Programming Throwdown - 170: 2023 Holiday Special Live

Episode Date: December 24, 2023

Predictions:Jason VR for WorkLowering AI training cost/ improved efficiencyRISC-V takeoffPatrickAi claim of AGIAi peer reviewerAi Video GeneratorMore space vehicles reaching orbitEarly career, finding role at FAANG, liaising vs shipping code. Startup?3 part. 1. How and when current hype for AI will end? 2. Shape of the show 3. Upcoming in techWhat are essential programmer knowledge items?CS Student, how to organize life and goals? What purpose life should serve?What kind of programmer were you in college?Happy Holidays! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

All right. 2023 Holiday Special Live. Take it away, Jason. All right. Maybe before we jump straight into business, Patrick, how are you doing now that you got your audio issues sorted out? I'm doing okay. Yeah? you reflected on on this year when it comes to programming work uh you know uh stuff you've been studying what's your overall feel of 2023 i mean i feel like 2023 was the year everyone decided ai was going to happen but i'm a little depressed i'm a little depressed to find out the new gemini demo videos were all fake. So that makes me sad in my heart.

Yeah, well, they got in trouble last time because they were not fake when they released Bard. And it was really embarrassing. So this time they totally faked it. You really can't win if you're Google. But yeah, I think it's been a good year. It's been a good year. I feel like we're stabilizing after the whole, you know, 2020, uh, stuff. Just say that we'll leave it there. Um, so, so yeah, so I think, I think it's good, but I'm curious what's going to happen

with the job market. You know, it's, it's, everyone's a little nervous. So, uh, hopefully things are up, uh, crypto's ripping again. So I'm starting to hear people get excited, which is excited to see people excited about something. So AI and crypto being exciting again could be cool. Yeah, I mean, this time I actually have crypto

for the first time. So, you know, we've missed every other crypto wave. Maybe we'll actually catch this one if it goes to the moon. I saw that there are upcoming two SpaceX launches scheduled for this evening as we're recording this podcast which is december 11th uh so i think that's pretty cool from like uh two launch pads very near to each other in cape canaveral so um yeah i space space is becoming

big again that's cool very cool so now where you live do you see the spacex launches like in the sky go look outside yes okay all right very cool and it's not too cloudy i'm far enough away where yeah it's often obscured by clouds okay got it um the thing about the job market's really interesting um i really don't know what's going to happen there. I mean, one thing that I guess really scared me about this year was just a huge RTO push. And did you feel at any point? So just like a bit of context. So Patrick and I both moved out of the Bay Area, you know since sometime around you know sometime during the

the the you know catastrophe and um you know yeah so so hearing stories on linkedin of folks saying oh you know i have to pack up and and move move to seattle or something like that that was definitely a scary one of the scariest things of the year but it seems like it's kind of stabilized at this point you know there's there's there's two different camps neither one seems to really be budging so yeah i i i don't know i i listened to actually some economists talk about it which was different than hearing software engineers talk about it because software engineers are obviously colored by uh personal vested interest let's say uh because it's highly personal so there's some economists talk to about it and they were sort of saying that if you look at the rate

that it was before and the rate it's going to be now and like where it's settling out and sort of like barring some sort of drastic change that it is just going to be a much, much larger portion of people spend more time working from home, whether that's fully from home or part of the week at home. They're like the sort of cats out of the bag. Everyone already figured out that it is okay and it does work. So there will probably be, it's a gradient

or probably a hybrid work for the foreseeable future. But they were kind of indicating that they believe it's here to stay uh if nothing else it's a competitive advantage for companies that don't do a fully in office thing to recruit sort of like key talent and so um that hearing someone outside the field say that and they were also talking about sort of implications for like just how much gas is consumed um by people right or not and office space and it we forget you know it's the classic traffic waves thing if you've ever seen that it actually doesn't take sort of a lot of change to sometimes swing wildly supply chains or bandwidth or you know insert your favorite uh example here and so uh sometimes actually only

a 10 decrease in the demand for like commercial real estate as an example leads to mass vacancies just because uh you'll find new and creative ways or do something different or go with the barely manageable office and so i think we've not fully seen the impacts of those thing yet because those leases are often long and so we'll see yeah you know you know i'm usually i'm usually a little bit bearish on vr i mean i have an oculus i actually used it yesterday i use it you know several times a week for exercise do boxing and other things on the oculus and so i'm using it regularly but um you know i never really saw the sort of commercial appeal or it hasn't been that, in my opinion, there hasn't really been that killer app. But I wonder if this is really that opportunity that's going to reveal itself, right?

Because what you'll hear folks say is you miss out on the water cooler chat or you can't go on the whiteboard and whiteboard with other people. But you're not doing that all day. I mean, there were definitely days when I was going into the office where even when everyone was in an office, they weren't in my office. There was a whole urban sprawl of buildings in our campus, and then there was still seattle and other places and so there were definitely days where i basically was in a conference room almost the entire day um just just uh um talking to people from all over and so um and so those days you know people wouldn't even know if you were at home or not and then the actual days where you want to get around a whiteboard,

if you were to schedule those, they don't really need to be very spontaneous, even though they were. But you could schedule those, and then everyone could put on their VR headset and sit around a VR whiteboard and brainstorm. They could do that once a week. Yeah, actually, VR is a good one i think we haven't we're talking about

predictions i think i think 2023 vr wasn't a thing for me yet but i have hopes for 2024 there are some key things the new oculus coming late in the year uh and okay well i guess i'll save it uh for 2024 predictions but uh but yeah that that's a great point what the i guess the thing i hear about remote work is that i i think resonates is depending on the kind of personality you have depending on where you are in your career and depending on like the nature of your tasking makes a very large impact and the thing is those things are not constant over your career and they're not constant even throughout the year and so uh i think that people say this you know oh it's very difficult to innovate you know in far-flung places but i i i don't know i think it requires like you said careful planning and i'm not clear that

everyone thrived under spontaneous you know interruption and let's sit down and talk about this and we have this come up on my team recently we were trying to let's call spontaneous, you know, interruption and let's sit down and talk about this. And we have this come up on my team recently, we were trying to, let's call it innovate, you know, not just turn the crank on some stuff, we were trying to like, yeah, figure out some new stuff. And we made a point to say, like, we're going to do this on Thursday, I think it was on Monday. And then, you know, Tuesday and Wednesday, when we briefly met together, we sort of added things for people to kind of think about and sort of like not go prepare slides for, but just when we came together on Thursday or whatever, be ready to sort of think these are the sets of things. And it was actually interesting because rather than making it halfway through the brainstorming session and someone going, oh, what about this? We kind of had a notional like set of things we needed to make sure we handled and discussed.

Now, it wasn't necessarily completely effective, but at least, you know, I found i found it yes it took a little bit more thought but it was okay yep yep that makes sense yeah during during the pandemic we also had some different brainstorming sessions and uh um we used um some software i forgot what it was called um but uh it was really quite good it it uh man i wish i could remember what it's called but it had um mapping yeah that's right yeah it had this uh it had a bunch of these different kind of icebreaker and different different corporate kind of tools different mind mapping tools all in one and um you kind of share with other people it's like a google docs kind of environment we're all working on interactively and so yeah i think there'll be there'll be just more of that as as companies realize that there's really no

no going back as you said um did you get on the uh portable gaming pc rage this year i feel like i feel like that was another thing this year. Did you get any? I was so tempted, but I didn't. Yeah, I am going to get a Steam Deck, I think. But I'm going to wait a little bit. Yeah, I just can't pull the trigger yet. But it's been looking really nice.

