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Comment by akritrime | Hacker News Reader

For me, it was Art of Code by Dylan Beattie, but mostly because that talk has the best ending[0] I have seen. Also, introduced to me a side of programming that I instinctively knew existed but never sought out.

[0]: https://youtu.be/6avJHaC3C2U?t=3366

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As an ex mathematician, I can't handle the part where he claims mathematicians have only been studying imaginary numbers "in recent decades" and then goes on to say that Mandelbrot is the first person to rigorously study these kinds of systems. Made me die inside.

Cauchy rolling over in his grave.

And the whole "mathematicians are only interested in problems they can solve" bit. Mathematicians have been interested in unsolved problems as long as maths has existed!

Edit: Okay, now I've watched the whole talk. Overall it's great.

Gödel has entered the chat

An excellent presentation. I find his other presentation, the Cost of Code, more important but less entertaining. "Fix it in software" is going to be growing in magnitude and impact, as software eats the world. (Boeing Max crashes, Uber pedestrian accident, Volkswagen emissions cheating)

The presentation from 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=001SxQCEuv8

I enjoyed his talk, but i can't help but feel like these style of talks always use the same examples: game of life, fractals, esolangs, and some sort of human-computer interactive art system (usually the last one has a lot of variety so maybe that should get a pass for this critique). I would love to see these sorts of programming as art talks with a different set of examples. Not that i don't love fractals and the Game of life, but there's got to be other stuff too.

If you liked the Game of Life running a Game of Life simulation you might enjoy the YT video[0] showing someone's functioning raycasting engine within the game world of Factorio using thousands of machines and parts provided by the game. It blew my mind.

What I also found quite amusing was the PowerPoint presentation demonstrating the Turing-completeness of PowerPoint animations[1].

I'll never get tired of this kind of tinkering walking the line between genius and a healthy portion of crazy.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28UzqVz1r24

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8

I would also very highly recommend you watch this talk about PowerPoint’s Turing-completeness — https://youtu.be/_3loq22TxSc

It’s from the same person (Tom Wildenhain) as your video, but this is an hour long, there’s an actual audience (that’s supportive and spends most of the talk in disbelief), and the end with recursive slides / fractals is an absolute mind melt.

Strong recommend! :) Thanks for the suggestions/reminder!

That's an idea for a talk. Crazy place where people have implemented computers. My personal favorite is the pokemon red implementation in minecraft.

https://youtu.be/H-U96W89Z90

If you have a bit of interest in programming, math and art, this is 1 hour of pure joy. Thanks for this

Funny, because I've seen just one talk in 2020 and it was that one :) I'm not too much into talks and conference stuff, mostly because almost all the time I find the subjects of talks completely irrelevant, to specific, too general etc. That one was really entertaining and I was looking for something similar, but haven't found anything.

Such a great talk. The storytelling here is top-notch. I’m glad you reminded me of it.

I second that! It's such a great talk because it showcases some powerful concepts while being very entertaining.

That's one of these talks you can watch with an interested layman as well, which I very much enjoy and find valuable.

Yep. That's another thing that I really liked about the talk too. Its very approachable and shows how fun programming can be, especially since coding can appear a bit dry and mechanical to others.

I no longer know what a programming language is. I am confused.

Thanks for the suggestion, thoroughly enjoyed watching it

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