soviet space program

Jack Rusher's Strange Loop 2022 talk argues that most programming languages are still designed around punchcard-era assumptions. He makes the case for live, interactive programming environments, drawing on Lisp, Smalltalk and REPL-driven development.

Patrick Boyle analyzes SpaceX's IPO prospectus, covering its financials, speculative products, AI business, related-party dealings, compensation, and a governance structure with minimal shareholder rights.

Scott Manley explains the thermal balance of spacecraft and how a satellite could be configured to radiate away the heat from datacenter-scale computing in space. His rough numbers suggest it is feasible.

Felienne Hermans presents Hedy, a gradual programming language for teaching kids that moves through levels from almost no syntax toward full Python. The talk covers why error messages and syntax are scary for beginners.

Theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed gives a public talk on why spacetime may not be fundamental and what might replace it, including newer approaches to scattering amplitudes.

An Asianometry explainer on why the Soviet Union, once a leading computing power, fell far behind the US in computers by the 1980s. It traces the gap from the 1960s onward despite strong state support for science.

Thunderf00t's critique of SpaceX's claims, arguing its launches are not actually cheaper than competitors or the Space Shuttle. It questions the economics of reusability.

A clip of Sandy Munro, a veteran automotive engineer, describing his visit to a SpaceX Starship design review and meeting Elon Musk. He says he was struck by how deeply Musk is involved in engineering.

A JuliaCon talk by a NASA Launch Services Program engineer on modeling spacecraft separation dynamics in Julia. He describes replacing a Simulink-based workflow for checking launch vehicle separation requirements with Julia and ModelingToolkit, with large speedups and much shorter code.

The first part of a series on programming in Jai, Jonathan Blow's in-development language. It covers compiling, writing hello world and using code from other files.

Guy Steele's Strange Loop 2010 talk argues that programmers should not have to think about parallelism, and that languages should support algorithms built on independence and divide-and-conquer. He also recounts fitting a program onto a single punch card.

Patrick Boyle examines SpaceX's planned IPO at a roughly $1.75 trillion valuation. He covers the merging of other Musk companies, orbital data center claims and the fast-track index rules that may help the listing.

Joe Scott takes a serious look at space sunshades as a climate fix, asking how big they would need to be, what they would cost and whether they would work. He draws on Roger Angel's paper and launch options.

EEVblog's Dave Jones critiques Reflect Orbital's plan to sell sunlight to solar farms after dark using orbital mirrors. He walks through the numbers to show the idea does not work out.

NASASpaceflight's 24/7 live stream from SpaceX's Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, showing Starship and Super Heavy development, testing and launches.

Joe Barnard of BPS.space shows his model rocket Scout F landing vertically like a SpaceX booster after seven years of attempts. The video documents the successful landing and the build-up to it.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, examines how programming languages are funded. He looks at where compiler engineers' salaries come from, why Go has about 5 engineers while Dart has about 30, and how this limits language design.

Sasha Rush surveys linear RNNs and state space models as replacements for attention in transformer-style models, in a talk for MLSys. It covers the foundational preliminaries and predates Mamba.

Scott Manley examines why SpaceX, Google and others are looking at orbital data centers. He walks through the economics, heat rejection and solar power arguments, with links to the Lumen/Starcloud and Google Suncatcher papers.

A CNN segment showing William Shatner emotionally describing his Blue Origin suborbital flight to Jeff Bezos right after landing.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day gives a talk to an aerospace audience, comparing how Apollo was engineered and managed with NASA's Artemis program. He raises concerns about unresolved details, the number of launches and in-orbit fuel transfer needed to reach the Moon, and the loss of institutional knowledge.

Gabriella Gonzalez argues that developers misunderstand marketing as deception or hype, and applies the technology-adoption ideas of Crossing the Chasm to Haskell. She looks at what keeps Haskell from reaching mainstream programmers and what a community can do about it.

NCommander investigates why Space Cadet Pinball disappeared from Windows Vista, building on Raymond Chen's explanation about 64-bit incompatibility. He tests it on 64-bit Windows including Itanium and walks through the debugging.

A five-hour Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack covering Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, programming, games and rockets.

Lex Fridman's long podcast conversation with Chris Lattner, creator of Swift, LLVM and MLIR and co-founder of Modular. Topics include the Mojo language, the future of programming and AI, and hardware.

EEVblog interviews Richard Stephenson of NASA's Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex about how the 70m DSS-43 dish is used to contact Voyager 2. It covers the ground antenna and low-noise receiver side of deep space communication. This is a 2023 re-release of a 2017 video.

Jonathan Blow's LambdaConf 2025 keynote demonstrates the Jai programming language and explains its design. It includes demos of metaprogramming and tools that visualize programs.

A Lambda Days keynote by Simon Peyton Jones and Tim Sweeney introducing Verse, Epic's functional logic language for the metaverse. It covers existential variables, unification and expressions yielding multiple values.

A Huberman Lab episode on setting up a workspace for productivity, focus and creativity, covering light, posture, movement and sound. It touches on ideas like ceiling height and the effect of screens on the brain.

A Lex Fridman podcast conversation with the four creators of Cursor, the AI-assisted code editor. They discuss how the editor integrates models into programming workflows, including custom completion models and techniques like speculative decoding to speed up applying edits.

Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut gets a close-up walkthrough of SpaceX's Raptor 2 engine from Elon Musk at Starbase. They cover how Raptor 2 was simplified and upgraded relative to Raptor 1, including cooling and thrust vectoring details.

Lex Fridman's long interview with Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM and Swift, covering the future of computing and programming languages. It touches on compilers, hardware, and his work at Apple, Tesla, Google and SiFive.

A clip of John Carmack on the Lex Fridman podcast discussing his programming setup, why he favors debuggers and IDEs, and his puzzlement at developers who avoid them.

A short clip from the Netflix series Space Force in which John Malkovich's character delivers a profanity-laden rant about Microsoft.

A one-minute clip of William Shatner trying to describe the awe of space after a Blue Origin flight while Jeff Bezos sprays champagne.

Lex Fridman's long conversation with Elon Musk covering SpaceX, Mars, Tesla Autopilot and self-driving, robotics and AI.

Douglas Crockford's code::dive 2022 talk on what the next programming language should look like. He presents ideas behind his Misty language, including message-passing actors.

A one-minute Rheinmetall promotional demo of Oerlikon Ahead air burst ammunition, which throws a cloud of sub-projectiles to destroy small air targets.

A short video that reads out comments from the leaked Team Fortress 2 source code to show the frustration of Valve's programmers over time.

Casey Muratori's two-hour talk tracing the history of object-oriented programming back to the 1960s and examining how its ideas, and later entity component systems, came about. It is followed by a Q&A.