Runtime Arguments

What is Information Theory?

• Information is not meaning
• Likely things need very few bits to communicate, maybe less than 1! Unlikely things need more bits.
• Entropy is in the eye of the beholder. It’s what you already know that informs your ability to extract meaning from a message. To one person, it’s just noise; to one who holds the encryption key, there may be way less information’s, but m much more valuable mea...

Jim walks through the classic 2038 problem — Unix's 32-bit signed timestamp (seconds since Jan 1, 1970) overflows on January 19, 2038, flipping negative and breaking anything that depends on file/time comparisons (e.g., Make). He compares it to Y2K, tracing the two-digit-year decision back to real storage constraints of the era — punch cards (80 characters each), early hard disks with fixed-size sectors — and argu...

It sounds like a productivity episode. It isn't. Everything changes, all the time; what you know is perishable, and so is what you've built. The scarce resource isn't time — everyone gets the same clock — it's attention, and where it lands. So how do you aim it? Wolf makes the case that the answer is values, and that every "should I adopt this?" decision you've ever made was a values call in disguise. Jim makes the case...

Jim leads a deep dive into HTTP — how it works, why it's still the backbone of the internet, and what's changed since Tim Berners-Lee built it at CERN in 1991. Wolf and Jim cover the protocol from request methods to modern performance upgrades, with detours into cookies, CORS, WebSockets, and the tools they reach for when debugging.

Topics covered

• What HTTP is: Hypertext Transfer Protocol, created by Tim Berners-Lee...

Wolf is at the "relies on tests" end of the spectrum. Jim is closer to the other end, somewhere around "how do I start?". He doesn’t need convincing. He just needs to get from zero (non-trivial) tests to one. Today’s episode is a candid discussion where Wolf addresses Jim’s obstacles and tries to "start Jim’s testing engine". With other stuff along the way (as always).

Links:

1. Pandoc celebrates 20 years
   ...

Wolf and Jim open with two AI stories from the week. First, the report that an OpenAI model "escaped its sandbox" and went after Hugging Face — a story Wolf finds infuriating precisely because the words don't go together. Reading the actual joint statement, it turns out the incident happened during an internal evaluation explicitly designed to push models toward advanced exploitation; the model found a zero-day in the package...

High-points on Rust: how it’s different, how it might help you even if you never actually use it on a project, why people care. … And some things Jim and Wolf have (separately) been working on.

Links:

1. SQL 'SELECT * (EXCEPT ...)' new functionality
   https://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2026/06/30/waiting-for-sql-202y-stockholm-meeting-report
2. Marlon recommended a book: “the book” (https://doc.rust-lang.org/boo...

Jim shares his adventure into running LLMs on his own hardware. For him it's less about saving money and more about privacy — working in healthcare, he can't send patient data to the cloud.

• App vs. model: Claude Code and Codex are applications, not models. Features like plan mode come from the app. (Wolf's "Opus Plan" is a Claude Code mode that uses Sonnet 4.6 for most work and Opus 4.8 for planning.)
• Ollama makes local mod...

You almost never have exactly the right amount of compute for the job. Either cores are sitting idle while your code runs on one, or you've got more problem than machine. This episode is about the two fundamental tools for closing that gap — and why picking the wrong one makes things slower, not faster.

Topics covered:

• Concurrency vs. parallelism — the core distinction: concurrency is a scheduling prob...

Jim talks about his struggles to get decent Wi-Fi in all corners of his house. The big issue is all of the numbers and codes and things they use to describe the different Wi-Fi  technologies.

Hosts:
Jim McQuillan can be reached at jam@RuntimeArguments.fm
Wolf can be reached at wolf@RuntimeArguments.fm

Follow us on Mastodon: @RuntimeArguments@hachyderm.io

If you have feedback for us, please send it to feedback@Runtim...

• Don't let the language be the problem — let the problem be the problem.
• You're not picking a language; you're picking an ecosystem.
• Boring is a feature.
• Resume-driven development is real, it's expensive, and everyone has done it at least once.
• Python is slow. But is your service slow? And is it slow because of Python?
• If your team is debating the language, you may not be debating the right thing.
• The language is not the product...

From rsh to certificates: The story of how we learned to log in safely.

SSH has been around for a long time, over 30 years in fact. In this episode we talk about what came before and why SSH is such a huge improvement. We talk about choices you can make in using SSH, such as choosing the right key algorithm and how to securely store those private keys and how to distribute the public keys.

Hosts:
Jim McQuillan can be reached at ja...

You already have an editor. You already love it. Nothing we say is going to change that — and we know it. But your editor shapes how you think about editing, which means there are problems it could solve for you that you've never even thought to have. We walk through the real differences between editors, IDEs, and the technologies underneath them — TreeSitter, LSPs, the Debug Adapter Protocol — and talk honestly a...

If you've been using Linux on the desktop you almost certainly have been using the X Window System.

In this episode we dive into what that is, where it came from and what kinds of choices you have.

We get into the toolkits like GTK and Qt and talk about desktop environments like Gnome and KDE.

Then we get into the future, namely Wayland.

If you want to run an X client application on a remote server, you need to have an Xserver running ...

If you've ever debugged a program, looked for lost socks or tried to figure out why red spots are developing on your skin, then Bayes' rule was almost certainly used to help you on your journey. Even if you don't know anything about it. Humans have evolved to solve problems but along the way, we as a species sometimes fall for traps or fail to consider all the evidence when figuring things out.

In this episode, Wolf explains what Ba...

Containers have become the standard way for deploying applications on servers and the web and sometimes even on the desktop.

In this episode we dive into what containers are, how they work, how to build them and what you can do with them.

Whether you are using containers in your development environment, deploying on servers in your data center or as a cloud service, containers save time, handle dependencies, increase security and jus...

In episode 8, Wolf talks about using AI to write code; and a bit of the landscape around that. In this episode, he describes what he’s learned on his journey from just coding to using AI as a major tool in his toolbox for addressing friction in every area of (mostly) work and (a bit of) life.

Less about the landscape and more about the applications, the reasoning, the big-picture, and having the right expectations.

Links:

Claude...

Jim brings his vast knowledge of Databases and dives into the history, some theory, some best practices and some choices you can make.

Links:

Claude best practices guide - https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices

Passkeys Server and Client - https://github.com/Runtime-Arguments/passkeys-demo

Webassembly History - https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/ten-years-of-webassembly-a-retrospective

E.F.Codd - Relational Model of Data for ...

Git is an amazing tool for managing your source code. Lots of people use it every day but most people barely scratch the surface of what git can do.

In this episode, we dive in and explain lots of features from the simple to the complex.

Links:

Julia Evans Wizard Zines

https://wizardzines.com - The main page

https://wizardzines.com/comics/inside-git/ - The git specific 'Zine

Hosts:
Jim McQuillan can be reached at jam@RuntimeArguments....