Épisodes

  • Tech News Roundup: Fighting Robots with Poetry
    Nov 27 2025

    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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    1 h et 4 min
  • Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs): How To Survive the Zombie Apocalypse
    Nov 13 2025

    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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    57 min
  • The Turing Test
    Oct 29 2025

    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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    59 min
  • Ubiquitous Computing
    Oct 15 2025

    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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    1 h et 1 min
  • The Two Problems With Regular Expressions
    Oct 1 2025

    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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    56 min
  • The History of Unix, Part 2: Unix not Eunuchs
    Sep 17 2025

    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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    53 min
  • The History of Unix: Part 1
    Sep 4 2025

    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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    1 h
  • Space, Time, and Squishy Pebbles
    Aug 20 2025

    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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    46 min