Plenary: Six Impossible Things
summary
Six concrete limits emerge: integer overflow and IEEE 754 NaN cause steering controls to go to NaN and crash a race car; epoch and time APIs return -1 and send logs back to 1969; a naive midpoint causes binary search to overflow on billion‑element arrays; permutation sort or true bogo approaches have nonzero probability of never terminating; CAP theorem forces tradeoffs in distributed data visibility; and quantifying technical debt as a single currency number proves misleading because interest and ownership cost remain unknowable.
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chapters (29)
- 0:00Six Impossible Things
- 2:15Nonfinites
- 4:55Floating Point Numbers
- 10:20Binary Search
- 13:16Assumptions
- 15:50The Yorktown
- 17:00Every question has an answer
- 22:45Algorithm
- 23:55Algorithm Header
- 29:15Sorting
- 31:51Related Problems
- 32:40girdle
- 34:30book
- 36:00null
- 38:24shorthand
- 39:30real world
- 40:20practical consequences
- 41:10machine learning
- 42:10time
- 42:50traffic jam
- 44:03engagement
- 44:51clicks shares
- 45:21james
- 46:30known unknowns
- 50:55the future
- 52:20estimation
- 55:22road maps
- 56:05alternative routes
- 58:57business value
