wrong abstraction

Chandler Carruth argues in a CppCon 2019 talk that C++ has no truly zero-cost abstractions. Using examples like unique_ptr, ABI constraints and compile-time costs, he shows that abstractions cost runtime, compile time or human effort.

Cheng Lou's react-europe 2016 talk lays out a mental framework for thinking about abstraction levels in JavaScript tooling, from Angular and Grunt to Webpack and React. It uses that framework to reason about the cost of abstractions and how to choose between competing solutions.

Sandi Metz takes an ugly section of conditional code and refactors it into a few simple objects, bridging object-oriented theory and practice. The talk includes her take on the Gilded Rose refactoring kata and the idea that duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction.

Dan Abramov's talk on the wet codebase, using visualizations to show how removing all duplication too early produces wrong abstractions that are hard to unwind.

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.

A very short clip of Carl Sagan saying that to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe. It illustrates how everything depends on a chain of prior things.

CGP Grey's five-minute animated explainer on how copyright terms grew from 14 years to life plus decades. It uses Disney and Star Wars examples to argue the system has gone wrong.

UnHerd interview with Swedish epidemiologist Johan Giesecke, who explains why he thinks lockdowns are the wrong policy and describes Sweden's approach during the spring 2020 pandemic.

Ben Felix argues that common beliefs about renting versus buying are wrong: homes are not great investments, mortgages are not a wealth hack, and ownership does not reliably bring happiness.

Matt Parker's Royal Institution talk based on his book Humble Pi, covering everyday mathematical mistakes and spurious patterns that went wrong in engineering and software. It mixes stand-up comedy with stories of coincidence and error.

CGP Grey explains why airport codes are inconsistent and sometimes confusing, from their origins in old weather station codes to the quirks that cause mistakes. He builds the story around a single typo that sent a flight to the wrong continent.

Geoffrey Hinton gives an MIT talk on what is wrong with convolutional neural networks and introduces his capsules project. The description points to the capsule network papers.

A School of Life video arguing that everyone marries someone who is somewhat wrong for them, and that this is unavoidable. It is a four-minute version of an essay by Alain de Botton.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths explains why people keep making the same mistake with millions and billions, using a Bloomberg cash calculator example. He looks at the unit slip behind the repeated arithmetic error.

Tom Scott's Ignite London talk about a flash mob that went very wrong.

Paul Phillips, a former Scala core contributor, argues after moving a million lines of code that much of what the software industry does is wrong. He critiques Scala and compiler design and calls for better approaches.

Ted Nelson, in his Computers for Cynics series, gives a critical history of Xerox PARC's vision of personal computing. He lists what he sees as the limitations and wrong turns in PARC's approach to the desktop and documents.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains what flat earthers believe and why, arguing that their reasoning is wrong but not stupid. She suggests scientists should take such believers more seriously.

Tom Scott's correction video on his earlier claim that 18th-century insurance firefighters let uninsured buildings burn. After a historian looked into it, he concludes the story was wrong and explains how the error happened.

Ian Cooper's DevTernity talk revisits Kent Beck's original TDD ideas and shows where misunderstandings crept in. It argues tests should target behaviors through public interfaces rather than implementation details, so suites support refactoring instead of resisting it.

The first lecture of MIT's 6.001 (SICP) with Abelson and Sussman, giving an overview of the course and an introduction to Lisp. It argues that computer science is about managing complexity and abstraction, not computers.

Not Just Bikes explains how North American speed limits are set and why posted limits matter far less than street design. It argues that drivers follow the road's cues, so safe speeds have to be built into the street.

Veritasium explains why a large share of published research findings may be false, covering p-values, p-hacking, publication bias and low replication rates. It draws on John Ioannidis's well-known paper and describes reforms such as preregistration.

Jonathan Blow's DevGAMM 2019 talk argues that software knowledge is being lost between generations and that growing layers of abstraction could lead to a decline in technological civilization.

Brian Lonsdorf explains why Underscore.js falls short as a functional programming library, then introduces currying, composition and point-free style in JavaScript. He argues for data-last argument ordering.

Casey Muratori's University of Twente guest lecture is a case study in how straightforward code can cut thousands of lines and tens of seconds of runtime down to a few dozen lines running in under a second. It uses concrete examples to show why software is often an order of magnitude slower than it should be.

Oh The Urbanity! argues that most city dwellers live in dense residential neighbourhoods outside downtown, which can be calm and peaceful. It draws on older, denser parts of Toronto and Montreal.

Veritasium's Derek Muller gives a Perimeter Institute livestream on how AI might change teaching and learning. He draws on past technology shifts and cognitive science to argue that learning requires effortful repetition.

Runar Bjarnason's Scala World talk argues that restraint and precision in components beat power and flexibility. Constraints on parts make them easier to compose into systems.

Veritasium explains, with expert input, that in general relativity gravity is not a force and objects follow straight paths through curved spacetime, including why standing on the ground means you are accelerating.

Law professor James Duane explains why you should not talk to the police even if you are innocent, drawing on case histories of wrongful convictions. It is a short version of the argument in his book on the right to remain silent.

Elm creator Evan Czaplicki's talk on how a file grows and when to split code up. He argues for keeping code in one file until it hurts and warns against premature extraction.

Explains induced demand beyond roads, showing that it applies to transit, walking and cycling infrastructure too but with different consequences. It corrects common misunderstandings of the concept.

Wendover Productions explains why drone delivery has not become the future once promised. It covers no-fly zones, costs and the difficulty of the final drop-off.

Johann Hari's TED talk arguing that addiction is driven largely by disconnection and environment rather than chemical hooks alone. He draws on his personal experience with addicted relatives and on research and policy examples from around the world.

Stanford Health Care hosts Christopher Gardner and Robert Lustig on whether all calories are equal, with a focus on processed food and sugar. The talk questions the idea that calories in versus calories out fully explains weight and health.

Sandi Metz argues that hidden assumptions in code are missing concepts, and shows how to name and expose them so code is easier to understand and change. It covers null objects and messages in Ruby.

Sid Meier's GDC 2010 keynote on how players perceive probability in games, including how Civilization's odds were adjusted because players misjudged them.

Veritasium explains why many real-world systems follow power laws rather than normal distributions. It covers self-organized criticality, with simulations of sandpiles, magnetism and forest fires.

Eugenia Cheng gives the opening keynote at Lambda World 2017, presenting category theory as very abstract algebra whose abstraction gives it broad applicability. She applies it to everyday questions including privilege and prejudice.