urs Hoelzle, Google's SVP of infrastructure, gives the 2012 Open Networking Summit keynote on how Google adopted OpenFlow and software-defined networking in its own networks. The slides are linked in the description.

Part two of a StrictlyVC interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, focused on AI. He discusses regulation, commodification of AI, Google's reluctance to release its own models, and best- and worst-case futures.

OpenAI's 2021 live demo of Codex translating natural language into code, from Hello World to building a game and a Microsoft Word plugin.

Clip from Lex Fridman's podcast with Roger Penrose in which Penrose argues that consciousness is not a computation. He discusses Godel-style arguments and the possible role of quantum effects in microtubules.

Theo de Raadt presents pledge, a new OpenBSD security mechanism that kills processes which exceed the system calls they declared they need. The talk was given late at night at Hackfest 2015.

Thunderf00t analyzes the leaked Pentagon UFO videos and offers mundane explanations for the fuzzy triangle and tic-tac footage.

Marco Reps builds and tests an open-source 8.5 digit voltmeter based on CERN's high-precision ADC design. The video walks through assembly, soldering and measurement of the resulting instrument.

A 36C3 talk that systematically evaluates OpenBSD's exploit mitigations, asking how effective they really are and what they cost in performance, complexity and inspectability. It challenges the project's security marketing.

Thunderf00t argues that the Pentagon's officially released 'UFO' videos have mundane explanations such as birds, parallax and sensor artifacts.

Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk is a hypothetical account of how an intelligence agency such as the NSA would sabotage open source software, standards and online discussion. It covers Skype's history, OpenSSL and psyops against standards.

Edwin Brady presents Idris 2, a rewrite of the Idris dependently typed language, and shows type-driven development in practice. The demos show the compiler filling in whole functions from their types.

Elm creator Evan Czaplicki's 2018 Elm Europe talk on how to define success for an open source project and language community. It argues against judging projects by GitHub activity and touches on community expectations.

Astronomer David Kipping of Cool Worlds talks with Mick West to break down the three declassified Pentagon UFO videos. They explain the footage through camera artifacts, glare, and perspective effects.

Lindybeige gives an hour-long history of English coinage and the problems of maintaining a trustworthy currency. It ends with an explanation of why the pounds, shillings and pence system worked so well.

Technology Connections spends 22 minutes on the humble can opener and what its design shows about products and why people don't know what to look for. It uses an everyday tool to draw broader lessons.

Thunderf00t goes through the three UFO videos released by the Pentagon and offers mundane explanations for each. He treats the footage as sensor artifacts, parallax and camera effects rather than alien craft.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever on time to AGI, what comes after generative models, data limits, alignment, and competing with Google. The title centers on whether next-token prediction could surpass human intelligence.

Enderman gets Windows 11 running on a Pentium 4 system with a Radeon HD 5870 and 8 GB of DDR2. It explores how an unsupported, ancient CPU can be made to work by using the rare last Pentium 4 variant and a registry flag.

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.

Edwin Brady, creator of Idris, presents Idris 2 and demonstrates type-driven development, where the compiler assists by filling holes and suggesting implementations from types.

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.

C J Silverio, former npm CTO, explains how the JavaScript package commons ended up in the hands of a for-profit company with no accountability. She discusses the cost of running a registry and what the community should do next.

Daniel Stenberg's keynote at FrOSCon 2025 on AI slop attacks on the curl project, with examples of bogus AI-generated security reports. He discusses the toll on maintainers and why various countermeasures don't fit the project.

A 2019 extended interview in which Connie Loizos talks with Sam Altman about his work, OpenAI's capped-profit structure, its mission toward safe artificial general intelligence, and criticisms the organization faces.

TED curator Chris Anderson interviews Linus Torvalds about his personality, his engineer's pragmatism, and the creation of Linux and Git. Torvalds also discusses taste in code and why he open sourced Linux.

Fools & Dreamers is a 30-minute documentary about Hinewai Nature Reserve in New Zealand, where botanist Hugh Wilson let gorse grow as a nurse canopy to regenerate native forest. It shows the results after 30 years and the local skepticism he faced.

Tom Caputi presents the design of native encryption for ZFS at the OpenZFS Developer Summit, including design decisions and how authentication uses checksum fields.

OpenAI's livestream demo of GPT-4 with Greg Brockman, showing its capabilities and limitations. Highlights include writing code, turning a hand-drawn sketch into a website, and a tax-question example.

Code Rush is a 2000 PBS documentary following Netscape engineers during the year they open-sourced the browser as Mozilla. It shows the pressure and long hours of work in Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com era.

Matt Adereth's Clojure/conj talk covers the history of keyboards and how he used Clojure generating OpenSCAD to design and build his custom Dactyl ergonomic keyboard, including 3D printing and laser-cut parts.

The first episode of James Burke's Connections series, 'The Trigger Effect', explores how modern society depends on interlinked technological systems and how quickly it breaks down when they fail, starting with a power blackout.

Sandy Pentland of MIT presents his book on social physics, which uses big-data studies of how people interact to explain how ideas spread. He describes findings on collective intelligence and social influence.

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.

Stuff Made Here builds a handwriting robot and sends its output to a handwriting expert to see whether it can pass as forgery. It walks through the engineering trials and errors along the way.