Programming Throwdown

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**Programming Throwdown**

Programming Throwdown educates Computer Scientists and Software Engineers on a cavalcade of programming and tech topics. Every show will cover a new programming language, so listeners will be able to speak intelligently about any programming language.

Latest Episodes:

189: Agentic Loops Aug 24, 2026

Show notes

189: Agentic Loops

Intro topic: Building in plain language

News/Links:

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

Book of the Show

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

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show

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

Topic: Agentic Loops

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

188: World Models Jul 09, 2026

Show notes

Intro topic: Running

News/Links:

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

Book of the Show

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

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show

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

Topic: World Models

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

187: Agentic Coding May 02, 2026

Show notes

187: Agentic Coding

Intro topic: Bad equity vesting schedules

News/Links:

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

Book of the Show

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

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h
Tool of the Show

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

Topic: Agentic Coding

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 Feb 03, 2026

Show notes

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

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185: Workflow Orchestrators Nov 04, 2025

Show notes

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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

184: Asynchronous Programming Sep 23, 2025

Show notes

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

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183: Landing a Software Job in 2025 Jul 31, 2025

Show notes

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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

182: AI Assisted Coding Jun 30, 2025

Show notes

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)

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

181: Memory Management May 12, 2025

Show notes

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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

180: Reinforcement Learning Mar 17, 2025

Show notes

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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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