Programming Throwdown

• RAM prices going through the roof . Tom’s Hardware
  • https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/memory-prices-climb-500-percent-in-12-months-up-to-10x-the-lowest-ever-tracked-prices-128gb-of-ddr5-now-usd3-399
• Mario meet Pareto
  • https://www.mayerowitz.io/blog/mario-meets-pareto
• Qwen 3.8 versus Muse Glimmer
  • https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/serve-qwen-3-8-27b-fast/
• Everyone should know SIMD
  • https://mitchellh.com/writing/everyone-should-know-simd
    
    

• Patrick
  • Waves in an Impossible Sea by Matt Strassler
    • https://amzn.to/4xXnbOK
• Jason
  • Diffusion World Modeling
    • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.12399
      
      

• Patrick
  • Nubby’s Number Factory
• Jason
  • Opencode https://opencode.ai/
    
    

• Managing llm uncertainty
• Polling / Timed Loops
  • Intelligent cronjobs
• Autoresearch
  • Andrej Karpathy
  • Recursive Self Improvement
• Verifiers
• Terminating conditions
• Managing context
  • Subagents
• Best Practices
  • Watchdogs to correct loops that are stuck/aborted

• Flow matching versus diffusion models
  • https://youtu.be/firXjwZ_6KI?is=QMq8DcCsXTTktOuE 
• OpenCV 5
  • https://opencv.org/opencv-5/
• Claude fable beats pokemon with no harness
  • https://youtu.be/Ty_50J84fMY?si=EJ1KjZCZegipfCsV 
• Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI? 
  • https://archive.ph/nKEVw
    
    

• Patrick
  • Strength of the Few - James Islington
    • https://amzn.to/4pmr10T
• Jason
  • Descender - Jeff Lemire
    • https://amzn.to/3QKhp3l

• Patrick
  • No Man’s Sky
• Jason
  • Paperlib https://paperlib.app/en/ 
    
    

• Making decisions with AI
  • Action-Value (called a Q model): What is the long-term value of making a decision at a position
  • Policy: What action should I take (must be a distribution)
  • Value (called a V model): What is the value of a position (depends on policy)
  • Advantage/Disadvantage: difference in value given two policies
  • When advantage is +, do that more.
• Model-Free
  • Look at the current situation and suggest an action
  • Run that action in the real world and measure the effect
  • Use that measurement to suggest better actions next time
• Model-Based
  • Observe rollouts (sequences of situations) and learn the dynamics
  • Choose an action, use your dynamics model to measure the consequence
  • Potentially do MPC (try many actions and choose the best)
• World Models
  • Observe many many rollouts and learn a full forward model (how to create the input in the future)
  • Train a policy & value inside the world model
  • Deploy the policy and fine-tune based on the real world
    
    

• Artemis II
  • https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-welcomes-record-setting-artemis-ii-moonfarers-back-to-earth/
• Gemma 4
  • https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/gemma-4/
• Hatetris
  • https://qntm.org/files/hatetris/hatetris.html
• Dripwarts: School of Drip
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnHjz8jvWFk 
    
    

• Patrick
  • Project Hail Mary
    • https://amzn.to/4cQdxVa

• Jason
  • FF6 T-Edition
    • https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/6339/
      
      

• Progression
  • Better Code Completion
    • Intellisense
    • Copilot
  • Cowriting 
    • Cursor
    • Roo Code 
  • Longer Horizon
    • Claude Code
    • Codex
    • Gemini CLI
  • Swarm
• Guidelines
  • Git
  • Planning
  • Task decomposition
  • AGENTS.md
  • Adjusting vs Restarting
  • Skepticism
• Future of software engineering?
  
  

186: Becoming a Manager

Intro topic: plastic welding kits

News/Links:

• Parse.bot, turn any website into an API
  • https://www.parse.bot/
• Gemini 3
  • https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3/
• Depth Anything 3
  • https://github.com/ByteDance-Seed/Depth-Anything-3
• Wan 2.2 (run on runpod)
  • https://www.runpod.io/
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick
  • The Thinking Game (DeepMind documentary)
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ
• Jason
  • Plato: The Republic
    • https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1497
      
      

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick
  • Core Keeper
    • Pc/Switch/Xbox/Playstation 
• Jason
  • Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic
    • PC

Topic: Becoming a Manager

• What is a Manager
  • Opportunity
  • Results + Retention
  • Sizing
    • Hiring
      • Philosophy
      • Interviews
    • Downsizing
• How to Manage
  • Company Goals / OKRs
    • Breaking down & claiming company goals.
    • Balancing inspirational & practical goals
  • Coaching
    • One-on-ones
    • Career planning
  • Performance 
    • Motivation
    • Performance Management Review
    • Compensation
• Choosing to become a manager
  • Balancing personal and company incentives
  • Why Manage
    • Mentorship
    • Build relationships
  • Why to not manage
    • Less time for your original joy (coding)
    • Less technical influence
    • More uncertainty and less closure
  • How to transition back to Engineer
    • Take the time/energy to get ramped up
    • Act as an advisor to your manager

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-california/
• ChatGPT Apps SDK
  • https://openai.com/index/introducing-apps-in-chatgpt/
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick
  • The Will of the Many by James Islington
    • https://amzn.to/43IfU8Q
• Jason
  • Interview with DHH (Founder of Ruby on Rails)
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vagyIcmIGOQ
      
      

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick
  • Factorio
    • https://www.factorio.com/ 
• Jason
  • nip.io 

Topic: Workflow Orchestrators

• Why
  • Batch jobs (embarrassingly parallel)
  • Long-running tasks (e.g. transcoding video)
  • Checkpointing/resuming
• How
  • Message Queues
  • Containerization
  • Worker Pools & Autoscaling
  • History & Backfill
• Steps to run workflows:
  • Containerize the workflow definition and send to the cloud
  • Containerize all the individual tasks
  • Submit job(s)
• Examples
  • Airflow
    • Legacy but dominant
  • Dagster
    • Great UX for python developers
  • Temporal: https://temporal.io/
    • The new hotness
  • Ray
    • Low-level but very powerful
  • Kubeflow
    • Designed for ML workflows, integrated dashboard

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 

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 Compensation
01:35:21 Interview Horror Stories
01:39:29 How Do You Deal With Fake AI Applicants?
01:45:32 The Bidding Network

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.com/orangepi-rv2-a-cost-effective-risc-v-board-with-m-2-2280-slot-and-dual-gigabit-ethernet/
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick
  • The Will of the Many (James Islington)
    • https://amzn.to/44Dznsz
• Jason
  • The Intelligence Trap
    • https://amzn.to/3TqoKCB
      
      

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick
  •  Pokemon Odyssey
    • https://www.reddit.com/r/PokemonROMhacks/comments/1l9zdta/pok%C3%A9mon_odyssey_final_release/
• Jason
  • Netflix Games
    • https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=6891422865930303475&hl=en_US
      
      

Topic: 

• Why
  • Speed up development
  • Catch errors faster than type checking/compiling
  • Writing tedious boilerplate code
  • Ask questions and learn local information
  • Look good for hiring managers
• How
  • Extensions for VSCode & other IDEs for inline suggestions
  • Chat with a selection/file
  • Command-line Tools run at the root directory
  • Local vs Cloud
• Examples
  • Copilot (VSCode extension)
    • Use the experimental mode
  • Cursor (Custom IDE)
    • Jumps to suggest changes in other places
    • Similar to copilot experimental mode
  • RooCode (VSCode extension)

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 Dia has arrived to challenge ElevenLabs, OpenAI and more
  • https://venturebeat.com/ai/a-new-open-source-text-to-speech-model-called-dia-has-arrived-to-challenge-elevenlabs-openai-and-more/
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick
  • The Muscle Ladder - Jeff Nippard
    • https://amzn.to/44Dznsz
• Jason
  • Metaphysics of War
    • https://amzn.to/4jMjvZ5
      
      

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick
  • Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket
• Jason
  • Phi-4
    • https://huggingface.co/spaces/microsoft/phi-4-multimodal
      
      

Topic: Memory Management

• Motivation
  • Avoid thrashing / crashes
  • Allocate resources efficiently
  • Keep high uptime
• Where
  • OS Level
    • Heap management
    • Virtual Memory
  • Language/Compiler Level
    • Cpp
    • Garbage collection
    • Ownership
• Tools
  • Instrumentation
    • Export to Datadog / Grafana
  • Python: psutil & tracemalloc
  • Valgrind
• What to do when your program uses too much memory?
  • Reduce data sizes
    • Compression
    • References
    • Lazy initializer
    • Generators & Back Pressure
  • Ring buffers
  • Arena allocators
  • Disk based caching

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 list of 10 rules for software development
  • https://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/cosc345/resources/nasa-10-rules.htm
• AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT performance estimates leaked: 42% to 66% faster than Radeon RX 7900 GRE
  • https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/amd-estimates-of-radeon-rx-9070-xt-performance-leaked-42-percent-66-percent-faster-than-radeon-rx-7900-gre 

Book of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • The Player of Games (Ian M Banks)
    • https://a.co/d/1ZpUhGl (non-affiliate)
• Jason: 
  • Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine
    • https://amzn.to/3ES4p5i
      
      

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • Pokemon Sword and Shield
• Jason: 
  • Features and Labels ( https://fal.ai )

Topic: Reinforcement Learning

• Three types of AI
  • Supervised Learning
  • Unsupervised Learning
  • Reinforcement Learning
• Online vs Offline RL
• Optimization algorithms
  • Value optimization
    • SARSA
    • Q-Learning
  • Policy optimization
    • Policy Gradients
    • Actor-Critic
    • Proximal Policy Optimization
• Value vs Policy Optimization
  • Value optimization is more intuitive (Value loss)
  • Policy optimization is less intuitive at first (policy gradients)
  • Converting values to policies in deep learning is difficult
• Imitation Learning
  • Supervised policy learning
  • Often used to bootstrap reinforcement learning
• Policy Evaluation
  • Propensity scoring versus model-based
• Challenges to training RL model
  • Two optimization loops
    • Collecting feedback vs updating the model
  • Difficult optimization target
    • Policy evaluation
• RLHF &  GRPO