Programming Throwdown
- Episodes
- 190
- Released
- irregularly
- Latest episode
- Aug 24, 2026
About the podcast
Programming Throwdown educates Computer Scientists and Software Engineers on a cavalcade of programming and tech topics. Every show will cover a new programming language, so listeners will be able to speak intelligently about any programming language.
Episodes 190
189: Agentic Loops
189: Agentic LoopsIntro topic: Building in plain languageNews/Links:RAM prices going through the roof . Tom’s Hardwarehttps://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/memory-prices-climb-500-percent-in-12-months-u …
Show notes
189: Agentic Loops
Intro topic: Building in plain language
News/Links:- RAM prices going through the roof . Tom’s Hardware
- Mario meet Pareto
- Qwen 3.8 versus Muse Glimmer
- Everyone should know SIMD
- Patrick
- Waves in an Impossible Sea by Matt Strassler
- Jason
- Diffusion World Modeling
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show- Patrick
- Nubby’s Number Factory
- Jason
- Opencode https://opencode.ai/
- Opencode https://opencode.ai/
- Managing llm uncertainty
- Polling / Timed Loops
- Intelligent cronjobs
- Autoresearch
- Andrej Karpathy
- Recursive Self Improvement
- Verifiers
- Terminating conditions
- Managing context
- Subagents
- Best Practices
- Watchdogs to correct loops that are stuck/aborted
Chapters
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188: World Models
Intro topic: RunningNews/Links:Flow matching versus diffusion modelshttps://youtu.be/firXjwZ_6KI?is=QMq8DcCsXTTktOuE OpenCV 5https://opencv.org/opencv-5/Claude fable beats pokemon with no …
Show notes
Intro topic: Running
News/Links:- Flow matching versus diffusion models
- OpenCV 5
- Claude fable beats pokemon with no harness
- Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?
- Patrick
- Strength of the Few - James Islington
- Jason
- Descender - Jeff Lemire
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show- Patrick
- No Man’s Sky
- Jason
- Paperlib https://paperlib.app/en/
- Paperlib https://paperlib.app/en/
- Making decisions with AI
- Action-Value (called a Q model): What is the long-term value of making a decision at a position
- Policy: What action should I take (must be a distribution)
- Value (called a V model): What is the value of a position (depends on policy)
- Advantage/Disadvantage: difference in value given two policies
- When advantage is +, do that more.
- Model-Free
- Look at the current situation and suggest an action
- Run that action in the real world and measure the effect
- Use that measurement to suggest better actions next time
- Model-Based
- Observe rollouts (sequences of situations) and learn the dynamics
- Choose an action, use your dynamics model to measure the consequence
- Potentially do MPC (try many actions and choose the best)
- World Models
- Observe many many rollouts and learn a full forward model (how to create the input in the future)
- Train a policy & value inside the world model
- Deploy the policy and fine-tune based on the real world
Chapters
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187: Agentic Coding
187: Agentic CodingIntro topic: Bad equity vesting schedulesNews/Links:Artemis IIhttps://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-welcomes-record-setting-artemis-ii-moonfarers-back-to-earth/Gemma …
Show notes
187: Agentic Coding
Intro topic: Bad equity vesting schedules
News/Links:- Artemis II
- Gemma 4
- Hatetris
- Dripwarts: School of Drip
- Patrick
- Project Hail Mary
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show- Jason
- FF6 T-Edition
Topic: Agentic Coding- Progression
- Better Code Completion
- Intellisense
- Copilot
- Cowriting
- Cursor
- Roo Code
- Longer Horizon
- Claude Code
- Codex
- Gemini CLI
- Swarm
- Better Code Completion
- Guidelines
- Git
- Planning
- Task decomposition
- AGENTS.md
- Adjusting vs Restarting
- Skepticism
- Future of software engineering?
Chapters
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186: Becoming a Manager
186: Becoming a ManagerIntro topic: plastic welding kitsNews/Links:Parse.bot, turn any website into an APIhttps://www.parse.bot/Gemini 3https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3/Depth Anything …
Show notes
186: Becoming a Manager
Intro topic: plastic welding kits
News/Links:
- Parse.bot, turn any website into an API
- Gemini 3
- Depth Anything 3
- Wan 2.2 (run on runpod)
Book of the Show
- Patrick
- The Thinking Game (DeepMind documentary)
- Jason
- Plato: The Republic
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick
- Core Keeper
- Pc/Switch/Xbox/Playstation
- Core Keeper
- Jason
- Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic
- PC
- Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic
Topic: Becoming a Manager
- What is a Manager
- Opportunity
- Results + Retention
- Sizing
- Hiring
- Philosophy
- Interviews
- Downsizing
- Hiring
- How to Manage
- Company Goals / OKRs
- Breaking down & claiming company goals.
