This is pushing it as far as "talk", but more of a presentation.

The Ugly, Dangerous, and Inefficient Stroads found all over the US & Canada https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ORzNZUeUHAM

1. It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware, by Timothy Roscoe at OSDI 2021 - https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke...

2. Computing Performance: On the horizon, by Brendan Gregg at LISA 2021 - https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa21/presentation/gregg-...

>1. It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware

That is a damned scary wake up call. If we don't control the hardware, then we don't own our computers. This implies we can't trust computing, ever again.

How are we supposed to run a democracy with every bit of computing hardware a potential trojan horse?

Robert Erdmann's keynote at PyCon: https://youtu.be/z_hm5oX7ZlE

The talk centers around Erdmann's use of python in "combining materials science, computer science, and imaging science to help the world access, preserve, and understand its cultural heritage".

The technical complexity and nuance that went into the project was truly jaw-dropping. This was the first talk I immediately felt the urge to share with multiple co-workers & friends.

Thank you, great talk! It's about making a 717 billion pixel image of Rembrandt's Night Watch, and summarizes—or at least touches on—the theory, from a lot of different fields, used in the project.