Talk Six Impossible Things
summary
Six concrete impossibilities get examined with examples and code: IEEE 754 isn’t real numbers illustrated by floating point quirks, a 1983 Java binary‑search variant later found in 2006 to have a midpoint overflow bug, time stamps pegged to 1970 and the 2038 limit showing OS/C pitfalls, permutation and Bogosort nontermination exercised with Kotlin, sequences and ChatGPT hallucinations, CAP theorem tradeoffs for distributed systems, and undecidability via the halting problem and C string undefined behavior.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:14Infinite Representations
- 5:57Perfect Arithmetic
- 13:35Definitive Answers
- 20:24Algorithmic Certainty
- 25:46Esoteric Sorting
- 33:36Halting Problem
- 35:56Establishing Truth
- 42:09Measuring Engagement
- 45:32Predicting the Future
- 50:54Quantifying Value
- 54:04Distributed Systems
- 59:49Technical Debt
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