- Balancing inspirational & practical goals
- Coaching
- One-on-ones
- Career planning
- Performance
- Motivation
- Performance Management Review
- Compensation
- Company Goals / OKRs
- Choosing to become a manager
- Balancing personal and company incentives
- Why Manage
- Mentorship
- Build relationships
- Why to not manage
- Less time for your original joy (coding)
- Less technical influence
- More uncertainty and less closure
- How to transition back to Engineer
- Take the time/energy to get ramped up
- Act as an advisor to your manager
Chapters
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185: Workflow Orchestrators
Intro topic: Asymmetric ReturnsNews/Links:NanoChat by Andrej Karpathyhttps://github.com/karpathy/nanochatPydantic AIhttps://www.marktechpost.com/2025/03/25/pydanticai-advancing-generative-ai-agent-development-th …
Show notes
Intro topic: Asymmetric Returns
News/Links:
- NanoChat by Andrej Karpathy
- Pydantic AI
- 1000th Starlink this year
- ChatGPT Apps SDK
Book of the Show
- Patrick
- The Will of the Many by James Islington
- Jason
- Interview with DHH (Founder of Ruby on Rails)
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick
- Factorio
- Jason
Topic: Workflow Orchestrators
- Why
- Batch jobs (embarrassingly parallel)
- Long-running tasks (e.g. transcoding video)
- Checkpointing/resuming
- How
- Message Queues
- Containerization
- Worker Pools & Autoscaling
- History & Backfill
- Steps to run workflows:
- Containerize the workflow definition and send to the cloud
- Containerize all the individual tasks
- Submit job(s)
- Examples
- Airflow
- Legacy but dominant
- Dagster
- Great UX for python developers
- Temporal: https://temporal.io/
- The new hotness
- Ray
- Low-level but very powerful
- Kubeflow
- Designed for ML workflows, integrated dashboard
- Airflow
Chapters
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184: Asynchronous Programming
184: Asynchronous ProgrammingIntro topic: AI ScamsNews/Links:Coding Adventure: Ray-Tracing Glass and Caustics (Sebastian Lague)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA1KVZ1eOuABoson AI announces Higgs Audio …
Show notes
184: Asynchronous Programming
Intro topic: AI Scams
News/Links:
- Coding Adventure: Ray-Tracing Glass and Caustics (Sebastian Lague)
- Boson AI announces Higgs Audio V2
- The Misconception that Almost Stopped AI [How Models Learn Part 1] (Welch Labs)
- A mind-bending conversation with Peter Thiel
Book of the Show
- Patrick
- The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien)
- Jason
- NYT Word Games
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick
- Escape Academy
- Jason
- Multi-modal LLMs to make calendar meetings
Topic: Asynchronous Computing
- What/Why
- Multi-threading in between the lines
- Many of the benefits of multiprocessing without the overhead/complexity
- How
- Coroutines
- Thread-Local Memory
- Blocking vs Non-Blocking operations
- Blocking: arithmetic
- Non-Blocking: Reading from the network card into thread-local memory
- Interpreter locking
- Typescript: Single threaded
- Python: GIL
- Implementations
- Polling (not-Asynchronous)
- Callbacks (interrupts)
- Multithreading (with queues/message passing)
- Promise/Futures
- Async/Await
Chapters
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183: Landing a Software Job in 2025
00:00:00 Intro00:01:58 Introducing Mark Cunningham00:07:01 How Do You Find A Job?00:15:43 How to Get the Best Interview00:33:06 Tips on How To Pass An Interview00:38:38 How to Have a Good Interview00:48:12 What …
Show notes
00:00:00 Intro
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
00:01:58 Introducing Mark Cunningham
00:07:01 How Do You Find A Job?
00:15:43 How to Get the Best Interview
00:33:06 Tips on How To Pass An Interview
00:38:38 How to Have a Good Interview
00:48:12 What is the Reverse Interview?
00:54:24 What Is The Hiring Manager's Role?
00:57:12 Reverse Interviews: Red Flags
01:14:45 How to Negotiate a Tech Offer
01:23:02 When to Negotiate Your Compensation
01:35:21 Interview Horror Stories
01:39:29 How Do You Deal With Fake AI Applicants?
