I’ve been confusing Don with frontier-lab links late at night for months.

Ilya Sutskever told a NeurIPS audience that pre-training as we know it would unquestionably end. There’s only one internet, and the data isn’t growing. The frontier labs call this the pre-training wall.

A leaked Google memo from 2023 argued they had no moat. R1 is on GitHub. Llama is on Hugging Face. …

Kate Gregory has been writing C++ for over forty years. Books, keynotes, a consulting firm she built from the ground up. At sixty-three, she’s one of the most experienced programmers alive.

She surveyed hundreds of software engineers about getting older. What scares you? What’s changed? What have you lost? The things people feared most — memory, stamina, keeping up — weren’t the …

Corey told me about his AI cat reel problem. He found these AI-generated cat videos hilarious. Who makes these? He kept sending them to his wife. Then he tried to stop watching and he couldn’t.

So I went down the rabbit hole of how social media algorithms actually work. It starts simple. Upvote, downvote, sort by time. But by 2017 Facebook has a metric that quietly reshapes what two billion people …

Multiple VS Code windows. “Agent stopping” in a robot voice. A laptop stand on the treadmill so Claude can keep working while I run. The Big Rich sitting unread by the fireplace while I check if the migration’s done.

Somewhere along the way, I started reorganizing my life around keeping the machine spinning. Claude Code had become my universal paperclip clicker. This is me trying …

Ron Garret left JPL for a 100-person startup he’d just discovered on Usenet. Four a.m. alarms. Burbank to San Jose on Southwest. A rented room in Susan Wojcicki’s house.

He expected the search engine engineering and instead he got asked to build ad serving. In Java and with JSPs and no syntax highlighting and no delimiter balancing.

Launch week was a stampede and then a window on his screen fills …

How do you accomplish something massive over time? I’ve had the chance to meet with a number of exceptional software developers and it’s something I always wonder about.

Today, I might have an answer with the incredible story of Yann Collet.

Yann was a project manager who went from being burnt out on corporate life to becoming one of the most sought-after developers in the world. What …

I’ve been on many projects that get canceled. We’re building cool stuff. We’re going above and beyond, and we’re excited. But the project encounters reality, shifting priorities, or budgeting constraints, and the work never goes anywhere. It always feels tragic, but then I move on.

But what if I didn’t let a project get canceled? What if I couldn’t accept that? …

I believe that getting underrepresented groups into software development is a good thing. This is not a controversial opinion until you start talking about felons.

Today’s guest is Rick Wolter. He’s an iOS developer who served 18 years in prison for second degree murder. Rick killed somebody and for some that’s all they need to know about Rick. But today’s episode is about …

I recently got an email from Jeff Shrager, who said he’d been working hard to solve a mystery about some famous code.

Eliza, the chatbot, was built in 1964, and she didn’t answer questions like Alexa or Siri. She asked questions. She was a therapist chatbot and quickly became famous after being described in a 1964 paper.

But here is the mystery. We’re not sure how the original …

Today I talk to Dan Robinson about trying to get someone their money back on Ethereum. He’s going to be battling this murky world of blockchain high-frequency bots. Along the way, we’ll learn how trades are executed on Ethereum and a bit of game theory and political philosophy.

It’s an entertaining peek into a world that seems like pure science fiction to me, a world where …

Lost treasure. Conspiracy theories. Impossible tech demos.

Jan Sloot claimed to have invented revolutionary data compression that could fit a full movie into a tiny smart card chip. Top executives and investors witnessed his demos and became true believers, ready to bankroll this company into the stratosphere.

But was it all an elaborate illusion?

Join me as I unravel the perplexing story of Jan …

Can a single line of code change the way we see science, policy, and trust?

In this episode we explore the “Climategate” scandal that erupted from leaked emails and code snippets, fueling doubts about climate science. What starts as an investigation into accusations of fraud leads to an unexpected journey through the messy reality of data science, legacy code struggles, and the complex …

I recently got an email from Jeff Shrager, who said he’d been working hard to solve a mystery about some famous code.

Eliza, the chatbot, was built in 1964, and she didn’t answer questions like Alexa or Siri. She asked questions. She was a therapist chatbot and quickly became famous after being described in a 1964 paper.

But here is the mystery. We’re not sure how the original …

On June 1st, 2014, the following question showed up on hacker news:

Why is 80 characters, the standard limit for code width. Why 80?

Why not? 79 or 81 or even a hundred.

So you probably know what happens next. People started to post their opinions and the comments and other people started to disagree. The posts spread around the internet.

So that is going to be today’s show: Let’s …

Learning to code can feel impossible. Like facing a sheer rock wall with no ropes or harnesses. But what if there was a path up the mountain? A trail blazed smooth by master coders who went before?

In this episode, we’ll follow that path. We’ll hear the stories of legends like Seymour Papert, who championed active, project-based learning. Of Fred Brooks, who discovered that pairing …

When you work on your computer, there are so many things you take for granted: operating systems, programming languages, they all have to come from somewhere.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, that somewhere was Bell Labs, and the operating system they were building was UNIX.

They were building more than just an operating system though. They were building a way to work with computers that had never …

Have you ever had a unique approach to a problem and been excited to use it, but you’re met with skepticism?

Today’s story: what happens if you take someone who’s passionate about LISP and put them in an organization where that’s just not how they write software.

Today’s story is about getting LISP into space.

The year is 1988. The USSR still existed. Ronald Reagan …

CPAN was the first open-source software module repository. And on this day, Aug 1st, in 1995, CPAN was first announced to a private group of PERL users.

And why does this matter? Who is still using PERL anyhow? CPAN inspired everything that would follow: npm, maven, cargo, nuget, hackage, ruby gems, python pypi and so on.

If you are building things today by pulling in various packages from various …

David Shayer worked at Apple for 14 years, and he has a wild experience to share. Apple has a unique culture, and David will give us an insider view of what it was like for him at Apple during the 2000s, roughly between 2001 to 2015 when Apple transformed into the powerhouse that it is today.

David worked as a Software Engineer but for the hardware organization with Apple. He worked on a few …

Shai Almog worked at Sun on Mobile JVMs just as phones started to turn from phones into something else.

Sun had deep expertise in mobile development, and unique engineering-driven culture, and relationships with manufacturers and operators. And yet internal politics and the collapse of its server market made it hard to get things done.

At Sun, as the mobile market changed, Shai and his friend Chen …

On this day in 2014, “lame april fools’ jokes” were banned from hacker news.

Today in our first This-Day-in-History segment, I want to share some of history not just of April Fools’, but of tech pranks in general, all leading up to 2014.

Why were pranks and April Fools’ jokes traditionally celebrated in tech? Why are they now considered lame? And is there anything we …