std::string

Nicholas Ormrod's CppCon 2016 talk on how Facebook optimizes std::string with its open-source replacement fbstring. It covers storage layout tradeoffs, small string optimization and memory allocation behavior.

Physicist Angela Collier's roughly hour-long video on how string theory was hyped to the public and what that did to science communication. She traces the history of the theory as a narrative and argues it is interesting but was oversold.

Sixty Symbols interviews Nottingham cosmologist Tony Padilla, who says string theory deserves to be taken seriously. He explains how strings emerged from the equations rather than being invented.

Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2015 talk argues that std::allocator is badly designed. He proposes building high-performance allocators from small composable, templated pieces.

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.

A four-minute programmer rap by stdout about abandoned side projects and the promise to finish them someday. The lyrics poke fun at dev procrastination and big app ideas.

Malte Skarupke's C++Now 2018 talk on hash table performance, explaining why std::unordered_map is slow and memory hungry and presenting faster designs, including his bytell hash map.

A very short clip titled Criminal Conspiracy Notes, apparently the scene from The Wire in which Stringer Bell scolds his associates for taking written notes at a meeting.

Stephan T. Lavavej's CppCon 2019 talk on implementing floating-point to_chars and from_chars in Microsoft's C++ STL. It covers the history of float-string conversion and the algorithms that make it much faster.

The first part of Google's Python Class, taught by Nick Parlante, introducing the language and its strings. It is aimed at people with some programming familiarity and comes with exercises.

In this first Crust of Rust episode, Jon Gjengset live-codes an example that needs multiple explicit lifetime annotations. Along the way he covers string types and generics over a custom trait.

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.

A short clip from The Wire, season 3, in which Stringer Bell chairs a meeting of the New Day Co-Op with Prop Joe and Fat-Face Rick. The scene shows the drug crews running their cooperative like a formal business meeting.

A three-minute clip from The Wire season 3 in which Stringer Bell chairs a drug-crew business meeting using Robert's Rules of Order. The scene plays the formal procedure against the criminal setting.

Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind gives a public lecture on the holographic principle, the indestructibility of information and the nature of black holes. It asks whether the world could be a hologram.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) traces the history of software from 1948 to today, looking at the problems programmers faced, how they were solved, and what mistakes the profession made. He then projects where the field is going, including professionalism and regulation.

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

Footage of the Mercedes A-Class production line at the Rastatt plant in Germany, filmed in 2013. It shows robots and fixtures working through assembly.

Matt Kulukundis explains how Google designed SwissTable, a fast, cache-friendly hash table, step by step from std::unordered_map. The talk covers open addressing, SIMD probing and the tradeoffs of changing a fundamental data structure.

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.

Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2019 talk revisits sorting, showing how branchless tricks, hybrid strategies and a cost metric can speed up std::sort-style algorithms on modern hardware.

BobbyBroccoli's first of three parts on Jan Hendrik Schon, the Bell Labs postdoc whose fabricated organic semiconductor results nearly won a Nobel Prize. It covers his rise and the context around Bell Labs.

A DEF CON 29 talk by Richard Henderson about encoding the EICAR antivirus test string into QR codes and barcodes and scanning them at real systems. Many systems that do not expect such input misbehave or collapse, including a parking garage system.

Technology Connections experiments with filtering white and colored LEDs to make holiday lights look less garish. He explains why narrowband LED strings look harsh compared with incandescent bulbs.

Rob Miles explains "glitch" tokens, odd strings in large language model vocabularies that make the model produce gibberish. He covers how they likely arise from tokenizer training data, such as Reddit usernames, that never appeared in the model's own training.

Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2015 talk on handling exceptional control flow declaratively in C++. It uses scope guards with success and failure variants, built on std::uncaught_exceptions, to replace ad hoc RAII classes and rethrowing try/catch blocks.

Curtis Poe's FOSDEM talk arguing that day-to-day Perl 6 is far simpler than its enthusiasts' talk of exotic features suggests. He compares basic math and string handling across languages.

Hana Dusikova's CppCon 2018 talk presenting a C++ library that builds regular expressions from compile-time strings, using a C++20 feature. It avoids runtime parsing cost and covers implementation details, problems she hit, and benchmarks.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2016 talk on designing hybrid data structures for performance. He covers cache locality, working-set size and allocation overhead, and why standard C++ containers fall short.

A run through the 32 factory presets of the Yamaha DX7 FM synthesizer, with timestamps for each patch such as brass, strings, pianos, bass and tubular bells. It is a straight audio demo of the sounds.

Chess master Yosha Iglesias presents an analysis of Hans Niemann's games, highlighting a string of 100% engine-correlation games and comparing them with other players. It was published during the 2022 Niemann-Carlsen cheating scandal.