I will say for the couple long-haul flights I took this year, if you're willing to pack the Steam Deck, oh, it's so nice. It's just like, because I don't get a ton of time to just sit. And then I had, you know, three, four, five, six hours to just sit and like play video games, you know, as long as you didn't kill your battery or you had a charging strategy. But that was just such a game changer for me. Yes, first world problems that you have to sit for six hours with nothing to do but uh it was really awesome yeah that's great um

yeah i think the the uh steam deck looks super nice i definitely want to get my hands on one but there's a there's other alternatives to now coming out depending on like what set of yeah i saw that the the rog ally or something like that yeah and there's there's some sort of like other second tier companies making them too there's a there's a bunch but yeah the steam deck obviously i think has like uh most people have well i shouldn't say many people have a steam library that's just like a huge backlog and there's like integration with that i don't know it's like the ease of it right just sitting down and playing it and the user base is there and for games that have a bad key mapping you know there's always like a user submitted key

mapping ranked by popularity and you can just switch over to someone else's and yeah that's very nice yeah actually speaking of games the uh did you see this fortnite thing where you you now have lego fortnite there's all these other games inside of fortnite that that came out i will i played for once i'm on the ball this time i saw it i was like really cool so i have kids that are you know i guess you know uh upper elementary early middle school i told them and they're like no that's dumb we just want to play real fortnite and i was like no no no let's play like this is gonna be great so we started up and my daughter and i did play a bunch of the lego fortnite i will say for being just a blatant ripoff of minecraft but like in fortnite world i really enjoy it was like a nice fresh take on you know not exactly the voxel

not exactly minecraft but in my opinion maybe i'm biased that's clearly where they're trying to go minecraft is such a juggernaut and i think that you know they want to piece that action but i i really enjoyed it the game was it had that cycle where you just always like ready to go play do the next thing like get one more little step up they had it very well polished yeah so you know i had the opposite situation with respect to kids where my older son was the one who told me about it and he's like dad we should try this kids at school are playing it and so um and so we tried it yeah i agree i think it was pretty good i like how um you know i guess for me the days of being creative are just kind of over on video games you know i just i just don't have it in me to like spend a bunch of time to like meticulously create my base and everything and and so um you

know i like how they had the prefabs where you could just say i want a house and then it would just show you all the different pieces and you just had to collect all the resources so you know my son built his own kind of custom house uh my four-year-old threw tantrums until we put him in his own world where there were no enemies he wanted to play too he's like oh i want to play you know everyone else is playing and so we're like yeah come on into so i made him an account and everything he joined our server and then he was like you know bitten to death by a spider or something and and and through a tantrum uh yeah i mean another game that i got on just recently that i've been

enjoying the like pickup put down is dave the diver have you heard about dave the diver oh man i've heard about that i heard it was really good okay it's such a goofy like mechanic but it's just sort of like a job simulator kind of game but you have like one you rotate through various you know sort of like parts of your day in the life of a slightly overweight diver by day and uh working at a sushi bar by night and so during the day you need to dive into the ocean and capture fish and then at night you you know work with your sushi chef to make the proper dishes from the food that you caught and you know serve patrons that come in and so it's basically a series of mini games right so diving is its own

mini game with a set of trade-offs and then the sushi at night there's you need to bus you know the sushi stuff makes the dish you got to take it to the person who wants the dish and then you got to like clean the table grind up the wasabi serve tea you know there's like various you know little things you need to do so yeah but it has that that really nice like repetition rate where you don't need to sit down and play for you know eight hours or two hours or one hour you know you can play for 10 minutes 15 minutes and do one dive or do one you know night at the sushi bar and it's not super pressing you that like you're gonna be hungry if you don't go get apples or you're gonna like if you so far as far as i can tell there's

very low repercussions for screwing up which allows you to sort of like experiment and try and you know do different things so i've really been enjoying dave the diver on my steam deck actually yeah actually related to that i got a game called uh cuba factorium which is like a yeah it's a weird name but it's basically like a watered down or simplified factorio okay um but there's a couple of mechanics they did really well number one uh similar to what you said there's no pressure like the people uh it's not it's more like um a rim world or a dwarf fortress actually than a factorio so you have a you know a group of people and you kind of give them tasks by like you know drawing blueprints of buildings and all of that um but there's there's no time pressure so there's

the people don't starve or anything like that you could just let it idle and um um it's like playing factorio with no monsters you know if you idle you know you'll slowly accumulate some resources but you know with you working on the efficiencies it's that's the way to push the game forward um the other thing they did really well is you know with factorio or any of these games the first time you play it you don't really know what you're doing. And so you make a bunch of bad design decisions and then you feel really compelled to start over. Right. What this game does is is you basically hop from island to island.

And so they did a really good job at the pacing. Like when I unlocked, you know, when I unlocked conveyor belts and like I'd up until then been doing the whole thing, which is people carrying goods back and forth. Of course, like it massively changes the way you want to design the base. And so that's just the time where they're like, OK, you know, you unlock conveyor belts, you won this level, go to the next level and and start from scratch. But you have all the research from the first level and and start from scratch but you have all the research from the first level and a bunch of resources and all that oh that's awesome i saw for dice and sphere program which i feel had a pretty good cut at that mechanic as well uh adding sort of enemies

and you know you have to kind of start your world over but i also learned that apparently which i don't know, I guess it goes into the economics of game design, but they have a thing where when you're building up your world, they do a sort of weighted average, but recording of your peak science output in a given save. So if you're making,

I don't even remember the color, blue cubes at a certain rate, not the total you produce. You can't just let the game sit there and run, but like how many cubes per second you reached at your peak gives you these like metadata points and then you can use those points in the future as like expenditure almost like a roguelike to sort of skip ahead in your research in your new site or they're going to add i guess permadeath or death and so you can spend these metadata credits to like restore it so it's this really interesting dynamic where you

should continue building up your worlds to like have this really massive focus on certain science production, because then later you'll be able to use those as like a sort of shortcut for future gaming. So I thought that was really interesting. Very cool. Yeah, I'll have to check that out. So, okay, let's jump into questions. But before that that maybe we'll

we'll we'll do the the typical like a recap and prediction so we did we did talk about 2023 my predictions for 2024 um and we called out one of them which is i do think there'll be some type of vr plus work um you know i just think the audience for that is massive and there's a huge schism right now that that could bridge over um so so yeah i do think that that's something that will come around um you know i feel like the cost of doing all this AI work is going to become a bigger and bigger problem. I think a lot of these ML training, machine learning training jobs are very inefficient because they're very complex. You have to do all this data transformation, and then you have to train the model and and the data

transformation is embarrassingly parallel but the training the model is is not um and so the whole thing is extremely inefficient and uh you know i don't know if it's really it's gotten a little bit better but it hasn't gotten better it hasn't kept up with the price of gpus per hour and all that which is skyrocketing so i would say next year i definitely expect to see more around lowering the cost of doing all this there's also some environmental aspects um i said i think it's like every bitcoin transaction uses a gallon of water or something i don't know there's something wild like that but um i think efficiency is going to be more and more important um and uh i guess maybe at one final prediction

