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
      
      

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