stop button

Rob Miles explains on Computerphile why implementing an off switch for a general AI is hard. A capable agent would resist being stopped because shutdown prevents it from achieving its goal.

A short clip showing a person touching an active table saw blade with a finger and walking away unharmed, thanks to SawStop's system that stops the blade within milliseconds of skin contact.

A short video advising how to handle a police stop by politely refusing searches and not answering questions, citing Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.

A short urbanism video presenting original observations of how drivers treat stop signs, to argue that cyclists rolling through them under an Idaho stop is no different. It filmed intersections in Ottawa.

Roaring Kitty's July 2020 analysis of GameStop, arguing a bullish deep-value case when the stock was about $4 and short interest exceeded 100%. It covers fundamentals, cash balance and technicals.

The official video for Baba Yetu, Christopher Tin's Swahili-language choral piece written as the theme to Civilization IV. It was the first video game music to win a Grammy.

Not Just Bikes argues that stop signs are a poor traffic control, drawing on Dutch practice and the Idaho stop to show intersections can be safer without them, especially for cyclists.

Ross Scott of Accursed Farms lays out a campaign to stop publishers from permanently shutting down games, using The Crew as the test case. He covers government initiatives and the legal options, and the stopkillinggames.com site.

Christopher Hitchens delivers a speech defending freedom of speech, including the right of audiences to hear offensive speakers and a take on the fire-in-a-crowded-theatre line. It is framed around the Charlie Hebdo attack.

Dan Olson's long Folding Ideas video on the GameStop meme stock phenomenon, its online community and the conspiracy thinking around it. It runs over two hours.

Christopher Domas presents his Cantor Dust tool at Derbycon 2012, a 3D visual approach to reverse engineering binaries by visualizing their structure dynamically.

Christopher Alexander's keynote at OOPSLA 1996 on patterns in architecture, addressed to the software community. He moves beyond patterns toward deeper ideas of wholeness and living structure.

A five-hour documentary history of the Super Mario 64 A button challenge, which aims to beat the game with as few A presses as possible. It covers the bugs and exploits discovered over the years.

MORE is Mark Osborne's Oscar-nominated stop-motion short about a joyless inventor in a drab, conformist society who yearns for his younger days. It won Best Short Film at Sundance in 1999.

A classic Bob Newhart comedy sketch in which a therapist's only advice to a patient is to 'stop it'.

Christopher Domas's Derbycon 2015 talk on the M/o/Vfuscator, a compiler that emits only x86 mov instructions, showing mov is Turing complete. It explains how a full machine is built from mov and why the output is a nightmare to reverse engineer.

A Boeing 737 pilot explains the runaway stabilizer checklist, the procedure for stopping unwanted horizontal stabilizer movement such as an MCAS activation on the 737 MAX. He walks through the steps, the trim cutout switches and the jackscrew mechanism, and shows a simulator run including the manual trim wheel effort.

Christopher Domas presents research at DEF CON 26 showing a hidden alternate instruction set and undocumented hardware backdoor in some x86 processors, found on a third-party CPU. He uses it to ask how feasible wider hardware backdoors are.

A three-hour PyCon 2016 tutorial by Christophe Pettus that orients Python developers to PostgreSQL. It covers installation, administration, and use, including vacuuming, MVCC, replication and backups.

Christopher Domas's REcon 2013 talk on dynamic binary visualization for reverse engineering. He shows how rendering binary data as interactive visual maps and trigraphs reveals structure that hex dumps hide, leading to his Cantor.dust tool.

Christopher Domas's DEF CON 26 talk on secret processor registers that vendors reserve for third parties holding trusted keys. He examines how users are locked out of parts of their own CPUs.

Aaron Swartz's keynote at Freedom to Connect 2012 describing how ordinary people helped defeat the SOPA censorship bill. He recounts how the Senate unexpectedly united behind the bill and how grassroots action stopped it.

Mathematician Hannah Fry's TED talk on patterns in dating and mate-seeking, including optimal stopping and three math-backed tips for finding a partner.

An Onion News Network satirical panel segment debating whether the government should stop pouring money into a giant desert hole during a recession.

The 'Stop trying to make fetch happen' scene clip from the film Mean Girls.

A one-minute Steve Summers clip of Willy Wonka saying no, don't, stop. It is a reaction meme.

Slaughterbots is a fictional short film, backed by Stuart Russell, depicting swarms of cheap autonomous drones that use facial recognition to assassinate targets. It was made to argue for banning autonomous weapons.

Jack Diederich's PyCon 2012 talk argues that classes are overused in Python and walks through real code, refactoring away unnecessary classes, exceptions and modules. It popularized the heuristic that a class with two methods, one being __init__, should be a function.

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.

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.

Aaron Bieber, a longtime Vim user, describes his experience trying Emacs with evil mode. He covers what he found, what he missed from Vim, and what Vim could borrow from Emacs.

Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues that the machine-learning systems used to serve ads also decide what political and social information people see. She explains how opaque algorithms can nudge, segment and manipulate users, and warns that the real danger is powerful people using AI to control populations.

Ron Pressler's Curry On 2015 talk arguing that imperative languages should not be polluted with pure functional concepts like monads. He favors simple blocking code over non-blocking styles.

Tom Scott tells how John Reber's plan to dam San Francisco Bay was disproved by the Army Corps of Engineers' giant hydraulic Bay Model in Sausalito. The model showed the plan would have been dangerously wrong.

Jon Moore's Strange Loop 2017 talk argues that rate limiting is the wrong tool for protecting services from noisy clients. He proposes concurrency-based capacity management and quotas instead.

A short, music-driven video built from Neil deGrasse Tyson's remarks on why advancing the space frontier matters, contrasting NASA's small budget with war spending and stressing inspiration.

Climate Town tells the history of the period when the greenhouse effect was not politically controversial and the US came close to acting on climate. It covers Exxon's early climate science and the policy failures that followed.

VICE News reporter Isobel Yeung goes undercover as a tourist in Xinjiang, documenting heavy surveillance, policing and internment of Uighurs. It also covers children taken into state-run institutions.

An Intelligence Squared debate in which Will Self argues for Brave New World and Adam Gopnik for Nineteen Eighty-Four as the better dystopian warning. It includes acted excerpts and is chaired by Jonathan Freedland.

Ned Batchelder's PyCon 2012 talk gives a quick overview of what Unicode is, then focuses on what a Python programmer needs to handle text correctly. It presents the 'Unicode sandwich' strategy: decode bytes at input, work with Unicode internally, encode at output.