um i do think that that uh i think that this risk v is going to is going to really take off um and we're you know we're going to see like a whole bunch of cheaper hardware come from that um can you tell me what that is oh yeah so is it v or five i i've always said V, but I don't know if that's correct. Okay. So it's basically a simpler architecture. And Patrick, you probably know a lot more than I do. But you have x86 and you have ARM, different processors. So for example, if you build some software on your PC, that's probably using x86. And so you can't just run that on your

phone so like you know different processors need different you know uh compilers and all of that and so this risk uh five or risk v is a completely open source specification so so you know anyone can go and make a processor and uh um and your code that you compiled on one risk v machine or cross compiled to a risk v architecture will run on another one and so you know it kind of blows up the duopoly on architectures do i get that right you probably know way more than i do about this yeah Yeah, no, no, I think you have it right. I guess like to put terms on it. So risk V is a ISA and instruction set architecture. So you're right, the two big ones are arm and x86. But x86 is sort of notoriously like very complicated, and really implemented by Intel and AMD are the only two people really make make x86 chips, x86 being that that

instruction set architecture, the bytecode that, you know, maps to specific operations. And so then there's ARM, and many people license ARM to have their own implementations, though. So you ARM different than x86 has a lot of, or at least in my opinion, has like a lot of modularity to it so you can add you know extra things like if you're building a digital signal processor a dsp you may add a lot of multiply accumulates which are useful for like ir fir filters um versus you know if you're not you don't include that one so it is more you know modular but you pay licensing fees to arm for you know basically the instructions on like how to do all that like what you know, modular, but you pay licensing fees to ARM for, you know, basically the instructions on like how to do all that, like what, you know, buying existing blocks to drop into an FPGA or

to your design for an ASIC. And so risk V is supposed to be more collaborative and unencumbered by the licensing you need to do. And so lots of people hopefully will build these modules out and then sort of manufacturers who are trying to compete very, very, very cheaply won't have to sort of invent their own instruction set, which, like you said, of these uh chip manufacturers are trying to start up and kind of gain momentum uh by being in this ecosystem so for things like a raspberry pi or an arduino or whatever they could use this and not have to pay uh you know licensing fees to which would be part even if you buy a chip off the shelf that already paid like part of the price you pay for it would be the licensing fee to ARM in a lot of cases if it's ARM-based,

which is very common for embedded chips. And so, yeah. So interesting prediction that'll take off. It's been a slow burn growth and we have started to see some more production outputs from folks for those chips. So that's a good prediction. Yeah, what are your predictions so i was going to press you on yours first hang on oh sure i was going to make you get a little bit more a little bit more bold here so you said vr for work

that was one of your predictions so i was going to push you on say uh what do you think that's going to look like that was that was a little hand wavy so so okay i'm like gotta hold you to it next year i think that the right play here is is you know the idea of you wearing a vr headset all day i just don't see that happening um monitors not like having nine monitors spread out like a you know stock trader yeah yeah and you know even like if you forget about the weight and all the encumbrance of wearing the headset and everything um you know people kind of like i think people are underestimating just like the proprioception part of it like just the fact that like you know you look in the real world and you touch things like you put your hand on your desk and your desk is

real and it's right there you know i think um i mean maybe there's all sorts of tricks they could do with you know like neural radiance fields and all these things like actually recreate your desk and have it be sort of like so accurate that when you put your hand on it in vr you feel the same way but um but yeah i'm a little bit you know skeptical're just going to wear it all day. I think what you'll what you'll want is. You know, everyone on the team gets a headset. It's you know, it's probably cheaper than monitor at this point. Right. It's only like 300 bucks.

Like some monitors are three, four hundred dollars. So on which headset you thought. But OK, so you're like you're talking about Oculus headset. Yeah. I mean, it seems to me like Oculus is just has just dominated. To be honest, I haven't even heard of any of the other headsets in a long time. I know there's the HTC Vive. There's one from Steam.

Yep. So I was going to say the next year there's rumors that there will be a new valve index. There's the Apple Vision Pro rumored to come. Oh, that's right. So I didn't know where you were going with this, but, but, okay. You know, I've, I didn't even think about the Apple one, that one, uh, it's not out yet. Right. No next year. Okay. Um, maybe, yeah, but so I don't know as much about the hardware, but I think that there'll be some type of app and maybe it'll be, you know know heterogeneous where some people could

be on apple some people could be on on oculus um but it'll be a way where you know when you want to do something creative you maybe you want to record a song or or or go on the whiteboard or something like that you know you and and your co-workers can can do this on VR. And, uh, and then it's, it's sort of like all integrated back into the workplace where, you know, all your notes are in Slack. Everything, everybody said was like,

you know, there's dictation. And so you get this, like this report afterwards, um, um, you know, along with the whiteboard and it's animated.

So you could kind of see, you know, how the whiteboard evolved over time. So yeah, I think there's going to be some kind of cool VR work meeting push. Okay. And then you talked about lowering AI training costs, improved efficiency. So not just adding more and more parameters to your models, but focusing on getting

more bang for your buck and being able to train quicker iterate is that the is that the call there yeah that's right yep i think uh the cost is getting totally out of control the models keep getting bigger although that's starting to plateau but um you know now you're seeing these ensemble models like mistral put out one where they created an ensemble um of eight different other large language models and so um it's like a mixture of experts type approach so um so you have it's faster than running you know each of those eight models because you you get some synergy there but um but yeah i think the the the inference you know folks try to optimize the inference it's really difficult because the inference um you know so

many people have spent so much time on that so you know once the model is trained um you know go ahead going ahead and evaluating it um you know there's a bunch of folks working on that and they've made a lot of really good progress but i think the actual training part of it is something that has lagged behind and uh um there are talks of you know am, AMD kind of, you know, upping their software game and, and, you know, creating a real rival for Nvidia. I mean, that could drive some of the costs, some of the price down, but, but still, I think that most people I talk to, they're wasting the GPU hours. So, you know, they, you get these GPUs from, from AWS or, you know, Amazon web services or Google cloud platform, and they charge you per hour. And, you know, if you turn on the

GPU machine and you don't use it, you're still paying per hour for, for the whole thing. Um, and, and in many of these cases, you know, know the the program is designed so that you know loading the data is so slow that you're only using like five percent of the gpu but you're paying for all of it um and so yeah this is something that we're just we're gonna have to fix as an industry all right and then uh you had risk v but i don't i don't know how to get you to make a bold a bold claim there well you know i've been trying to get my hands on uh basically like a raspberry pi equivalent but in risk v and they're still really expensive so um i just i think that with all the geopolitics stuff around you know the the intellectual property and everything i just feel like

something's going to open up there but i have to confess i know very little about that side of it it just feels like there's a lot of energy there we have a benefit of live chat we're getting feedback that it's risk five and wikipedia agrees it's risk five so okay wait where are you seeing the live chat oh in the general room uh so okay we'll use ai to go back and auto edit all of this so we're not yeah all right so so i have i guess like first i'll make some ai ones i think next year we're going to see someone claim to have uh gotten agi and it's going to unleash like a little bit of a debate about what does that actually mean like what is what is I think some people feel that means like sentience like oh it has some ongoing consciousness and like continuity to itself where you know right now we have like a look back where and and you can correct me if I'm wrong I might be misunderstanding but today like

you talk to chat GPT it can only remember a certain number of tokens before basically you know the tokens start falling off the back so agi at some level will be it's able to recall indefinitely and you know sort of shape itself going forward over time and sort of build on it but i i don't know i think someone's going to claim that it just has to be expert enough across enough domains and so it's oh it's creative and it's doing this you know we've reached agi so someone's going to claim it because i feel there's a lot of uh political zeitgeist and uh yeah you know just saying it and we're gonna have the debate we saw google put out some guidelines on what they think qualifies as agi or not as a as a you know trying to get in and shape and define it but i think that'll be sort of one thing i think another thing we'll see is uh a lot of people focus on this like code writing code suggestion i'm actually i don't know whatever maybe i'm i'm short side i think it will come eventually i actually think

what will will be uh more impactful and i'll i'm gonna make a bet that someone will come out with this next year is you see a lot in summarization and so i think having something like when you do a you know a github you know pull request or whatever that having something that comes in and does you know basically like a expert level suggester peer reviewer so we always talk on this you know program or on this podcast a difficult and responsibility of everyone to you know doing a uh not super high latency peer review but what if your first peer review was sort of just like from an ai suggesting you know oh that's genius not not just in your review but actually across your entire code base i've looked at it done some sort of summarization and said you know hey it looks like you're

duplicating a lot of code from this other module over here. Have you looked at just using that one instead or making it more extensible or flexible? I think that'd be super cool. I think someone's working on it. They're just not talking about it yet. Well, to be clear, I don't actually know that. No, I think you're right. I mean, it's a great idea.

And then my final sort of AI one is I think we're going to see video generation, but for memes. So everyone's sort of focused on this like deep fake. And, you know, I think that's happening in the high production value. I think someone's going to find the right, you know, tick talkable. OK, but I don't know how you say that. The right, you know, sort of easy. Everyone can just like go make the goofy videos.

They were a rage for a while. I think it was like Korea or something where they would they would do the like you know news reports with the little like avatars you know marching right but like imagine that but like you just type in the scene you know whatever and you know i want to make a joke like this and someone's delivering the punchline for you as like a cartoon character something like that something that is within striking distance of today but it hits like a nerve of like it's funny it's not like creepy you know it's kind of obviously fake but but it's still you know pretty funny yeah have you seen the uh the fake uh pixar like uh movie movies uh where it shows like the yeah it has like um trying to think of an example, but it looks like the cover of a Pixar movie. And, you know, the characters look like Pixar characters, but they're fake. Like people generated it with the Bing image generator. And yeah, there was one, it was like, it was like Texans. And it was a bunch of pixar children like holding holding ars and stuff

yeah i mean i mean i'm sure you can find like the the the level of tastefulness you know you can get whatever you want there but um but but yeah and so they actually looked really really good i mean you know i knew that it was fake just from the content but but the quality looked real um like it looked like a you know a professional person artist had made this parody nice so yeah i mean but video is a whole nother level maybe i'll push you a little bit on that like uh you know like what do you think it's going to be video or images or where are we at now with video generation? So from what I kind of like gather, I've not gone and tried them yet. I think there's a bunch that are fairly close, but I've seen some really, really awesome ones, but they

require you to still like start with a good template, like a blender, you know, sort of render and it doesn't have to be super precise or sort of drawing and getting there so i think my understanding is part of it is the sort of continuity so like if you wanted to make a scene right from like a movie or even for memes like you need characters that you can sort of cut away and cut back to and like they're not just some new complete random right so how do you sort of like give that guidance and and have the ai sort of keep we talked about that that sort of look back it needs the continuity across the entire you know clip that it sort of knows all the moving pieces whether they're on screen or off and so i think images are kind of i don't want to say like already there but you can go in and you can get like if you see the pictures coming out now with

people it's always that i still see this oh you can tell it's ai you can tell it's not ai because the person has five fingers on each hand and i'm like oh i feel like oh they fix that yeah like all that stuff is so fixed it's really ambiguous at this point when you get a picture especially because it's blended if you look at like photoshop uh in in the public app now has you you draw a little lasso and type in what you want and it'll put it in there. So it becomes this very difficult, like, you know, what's real versus fake, I think. Have you ever been to thispersondoesnotexist.com?

A long time ago. Is it updated? Do they keep adding new versions? I mean, these people look like they exist. I mean, it's just solved um i mean i'm not an expert but like yeah i mean all of these people look totally real you know what actually what gives their way is the background but the person's face if you had if you had just cropped out just uh silhouetted out the background the person's face looks totally real there was

i'm not i'm not big on like youtuber personality people but i think i i'm gonna i'm gonna try i think it's peter mckinnon had a uh he's like a you know famous for doing photography stuff he's anyways he had a video where the users submitted uh using kind of this photoshop tool where they either extended the background or they started with a picture but then they edited it in some way like inserting a shed inserting a bison like whatever so they would give him a picture and people would send them in he wouldn't see him before and he would get i forget some number of seconds you know 20 seconds 30 seconds to look at the picture on his computer and figure out which parts were fake and which parts were real and of course you know he's he's a like if he zoomed in

and really thought about it or he knew knew the location, he would probably know. But in general, he had a really hard time because, you know, you just don't know. It was like, oh, these entire mountains in this beautiful, rocky, you know, landscape or Swiss Alps, it's just completely fake. It was actually just somebody's backyard. And so it's really difficult at the level these tools are getting when you start to blend between them. And I think for first glance stuff, again, that sort of Instagram, TikTok, whatever, you know, just passing by how much content you consume.

A lot of that's going to become sort of the quote unquote airbrushed. It's going to become augmented in this way. But I think the next step is where you don't even need, like you said, the background, right? You don't even need that. It's just going to be completely end to end. I feel like that's so at hand. It's a bold bold move to guess images which is why i went video i think video is still not there yet it's very difficult to get stable looks like it was shot in a video camera yeah that makes sense um no that's fine any other predictions for 2024

so let's see let me see if i have a recap so you're saying oh uh a um a peer reviewer ai peer reviewer yeah we'll also throw in ai like document writer you know like like uh documenting their functions and stuff i feel like that's that would kind of come for free if you had the other one um and uh oh and um the video generation like a tiktok type thing with generative ai yeah any do you want to do a third prediction sure i'll do i think i had one more but i've already forgot it i think the third one will make a space we always like to make a space prediction because i i'm bullish i think there's a big unlock that can happen if we can get to space really cheap like lots of mass to orbit and i feel there's a lot of different uh sort of companies working in the space now a lot of them have really cool technologies a lot of the demos of pieces

of their systems this year uh not just basex with uh you know their stuff that they're they're they're testing out uh in um in texas but also the what is that spin launch and uh people who are uh just building various like stage one or stage two components i think there's a there's a lot of really cool stuff so i think next year we're going to see people reaching orbit with a lot of these test platforms and uh you know sort of start a new space race because if you can get things up there and you can get fuel up and refuel all of a sudden i mean they talk about that like bringing one asteroid back i don't think we'll see an asteroid come back you know for the next 10 years but you start to get to where a lot of interesting things become possible if it's super

cheap to get things into orbit and vice versa, get things from orbit down onto earth. You know, I think a lot of stuff we talk about, one of the problems for electric vehicles is a lot of the materials that go into them are scarce or ecologically impactful to mine. But if it's really easy to get, you know, things up into orbit and asteroids into orbit or, you know, things out to asteroids to mine them it could be pretty straightforward to it's probably much more ecological to sort of bring down a cargo box i don't always say that of lithium than it is to mine lithium out of the earth and so also you can have you know extending i don't know if the lithium isn't someone's going

to fact check me i don't know if that was a good one to pick, but a lot of these metals that are in asteroids and stuff, I think become accessible. And so I think that's why I'm bullish on it overall, but I think next year we're going to see a lot of the, you know, people building these sort of test platforms. And I think there's probably a lot in stealth mode because if we can see all these that are out in public,

