•  The Yoda of Silicon Valley discusses the life & work of computer-science OG Don Knuth. The whole article & the accompanying reader comments are fascinating. (Side bonus for me: I ended up learning the names of various people in my extended team (!), who are quoted in the article.) I love that Don’s defiantly 1997-looking personal site includes a list of Infrequently Asked Questions.
• The New Yorker profiles Google coding duprass Jeff Dean (who leads our org) and Sanjay Ghemawat. They “seem like two halves of a single mind,” and their work enabled planet-scale data infrastructure (among many other things). Retaining as I do the most unimportant details, I now really want to see Jeff’s bespoke basement trampoline. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Oh, and you should definitely read Chuck Norris-style Jeff Dean Facts (“Jeff Dean’s PIN is the last 4 digits of pi,” etc.).

The Nack fam is in the midst of a somewhat fraught roadtrip (busted Westfalia, freezing temperatures, etc.)—hence the light blogging—but this reminds me to recommend the brilliant podcast “Everything Is Alive.” This description doesn’t do it justice…

Everything is Alive is an unscripted interview show in which all the subjects are inanimate objects. In each episode, a different thing tells us its life story–and everything it says is true.

 …so please just trust me & try an episode (e.g. Louis the soda can or Sean the subway seat). Our kids are enthralled, as are we, and we end up learning a bunch of random facts (from radioactive beverages to ghost-attracting soda to Ukrainian rejection pumpkins) that are now firm parts of family banter.

Enjoy!

Wherever you are & whatever you may celebrate, I wish you the kind of ridiculous good cheer one gets from mashing up Lil Jon with the Kool-Aid Man. YEEEAAH-ah! 😌🤘

Bonus: Come out to the coast, have a few laughs.

[YouTube 1 & 2]

I couldn’t figure out why my wife was laughing so uproariously; then I saw this work of genius:

Someone stole a package from me. Police wouldn’t do anything about it so I spent the last 6 months engineering up some vigilante justice. Revenge is a dish best served fabulously.

[YouTube]

Touching & fun as ever. You can also see more about what was trending in 2018.

 [YouTube]

I’ve been hearing about this seminal presentation for ages, but until now I’d never actually seen it. It’s well worth a look at what must’ve been a jaw-dropping peek into so many breakthroughs that remain central to our lives today:

On December 9, 1968, Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart and the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute staged a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration… [F]or the first time, the public saw a computer mouse, which controlled a networked computer system to demonstrate hypertext linking, real-time text editing, multiple windows with flexible view control, cathode display tubes, and shared-screen teleconferencing. The 1968 demo presaged many of the technologies we use today, from personal computing to social networking.

[YouTube] [Via Peyman Milanfar]

Colin Smith shows off the latest upgrades (which arrived in October), including changing selected source and specifying rotation, scaling, and mirroring:

[YouTube] [Via]

Cool—and open source. 9to5 Google writes,

By using WebAssembly, Squoosh is able to use image codecs that are not typically available in the browser.

Supporting a variety of web formats like MozJPEG and WebP and traditional ones like PNG, Squoosh allows you to quickly make your images web-ready. The app is able to do 1:1 visual comparisons of the original image and its compressed counterpart, to help you understand the pros and cons of each format.

[YouTube]

Wow—check out this cleverness from Vince Staples, bringing a neighborhood to life through the compound eye of a Street View car (or faithful simulation thereof):

[YouTube] [Via Tim Novikoff]

I love this short film from the hilarious Demi Adejuyigbe (whose Lando/Gambino parody is so great, I still want it to be real) and Adam Lisagor:

[YouTube] [Via]