sci-fi

A re-upload of Rupert Sheldrake's TEDx talk The Science Delusion, which TED removed from its channel. He challenges what he calls the dogmas of modern science, including whether fundamental constants are constant.

David Beazley's PyData Global 2021 keynote, an oral history of early scientific Python. He tells how Python ended up running on a Connection Machine supercomputer at Los Alamos.

John Searle's Talk at Google on consciousness and artificial intelligence, hosted by Google's Singularity Network. He presents his philosophy of mind and Chinese room argument that computation is syntactic and cannot capture semantics.

A short clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson answering a question about why there are not more women in science. He describes the resistance he faced as a Black kid pursuing science and the systemic barriers many people encounter.

Joscha Bach's 31c3 talk argues that the mind should be understood as an information-processing system and that even the physical universe can be seen as computational. It tours the philosophy underlying artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

Philosopher Dan Dennett argues in a TED talk that we do not understand our own consciousness and that our brains often fool us. He uses perceptual examples, including a painting that invites the viewer to fill in detail.

Stuart Halloway of Cognitect argues for debugging with the scientific method: form hypotheses, try to falsify them, and write everything down. The talk is given to the Clojure community but applies to any language.

Freeman Dyson's 2005 Boston University talk on heretical views about science and society. He questions prevailing dogmas, including his argument that climate and CO2 are a land management issue.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues in this TED talk that perception is a controlled hallucination: the brain constantly predicts the world and our shared agreement is what we call reality. He also touches on the construction of the self.

Charles Stross's 34C3 talk on how science fiction gets the future wrong. He argues that corporations are slow, human-powered AIs that optimize for profit, and that regulation lags behind accelerating technology.

Martin Kleppmann's Local-First Conf talk reviewing where the local-first idea came from, where it stands five years after the essay, and what the community should work toward. He argues for generic sync infrastructure.

A DEF CON 26 talk by investigative journalists and hackers on the fake science industry, with bogus conferences and predatory journals that give studies false credibility. It draws on a large investigation into the money behind them.

Physicist David Deutsch's TED talk on why science took off, arguing that good explanations are those that are hard to vary. It contrasts scientific explanation with myth.

A panel from the Beneficial AI 2017 conference moderated by Max Tegmark, with Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Kurzweil, Hassabis, Harris, Bostrom, Chalmers and others. They discuss likely outcomes of human-level AGI and what outcomes are desirable.

Berkeley sleep scientist Matthew Walker presents the science of sleep and dreams and how sleep affects health and lifespan, based on his book Why We Sleep.

Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, the creators of ZFS, present 'ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems' at the 2008 SNIA Software Developers' Conference. They explain the design, including copy-on-write, checksumming and avoiding the write hole.

Ronald Minnich of Google explains how UEFI firmware is a large closed attack surface and describes Google's work replacing it with Linux-based boot firmware. It also touches on Intel ME and other security coprocessors.

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.

Lin Clark gives an illustrated, cartoon-style walkthrough of React Fiber, the rewrite of React's reconciler, explaining its incremental rendering and scheduling at React Conf 2017.

Dave Ackley gives a high-level introduction to robust-first computing, which prioritizes robustness over efficiency in computer architecture. A sorting demo illustrates the idea.

A Google Tech Talk by Sebastian Deterding on gamification. It looks at what points and badges get wrong and what lessons game design offers for non-game applications.

Jared Mauch tells how he got fed up with poor internet options in rural Michigan and built his own fiber network to his town. The talk was given at NLNOG Live in September 2020.

A BSidesLV 2013 talk from the Sixteen Colors project on archiving the ANSI and ASCII art scene. It traces the scene's evolution from BBSs to the NFO and IRC era.

Dave Chinner's linux.conf.au 2012 talk on XFS scalability, covering pain points with large numbers of files and complex metadata, and the work to fix XFS metadata performance.

Hamish Coleman describes reverse engineering the keyboard controller in a Thinkpad and reflashing it with custom firmware. He covers how Lenovo secures its firmware, and his ongoing work on the protocol between the BIOS and the vendor flash tool.

Clay Shirky argues at Web 2.0 Expo NY that the problem online is not information overload but filter failure. He says the real challenge is building better ways to filter and organize what we see.

Matthew Garrett's linux.conf.au 2012 talk covers EFI and UEFI from the Linux point of view: why the PC BIOS was bad, what EFI changes, the issues it brings, and Secure Boot.

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.

John Kitchin shows how Emacs org-mode with Python lets researchers combine narrative, math, figures and executable code in one document. It exports to LaTeX, HTML and PDF, and he used it for papers and e-books.

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.

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 Microsoft Research talk on BetrFS, a file system built on B-epsilon trees, a write-optimized data structure. It covers WODS such as LSM-trees, how to design a file system around them, and benchmark wins over ext4 and xfs.

A Google Ventures talk on how unconscious biases shape product decisions, hiring and workplace interactions. It draws on research, including work by Google scientists, on how to counter them.

A talk given at the 2011 Nammour Symposium at Sacramento State arguing that past generations were wrong about nearly everything, so we should expect to be wrong too. It tours the many surprising ways scientific beliefs have failed, drawing on pessimistic induction.

Marshall Kirk McKusick gives a talk at EuroBSDCon tracing filesystem and storage development from 1979 to today, using the BSD Fast Filesystem as the focus. It covers early disk-geometry optimization through later contiguous layout and small-file performance work.

Peter Munch-Ellingsen explains at NimConf 2021 why he wrote his own keyboard firmware in Nim instead of using QMK or Arduino. He shows that the resulting firmware is very small.

Joel Grus's JupyterCon talk explaining why he dislikes Jupyter notebooks. He covers hidden state, trouble with reproducibility and testing, and how notebooks frustrate teaching. He shows his preferred workflow and what Jupyter could change.

Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes watching her own brain functions shut down during a massive stroke. She gives a first-person account of losing speech, motion and self-awareness.

Aaron Boodman of Replicache asks why sync engines have not yet fixed web app complexity and what is missing for them to go mainstream. The talk lays out the ideas that led to the Zero sync engine.

A Google Tech Talk by Steve Weis that introduces modern cryptography and its use in practice and at Google. It covers proofs of security and security definitions and a special topic. HN commenters treat it as a talk on verifiable electronic voting.