I think there's a lot more that are keeping their sort of head to the ground and just focused on working. once they start launching you can't really keep that secret anymore or less they look like sort of weapon so uh they have to become public so i think we're gonna see a lot more stealth uncoverings again i don't know any secret details there uh but i think uh getting to orbit for a lot of these uh startups is going to be a thing for next year wow it's a bold prediction yeah we'll go that all right um all right so we'll before we get into questions i'll talk about our first winner our first winner is frederick jay uh in germany i won't say your last name, Frederick, but you won a t-shirt.

So I'll be reaching out to you. Isn't it? Is it Guten Tag? Doesn't that mean like welcome? I know a little, a very tiny amount of German. But anyways, Frederick, thank you so much for being a patron. And I will be in contact with you

to get a t-shirt, to give a t-shirt um all right and with that said our first question is um from don on discord he says i'm an early career dev been working for about three years i'm finding my current role and he put in parentheses fang so for people don't know it's what facebook amazon apple netflix google um at one of those companies um that i'm part of a huge machine all the work i do is liaising with other teams rather than shipping code um i have an offer from a startup where i'd be shipping a lot more stuff um you know he's worried that at his uh current position he's missing out a lot of lessons uh just because it's just so much so much discussion not that much uh you know working on your craft

and writing code um but he's also where he's undervaluing the soft skills that he's doing right now um how do you think about the trade-off between coding and soft skills? Patrick, how do you feel about that trade-off? Oh, man, I'm taking off guard because that's not where I thought the question was going. So I was prepping myself. Well, maybe I'll take a crack at it. I mean, I think, you know, man, so I don't know if this is going to be a distraction or diversion or not, but at some point in my career, I realized that not having very good soft skills and not being really aware of what was going on in the company, in the news, like the programming news, but that was really hurting me. You know, at some point I realized that like I was doing a lot of stuff that could have been done a lot easier if I had, you know, just been more aware. So for example, I mean,

this isn't exactly what happened, but imagine, you know, you spent all this time trying to figure out a way to really quickly get data from a CSV file. And so like you're writing all this crazy C++ code or something to like quickly like seek through this CSV file and pull rows. And then someone comes to you and says, oh, there's there's this thing called a database. And, you know, you just put it in the database and they've done it all for you. It's that kind of thing where, you know, I realized at some point in my life, I realized that like, yeah, I should actually, you know,

read more and talk to more people and spend like a little bit less time just like coding absolutely everything from scratch. So I do think that you know personally i kind of was too far on one end of it um now on the other end you do spend a lot of time in big companies um you know kind of like doing a lot of social work with a lot of different teams and coordinating and all of that and that does take an extraordinary amount of time. I mean, there's, there's a lot more training time at bigger companies, uh, you know, and these are sort of like these soft skills

training courses, like effective communication and all these things that, that you might have to take. And, um, um, actually the bigger issue is that the code, you probably do spend a decent amount of time coding, even at a bigger company, but that coding works going to be more like integration work and you're not going to be building as much from scratch. So I do think there's, what is your immediate team and manager like? done do you look back and say oh really that's really cool that we built that or or is it just you know turning turning a dial or turning a cog in this machine that you're not they're totally disconnected from so i think those are the big things um and and uh yeah i'd be less concerned about um whether there's more or less soft skills versus coding. But Patrick, what's your thoughts? All right.

Thank you for buying me time. No, it was a good answer. I guess, not to cop out, I don't think there's a singular correct answer. I mentioned this before, but I think the same thing applies here. This isn't something that is you set a dial between the two soft skills and sort of programming skills and you leave it there. That's, that is definitely the wrong answer regardless of where you set the dial.

And I think depending on where you are in your career, what situation calls for, but okay. Specifically at a Fang company, I will say i'll give that caveat first uh having been at two of the letters in the fang company um jason can one-up me there but that's fine i will say that soft skills are often in short supply and so having them yeah that's true a critical critical team member but when it comes time for promotion you're being able to point to specific innovative pieces of code or integrations that you did they're much more

defensible it is very very hard for your manager your director to go to another director or manager and say this person is such a, such a collaborator, they are such a, you know, ability to just find the right problem to like, those things are all true. And they're all necessary. And they help you get the results and the leverage. So you, you really have to be clutch at them. But if they come at the cost of being able to point to like, you're helping everyone else do their amazing coding you're very high risk of having all those people you help get promoted before you do so in a purely selfish not best thing for the project now helping the project succeed is ultimately good for you but like

i think i've suffered from this before doing exactly these things running around helping people doing integrations making sure and then myself not being able to point to specific code contributions has hurt me at FANG companies. So that probably has different dynamics on different teams and maybe even different of the letters in the company and at a startup. But in those companies, I will say you have to be cognizant that you have to get the right work at the right time, which is a soft skill, but being able to execute and write that code that everyone agrees is, is, you know, chef's kiss, right? That, that it doesn't have to be a lot of code. It has to be, you have to point to specific code that no one else was writing that you

were writing. That's the, the way to sort of light the engine on the rocket ship. And so, um so playing that balance, the fiddle of moving between soft skill, hard skill, soft skill, hard skill, filling your pipe, I think that's a skill in itself. And it is really hard because you never know the right answer.

And not even in retrospect, do you really learn whether or not you had the dial set correctly? Yep, yep. I agree with all of that. That makes a ton of sense. The other thing is, you know, the big difference, in my opinion, between a startup and a fan company is. In the case of the startup, everyone's taking this gigantic collective risk and either everyone wins or everyone loses at the company um and so that creates um you know a sort of sense of camaraderie um you know that that that naturally creates this this like a sense of of uh you know you're all winning or losing together. But in the FANG companies, that's not really true.

