Programming Throwdown

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-c...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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 ...

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/ 

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/
    
    
...

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-stre...

• 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...

175: Resume Writing

Intro topic:  DSLR Photography vs Camera Phone

News/Links:

• Free Internet while flying by abusing edits to your profile name
  • https://robertheaton.com/pyskywifi/
• Making Animated Characters with AI Art
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSN76gb_Z28
• On 10x Engineers
  • https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/06/19/the-real-10x-developer-makes-their-whole-team-better/
• The Beau...

Intro topic:  Social Media Auto Responder LLM

News/Links:

• Amazon releases Amazon Q
  • https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/4/aws-announces-general-availability-of-amazon-q-the-most-capable-generative-ai-powered-assistant-for-accelerating-software-development-and-leveraging-companies-internal-data
• Cheap RiscV “Super Cluster” from Bitluni
  • DIY 256-Core RISC-V super computer
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4d3Pg...

173: Mocking and Unit Tests

Intro topic:  Headphones

News/Links:

• Texas A&M University Physics Festival
  • https://physicsfestival.tamu.edu/
• 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
  • https://arxi...

172: Transformers and Large Language Models

Intro topic: Is WFH actually WFC?

News/Links:

• Falsehoods Junior Developers Believe about Becoming Senior
  • https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/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...

Intro topic: Monitor setups

News/Links:

• BlueScuti, Willis, beats Tetris
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuJ5UuknsHU
• PalWorld accused of being an AI Product
  • https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/01/22/palworld-accused-of-using-genai-with-no-evidence-so-far/?sh=26a9651b4239
• 4 Billion if-statements to determine if a number is even or odd
  • https://andreasjhkarlsson.github.io/jekyll/updat...

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 Studen...

Intro topic: Testing your car battery

News/Links:

• Tech Layoffs still going on
  • https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/google-layoffs-california-companies-18465600.php 
• Real-time dreamy Cloudscapes with Volumetric Raymarching
  • https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/real-time-cloudscapes-with-volumetric-raymarching/
• Robot Rascals
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Rascals 
• Meta Quest 3 

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
  • https://smartguess.is/blog/your-estimate-is-less-than-that/
• Announcing python in excel
  • https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing-python-in-excel-combining-the-power-of-python-and-the/ba-p/3893439
  ...

Intro topic: Jogging Metrics

News/Links:

• Unholy LLM
  • https://huggingface.co/Undi95/Unholy-v1-12L-13B 
• The reverse red herring  
  • https://www.blameless.com/blog/the-reverse-red-herring
• The "ens–tification" of TikTok
  • https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ 
• Response letter to Godot is not the new Unity
  • https://sampruden.github.io/posts/godot-is-not-the-new-unity/
  • ht...