What I’m Watching
From most recommended to least (roughly):
The movie Manufacturing Consent details Noam Chomsky’s criticism of the media, covering Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor and media bias generally. Highly recommended. Much more balanced than his written work.
“NSA operation ORCHESTRA: Annual Status Report:” A FOSDEM talk of the form if-I-were-the-NSA-here’s-how-I’d-do-it. Foresees the heartbleed bug.
Alan Kay talks about The Inner Game of Tennis and quieting the ego in pursuit of learning.
Scala vs Idris: Dependent Types, Now and in the Future. Idris is sort of Haskell with a stronger type system. Dependent types are a lot more exciting than I thought they were going to be.
Alex Stepanov and Paramjit Oberoi’s “Programming Conversations” class. The first three videos (what I’ve watched thus far) are mostly history of programming stuff.
Don Knuth’s advice to young people. He speaks a bit about his writing process.
Leslie Lamport’s Thinking for Programmers. On the importance of thinking through writing specifications (and writing generally).
Vi Hart’s anti-Pi rant. Might be better titled “There’s nothing particularly interesting about pi.”
Scott Aaronson’s TEDx talk: “Physics in the 21st Century: Toiling in Feynman’s Shadow.” Sort of “why complexity theory is exciting.”
Simon Peyton Jones’s 2007 OSCON talk. He walks through the design of XMonad.
A Possible Future of Software Development: A talk given by one of Adobe’s head engineers about their use of generic programming, which is a sort of abstract algebra for algorithms. The idea is simple: identify the most general form of the algorithm and then abstract it out. So concretely instead of writing a sort for each data structures, you write one sort and let it run on all data structures. This is the philosophy of programming being pushed by Alexander Stepanov, chief architect of the STL.
Alexander Stepanov and Paul McJones’s talk at Stanford on their book Elements of Programming. You’re probably going to need some exposure to abstract algebra before digesting this one.
Judea Pearl’s Turing award lecture: “The Mechanization of Causal Inference: A ‘mini’ Turing Test and Beyond”