Most people are being evaluated and they're being incentivized as an individual. So you could get promoted on a project that completely fails. And as long as you aren't laid off, as long as you're just put onto some other project in that thing company, then, then you did,

you did, you did great versus like the startup. If the startup fails, everyone's stock goes to zero. Um, all right. So we have a three part question. Um, actually these are three very distinct really great questions so we'll just go through go through them one by one um the first one is

how and when do you think the current hype for ai will end um it's a good question. I mean, it does feel like 2012 all over again with AlexNet and all of that. I think that, here's what I think, and star thing from open AI is not going to work. I'm pretty skeptical. You know, in general, you know, I have this theory that things that are secretive usually don't work when it comes to research. You know, the idea that like there's going to be some big reveal. So, you know, OK. Look at chat GBT, for example. So, you know, Facebook had something that predated chat GBT called a Galactica where it would write research papers and, um, it worked pretty well and, and it would write, you know, it would, it would generate research papers based on a topic um and so chat gbt is built on the

shoulders of all of these other bottles right um the thing that open ai did really well is connect connect that technology to everyday people market it really well um you know handle the fallout when it does hallucinate and generate fake things, you know, handle that fallout appropriately and, and, and all of that. Um, but it was, you know, all of these things are incremental. Um, in general, everything is much more incremental than people would like to have you believe. Um, and so this idea of, um, merging, you know, kind of policy optimization, you know, making decisions, whether it's in a board game or decisions in the real world, if you, if you have a way to do that, um, you know, connecting that with language understanding um you know i feel like the first approach to really do that i mean we have cicero and some of these approaches for some board games but all of these are you know very

specific to to board games and as we know from alpha go you know google wasn't able to take the computer the the the code and all that behind alpha go and use it to like trade stocks or something or i don't know use it to do anything else so so you know i i'm skeptical that like even though the people behind cicero went to open ai i'm skeptical that this q star thing is going to um really be a huge revolution it could be but, but I'm skeptical. And so I think when people realize that actually using this new wave of AI to do things in the real world is a lot harder than everyone thinks, I think at that point, the hype will end. And it'll be part of another cycle. And eventually, we will figure out an elegant, powerful way to do policy optimization. Imagine, how would you combine these large language models with robotics, for example? Someone's going to crack that in an elegant way, and then that'll be the next type curve but uh but i think this hype curve will die when people realize that it's it's pretty good for speaking and pulling data and

engaging it's good for search and relevance type stuff but it's difficult for actually doing things what about you patrick yeah so i mean i guess it's an easy question which is like uh maybe it already has um or next and i think the there's a couple of like human factors things that just go into that which is in a relative performance you know metric the each new open ai release isn't it it can be the same sort of like absolute improvement but on a relative basis that goes down right and so the the leap from gpt2 to gpt3 or whatever it it feels so much more powerful because it just it just seems so much cooler but over time each one of those increments you have to actually to give the same percentage increase your absolute increase has to be significantly more and they've already said hey listen like

we've reached the end of parameter scaling we know who knows how much truth there you know pr there is to that but i think we're seeing that which is we're not seeing the same the leap forward already doesn't feel as big that said i think normalizing this out you kind of mentioned for search purposes jason like being able to even going from pre i'll call it pre-google search engines where they literally were doing like fuzzy string matching i mean i know there were others to being able to give just something vaguely in line with your question and get back answer at least you know the next step to writing it even worse i was asking you know open ai chat gpt the question about some computer science problem and i didn't know what it was called i didn't know the right

search terms of print in google so i just like explained it the nature of the problem uh it failed me but it did give me a bunch of like relevant things that matched what i was saying whereas i wouldn't have been able to put like i I have a graph, and I'm trying to like, count the number of you know, neighbors of this or that, you know, in this particular way, Google would have just matched like, count number of neighbors in a graph or something, right? And give me some algorithm for adjacency matrix, you know, counting anyways. So I think it's already here. But I think the hype is already like, people, people have the attention span of a gnat. I don't know. I feel like the hype is already dead.

So now it's just a bunch of people are going to get to work integrating the current capabilities. The question, like you said, if you go back to previous AI booms, they never really manifested and being used in everyday life in a super, super meaningful way. The question is whether the current batch given 12, 18, 24 months, are they going to be like a new industrial revolution or not? Right. And sure, maybe they'll continue to be hype cycles after that. But will they actually affect meaningful change? I think it's yet to be seen.

Yep. Yep. That makes sense. All right. What do you think about the current shape of the show is there anything you'd like to change next year patrick ai patrick oh man you know that's a great idea we should have uh some type of of ai in the show i mean it really behooves us as technologists and as AI people to put some

type of AI. One thing I've always wanted to do is the speech-to-speech translation. I think Facebook has a... I forgot what it's called. Facebook has this model where they do speech-to-speech translation. So in other words,

you can take embedding and then they pull it back out again right but in a different language so you can actually take one of our episodes and uh you know you can you can convert it so that we're speaking you know portuguese or something but it's it has our intonations and everything okay well that i was partly joking uh i think like we actually did change the show this year so i think trying you know jason and i are pretty busy so i think we've gone to a little bit of a different format and yeah i actually think this is uh i'll say more sustainable long term for us so yeah i'm i'm happy happy with this and uh it's been going a long time i listen to other podcasts podcasts, and they say, Oh, you know, this is our, you know, eighth year or ninth year. And I'm like, Wow, they've been going a long time. Now, wait a minute. Hey, wait, like, we got longer than that. But I kind of doesn't like it's not real to me. I don't know. It's very, it's very strange. I have a very strange relationship with this podcast, I guess. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think, you know, one thing we did this year, as Patrick

alluded to, is like, we just made it a little bit more effortless. Um, we just, you know, we get on, we talk, I don't think we're doing right now. It really casually, uh, maybe next year I'd like to somehow get more of the community involved, but I don't, I don't have any clear plans, but I'm happy with what we're doing right now where we're keeping it pretty casual. I think when you have a guest on the show, that guest is on your show to either promote something or to advance a cause or they have a goal. And anytime anyone has a goal, there's a chance that they don't meet their goal. Right. And so and so it just, you know, no one's really come back to us and said, Oh, I hated that show. I hated being on your show. Like nothing like that has happened. Every guest has been, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Every guest has been nothing but polite to us, but it does, it does kind of put a bit of a weight. It's much, much, much nicer if, uh, Patrick and I can just, you know, roll out of bed on Monday and say, Hey, you know, should we do a show this week? So we're going to stick with this format, at least for the early part of 2024 and see how it goes. Last question was anything exciting in tech coming up? I think we covered that in the beginning. But thank you so much, Vitkosoft, for your questions. Are we doing another giveaway? Let's do it. So the next

person to get a t-shirt is Rob G. I don't have Rob's address, but I do have your email address. And so Rob, I will be in contact with you to get a t-shirt.

So congratulations Rob. and thank you so much for being a patron rob's been a patron for over a year so thank you rob nice uh i have a small small segue before we go into another question uh something that we we haven't talked about but has been really interesting uh is 3D printers. So we've talked briefly about 3D printers in the past. I think 3D printers are also sort of like coming into their own this year. So we didn't make, I didn't have a bold prediction about it, but I'm excited to see sort of what's going to happen with the quality and amount. Do you have a 3D printer, Jason? Yeah, I do. I actually, last Black Friday, I replaced my 3D printer jason yeah i do i actually last black friday i replaced my 3d

printer and now i have an ender s1 pro which i really enjoy nice nice i think we save it up for another episode to talk about but i recently i think i'll call it a gen 3 so i had a gen not a gen 0 like a rep rap like a know, do everything yourself from scratch. But I got on at Gen One, I'll call it, which was like you procured 2020 aluminum extrusion and you like screwed stuff together. And, you know, it's just like a kit. Yeah, I had one of those. Personal, I call that Gen One. Then Gen Two was like the ender.

