Programming Throwdown

Intro topic: Testing your car battery

News/Links:

• Tech Layoffs still going on
  • https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/google-layoffs-california-companies-18465600.php 
• Real-time dreamy Cloudscapes with Volumetric Raymarching
  • https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/real-time-cloudscapes-with-volumetric-raymarching/
• Robot Rascals
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Rascals 
• Meta Quest 3 
  • https://www.theverge.com/23906313/meta-quest-3-review-vr-mixed-reality-headset
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick:
  • HyperLogLog Paper
    • https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/40671.pdf 
• Jason: 
  • Eureka! NVIDIA Research Breakthrough Puts New Spin on Robot Learning 
    • https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2023/10/20/eureka-robotics-research/ 

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

Tool of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • Techtonica: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1457320/Techtonica/ 
• Jason:
  • ESP32 development board: https://amzn.to/3Qpmb20 
  • WEMOS

Topic: HyperLogLog

• Motivation
  • Cardinality Counting
• LinearCounting
  • Hash + expectation of collision based on how full
  • Bloom Filter
• LogLog
  • Use first N bits as bucket
  • Use max sequential 0s in each bucket
  • Average
• HyperLogLog
  • Handle empty buckets
  • Use correction factor like linear counting for low counts (number of empty buckets) and high counts
• Distributing
  • Transfer bucket counts

Intro topic: What are expectations on developers that have nothing to do with programming

News/Links:

• Pushing for a lower dev estimate is like negotiating weather with a Meteorologist
  • https://smartguess.is/blog/your-estimate-is-less-than-that/
• Announcing python in excel
  • https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing-python-in-excel-combining-the-power-of-python-and-the/ba-p/3893439
• 7 Habits of Highly Effective Software Engineers
  • https://makingsmallercircles.com/articles/7-habits-of-highly-effective-software-engineers/
• Raspberry pi 5 begins shipping
  • https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-5-Shipping
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick:
  • Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone Illustrated Edition
    • https://amzn.to/3St3L35
• Jason: 
  • The Pete and Sebastian Show
    • https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-pete-and-sebastian-show/id570256898

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

Tool of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • Obsidian
    • obsidian.md
• Jason:
  • Ink by Inkle
    • https://github.com/inkle/ink
      
      

Topic: Godot

• What is a game engine?
  • Graphics, animation, particle effects
  • Tilemaps
  • Entity component systems
  • Physics
  • Sound
  • I/O
  • Input handling (touchscreen, joystick)
  • GDScript
• Why use a game engine?
  • Portability
  • Allow for testing individual components of the game
  • Libraries for ads, in-app-purchases
• Godot
  • Open source
  • Focused on 2-D but now many 3-D features
  • Great development environment
• AI Hero
  • Started in phaser (development rut)
  • Moved to Godot, rapid prototyping

Intro topic: Jogging Metrics

News/Links:

• Unholy LLM
  • https://huggingface.co/Undi95/Unholy-v1-12L-13B 
• The reverse red herring  
  • https://www.blameless.com/blog/the-reverse-red-herring
• The "ens–tification" of TikTok
  • https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ 
• Response letter to Godot is not the new Unity
  • https://sampruden.github.io/posts/godot-is-not-the-new-unity/
  • https://gist.github.com/reduz/cb05fe96079e46785f08a79ec3b0ef21
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick:
  • Math Games with Bad Drawings by Ben Orlin
  • https://amzn.to/48qlg9A
• Jason: 
  • The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates
  • https://amzn.to/3LChBff

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

Tool of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • Factorio (Desktop Game)
• Jason:
  • AI Hero (iOS and Android)

Topic: Desktop user interfaces

• What is a user interface?
• Web and Mobile UI toolkits
• Desktop options
  • Qt
    • Cross platform, custom UI elements
    • Qt creator, code generator
  • WxWidgets
    • Cross platform, uses native UI elements 
    • WxFormDesigner, code generation
    • Can look different on different operating systems
  • Electron
    • Local nodejs webserver
    • Html/JavaScript technology
    • Requires interprocess communication to use other languages  
  • Jupyter notebooks
    • Mathematica-like notebook 
    • Not for distribution 
  • Streamlit
    • Python to web compiler
  • Game Engines
    • Unity, Godot, Unreal
• Tips for building desktop UI
  • UI is slow (startup time, interaction time)
  • Separate the UI from the engine & business logic

- pganalyze: https://pganalyze.com/

- Weekly series "5mins of Postgres": https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDV_1Dz2Ixgl1nT_3DUZVFw

- How Postgres chooses which index to use: https://pganalyze.com/blog/how-postgres-chooses-index

- CMU databases courses: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/courses/

