Programming Throwdown

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Software How-To
**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:

169: HyperLogLog Nov 27, 2023

Show notes

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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

168: Godot Nov 20, 2023

Show notes

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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

167: Desktop User Interfaces Oct 23, 2023

Show notes

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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

166: Speedy Database Queries with Lukas Fittl Oct 16, 2023

Show notes

- 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/

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

165: Differential Equations Sep 25, 2023

Show notes

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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

164: Choosing a Database For Your Project With Kris Zyp Sep 11, 2023

Show notes

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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

163: Recursion Aug 14, 2023

Show notes

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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

162: Interactive Fiction Jul 24, 2023

Show notes

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: programmingthrowdown@gmail.com

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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

161: Leveraging Generative AI Models with Hagay Lupesko Jul 10, 2023

Show notes

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: programmingthrowdown@gmail.com

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

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

160: Position Localization Jun 26, 2023

Show notes

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: