Everyone would due well to learn all this. Like, I talk to friends all the time who don't consider themselves programmers. I have a few who really know how to create and use spreadsheets. One lost their job due to office politics and they were out of a job for like a week.
Spreadsheets are, in my opinion, the closest we ever came as an industry to end user computing. We gave up because you make billions more if you sell them subscriptions to tools that do only what you let them while pretending they're better than a general purpose computer. It's one of the real shames of the industry if you ask me. We were so close.
I think LLMs may potentially unlock end user computing again, mostly by accident. I've been hearing about all sorts of non-technical people creating their own software tools again finally. Like a guy's dad who created his own browser plugin for a thing he wanted. It's such an ugly way to get them to really use a computer to compute, but at least we're moving in the right direction again.
Finally, if you're going to create an Excel clone (hence why this was filmed at Google) you're going to want to pay close attention to this. This is what real Excel users expect your application to do. Not things they should have alternatives to if they learn how to use your thing. No, this is all just very basic, expected functionality. Notice how over 99% of everything talked about here works exactly like this on Google Sheets? Yeah.
At some point, I realized, without knowing it up until that point, that I was 3 weeks from an operating system. Luckily right at that moment, my wife went on a 3 week vacation to take my one year old (roughly) to visit my in-laws, who were in California. Disappeared. All alone. And one week, one week, one week and we had Unix.
Absolute Legend.
Super cool insights into the biological world. A great look into some of what's been happening in biology research and how computation intersects. Where computer scientists can team up with biologists to help improve our understanding and thus our ability to improve medicine.
I also always appreciate when biologists bust the myth that you're some kind of brain in a jar. That your brain is the important thing making decisions and the rest of your body is a skin suit for it to enact it's control of the world. That's not how any of this works. Not even close. I hope the insights he is able to share and the experiments we have from the biological world help you see how complex and interconnected every single part of your body is. You're whole body is thinking, not just your brain, in ways we still really don't understand.
This is less practical, more historical. I always say learning your history is really important. It helps you understand why things are the way they are. To that end, this talk isn't that great at building a picture to understand how we got here, however, there are a number of interesting things to learn about how filesystems have evolved in the BSDs.
I'd say, if you have the time and want to, it's a decent talk. If you're on the fence about what to spend your time listening to, maybe pick a different talk.