- Postgres community: https://www.postgresql.org/community/

As well as social links:

- Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@lukas

- Twitter/X: @pganalyze, @LukasFittl

- GitHub: @pganalyze, @lfittl

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lfittl/ , https://www.linkedin.com/company/pganalyze/

Intro topic: Revisiting the power of Spreadsheets

News/Links:

• LK-99 Isn’t a Superconductor
  • https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02585-7
• Normalizing Flows
  • https://pyro.ai/examples/normalizing_flows_i.html
• How is llama.cpp possible?
  • https://finbarr.ca/how-is-llama-cpp-possible/
• Chat with open source large language models
  • https://chat.lmsys.org/
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick: Math with Bad Drawings by Ben Orlin
  • https://amzn.to/44dsgDz
• Jason: 
  • Overboard! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.InkleLtd.Overboard Nhl=en_US&gl=US 

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

Tool of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • ffmprovisr https://amiaopensource.github.io/ffmprovisr/
• Jason:
  • Pandas read_ods() read_excel()

Topic: Differential Equations

• Why should programmers learn about DiffEq
  • Law of Large Numbers
• What are differential equations?
  • When you know the rate of change
  • EigenVectors & EigenValues
  • What is Jacobian What is Jacobian? | The right way of thinking derivatives and integrals
    
    
• Special cases
  • Partial Differential Equations
  • Ordinary Differential Equations
• Why solvers are important
  • Numerical Stability at larger step sizes
  • Example: https://medium.com/@pukumarathe/eulers-method-and-runge-kutta-4th-order-method-in-python-b4a0068a8ebe 
• Fun Examples
  • Predator-Prey relationships in scipy
    • https://scientific-python.readthedocs.io/en/latest/notebooks_rst/3_Ordinary_Differential_Equations/02_Examples/Lotka_Volterra_model.html 
  • Physics Engines for games
    • https://youtu.be/52n2qKgwW_Q 
  • PageRank
    • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08973.pdf 

Things to consider when choosing a database

• Speed & Latency
• Consistency, ACID Compliance
• Scalability
• Language support & Developer Experience
• Relational vs. Non-relational (SQL vs. NoSQL)
• Data types
• Security
• Database environment
  • Client vs Server access

Info on Kris & Harper:

• Website: harperdb.io
• Twitter: @harperdbio, @kriszyp
• Github: @HarperDB, @kriszyp

Episode 163 - Recursion

Intro topic: Electric Cars

News/Links:

• Snake Game in 101 Bytes in a QR Code
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/15ab4ct/my_qr_code_snake_game_is_now_only_101_bytes/
• Superconductor Rumors abound
  • https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/08/whats-going-on-with-the-reports-of-a-room-temperature-superconductor/
• OpenWorm
  • https://github.com/openworm/OpenWorm
• Creator of vim passes away
  • https://news.itsfoss.com/vim-creator-passed-away/
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick:
  • Little Book of Common Sense Investing by Jack Bogle https://amzn.to/43YqANR
• Jason: 
  • Mistborn Saga: https://amzn.to/3DJkUN8

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

Tool of the Show

• Jason:
  • reMarkable https://remarkable.com/
• Patrick: 
  • Stellarium (iOS and Android)

Topic: Recursion

• What is it
  • Divide-And-Conquer
  • Fibonacci numbers
• How to (not) teach recursion
• Practical Applications
  • Graph operations
    • Tree retrieval, balancing
    • Graph Search
  • Spatial partitioning
• Pitfalls
  • Stack size
• How to solve problems with recursion
  • (1) Consider the base cases
  • (2) Build the recursive step
  • (3) Look for ways the recursion will not terminate and fix
  • (4) (rest are optional) Remove global contexts
  • (5) Add memoization
  • (6) Build solutions incrementally

In the latest episode of Programming Throwdown, we delve into the captivating world of interactive fiction. We explore: Wordnet, Inform, and how games in the past have been the forerunners of today’s NLP challenges.

00:00:22 Introductions

00:00:39 To hard mode or not to hard mode

00:08:58 No moats in Google

00:16:37 Stable Diffusion blows Jason’s mind

00:21:31 Putting beats together

00:23:38 GPT4All

00:27:44 White Sand

00:35:28 Fortuna

00:38:55 Patrick’s ‘dirty’ secret

00:47:20 Wordnet

00:53:56 Procedural generation

00:57:29 On tabletop RPGs

01:00:48 Inform

01:07:27 Farewells

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Join the Programming Throwdown Patreon community today: https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Subscribe to the podcast on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@programmingthrowdown4793

News/Links:

• Google: We have no moat and neither does OpenAI
  • https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither
• Stable Diffusion QR Codes
  • https://stable-diffusion-art.com/qr-code/ 
• Beginning to Make Music
  • https://learningmusic.ableton.com/
• GPT4All
  • https://gpt4all.io/index.html
• Wordnet:
  • https://wordnet.princeton.edu/
• Inform:
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform

Book of the Show

• Patrick:
  • White Sand https://amzn.to/43CPMKA
• Jason: 
  • The Fortuna https://www.generativefiction.com/

Tool of the Show

• Jason:
  • Gatsby.js https://www.gatsbyjs.com/
• Patrick: 
  • Peglin https://store.steampowered.com/app/1296610/Peglin/ 

If you’ve enjoyed this episode, you can listen to more on Programming Throwdown’s website: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/

Reach out to us via email: [email protected]

You can also follow Programming Throwdown on 

Facebook | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Player.FM | Youtube

Join the discussion on our Discord

Help support Programming Throwdown through our Patreon

MosaicML’s VP Of Engineering, Hagay Lupesko, joins us today to discuss generative AI!  We talk about how to use existing models as well as ways to finetune these models to a particular task or domain.

00:01:28 Introductions

00:02:09 Hagay’s circuitous career journey

00:08:25 Building software for large factories

00:17:30 The reality of new technologies

00:28:10 AWS

00:29:33 Pytorch’s leapfrog advantage

00:37:24 MosaicML’s mission

00:39:29 Generative AI

00:44:39 Giant data models

00:57:00 Data access tips

01:10:31 MPT-7B

01:27:01 Careers in Mosaic

01:31:46 Farewells

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Join the Programming Throwdown Patreon community today: https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Subscribe to the podcast on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@programmingthrowdown4793

Links:

• Hagay Lupesko:
  • Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hagaylupesko/
  • Twitter: https://twitter.com/hagay_lupesko
  • Github: https://github.com/lupesko
• MosaicML:
  • Website: https://www.mosaicml.com/
  • Careers: https://www.mosaicml.com/careers
  • Twitter: https://twitter.com/MosaicML
  • Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mosaicml/
• Others:
  • Amp It Up (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/Amp-Unlocking-Hypergrowth-Expectations-Intensity/dp/1119836115
  • Hugging Face Hub: https://huggingface.co/

If you’ve enjoyed this episode, you can listen to more on Programming Throwdown’s website: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/

Reach out to us via email: [email protected]

You can also follow Programming Throwdown on 

Facebook | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Player.FM | Youtube

Join the discussion on our Discord

Help support Programming Throwdown through our Patreon

Where are you now? It’s a question that may seem easy to answer on the surface, but in truth hides more complexity than people expect. In today’s episode, we tackle the latest on AI, creative endeavors, and more before diving into the meaty discussion of position localization.

00:01:13 Steam Deck
00:11:22 Summoning Salt on Mario
00:16:49 100k stars
00:24:26 ChatGPT spam call
00:25:31 Build Your Own DB (from scratch)
00:29:50 DuckDB
00:35:07 Jason has an idea
00:37:58 Fighting Fantasy Classics
00:41:52 Patrick’s bread
00:47:52 Support the show
00:53:54 Awkward CRM emails
00:56:07 Rill
01:00:29 Position localization in detail
01:17:15 Common filter
01:25:22 Simultaneous localization
01:28:59 Farewells

Resources mentioned in this episode:
Join the Programming Throwdown Patreon community today: https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Subscribe to the podcast on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@programmingthrowdown4793

News/Links:

• The History of Super Mario Bros 3 100% World Records (Summoning Salt)
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EsFyogVvkw
• AutoGPT hits 100k stars
  • https://twitter.com/AlphaSignalAI/status/1649524105647906819
• Build Your Own Database from Scratch
  • https://build-your-own.org/database/
• Asking generative art AI to render mathematical theorems
  • https://twitter.com/TivadarDanka/status/1649721970886594561
• DuckDB:
  • https://duckdb.org/

Book of the Show:

• Jason: Fighting Fantasy Classics
  • https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tinmangames.ffhub&hl=en_US&gl=US
  • https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fighting-fantasy-classics/id1261201650
• Patrick: Evolutions in Bread: Artisan Pan Breads and Dutch-Oven Loaves at Home
  • https://amzn.to/44kW4iE

Tool of the Show:

• Jason: Jinja 
  • https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.1.x/
• Patrick: Rill 
  • https://www.rilldata.com/

If you’ve enjoyed this episode, you can listen to more on Programming Throwdown’s website: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/

Reach out to us via email: [email protected]

You can also follow Programming Throwdown on 

Facebook | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Player.FM | Youtube

Join the discussion on our Discord

Help support Programming Throwdown through our Patreon