will wright

A remastered recording of Will Wright's 2005 GDC talk revealing Spore, titled The Future of Content. He covers procedurally generated content and the ambitions of the game, with gameplay demo starting around 12:30.

A Google Tech Talk by sleep researcher Dr. William Dement on healthy sleep and performance. He argues sleep debt must be repaid and describes the three characteristics of healthy sleep.

A 29C3 panel with whistleblowers Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake and William Binney. They talk about what happens when exposing secret government power becomes a crime, and about surveillance abuses.

The 1965 Cambridge Union debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on race, justice and history in America. Baldwin argues that the American dream came at the expense of Black Americans.

Tony Seba's 2016 keynote argues that batteries, electric vehicles, self-driving cars and solar will converge to disrupt energy and transportation. He predicts by 2030 all new vehicles will be electric and autonomous and that oil and other fossil fuels will be obsolete.

William Byrd presents at Papers We Love NYC on what he calls the most beautiful program ever written, a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp. He walks through the metacircular interpreter and related ideas, and demos relational programming and program synthesis near the end.

Will Wilson of FoundationDB explains how the team tested their distributed database using deterministic simulation. By running the whole system in a simulator with injected faults and reproducible seeds, they could find rare concurrency and network bugs.

Vlambeer's Jan Willem Nijman shows how to make an action game feel great by stacking small effects like screenshake, recoil and particles onto a basic shooter. It was presented at INDIGO Classes 2013.

R. Stanley Williams of HP Labs gives a keynote on the memristor, covering the physics, crossbar computation, and potential for memory and new computer architectures.

Will Stephen's humorous six-minute TEDx talk shows presentation techniques that make you sound brilliant while saying essentially nothing.

Will Wilson explains autonomous testing: using deterministic simulation and fuzzing, building on FoundationDB's approach, to test software continuously. It sets out the ideas behind his later company Antithesis.

Admiral William McRaven's 2014 University of Texas commencement address, built around lessons from Navy SEAL training. It famously opens with the case for making your bed every morning.

Dan Friedman and William Byrd demonstrate miniKanren, a logic programming system for Scheme, in an unconference talk. It includes generating programs by running relations in reverse.

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.

Hyrum Wright shares lessons from five years of mass code migrations in Google's huge C++ codebase. He covers why to migrate, how hard it really is, and how Google updates core libraries and their users continually.

Former bank regulator William Black explains how fraud, including liar's loans, was committed from inside banks and drove the 2008 financial crisis.

Michael Abrash of Valve explains what affordable VR hardware will be capable of within a couple of years, and describes a prototype showing what that level of hardware can do.

A 95-minute recorded debate at the ARITH23 computer arithmetic conference between John Gustafson, proponent of unums/posits, and William Kahan, architect of IEEE 754 floating point. They argue the merits of the new number formats versus conventional floats and interval arithmetic.

William Li presents anti-angiogenesis, the idea of cutting off the blood supply that feeds tumors, and argues that certain foods can help do this. It is a TED-Ed version of his TED talk.

A DEF CON 23 talk showing how weak controls in electronic death registration systems let someone virtually kill a person and obtain a real death certificate, with consequences for their identity and life.

Zach Tellman's Clojure West talk covers the basics of queueing theory and its practical use in systems, including backpressure, how queues break down under load, and pitfalls of naive core.async use.

Jean-Marc Jancovici gives an MIT Media Lab talk on whether technology can save us from climate change. He argues from a physical view of energy that economic growth, energy use and climate impact are tightly linked.

Bryan Cantrill's Scale By The Bay 2019 talk on software after Moore's Law. He covers the end of easy scaling and the move toward specialized, emerging architectures.

A Clojure/conj 2016 talk demoing Barliman, a prototype smart editor that does program synthesis. Given a partial program and tests, it completes the program using a relational interpreter written in miniKanren.

Gary Yourofsky's 2010 lecture at Georgia Tech arguing for veganism on ethical, health and environmental grounds. It is a long, forceful animal-rights speech.

Clayton Christensen's TEDx talk applying business theory to personal life. He argues that career success is not the right measure of a life and urges attention to relationships and values.

A DEFCON 20 panel with NSA whistleblower William Binney, journalist James Bamford and ACLU lawyers on the NSA's mass collection of communications and its conflict with the Constitution.

Hans Rosling's TED@Cannes talk uses boxes and animated data graphics to show how world population will grow to about 9 billion. He argues that raising living standards for the poorest is what reduces population growth.

Stanford futurist Tony Seba argues that electric vehicles, battery storage, solar and autonomous vehicles form a 10x exponential disruption that will make fossil fuels obsolete within about a decade. It draws on his Clean Disruption book.

Gerald Jay Sussman speaks at Dan Friedman's 60th birthday celebration about how programming helps formulate and clarify ideas. He argues that ambiguous mathematical notation hinders understanding.

John Sotos, a physician and former Intel chief medical officer, argues at DEF CON 25 that genetic diseases are exploitable vulnerabilities in the genome. He warns that CRISPR and related tools will make malicious genome hacks and targeted bioweapons feasible.

Mathematician Kevin Buzzard explains why he believes the Lean theorem prover will shape the future of mathematics, and describes digitizing his university curriculum in Lean with undergraduates, plus the cultural challenges.

Cory Doctorow's 28c3 keynote argues that the copyright wars were just a skirmish and that the real fight will be a war on the general-purpose computer. He explains why locked-down devices, DRM and surveillance tools all depend on removing general computation.

Simon Sinek's TED talk presents the 'golden circle' model: great leaders and companies inspire action by starting with why they do something, before how or what. He illustrates it with Apple, Martin Luther King, the Wright brothers and, as a counterexample, TiVo.

A short talk by Will Dayble of Squareweave arguing that you should design software as if the user were drunk: distracted, impaired in attention and vision, and prone to misreading. It is a user experience talk built around that framing.

Kathy Sierra's Fluent 2015 keynote on the one metaskill for developers: the ability to come up to speed quickly and stay there. She covers how people learn, cognitive resources versus willpower, and building skill.

Psychologist Dan Gilbert argues in this TED talk that our psychological immune system lets us become happy even when things do not go as planned. He challenges the idea that we will be miserable if we do not get what we want.

A 2012 debate between Peter Thiel and George Gilder on whether technological progress and economic growth are accelerating or decelerating, moderated by William Davidow.

Sam Harris argues in a TED talk that we will build superhuman AI and have not grappled with the risk of creating something that may treat us the way we treat ants. He makes a logical case for taking AI risk seriously.

Pranav Mistry demos SixthSense, a wearable device that projects information onto the physical world and lets people interact with data through gestures. He also shows a paper "laptop" and says he will open-source the software.