reference frames

Lex Fridman interviews Jeff Hawkins, founder of Numenta and author of On Intelligence, about the Thousand Brains Theory and reverse-engineering the neocortex. They also cover Hierarchical Temporal Memory and brain-inspired AI architectures.

Tony Hoare's InfoQ talk in which he describes introducing null references in ALGOL W in 1965 and calls it his billion-dollar mistake. He discusses language designer responsibility and run-time checks.

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.

Eric Weinstein interviews economist Timur Kuran on The Portal about preference falsification and how societies where people hide their real views can tip into revolutions.

The first lecture of an MIT course on Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, covering themes like self-reference, recursion and incompleteness. The full lecture series is on YouTube.

A HOPE09 talk on how modern computer chips are manufactured, from 22nm transistors to ultra-clean fabs and the tricks used to pattern tiny features with light. It frames chipmaking as hacking electrical engineering and physics.

Jonathan Blow's DevGAMM 2019 talk argues that software knowledge is being lost between generations and that growing layers of abstraction could lead to a decline in technological civilization.

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.

Rick Hartley's AltiumLive keynote on differential pairs in PC boards. He argues the rules from cables and twisted pairs do not carry over, and covers which pair geometry gives the best impedance control, the right spacing, routing practice and how much skew is acceptable.

Cory Doctorow's Talks at Google lecture on the coming civil war over general-purpose computing. He argues that locked-down devices, DRM, and surveillance threaten user control of computers.

A SXSW talk by W Watson that uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, with nods to Zizek, to critique popular programming languages. It argues that people choose and defend languages for emotional and ideological reasons rather than rational ones.

Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, starting with Musical Phonology. He draws analogies between music and linguistics, including references to Chomsky.

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.

David Heinemeier Hansson's opening keynote at RailsConf 2019 argues against the expectation of payment for open source work, drawing on his experience releasing Rails. It also includes lighter asides about the industry.

Peter Seibel's 2006 Google TechTalk on Practical Common Lisp, framed by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Paul Graham's Blub paradox. It shows Lisp features such as condition restarts and its generic-function object system.

Matt Parker gives a hands-on Royal Institution talk on how four-dimensional shapes appear in a 3D world, with props like straw frames, Mobius strips and a knitted hat. It is a playful general-audience tour of the fourth dimension.

A 1983 Los Angeles lecture by KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov on how the Soviets carried out ideological subversion of target societies through propaganda. He walks through demoralization and normalization stages.

Andrew Huberman discusses ADHD, its biology and myths, behavioral and pharmacologic treatments, and training protocols to improve focus for people with or without ADHD. It covers dopamine and the coordination of brain networks.

Matt Parker's Royal Institution talk based on his book Humble Pi, covering everyday mathematical mistakes and spurious patterns that went wrong in engineering and software. It mixes stand-up comedy with stories of coincidence and error.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk in which Bryan Cantrill demonstrates DTrace and explains how it improves debugging of both development and live production systems.

Clayton Christensen speaks at Google on where growth comes from, covering disruption, market-creating versus efficiency innovation, and jobs to be done. He also touches on measuring your life.

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.

Google engineers describe Google's internal build system, a unified, language-agnostic system used across the company. It was presented as a 2012 NYC tech talk.

Lex Fridman interviews Marcus Hutter of DeepMind about universal artificial intelligence, AIXI, Kolmogorov complexity, Solomonoff induction and the idea of intelligence as compression.

Erik Meijer argues that category theory is the mathematicians' version of interface-based design. He shows that Java 8 lambdas and method references form a Cartesian closed category.

Matthias Felleisen's keynote uses weather prediction as an analogy for type systems, arguing they forecast problems so you can act on them. It draws on his experience developing Typed Racket.

An episode of the BSD Now podcast in which Bryan Cantrill joins the hosts to rant about Linux interfaces, alongside the week's BSD headlines. The conversation also touches on containers and related systems topics.

Rich Hickey presents an extensive introduction to Clojure at the Boston Lisp meeting, assuming prior Lisp knowledge. It covers the language's design decisions relative to other Lisps.

A roughly 2.5-hour Toronto debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek on happiness under Marxism versus capitalism. This is the official upload from April 2019.

Adam Curtis's 2016 BBC documentary argues that since the 1970s governments, financiers and technologists have retreated into a simplified fake world. It ranges from Syria and Libya to the road to Trump.

Chris McCord's ElixirConf EU 2023 keynote tracing LiveView's evolution from simple form validation to full apps, with code examples and live demos of what 1.0 will offer.

Elon Musk's 2016 IAC presentation on the technical challenges and architectures for building a self-sustaining human presence on Mars.

Guy Kawasaki's UC Berkeley Haas talk on the top ten mistakes entrepreneurs make, covering a startup from inception to exit.

Jordan Peterson's testimony at the Canadian Senate hearing on Bill C16, which added gender identity and expression to protected grounds. He argues against compelled speech.

Olivier Giroux's CppCon 2019 talk recounts the roughly ten-year effort to bring std::atomic and the C++ memory model to CUDA GPUs, through ten stories from that work.

Jensen Huang's two-hour NVIDIA GTC March 2024 keynote announcing AI hardware and software advances, including Blackwell, omniverse, robotics and digital twins.

A London Haskell talk on the algebra of algebraic data types, showing how sum and product types behave like arithmetic. It frames types as numbers obeying algebraic laws.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk introducing Polyworld, an artificial life simulator used to evolve artificial intelligence by designing worlds rather than minds. It presents results from ongoing attempts to evolve intelligent behavior.

Lennart Augustsson's CUFP 2011 keynote covers using Haskell commercially at Standard Chartered Bank. He discusses non-standard Haskell implementations, including a strict dialect, and weighs strict against lazy evaluation.

Barack Obama, then a presidential candidate, presents his innovation agenda at Google and takes questions from Eric Schmidt and employees in November 2007.