perspective

FreeBSD developer Benno Rice traces the history of init and bootstrap systems at linux.conf.au 2019 to explain why systemd was seen as necessary and why it provokes such strong reactions. He also discusses why change is scary.

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address, told through three stories: connecting the dots, love and loss, and death. It includes the calligraphy class and the 'stay hungry, stay foolish' close.

Mathematician Kevin Buzzard explains why he believes the Lean theorem prover will shape the future of mathematics, and describes digitizing his university curriculum in Lean with undergraduates, plus the cultural challenges.

David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, about the default settings of the mind, choosing what to pay attention to, and what we end up worshipping.

Actress Claudia Christian tells how she overcame alcoholism using the Sinclair Method, which uses naltrexone to gradually reduce cravings. She discusses fresh perspectives on treating alcohol use disorder.

Kevlin Henney's GOTO 2018 talk argues that much of what looks new in software is a recycling of concepts with long histories. It draws on history to show the slow, steady current beneath constant churn in frameworks and trends.

Raph Koster's 2014 GDC Next talk on what science says about creativity, with practical steps game designers and developers can use to be more creative. It frames creativity as applying existing patterns in new contexts.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2016 talk tries to defuse the heated debate over undefined behavior in C and C++. He explains from the compiler writer's perspective why UB exists and how it enables optimization.

Joscha Bach's 35C3 talk offers an AI perspective on the soul, covering perception, mental representation, agency, consciousness and selfhood as things that can arise in a computational system like the brain.

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.

Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford commencement address, in which he tells three stories about connecting the dots, love and loss, and death, including his remarks on typography.

Moxie Marlinspike's 36C3 talk examines why distributed and decentralized technology is hard to build into consumer products, from the perspective of developing Signal. It argues that ecosystems move slowly and federation causes problems.

Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software and StackExchange, speaks at Y Combinator's Startup School in 2012. He shares his perspective on building startups.

Anna Rosling Rönnlund presents Dollar Street, a project photographing homes in dozens of countries, from stoves to beds to toilets, and sorting them by income. She shows how data visualization can change how we see the world.

Farmer Joel Salatin gives a TEDx talk on how well-managed grass and rotational grazing support sustainable farming and affect the climate. He draws on his work at Polyface Farm in Virginia.

Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote argues that the computer revolution has not really happened yet, reflecting on how computing, objects and the web fall short of their potential.

Kalman Reti, one of the last Symbolics developers, gives a roughly hour-long talk on Symbolics Lisp machines. It covers the machines and their environment from an insider's perspective.

A short pre-recorded talk by Rich Sutton for the World AI Conference in Shanghai arguing that succession from humanity to AI is inevitable. He lays out his view of that transition.