For the holiday we're doing another news roundup, although it's mostly about data centers and AI to be honest.  

Inside the Data Centers...

Korean Data Center

Oracle Data Center Debt

Cloudflare Outage

Rust Adoption Drives Android Memory Safety Bugs Below 20%

Adversarial Poetry

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Erik became fascinated with CRDTs while working on a project, so we're talking about how they work, how they simplify some distributed systems, and how they might protect you from zombies.

Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types

A Comprehensive Study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types

Counters - Aviral Goel

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This episode is about the Turing Test, and Alan Turing's original description of the test in Computing Machinery and Intelligence.  We also discuss a recent work by two UCSD researchers that claims that current LLMs pass the Turing Test.

Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test 

Pragmatic Engineer Podcast with Armin Ronacher

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In 1988 Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC coined the term "ubiquitous computing", and in 1991 he spelled out the particulars of this concept in a Scientific American article called "The Computer for the 21st Century".  We discuss whether or not Weiser's vision was achieved.  It's hard to argue that computers are now all around us, but it doesn't seem like they've faded into the background as Weiser hoped.

The Computer for the 21st Century

Designing Calm Technology

Toward Ubiquitous Operating Systems: Lessons from the Field

Ambient Computing Has Arrived: Here's What It Looks Like in My House

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This week we're talking about regular expressions, aka, regex.  These are a favorite tool of programmers, but they also have a dark side.  Do regex cause more problems than they solve?  Can they be evil?  We also discuss the origins of regular expressions, formal language theory, and finite automata.

Now You've Got Two Problems

XKCD: Regular Expressions

Representation of Events in Nerve Nets and Finite Automata

OWASP: ReDOS

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A continuation of our discussion about the history of Unix and its development at Bell Labs.  Erik wonders why Unix became successful and which features were novel and important. Mike just wants to talk about cool pranks Group 1127 pulled off.

Unix: A History and Memoir - Brian Kernighan

The Unix Time-Sharing System

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This week we talk about the early days of Unix, primarily based on Brian Kernighan's book Unix: A History and Memoir, about his days at Bell Labs and the creation of Unix and C by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and other luminaries.

https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552

https://dsf.berkeley.edu/cs262/unix.pdf

https://cs3210.cc.gatech.edu/r/unix6.pdf

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This week we dip our toes into the river of theoretical computer science and immediately drown.  We discuss the amazing and surprising result of researcher Ryan Williams about how space is a more powerful resource in computing than time.

For Algorithms, Memory Is a Far More Powerful Resource Than Time | WIRED

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17779

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JuWdXrCmWg

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This week we try to make sense of what were once called "NoSQL" databases, focusing on the early entries into the field like Bigtable, Dynamo and Cassandra.  We try to explain how they differ from prior database systems and what motivated their creation.

Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data

Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store

Cassandra - A Decentralized Structured Storage System

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This week we host our friends Bobak Farzin and Kevin Fahey to talk about their experiences building applications with AI tools.  Both Bob and Kevin are very tech savvy in different ways, but neither is a full-time software developer.  Yet both have had good experiences building functional applications with tools like Cursor and Claude Code.  We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of these tools, and the challenges that Bob and Kevin found in building their own software.

• “Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)”
• Vibe scraping and vibe coding a schedule app for Open Sauce 2025 entirely on my phone
• “Will the future of software development run on vibes?” Ars Technica

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