01:45:32 The Bidding NetworkChapters
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182: AI Assisted Coding
Intro topic: Getting an entry-level jobNews/Links:Mario Kart 64 Fully Decompiledhttps://gbatemp.net/threads/mario-kart-64-decompilation-project-reaches-100-completion.671104/Q-Learning is not yet …
Show notes
Intro topic: Getting an entry-level job
News/Links:
- Mario Kart 64 Fully Decompiled
- Q-Learning is not yet scalable
- Grover’s Algorithm
- OrangePi has a RISC-V SBC
Book of the Show
- Patrick
- The Will of the Many (James Islington)
- Jason
- The Intelligence Trap
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick
- Jason
Topic:
- Why
- Speed up development
- Catch errors faster than type checking/compiling
- Writing tedious boilerplate code
- Ask questions and learn local information
- Look good for hiring managers
- How
- Extensions for VSCode & other IDEs for inline suggestions
- Chat with a selection/file
- Command-line Tools run at the root directory
- Local vs Cloud
- Examples
- Copilot (VSCode extension)
- Use the experimental mode
- Cursor (Custom IDE)
- Jumps to suggest changes in other places
- Similar to copilot experimental mode
- RooCode (VSCode extension)
- Copilot (VSCode extension)
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★Chapters
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181: Memory Management
Intro topic: Video Game PricesNews/Links:Step one: Jump in the Lava - Abyssofthttps://youtu.be/WdadpHLAfdA?si=oXYnhB0EdkR_RaPEScalable world models for continuous controlhttps://www.tdmpc2.com/Clever code is …
Show notes
Intro topic: Video Game Prices
News/Links:
- Step one: Jump in the Lava - Abyssoft
- Scalable world models for continuous control
- Clever code is probably the worst code you could write - Engineer’s Codex
- A new, open source text-to-speech model called Dia has arrived to challenge ElevenLabs, OpenAI and more
Book of the Show
- Patrick
- The Muscle Ladder - Jeff Nippard
- Jason
- Metaphysics of War
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick
- Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket
- Jason
Topic: Memory Management
- Motivation
- Avoid thrashing / crashes
- Allocate resources efficiently
- Keep high uptime
- Where
- OS Level
- Heap management
- Virtual Memory
- Language/Compiler Level
- Cpp
- Garbage collection
- Ownership
- OS Level
- Tools
- Instrumentation
- Export to Datadog / Grafana
- Python: psutil & tracemalloc
- Valgrind
- Instrumentation
- What to do when your program uses too much memory?
- Reduce data sizes
- Compression
- References
- Lazy initializer
- Generators & Back Pressure
- Ring buffers
- Arena allocators
- Disk based caching
- Reduce data sizes
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★Chapters
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180: Reinforcement Learning
Intro topic: GrillsNews/Links:You can’t call yourself a senior until you’ve worked on a legacy projecthttps://www.infobip.com/developers/blog/seniors-working-on-a-legacy-projectRecraft might be the most …
Show notes
Intro topic: Grills
News/Links:
- You can’t call yourself a senior until you’ve worked on a legacy project
- Recraft might be the most powerful AI image platform I’ve ever used — here’s why
- NASA has a list of 10 rules for software development
- AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT performance estimates leaked: 42% to 66% faster than Radeon RX 7900 GRE
Book of the Show
- Patrick:
- The Player of Games (Ian M Banks)
- https://a.co/d/1ZpUhGl (non-affiliate)
- The Player of Games (Ian M Banks)
- Jason:
- Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick:
- Pokemon Sword and Shield
- Jason:
- Features and Labels ( https://fal.ai )
Topic: Reinforcement Learning
- Three types of AI
- Supervised Learning
- Unsupervised Learning
- Reinforcement Learning
- Online vs Offline RL
- Optimization algorithms
- Value optimization
- SARSA
- Q-Learning
- Policy optimization
- Policy Gradients
- Actor-Critic
- Proximal Policy Optimization
- Value optimization
- Value vs Policy Optimization
- Value optimization is more intuitive (Value loss)
- Policy optimization is less intuitive at first (policy gradients)
- Converting values to policies in deep learning is difficult
- Imitation Learning
- Supervised policy learning
- Often used to bootstrap reinforcement learning
- Policy Evaluation
- Propensity scoring versus model-based
- Challenges to training RL model
- Two optimization loops
- Collecting feedback vs updating the model
- Difficult optimization target
- Policy evaluation
- Two optimization loops
- RLHF & GRPO
Chapters
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179: Project Planning
Intro topic: Lego event space & retail store: https://www.instagram.com/bambeecave News/Links:StackOverflow Question Count Going Down https://gist.github.com/hopeseekr/f522e380e35745bd5bdc3269a9f0b132DeepSeek …
Show notes
Intro topic: Lego event space & retail store: https://www.instagram.com/bambeecave
News/Links:
- StackOverflow Question Count Going Down
- DeepSeek claims its ‘reasoning’ model beats OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks
- Computer Science Papers Every Developer Should Read
- Nvidia Cosmos - an AI platform to change the future of robots and cars - wins Best of CES 2025
Book of the Show
- Patrick: Alice’s Adventures in a differentiable wonderland
- Jason:
- A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Hulu/Netflix/etc)
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick:
- Jason:
- Sqlitedict - Python dictionaries saved to disk
Topic: Project Planning and Management
- Why?
- Gathering feedback
- Identifying risks
- Deciding future headcount
- Documenting / discovering dependencies
- Critical path
- Schedule
- Reduce the bullwhip effect
- How it works
- SMART goals
- specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound
- MT is most important
- Gantt Charts
- Scrum
- Agile
- Kanban
- SMART goals
- Tools
- Whiteboard (the generic IRL one)
- Post it notes
- JIRA
- Asana
- OpenProject
- Dealing with uncertainty
- Buffering
- Issues with recursive padding
- Project planning Post-Mortems
- Buffering
Chapters
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178: Working from Home
Intro topic: Smart homesNews/Links:SpaceX Starship Flight Test Five / Sixhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIKI7y3DTXkShareDBhttps://github.com/share/sharedbOrion AR …
Show notes
Intro topic: Smart homes
News/Links:
- SpaceX Starship Flight Test Five / Six
- ShareDB
- Orion AR Glasses
- Blade and Sorcery 1.0 is out
Book of the Show
- Patrick:
- The Book that Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence
- Jason:
- Masters of Doom
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick:
- Balatro
- Jason:
- Cursor IDE
Topic: Working from Home
- Intro
- Background & WFH experiences
- Is it Panacea?
- Realizing it works better for some than others
- Internally Motivated
- Scheduling
- Communications
- Home Setup
- Dedicated space
- Handling Non-work Distractions
- Keyboards, Monitors, Music, … Desk related things
- The specter of RTO
Chapters
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177: Vector Databases
Intro topic: Buying a CarNews/Links:Cognitive Load is what Mattershttps://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-loadDiffusion models are Real-Time Game Engineshttps://gamengen.github.io/Your Company Needs Junior …
Show notes
Intro topic: Buying a Car
News/Links:
- Cognitive Load is what Matters
- Diffusion models are Real-Time Game Engines
- Your Company Needs Junior Devs
- Seamless Streaming / Fish Speech / LLaMA Omni
Book of the Show
- Patrick:
- Thought Emporium Youtube
- Jason:
- Novel Minds
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick:
- Escape Simulator
- Jason:
- Cursor IDE
Topic: Vector Databases (~54 min)
- How computers represent data traditionally
- ASCII values
- RGB values
- How traditional compression works
- Huffman encoding (tree structure)
- Lossy example: Fourier Transform & store coefficients
- How embeddings are computed
- Pairwise (contrastive) methods
- Forward models (self-supervised)
- Similarity metrics
- Approximate Nearest Neighbors (ANN)
- Sub-Linear ANN
- Clustering
- Space Partitioning (e.g. K-D Trees)
- What a vector database does
- Perform nearest-neighbors with many different similarity metrics
- Store the vectors and the data structures to support sub-linear ANN
- Handle updates, deletes, rebalancing/reclustering, backups/restores
- Examples
- pgvector: a vector-database plugin for postgres
- Weaviate, Pinecone
- Milvus
Chapters
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176: MLOps at SwampUp
James Morse: Software Engineer at CiscoSystem Administrator to DevOpsDifference between DevOps and MLOpsGetting Started with DevOpsLuke Marsden: CEO of Helix MLHow to start a business at 15 years oldBTRFS vs …
Show notes
- James Morse: Software Engineer at Cisco
- System Administrator to DevOps
- Difference between DevOps and MLOps
- Getting Started with DevOps
- Luke Marsden: CEO of Helix ML
- How to start a business at 15 years old
- BTRFS vs ZFS
- MLOps: the intersection of software, DevOps and AI
- Fine-tuning AI on the Cloud
- Some advice for folks interested in ML Ops
- Yuval Fernbach: CTO MLOps & JFrog
- Starting Qwak
- Going from a jupyter notebook to production
- ML Supply Chain
- Getting started in Machine Learning
- Stephen Chin: VP of DevRel at Neo4J
- Developer Relations: The Job
- What is a Large Language Model?
- Knowledge graphs and the Linkage Model
- How to Use Graph databases in Enterprise
- How to get into ML Ops
Chapters
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- James Morse: Software Engineer at Cisco
175: Resume Writing
175: Resume WritingIntro topic: DSLR Photography vs Camera PhoneNews/Links:Free Internet while flying by abusing edits to your profile namehttps://robertheaton.com/pyskywifi/Making Animated Characters with AI …
Show notes
175: Resume Writing
Intro topic: DSLR Photography vs Camera Phone
News/Links:
- Free Internet while flying by abusing edits to your profile name
- Making Animated Characters with AI Art
- On 10x Engineers
- The Beauty and Challenges of AI-Generated Artistic Gymnastics
Book of the Show
- Patrick:
- The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
- Jason:
- The Checklist Manifesto
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick:
- Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Nintendo Switch)
- https://amzn.to/3S9VJLf
- Jason:
Topic: Resume Writing (Courtesy of Matthew C.)
- Why have a resume?
- Many jobs require it to get into the consideration
- Today many are screened for keywords automatically
- Log for future you
- What is a resume?
- One-page description
- Key accomplishments & experiences
- Comparison to CV
- References
- How to write a good resume?
- Do’s
- Include your github if it has good contributions
- Be specific (dates, locations, skills)
- Isolate your specific contributions
- Be accurate/honest
- Be concise
- Be ready to discuss any point you have on the resume
- List hobbies/activities/extracurriculars
- Don’ts
- Have mistakes (especially dates)
- Use images (most companies use text extraction)
- Use it as a design portfolio
- Put social qualities (e.gs. hard-working, motivated, friendly)
- Use fancy templates/tools
- Resources
- Manager Tools: How to scan resumes https://www.manager-tools.com/2016/05/how-scan-resume-part-1
- Google docs
- Latex/Lyx for CVs
- Do’s
- How to think about your career and how it impacts your future resume writing (career planning)
- Technologies and architectures more than specifics of project details
- How various choices may age over time
Chapters
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174: Devops
Intro topic: Social Media Auto Responder LLMNews/Links:Amazon releases Amazon Qhttps://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/4/aws-announces-general-availability-of-amazon-q-the-most-capable-generative-ai-powered-assistant …
Show notes
Intro topic: Social Media Auto Responder LLM
News/Links:
- Amazon releases Amazon Q
- Cheap RiscV “Super Cluster” from Bitluni
- Phi 3 Vision Released
- ChatGPT 4o
Book of the Show
- Patrick: MyFirstMillion Podcast
- Jason: A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence
Patreon https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick: Dave the Diver
- Jason: Turing Complete
Topic: DevOps
- What is DevOps
- DevOps vs SRE
- Why DevOps is important
- Engineering time is expensive
- Outages can hurt company metrics & reputation
- Build & Testing Infrastructure
- Bazel & Build/Test Idempotency
- Build/Test Farms
- BuildBarn
- Github Actions
- Jenkins
- Infrastructure as code
- Terraform
- Blue Green Deployment
- Continuous Everything!
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Deployment
- How to Measure DevOps
- Build Times
- Release cadence
- Bug tracking / round trip times
- Engineer Surveys
- Time spent doing what you enjoy
- DevOps Horror Stories
Chapters
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173: Mocking and Unit Tests
173: Mocking and Unit TestsIntro topic: HeadphonesNews/Links:Texas A&M University Physics Festivalhttps://physicsfestival.tamu.edu/Rust vs Cpp at GoogleLars Bergstrom (Google Director of Engineering): Rust …
Show notes
173: Mocking and Unit Tests
Intro topic: Headphones
News/Links:
- Texas A&M University Physics Festival
- Rust vs Cpp at Google
- Lars Bergstrom (Google Director of Engineering): Rust teams at Google are as productive as the ones using Go and 2x those using Cpp
- https://youtu.be/6mZRWFQRvmw?t=27012
- Is Cosine Similarity Really About Similarity
- Xz utils supply chain attack
Book of the Show
- Patrick:
- 80/20 Running by Matt Fitzgerald
- https://amzn.to/3xyEKLo
- Jason:
- A Movie Making Nerd
- https://amzn.to/49ycDJj
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick:
- Jason:
Topic: Mocking and Unit Tests
- What are Unit Tests
- Balance between utility, maintenance, and coverage
- Unit Test: testing small functions
- Regression Test: Testing larger functions
- System Test: End-to-end testing of programs
- What are mocks & fakes
- When to use mock vs. fake
- Mocking libraries in various languages
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★Chapters
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172: Transformers and Large Language Models
172: Transformers and Large Language ModelsIntro topic: Is WFH actually WFC?News/Links:Falsehoods Junior Developers Believe about Becoming Seniorhttps://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/falsehoods-junior-developers-bel …
Show notes
172: Transformers and Large Language Models
Intro topic: Is WFH actually WFC?
News/Links:
- Falsehoods Junior Developers Believe about Becoming Senior
- Pure Pursuit
- Tutorial with python code: https://wiki.purduesigbots.com/software/control-algorithms/basic-pure-pursuit
- Video example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYR7mmcwT2w
- PID without a PHD
- Google releases Gemma
Book of the Show
- Patrick: The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time)
- Jason: How to Make a Video Game All By Yourself
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick: Stadia Controller Wifi to Bluetooth Unlock
- Jason: FUSE and SSHFS
Topic: Transformers and Large Language Models
- How neural networks store information
- Latent variables
- Transformers
- Encoders & Decoders
- Attention Layers
- History
- RNN
- Vanishing Gradient Problem
- LSTM
- Short term (gradient explodes), Long term (gradient vanishes)
- RNN
- Differentiable algebra
- Key-Query-Value
- Self Attention
- History
- Self-Supervised Learning & Forward Models
- Human Feedback
- Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
- Direct Policy Optimization (Pairwise Ranking)
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★Chapters
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171: Compilers and Interpreters
Intro topic: Monitor setupsNews/Links:BlueScuti, Willis, beats Tetrishttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuJ5UuknsHUPalWorld accused of being an AI Producthttps://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/01/22/palworld-a …
Show notes
Intro topic: Monitor setups
News/Links:
- BlueScuti, Willis, beats Tetris
- PalWorld accused of being an AI Product
- 4 Billion if-statements to determine if a number is even or odd
- Seamless M4T
Book of the Show
- Patrick:
- Foundation by Isaac Asimov
- Jason:
- Propaganda by Edward Bernays
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick:
- The Room Game
- Jason:
- Incredibuild
Topic: Compilers and Interpreters (Request by Jessica W.)