I had an ender. Yeah, it was great. Great. I'll say I think it's a clear Gen Three. I got a bamboo X1C. And yeah, we'll talk about in a future episode but it is it is fundamentally a different interaction than gen 1 and 2 and uh i printed so many things i've had exactly one issue once and i haven't like touched it like wow it's dude it's it's crazy so that's amazing this is the unlock and so it's just gonna

ripple out i think people have been a little burned so it's gonna take a little time but i think uh yeah i think there's a revolution brewing have you been following the uh nerfs and the gaussian splatting and all of this tech or basically you could take a couple of pictures of something and get a 3d model i am so intrigued i see i don't go on x x on twitter that much when i do i have some people who have been doing this and it blows my mind i don't i like literally don't understand it at all except i i know how like traditional photogrammetry works in theory, right? Like taking pictures, matching features. Jason and I have talked about this before. We used to do some work in this field prior. So like I understand like matching features from thing to thing, understanding parallax,

like estimating pose. So like a traditional pipeline for building that stuff, I understand. When I watch the nerfs and Gaussian splatting, I don't understand. Like I just see the things like thin wires and strings that traditionally would have been impossible to do via you know other mechanisms they just would have screwed up and i see them work and it's just like they blow my mind away but i i haven't done the deep dive to figure out what they're actually doing yeah we should do a show on it um i know a decent amount i know a decent amount about it. But yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, I feel like that's all kind of coming to a head, isn't it?

Like, imagine if you break something. It's not completely shattered. It's just broken in two. You could, like, you know, put the two pieces next to each other, you know, get a 3D model out and then 3D print a replacement. Something that'd be freaking awesome see we already but we already passed our prediction thing it has to be like no one do this this year we got a pretty good for 2025 if you do it we have to be advisors on my company or something um all right so rick vegas, what's the, what are the essential things you think every programmer should know? For example, commands, types, for loops, dictionaries, arrays, what are the important things that cross all languages?

Machine op codes, you should have memorized assembly set for, for, for, you know, at least three or four different. For RISC-V. Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I would say, I mean, there's definitely, you know, definitely data structures. Actually, I would say university does a pretty good job of covering the abstractions in a pretty general way. Data structures, they use sorting as a way to teach recursion and also teach algorithms and complexity. A lot of people get turned off when we talk about all the different sorting stuff in in undergrad um they say themselves like why why would i learn this when it's like dot sort in

almost every language right um but it's really just a case study in you know different different ways of solving the same problem and how to relate them to each other and everything. So, um, so I would say, you know, you know, it's hard to give that answer, uh, you know, in, in five minutes, but, but I think, I think that, you know, the, the undergrad curriculum is like pretty good at, at giving kind of the overall basics and, you know, you don't, it doesn't mean you have to get an undergrad, but it's a really good, know launch point yeah i you know if i had to like add one thing i agree with you you know a lot of people would say like hash hash map or something which is is definitely also like a good one when you start growing up in size but if i had to add like something to the data structures

and algorithms and a sort of way of thinking and decomposing things i would add string manipulation um it doesn't have to be like regexes but just like being able to like and maybe it comes from doing programming competition i don't know but like so many times i see just folks struggle like i have a string i don't know how to get the thing i want out of the string and it's just like no be comfortable and sort of like it could be crappy it could be like non-efficient it doesn't matter just know how to like i have a string the string isn't what i want i want some piece of it or some recombination of it and that that requires of course like you know arrays because mostly we treat strings as you know arrays of characters uh you know it requires looping it requires you know arrays

of arrays and being comfortable in that but like just really be comfortable like taking a string chopping it up and getting the pieces you want out of it is uh they don't really teach that in data structure now they teach things you would need for doing it but that specific like additional one just like very very common oh and debugging oh man that's a great one yeah actually that is one thing that's not taught very well in school because it's so language specific um but just getting whichever language you know when you start your first job chances are you probably won't have any control over the language. They'll say, hey, you're writing in C++ or Python or whatever. I thought you were going to name something esoteric.

It's your first day on the job and you have to write in, what was it, Plet or something? That one where it's all images. Dude, that's awesome. Wasn debugger works in that language and and how to profile and find out what how where your code is fast and slow is really important oh i wasn't thinking that would be but yes you mentioned that was good performance analysis as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, both. All the things you need to know.

Yeah. Debugging and perf analysis. Super, super important. Um, all right. So Hoover, Hoover shoes, hover shoes, uh, asks, Oh, this is going to be a tough one. Um, I'm a computer science student who's still deciding how I want to organize my life. Like, for example, what purpose? And he gave some examples, raise a family, effective altruism, doing cool engineering and science.

What purpose his career should serve? Question is, were there profound experiences you had that made you want to pursue a particular life? And I think he means outside of work or, you know, a life that your career affords you. So, yeah, I think. Man, I have to think about this for a minute. I don't know if you have a quicker answer, Patrick. So for me, that's definitely like a part of it. But just in general, I would say, you know, leaving that aside that you kind of have to pick, in my opinion, and decide what is work going to define like who you are, or are you going to have like a definition of who you are? And like you work to kind of achieve it, I guess, like hand wave without getting into, you know, having thought to write it. And I think that both kinds are okay. And, and I'll give an example, which is I routinely have career conversations with people, you know, I've talked to people over the years, managers, there are some people who will say, I never want to work on an ad system ads are, you know, are bad. And I don't want to work on, you know, anything that has to do with serving ads,

building ads, building ads, like, you know, just, and you can insert any, you know, are bad. And I don't want to work on, you know, anything that has to do with serving ads, building ads, building ads, like, you know, just, and you can insert any, you know, topic here. Other people might say, you know, I don't have a specific moral, like, you know, problem with ads. So as long as if the technology I'm working on, and I'm learning something, and I'm engaged, and I have a good team, you know, these things are more important. I think this is a slice of that same problem, which is, do you go to work and, you know, you spend a lot of time with the people there and on those topics. So it is perfectly fine to want those to align very closely with your internal beliefs. But I think it is also okay to say you have a very strong, you know, external, so you might call that work-life balance, you might call it whatever, but you have very strong external, you have a family, you know, several people you might call that work-life balance you might call it whatever but you have very strong external you have a family you know whether that's your own

you know spouse and children or whether it's your parents or your brothers like it doesn't matter or friend group and you're really you know focused a hobby outside of work and work as a way to like make money and like you know provide good insurance and support your life i think both are okay and being understanding that there are people who turn that dial between those two and again already the hobby horse i don't think it's static over time i think various times people can have that knob turn back and forth so i don't know that there's advice you can give you i think it's a decision you should make um and be thoughtful about like what what is the reason that you work and why do you work and

why do you work where you work and you should reevaluate it from time to time and and maybe come to the realization that it should switch and for some people i will say it becomes a bit of a stumbling block if you allow it always to be turned to work defines me then it becomes very difficult to switch jobs because you're almost switching identities and i will just say in i guess i'll say at least in western society in our current you know capitalistic whatever you think about that allowing work to have that control over you is something that doesn't lead you to a game theoretic optimum right like you are going to end up being probably underpaid under thing, if you allow work to have a sort of hold over you that you have to do that. Maybe if you go run a startup and your

own founder, and that that is, I'll leave that aside. I don't, I can't sort of speak to that. I've never done it. But that may be a way out. But otherwise, if you're working at sort of like a medium or big company, and you know, that's a dangerous place in the dial to be for too long, which is I allow this work to be who I am. So that would be my only caution there. But otherwise, I think it's something that individuals all will and you will work on a team where everyone on that team defines that differently. Yeah, fantastic answer. I mean, similar to Patrick, I think for me, you know, I have a lot of things outside of work, things related to kind of church service and some of these other things that that, you know, when I look back on are a big part of my life i think um man i saw this thing that like i don't really get to i am the kind of person that cries in movies i'm guilty of that you know there's something about like when the music plays a certain way like they've they've like figured out um and you know i realized at some point i i

came into a movie about halfway through and I started getting real emotional. And I realized like, I don't even know what's going on in this movie. It's just when they have the music a certain way and the people look a certain way and the angles, a certain way, the camera, like it just triggers something in me.

