Intro topic: Asymmetric Returns





News/Links:



 * NanoChat by Andrej Karpathy
   * https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat
 * Pydantic AI
   * https://www.marktechpost.com/2025/03/25/pydanticai-advancing-generative-ai-agent-development-through-intelligent-framework-design/
 * 1000th Starlink this year
   * https://spaceflightnow.com/2025/05/16/live-coverage-spacex-plans-morning-launch-of-starlink-satellites-from-california/
 * ChatGPT Apps SDK
   * https://openai.com/index/introducing-apps-in-chatgpt/
     
     

Book of the Show

 * Patrick
   * The Will of the Many by James Islington
     * https://amzn.to/43IfU8Q
 * Jason
   * Interview with DHH (Founder of Ruby on Rails)
     * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vagyIcmIGOQ
       
       



Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h



Tool of the Show

 * Patrick
   * Factorio
     * https://www.factorio.com/ 
 * Jason
   * nip.io [http://nip.io] 



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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★ [https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown]

185: Workflow Orchestrators

184: Asynchronous Programming



Intro topic: AI Scams



News/Links:



 * Coding Adventure: Ray-Tracing Glass and Caustics (Sebastian Lague)
   * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA1KVZ1eOuA
 * Boson AI announces Higgs Audio V2
   * https://www.boson.ai/technologies/voice 
 * The Misconception that Almost Stopped AI [How Models Learn Part 1] (Welch Labs)
   * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrO20Jb-hy0
 * A mind-bending conversation with Peter Thiel
   * https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/podcasts/interesting-times-a-mind-bending-conversation-with-peter-thiel.html
     
     

Book of the Show

 * Patrick
   * The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien)
     * https://amzn.to/4mevuzE
 * Jason
   * NYT Word Games



Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h



Tool of the Show

 * Patrick
   * Escape Academy
     * https://escapeacademygame.com/en
 * Jason
   * Multi-modal LLMs to make calendar meetings
     * www.chatgpt.com
       [http://www.chatgpt.com]
       



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 

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★ [https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown]

184: Asynchronous Programming

00:00:00 Intro
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 Network

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★ [https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown]

183: Landing a Software Job in 2025

Intro topic: Getting an entry-level job



News/Links:



 * Mario Kart 64 Fully Decompiled
   * https://gbatemp.net/threads/mario-kart-64-decompilation-project-reaches-100-completion.671104/
 * Q-Learning is not yet scalable
   * https://seohong.me/blog/q-learning-is-not-yet-scalable/
 * Grover’s Algorithm
   * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQWpF2Gb-gU&vl=en
 * OrangePi has a RISC-V SBC
   * https://linuxgizmos.com/orangepi-rv2-a-cost-effective-risc-v-board-with-m-2-2280-slot-and-dual-gigabit-ethernet/
     
     

Book of the Show

 * Patrick
   * The Will of the Many (James Islington)
     * https://amzn.to/44Dznsz
 * Jason
   * The Intelligence Trap
     * https://amzn.to/3TqoKCB
       
       



Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h



Tool of the Show

 * Patrick
   *  Pokemon Odyssey
     * https://www.reddit.com/r/PokemonROMhacks/comments/1l9zdta/pok%C3%A9mon_odyssey_final_release/
 * Jason
   * Netflix Games
     * https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=6891422865930303475&hl=en_US
       
       



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)



★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★ [https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown]

182: AI Assisted Coding

Intro topic: Video Game Prices



News/Links:



 * Step one: Jump in the Lava - Abyssoft
   * https://youtu.be/WdadpHLAfdA?si=oXYnhB0EdkR_RaPE
 * Scalable world models for continuous control
   * https://www.tdmpc2.com/
 * Clever code is probably the worst code you could write - Engineer’s Codex
   * https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/clever-code-is-probably-the-worst
 * A new, open source text-to-speech model called Dia has arrived to challenge ElevenLabs, OpenAI and more
   * https://venturebeat.com/ai/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
     * https://amzn.to/44Dznsz
 * Jason
   * Metaphysics of War
     * https://amzn.to/4jMjvZ5
       
       



Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h



Tool of the Show

 * Patrick
   * Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket
 * Jason
   * Phi-4
     * https://huggingface.co/spaces/microsoft/phi-4-multimodal
       
       



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
 * Tools
   * Instrumentation
     * Export to Datadog / Grafana
   * Python: psutil & tracemalloc
   * Valgrind
 * 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



★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★ [https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown]

181: Memory Management

Intro topic: Grills



News/Links:



 * You can’t call yourself a senior until you’ve worked on a legacy project
   * https://www.infobip.com/developers/blog/seniors-working-on-a-legacy-project
 * Recraft might be the most powerful AI image platform I’ve ever used — here’s why
   * https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/ai-image-video/recraft-might-be-the-most-powerful-ai-image-platform-ive-ever-used-heres-why
 * NASA has a list of 10 rules for software development
   * https://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/cosc345/resources/nasa-10-rules.htm
 * AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT performance estimates leaked: 42% to 66% faster than Radeon RX 7900 GRE
   * https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/amd-estimates-of-radeon-rx-9070-xt-performance-leaked-42-percent-66-percent-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)
 * Jason: 
   * Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine
     * https://amzn.to/3ES4p5i
       
       



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 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
 * RLHF &  GRPO

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★ [https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown]

180: Reinforcement Learning

Intro topic: Lego event space & retail store: https://www.instagram.com/bambeecave 



News/Links:



 * StackOverflow Question Count Going Down 
   * https://gist.github.com/hopeseekr/f522e380e35745bd5bdc3269a9f0b132
 * DeepSeek claims its ‘reasoning’ model beats OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks
   * https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/20/deepseek-claims-its-reasoning-model-beats-openais-o1-on-certain-benchmarks/ 
 * Computer Science Papers Every Developer Should Read
   * https://newsletter.techworld-with-milan.com/p/computer-science-papers-every-developer
 * Nvidia Cosmos - an AI platform to change the future of robots and cars - wins Best of CES 2025
   * https://www.zdnet.com/article/nvidia-signs-largest-car-maker-toyota-to-use-its-self-driving-tech/ 

Book of the Show

 * Patrick: Alice’s Adventures in a differentiable wonderland
   * https://www.sscardapane.it/alice-book/
 * Jason: 
   * A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Hulu/Netflix/etc)



Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h



Tool of the Show

 * Patrick: 
   * Digseum
     * https://store.steampowered.com/app/3361470/Digseum/
 * 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
 * Tools
   * Whiteboard (the generic IRL one)
   * Post it notes
   * JIRA
   * Asana
   * OpenProject
 * Dealing with uncertainty
   * Buffering
     * Issues with recursive padding
   * Project planning Post-Mortems

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★ [https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown]

179: Project Planning

Intro topic: Smart homes



News/Links:



 * SpaceX Starship Flight Test Five / Six
   * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIKI7y3DTXk
 * ShareDB
   * https://github.com/share/sharedb
 * Orion AR Glasses
   * https://about.fb.com/news/2024/09/introducing-orion-our-first-true-augmented-reality-glasses/
 * Blade and Sorcery 1.0 is out
   * https://www.meta.com/experiences/blade-sorcery-nomad/2031826350263349/
     
     

Book of the Show

 * Patrick: 
   * The Book that Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence
     * https://amzn.to/4fry2XW
 * Jason: 
   * Masters of Doom
     * https://amzn.to/3YxuD3c
       
       



Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h



Tool of the Show

 * Patrick: 
   * Balatro
     * https://www.playbalatro.com/
 * Jason: 
   * Cursor IDE
     * https://www.cursor.com/
       
       

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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★ [https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown]

178: Working from Home

Intro topic:  Buying a Car



News/Links:



 * Cognitive Load is what Matters
   * https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load
 * Diffusion models are Real-Time Game Engines
   * https://gamengen.github.io/
 * Your Company Needs Junior Devs
   * https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2024/09/07/your-team-needs-juniors
 * Seamless Streaming / Fish Speech / LLaMA Omni
   * Seamless: https://huggingface.co/facebook/seamless-streaming
   * Fish: https://github.com/fishaudio/fish-speech 
   * LLaMA Omni: https://github.com/ictnlp/LLaMA-Omni 

Book of the Show

 * Patrick: 
   * Thought Emporium Youtube
     * https://youtu.be/8X1_HEJk2Hw?si=T8EaHul-QMahyUvQ
 * Jason: 
   * Novel Minds
     * https://www.novelminds.ai/
       
       



Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h



Tool of the Show

 * Patrick: 
   * Escape Simulator
     * https://pinestudio.com/games/escape-simulator/
 * Jason: 
   * Cursor IDE
     * https://www.cursor.com/
       
       

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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★ [https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown]

177: Vector Databases

 * 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 Quark
   * 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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★ [https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown]

176: MLOps at SwampUp

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.

Jason Gauci

Shows