Best tech talks you have heard in 2023?

Kevlin Henney completely changed my world view on programming, when I watched his presentation Concurrent Affairs: Procedural Programming Unlocked - NDC London 2022, earlier this year.[1]

  "when you introduce concurrency into a non-concurrent environment what you do is you change the laws of physics of your program, you change the nature of time"

This is a profound insight. It totally changed how I think about the nature of multithreaded and multiprocessor based programming.

Also from Kevlin - Refactoring to immutability[2], which showed me exactly why you would want immutable "variables". I never got the point of Rust before that. The "Borrow Checker" principle still seems nuts to me, nut at least I know there's logic behind it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi6ICEVVRiw

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APUCMSPiNh4

[1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models by Andrej Karpathy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g

More of a social one, but I liked The Economics of Programming Languages by the creator of Elm. https://youtu.be/XZ3w_jec1v8?si=aYnKmDhTf30t8Nn_

Here are a few that come to mind:

1. Hal Varian's (Chief Economist at Google) presentation on how to incorporate Google Trends term information in univariate time series models: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kb89ccsSPQ

2. What is a standard error, where a few econometricians and statisticians present the notion of standard error when N = all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqs2yQOXEP8

"Great Impractical Ideas in Computer Science: PowerPoint Programming" Tom Wildenham (2019) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3loq22TxSc

Really fun, kinda blew my mind. Guy got a job at Microsoft shortly after giving this talk.

For me, my favorites were:

0. "Computational Physics, Beyond the Glass" by Sam Ritchie (Strange Loop 2023) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv2JgzAl5yU - This guy created an interactive Lisp-based Physics visualizer and got started on it by reading Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics. He now has a full-fledged project, and touches upon many ideas for educating people through innovative means. Really loved this video. Connected the ideas of Logo programming environment and something like a LISP-Physics visualizer.

1. "The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8 - How does creating a new programming language work really? Who are the players, and what goes behind? Very highly recommend this funny, informative talk to understand aspects of creating a programming language other than the theoretical ones.

2. Function Composition in Programming Languages - Conor Hoekstra - CppNorth 2023 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JELcdZLre3s - This is actually about array languages and Haskell and not C++. Encountered "tacit" programming for the first time, and it opened a slightly new way of thinking for me.

And others that I liked were:

0. Ruby on Rails: The Documentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDKUEXBF3B4 - Not a Rubbyist, but still liked this documentary.

1. "Software & The Game of Go" by David Nolen (Strange Loop 2023) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2yJ3FBtU4Y

2. "Making Hard Things Easy" by Julia Evans (Strange Loop 2023) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30YWsGDr8mA - I always liked Evans' written content and zines, as they were fun to read and helped people. It was nice to see how she operates, thinks, and works- that go behind all of these.

All are valuable