Some answers/notes still Twitter (X) compatible in size (280 chars) but not with the audience...
- 0:15 Fast search engines: Now try to imagine the power consumption of those hundreds of thousands of servers and ask yourself what is 'fast enough to find cats' or is the constant growth 'sustainable'?
- 1:10 AI replacing computing jobs: If you do something of which the result and evaluation is transparent to a search engine and done by hundreds of people (that is, translate a request to search terms and copy/paste the answer into another box), a search engine can do a better job than you. Bonus hint: use the newest languages to solve the same tasks, that will keep you ahead of the curve...
- 2:34 How chips work: The answer depends on how much you know already (but the more you know the less you would likely ask this question). See Feynman's answer to "how magnets work?" and 4.
- 4:00 Coding vs Computer Science at the university: If anyone can cut with a knife, why surgeons learn for decades? To ensure that the person on the other end of the knife gets better and not worse. See also, 2: to get better than a search engine based language model. See also, 3.
- 5:00 How zeros and ones turn into the internet? See 3.
- 6:19 Why binary? If you learned IT history you know that binary was not decided or voted for or "supposed to be faster" but turned out to be the best. See, 4.
- 7:22 Why restart always works: Beyond the correct answer, it does not fit to systems that must "always work" from your car to power plants or medical equipment. You should pray that the systems your life depends on were written by properly trained experts. See also, 4.
- 8:00 What is the best OS? Bob Barton once called systems programmers "High priests of a low cult" and pointed out that "computing should be in the School of Religion" (ca 1966). Note from Alan Kay, see also, 6.
- 9:17 Computers not getting cheaper??? "I hold in my hand the economic output of the world in 1950 and we produce them in lots of hundreds of millions..." Bob Martin, The future of Programming lecture, 2016. See also, 6.
- 10:05 Cloud computing: Some big companies need huge server farms to fulfil requirements in peak periods (like Amazon at Christmas) and found a way to profit on them at idle (~90%) time. It's win-win, as long as you are OK with network latency, security questions and eventual lost connection.
- 10:33 How does computer memory work? See 3.
- 11:47 How do you explain web3? As the ownership over computing performance (speed, memory, bandwidth) got dirt cheap, more and more people got involved in "content making". Is this good? Not really, we rather Amusing Ourselves to Death. See Neil Postman and 4.
- 13:34 Difference between firmware and software? You have hardware components to execute a specific function in your ecosystem by providing their services over an interface to you, other software, or hardware. The firmware is the software that makes the hardware work according to that interface.
