Keynote: Six Impossible Things
summary
Argues six concrete impossibilities: no physical infinities so IEEE 754 encodes symbols like NaN — blamed for a driverless car steering failure — and floating point forces approximations; shows a real-world binary-search overflow from 32-bit midpoint arithmetic and a USS Yorktown divide-by-zero crash; demonstrates C strlen’s unprovable preconditions as Gödel-style undecidability; recreates fake traffic via hundreds of Android phones to expose metric-correlate limits; and rejects treating technical debt as a precise financial number.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:03representations can be infinite
- 5:38how many numbers exist
- 7:07integers
- 10:11formal verification
- 16:15every question has an answer
- 21:54Algorithm comfort zone
- 25:37What is an algorithm
- 29:00The holding problem
- 40:27Engagement
- 42:21Knowledge
- 44:03Futureproof
- 48:19Prioritization
- 49:57Distributed Systems
- 54:07Technical Debt
- 57:16Questions
