Mainlining Videos

It has been a weird weekend. I had to go to hospital for 24 hours and wasnt in a state to be making stuff but I did end up with a lot of time to consume stuff, so I thought I’d list down what I’ve been watching:

• CppCon 2014 Lightning Talks - Ken Smith C Hardware Register Access This was ok I guess it is mainly a way of dressing up register calls so their sytax mirrors their behaviour a bit more. After having worked with macros for so long this just feels kinda sensible and nothing new. Still was worth a peek
• Pragmatic Haskell For Beginners - Part 1 (cant find a link for this) - I watched a little of this and it looks like it will be great but I want to watch more fundamentals first and then come back to this.
• JAI: Data-Oriented Demo SOA, composition - Have watched this before but rewatched it to internalize more of his approach. I really am considering implementing something like this for lisp but want to see how many place I can bridge lisp and foreign types in the design. I highly recommend watching his talk on implicit context as I think the custom allocator scheme plays really well with the data-oriented features (and is something I want to take ideas from too)
• Java byte-code in practice - started watching this one but didnt watch all the way through as not relevent to me right now. I looked at this stuff while I was considering alternate ways to do on-the-fly language bindings generation, but I don’t need this now (I wrote a piece our new approach a while back)
• Relational Programming in miniKanren by William Byrd Part 1 Part 2 - This has been on my watch list for ages, a 3 hour intro to mini-kanren. It was ace (if a bit slow moving). Nice to see what the language can and cant do. I’m very interested in using something like this as the logic system in my future projects.
• Production Prolog - Second time watching this and highly recommended. After looking at mini-kanren I wanted to get a super highlevel feel on prolog again so watched this as a quick refresher of how people use it.
• Practical Dependently Typed Racket Wanted to get a feel for what these guys are up to. Was nice to see what battles they are choosing to fight and to get a feel for how you can have a minimal DTS and it still be useful
• Jake Vanderplas - Statistics for Hackers - PyCon 2016 - As it says. I feel i’m pitiful when it comes to maths knowledge and I’m very interested in how to leverage what I’m good at to make use of the tools statisticians have. Very simple examples of 3 techniques you can use to get good answers regarding the significance of results.
• John Rauser keynote Statistics Without the Agonizing Pain - The above talk was based on this one and it shows, however the above guy had more time and cover more stuff.
• Superoptimizing LLVM - Great talk on how one project is going about finding places in LLVM that could be optimized. Whilst it focuses on LLVM the speaker is open about how this would work for any compiler. Nice to hear how limited their scope was for their first version and how useful it still was. Very good speaker.
• Director Roundtable With Quentin Tarantino, Ridley Scott and More I watched this in one of the gaps when I was letting my brain cool down. Nothing revalutionary here, just nice to hear these guys speak.
• Measure for Measure: Quantum Physics and Reality - Another one that has been on my list for a while. A nice approachable chat about some differing approaches to the wave collapse issue in quantum phsyics.
• Introduction to Topology This one I gave the most time. I worked through the first 20 videos of this tutorial series and they are FANTASTIC. The reason for looking into this is that I have some theories of the potential of automatic data transformation in the area of generating programs for rendering arbitrary datasets. I had spent an evening dreaming up what roughly I would need and then hada google to see if any math exists in this field. The reason for doing that is that you then know that smart people have proved whether you are wasting your time. The closest things I could find were based in topology (of various forms) so I think I need to understand this stuff. I’ve been making some notes so I’m linking them here but don’t bother reading them as they are really only useful to me.

That’s more than enough for now, I’m ready to start coding again :p

Peace.

p.s. I also watched ‘The Revenant’ and it’s great. Do watch that film.