pointer pointer

Paul Irish explains how pointerpointer.com works. It uses a hidden canvas of colored Voronoi regions to look up which photo matches the cursor position.

Casey Muratori argues against smart pointers and RAII, advocating grouped-element thinking, zero-is-initialization and stubs as better ways to structure memory and handle errors.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2016 talk on lifetime safety in C++, aiming for code free of leaks and dangling pointers by default. It covers smart pointers, ownership, reference counting pitfalls and deferred reclamation resembling garbage collection.

An OpenZFS office hours session with ZFS co-creator Matt Ahrens answering questions on topics such as hole birth time, send/receive buffers, device removal, block pointer rewrite and performance with many snapshots.

AlphaPhoenix shows off a new camera that films at two billion frames per second and uses it to film a laser pointer pulse. He investigates a strange quirk in how the speed of light appears on camera.

Eskil Steenberg's two-hour talk on his personal approach to writing C, covering code style, structure, naming, pointers and large-project organization. He warns it contains a fair bit of programming religion.

Herb Sutter revisits basic C++ questions in light of C++11 and C++14: how to declare and initialize variables, pass values to functions, write loops, and use smart pointers. It covers auto, rvalue references, range-for, uniform initialization, lambdas, unique_ptr and shared_ptr.

A one-minute Sesame Street animation of a counting pinball game focused on the number 12, set to Pointer Sisters music.

Kate Gregory argues at CppCon 2015 that C++ should be taught without starting from C: no char* strings, printf or raw arrays at first, with references before pointers.

3Blue1Brown explains fractal dimension and shows why many fractals are not strictly self-similar. Self-similarity turns out to be a special case of the broader idea of fractional dimension.

Posy gives a short history of the computer mouse cursor, from early straight pointers to the tilted arrow, comparing Apple and Windows designs. He then explains why he designed his own cursor set and offers it as a free download.

Technology Connections explains how the simple American drip coffee maker works, including the bimetal valve and bubble-pump heating, and compares the original Mr. Coffee with modern machines.

A JSConf 2014 talk visually breaking down algorithms behind everyday UI patterns, such as dropdown menus that vanish when the mouse drifts and picking the nearest target to the cursor. It shows how these are implemented in JavaScript.

Festo's promo video of SmartBird, an ultralight bionic flying model inspired by the herring gull that flaps and twists its wings to fly. It shows the robot in flight.

Aditya Siram introduces ATS, a statically typed ML-like language that compiles to C and offers type-safe pointer arithmetic and a full proof language. The Strange Loop talk shows off C interop, concurrency and verification features with non-trivial examples.

Scott Meyers explains how CPU caches work and why they matter for performance, covering cache levels, access speeds, associativity, and effects in multithreaded code. The focus is C++ and cache-aware, data-oriented programming.

Aaron Hsu shows how to manipulate and transform tree data in APL using arrays and inverted tables instead of pointers. He claims much smaller code, better performance and easier parallelisation.

Richard Feldman's Elm Europe 2017 talk on how to structure and scale large Elm applications, including when to nest messages.

Emery Berger's CppCon 2019 talk introducing Mesh, a drop-in malloc replacement that compacts memory in unmodified C and C++ programs. It tackles fragmentation by merging pages without changing pointers.

Dan Gelbart shows his home-built air bearing CNC lathe and grinder, which reaches about 1 micron accuracy. He demonstrates the machine and its parts.

Matt Ahrens presents the FreeBSD Foundation sponsored RAID-Z Expansion project for ZFS at the June 2021 FreeBSD Developer Summit. It explains how a RAID-Z vdev can be grown by adding disks on the fly.

A PBS Space Time episode on fuzzballs, the string-theory proposal for black holes that replaces the singularity with a tangle of strings. It explains why black holes seem to both have to exist and break known physics.

Rick Falkvinge responds to viewer feedback on his earlier Lightning Network video and raises a flaw he says was not previously discussed. The main thread is the network's unsolved routing problem.

A short first look at Dasung's 25.3-inch Paperlike 253 e-ink monitor, edited from the company's own Weibo reveal video. Price and release date were not yet known.

A short video of a Microsoft Surface multimedia coffee table, with a pointer to making a homemade multi-touch screen. It shows the original touch-table concept.

A Cracked video about the experience of intervening in a violent stabbing attack and the lack of police protection afterwards.

Ali Rahimi accepts the NIPS 2017 Test of Time Award and argues that machine learning has become alchemy, with practice running ahead of understanding.