- Machine Code
- Architecture Specific
- Assembly
- Single vs Two Pass Compiler
- High level Languages
- Intermediate Representation
- JVM ByteCode vs Machine Code for portability
- Scripting/Interpreters
- JIT
- Profile Guided Optimization
- Resources
- https://www.craftinginterpreters.com/
- https://nandgame.com/
- Turing Complete
Chapters
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170: 2023 Holiday Special Live
Predictions:Jason VR for WorkLowering AI training cost/ improved efficiencyRISC-V takeoffPatrickAi claim of AGIAi peer reviewerAi Video GeneratorMore space vehicles reaching orbitEarly career, finding role at …
Show notes
Predictions:
Jason- VR for Work
- Lowering AI training cost/ improved efficiency
- RISC-V takeoff
Patrick
- Ai claim of AGI
- Ai peer reviewer
- Ai Video Generator
- More space vehicles reaching orbit
Early career, finding role at FAANG, liaising vs shipping code. Startup?
3 part. 1. How and when current hype for AI will end? 2. Shape of the show 3. Upcoming in tech
What are essential programmer knowledge items?
CS Student, how to organize life and goals? What purpose life should serve?
What kind of programmer were you in college?
Happy Holidays!
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169: HyperLogLog
Intro topic: Testing your car batteryNews/Links:Tech Layoffs still going onhttps://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/google-layoffs-california-companies-18465600.php Real-time dreamy Cloudscapes with Volumetric …
Show notes
Intro topic: Testing your car battery
News/Links:
- Tech Layoffs still going on
- Real-time dreamy Cloudscapes with Volumetric Raymarching
- Robot Rascals
- Meta Quest 3
Book of the Show
- Patrick:
- Jason:
- Eureka! NVIDIA Research Breakthrough Puts New Spin on Robot Learning
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick:
- Jason:
- ESP32 development board: https://amzn.to/3Qpmb20
- WEMOS
Topic: HyperLogLog
- Motivation
- Cardinality Counting
- LinearCounting
- Hash + expectation of collision based on how full
- Bloom Filter
- LogLog
- Use first N bits as bucket
- Use max sequential 0s in each bucket
- Average
- HyperLogLog
- Handle empty buckets
- Use correction factor like linear counting for low counts (number of empty buckets) and high counts
- Distributing
- Transfer bucket counts
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168: Godot
Intro topic: What are expectations on developers that have nothing to do with programmingNews/Links:Pushing for a lower dev estimate is like negotiating weather with a …
Show notes
Intro topic: What are expectations on developers that have nothing to do with programming
News/Links:
- Pushing for a lower dev estimate is like negotiating weather with a Meteorologist
- Announcing python in excel
- 7 Habits of Highly Effective Software Engineers
- Raspberry pi 5 begins shipping
Book of the Show
- Patrick:
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone Illustrated Edition
- Jason:
- The Pete and Sebastian Show
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick:
- Obsidian
- Jason:
- Ink by Inkle
Topic: Godot
- What is a game engine?
- Graphics, animation, particle effects
- Tilemaps
- Entity component systems
- Physics
- Sound
- I/O
- Input handling (touchscreen, joystick)
- GDScript
- Why use a game engine?
- Portability
- Allow for testing individual components of the game
- Libraries for ads, in-app-purchases
- Godot
- Open source
- Focused on 2-D but now many 3-D features
- Great development environment
- AI Hero
- Started in phaser (development rut)
- Moved to Godot, rapid prototyping
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167: Desktop User Interfaces
Intro topic: Jogging MetricsNews/Links:Unholy LLMhttps://huggingface.co/Undi95/Unholy-v1-12L-13B The reverse red herring https://www.blameless.com/blog/the-reverse-red-herringThe "ens–tification" of …
Show notes
Intro topic: Jogging Metrics
News/Links:
- Unholy LLM
- The reverse red herring
- The "ens–tification" of TikTok
- Response letter to Godot is not the new Unity
Book of the Show
- Patrick:
- Math Games with Bad Drawings by Ben Orlin
- https://amzn.to/48qlg9A
- Jason:
- The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates
- https://amzn.to/3LChBff
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick:
- Factorio (Desktop Game)
- Jason:
- AI Hero (iOS and Android)
Topic: Desktop user interfaces
- What is a user interface?
- Web and Mobile UI toolkits
- Desktop options
- Qt
- Cross platform, custom UI elements
- Qt creator, code generator
- WxWidgets
- Cross platform, uses native UI elements
- WxFormDesigner, code generation
- Can look different on different operating systems
- Electron
- Local nodejs webserver
- Html/JavaScript technology
- Requires interprocess communication to use other languages
- Jupyter notebooks
- Mathematica-like notebook
- Not for distribution
- Streamlit
- Python to web compiler
- Game Engines
- Unity, Godot, Unreal
- Qt
- Tips for building desktop UI
- UI is slow (startup time, interaction time)
- Separate the UI from the engine & business logic
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166: Speedy Database Queries with Lukas Fittl
- pganalyze: https://pganalyze.com/- Weekly series "5mins of Postgres": https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDV_1Dz2Ixgl1nT_3DUZVFw- How Postgres chooses which index to use …
Show notes
- pganalyze: https://pganalyze.com/
- Weekly series "5mins of Postgres": https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDV_1Dz2Ixgl1nT_3DUZVFw
- How Postgres chooses which index to use: https://pganalyze.com/blog/how-postgres-chooses-index
- CMU databases courses: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/courses/
- Postgres community: https://www.postgresql.org/community/
As well as social links:
- Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@lukas
- Twitter/X: @pganalyze, @LukasFittl
- GitHub: @pganalyze, @lfittl
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lfittl/ , https://www.linkedin.com/company/pganalyze/
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165: Differential Equations
Intro topic: Revisiting the power of SpreadsheetsNews/Links:LK-99 Isn’t a Superconductorhttps://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02585-7Normalizing Flowshttps://pyro.ai/examples/normalizing_flows_i.htmlHow is …
Show notes
Intro topic: Revisiting the power of Spreadsheets
News/Links:
- LK-99 Isn’t a Superconductor
- Normalizing Flows
- How is llama.cpp possible?
- Chat with open source large language models
Book of the Show
- Patrick: Math with Bad Drawings by Ben Orlin
- Jason:
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Patrick:
- ffmprovisr https://amiaopensource.github.io/ffmprovisr/
- Jason:
- Pandas read_ods() read_excel()
Topic: Differential Equations
- Why should programmers learn about DiffEq
- Law of Large Numbers
- What are differential equations?
- When you know the rate of change
- EigenVectors & EigenValues
- What is Jacobian What is Jacobian? | The right way of thinking derivatives and integrals
- Special cases
- Partial Differential Equations
- Ordinary Differential Equations
- Why solvers are important
- Numerical Stability at larger step sizes
- Example: https://medium.com/@pukumarathe/eulers-method-and-runge-kutta-4th-order-method-in-python-b4a0068a8ebe
- Fun Examples
- Predator-Prey relationships in scipy
- Physics Engines for games
- PageRank
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164: Choosing a Database For Your Project With Kris Zyp
Things to consider when choosing a databaseSpeed & LatencyConsistency, ACID ComplianceScalabilityLanguage support & Developer ExperienceRelational vs. Non-relational (SQL vs. NoSQL)Data typesSecurityDatabase …
Show notes
Things to consider when choosing a database
- Speed & Latency
- Consistency, ACID Compliance
- Scalability
- Language support & Developer Experience
- Relational vs. Non-relational (SQL vs. NoSQL)
- Data types
- Security
- Database environment
- Client vs Server access
Info on Kris & Harper:- Website: harperdb.io
- Twitter: @harperdbio, @kriszyp
- Github: @HarperDB, @kriszyp
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163: Recursion
Episode 163 - RecursionIntro topic: Electric CarsNews/Links:Snake Game in 101 Bytes in a QR Codehttps://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/15ab4ct/my_qr_code_snake_game_is_now_only_101_bytes/Superconductor …
Show notes
Episode 163 - Recursion
Intro topic: Electric Cars
News/Links:
- Snake Game in 101 Bytes in a QR Code
- Superconductor Rumors abound
- OpenWorm
- Creator of vim passes away
Book of the Show
- Patrick:
- Little Book of Common Sense Investing by Jack Bogle https://amzn.to/43YqANR
- Jason:
- Mistborn Saga: https://amzn.to/3DJkUN8
Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show
- Jason:
- reMarkable https://remarkable.com/
- Patrick:
- Stellarium (iOS and Android)
Topic: Recursion
- What is it
- Divide-And-Conquer
- Fibonacci numbers
- How to (not) teach recursion
- Practical Applications
- Graph operations
- Tree retrieval, balancing
- Graph Search
- Spatial partitioning
- Graph operations
- Pitfalls
- Stack size
- How to solve problems with recursion
- (1) Consider the base cases
- (2) Build the recursive step
- (3) Look for ways the recursion will not terminate and fix
- (4) (rest are optional) Remove global contexts
- (5) Add memoization
- (6) Build solutions incrementally
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162: Interactive Fiction
In the latest episode of Programming Throwdown, we delve into the captivating world of interactive fiction. We explore: Wordnet, Inform, and how games in the past have been the forerunners of today’s NLP …
Show notes
In the latest episode of Programming Throwdown, we delve into the captivating world of interactive fiction. We explore: Wordnet, Inform, and how games in the past have been the forerunners of today’s NLP challenges.
00:00:22 Introductions
00:00:39 To hard mode or not to hard mode
00:08:58 No moats in Google
00:16:37 Stable Diffusion blows Jason’s mind
00:21:31 Putting beats together
00:23:38 GPT4All
00:27:44 White Sand
00:35:28 Fortuna
00:38:55 Patrick’s ‘dirty’ secret
00:47:20 Wordnet
00:53:56 Procedural generation
00:57:29 On tabletop RPGs
01:00:48 Inform
01:07:27 Farewells
Resources mentioned in this episode:Join the Programming Throwdown Patreon community today: https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Subscribe to the podcast on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@programmingthrowdown4793
News/Links:
- Google: We have no moat and neither does OpenAI
- Stable Diffusion QR Codes
- Beginning to Make Music
- GPT4All
- Wordnet:
- Inform:
Book of the Show
- Patrick:
- White Sand https://amzn.to/43CPMKA
- Jason:
- The Fortuna https://www.generativefiction.com/
Tool of the Show
- Jason:
- Gatsby.js https://www.gatsbyjs.com/
- Patrick:
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, you can listen to more on Programming Throwdown’s website: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/
Reach out to us via email: [email protected]
You can also follow Programming Throwdown on
Facebook | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Player.FM | Youtube
Join the discussion on our Discord
Help support Programming Throwdown through our Patreon
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161: Leveraging Generative AI Models with Hagay Lupesko
MosaicML’s VP Of Engineering, Hagay Lupesko, joins us today to discuss generative AI! We talk about how to use existing models as well as ways to finetune these models to a particular task or domain. 00:01:28 …
Show notes
MosaicML’s VP Of Engineering, Hagay Lupesko, joins us today to discuss generative AI! We talk about how to use existing models as well as ways to finetune these models to a particular task or domain.
00:01:28 Introductions
00:02:09 Hagay’s circuitous career journey
00:08:25 Building software for large factories
00:17:30 The reality of new technologies
00:28:10 AWS
00:29:33 Pytorch’s leapfrog advantage
00:37:24 MosaicML’s mission
00:39:29 Generative AI
00:44:39 Giant data models
00:57:00 Data access tips
01:10:31 MPT-7B
01:27:01 Careers in Mosaic
01:31:46 Farewells
Resources mentioned in this episode:Join the Programming Throwdown Patreon community today: https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Subscribe to the podcast on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@programmingthrowdown4793
Links:
- Hagay Lupesko:
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hagaylupesko/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/hagay_lupesko
- Github: https://github.com/lupesko
- MosaicML:
- Website: https://www.mosaicml.com/
- Careers: https://www.mosaicml.com/careers
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/MosaicML
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mosaicml/
- Others:
- Amp It Up (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/Amp-Unlocking-Hypergrowth-Expectations-Intensity/dp/1119836115
- Hugging Face Hub: https://huggingface.co/
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, you can listen to more on Programming Throwdown’s website: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/
Reach out to us via email: [email protected]
You can also follow Programming Throwdown on
Facebook | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Player.FM | Youtube
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Help support Programming Throwdown through our Patreon
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- Hagay Lupesko:
160: Position Localization
Where are you now? It’s a question that may seem easy to answer on the surface, but in truth hides more complexity than people expect. In today’s episode, we tackle the latest on AI, creative endeavors, and …
Show notes
Where are you now? It’s a question that may seem easy to answer on the surface, but in truth hides more complexity than people expect. In today’s episode, we tackle the latest on AI, creative endeavors, and more before diving into the meaty discussion of position localization.
00:01:13 Steam Deck
00:11:22 Summoning Salt on Mario
00:16:49 100k stars
00:24:26 ChatGPT spam call
00:25:31 Build Your Own DB (from scratch)
00:29:50 DuckDB
00:35:07 Jason has an idea
00:37:58 Fighting Fantasy Classics
00:41:52 Patrick’s bread
00:47:52 Support the show
00:53:54 Awkward CRM emails
00:56:07 Rill
01:00:29 Position localization in detail
01:17:15 Common filter
01:25:22 Simultaneous localization
01:28:59 FarewellsResources mentioned in this episode:
Join the Programming Throwdown Patreon community today: https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=hSubscribe to the podcast on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@programmingthrowdown4793
News/Links:- The History of Super Mario Bros 3 100% World Records (Summoning Salt)
- AutoGPT hits 100k stars
- Build Your Own Database from Scratch
- Asking generative art AI to render mathematical theorems
- DuckDB:
Book of the Show:
- Jason: Fighting Fantasy Classics
- Patrick: Evolutions in Bread: Artisan Pan Breads and Dutch-Oven Loaves at Home
Tool of the Show:
- Jason: Jinja
- Patrick: Rill
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, you can listen to more on Programming Throwdown’s website: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/
Reach out to us via email: [email protected]
You can also follow Programming Throwdown on
Facebook | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Player.FM | Youtube
Join the discussion on our Discord
Help support Programming Throwdown through our Patreon
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★Chapters
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