So I'm kind of a sap in that way, but, but I saw, but I don't really feel that way about, you know, you know, things I see on the internet or quotes or anything like that. But I found this one quote and it said,

it said something like there's a younger version of you who would be like so proud of, you know, like who you are right now. Right. And that like really hit me. It's like, man, you kind of forget about what you were like, you know, like so many years ago and, and, and the whole journey. Right. So I think, um, for me, I try to stay like pretty, I can't, I want to use the word pure. It's not really the right word, but like, I want to keep like pretty, like, uh, not like compromised, you know, like if, um, um, I want to have like, it doesn't mean that like, I just have no filter and I just tell everyone like, oh, you know, you're fat or something like that. No, it's not it.

But it's like, but it's like, you know, in my head I have kind of like an unadulterated view of like myself and the, you know, my place i'm in and the world around me and everything and so i can kind of uh make predictions that come true at least you know locally i'm not predicting like you know anything like the lottery or anything but but yeah but like locally in my life i can kind of like make predictions that that more or less come true because i have like a pretty clear view of what's going on um i think that that's something that um that i think is really important and you know if you have that then you can kind of say like where do i want to be and like you know what is the path that i could take to get there and just you, doing that kind of one step at a time. Um, um, and so I think as Patrick said, there's times where, you know, I'm really passionate about some work thing. And so, you know, life is kind of getting in the way of solving this

problem or getting some, some work thing done. And there are other times where I really have a lot going on outside of work and work is really there to pay the bills or to be something that I do during the day before I do the thing I really want to do. And so you're constantly going to keep moving through that space. I don't think that you'll ever be just focused on on one or the other um but yeah i do think it's important to really take inventory of of yourself you could look back really far like as that as that slogan was suggesting or you could even look back in the past week and say you know what did i do this week um you know did i kind of end this week kind of better than i started it um did i waste a lot of time this week and do i have a whole bunch of regrets is there things i can fix there or am i overall pretty pretty happy i think there are

like uh so many people that you know on on social media and other places that are trying to tell you how to be happy or, you know, give you purpose in your life. And, uh, I don't know, I'm a little skeptical. I haven't listened to any of them and I look back and I feel like it was probably a good decision. Yeah. I mean, you made some good points there. I think like for me, I guess like if I iterate on what you're saying too, is I think people get a little hung up about setting specific goalposts that they want to like, it's like very, very, like if you think about all the design space

of everywhere you can be, family, marriage, whatever, they set very specific goals. Like I have to be married and I want to be married by this age. And I want, like people set very specific things and work related as well. For me, it's about like,

and I think you're sort of alluding to that, Jason, is like each day, each month, each year year like trying to just have that compounding growth so for where i am right now given the extents of my abilities like being honest about that and saying if i want to grow it's not just like go take a supplement or go you know take a course it's like i need to start spending a little bit more time each week, and not trying to have these like step function changes, but just slowly move the, you know, heading of my vector through the space, and realize that further away, you know, items are going to have a bigger cone of uncertainty. And what I want today, for me in five years, is very different than what I will probably end up

being in five years. But I want to look back like that, like look back and say, Oh, I'm still happy that like, like, this is a good spot to have been in, and be realizing your circumstances and what is and isn't in your control. But personally, I've never resonated with this, like, you have to have a five year goal and be pushing with it, or where are you going to end up? Maybe, maybe it's a maybe for some people, that is actually a strict necessity. But I found for myself, it's like, I've never really had a like goal other than to be somewhat better than I am today. Like being more and having grown and across like all the things in five years without specifically, like I need to have done this bucket list or checklist in five years, or I will, I will be sort of like have missed my goal. i mean looking back one thing that i feel is pretty universal that i'm really

kind of happy with is that i didn't i didn't really have any um like uh like fear or shame you know like uh um um yeah i'll put myself out there I'll try like the show is a great example. Like every, every episode we talk about a programming language of spoiler alert, Patrick and I are not experts on like unity, right? Like every now and then we'll get an email from someone who's really an expert on a language telling us how, like, we don't know what we're talking about and that's fine. I mean, it's, it's one email in the span of many many many positive emails so it doesn't bother me at all but but i mean we do get that and i think that person's probably right um but you know patrick and i kind of put ourselves out there to talk about as many programming languages as possible

and you know we can um um you know we can do our best to talk about the language, to explain it to folks as best we can. And we're not really deterred by the fact that we're not experts in every language. And so I think that kind of, I think, percolates through everything. I had this philosophy, like this is so many years ago in college, I would always go on a date on one date with anybody, any, any, any girl who, uh, who, um, um, you know, if we seem like we were, we got along maybe in a class or something, I'd always like try

and ask to on a date or if a girl asked me to go on a date i'd go on one date with anybody and and uh and and so when you have that philosophy you get rejected all the time people have boyfriends or they are just not into you or whatever and um um but i think all of those experiences were really useful and eventually you know i went on a date with a girl who then we got married and I'm really proud to be married to her today. So without a parachute, yeah, be afraid. But don't be afraid to do social things. Really kind of push yourself. And you can learn lessons from that. There are definitely things I regret, arguments I got into at work, times where I raised a big stink out of something about something that

really wasn't that big a deal you know everyone has these kind of uh they're not skeletons because everyone knows about it but but what's the word but things that you regret that kind of weigh on you right um but uh um but that you know there, that also needs to be in the context of like all the things you did, all the things you said, uh, that, that had a huge impact, a positive impact on people. So, um, so yeah, just, just, uh, I think the biggest, the biggest, um, um, the biggest thing that I could try and tell people is to just take chances and explore and uh um you know and learn as much as you can about yourself about people around you and about programming languages that got really deep all right uh so next question from champion two-timer

oh two-timer champion that's cool okay i just figured it out as i said the name and now we want to know what their champions of yeah you should tell us champion if you're in the discord right now um um actually i'm gonna ask champion tell us what he's a champion of but in the meantime uh what kind of programmers were you in college and what was your first job when you got out patrick and i had the same job so this is gonna be interesting patrick why don't you go first i was a terrible programmer no and i'm just in college i mean i used it to like try a lot of different things so i guess like i don't i don't exactly know how to answer what kind of programmer i was uh

in in college but uh i definitely wasn't like super sure what I was going to do when I got out. I first job I took was at a defense contractor. But I did it as part of a program where I would get to try a bunch of different projects there over the first few years that I was going to work there. And so that really appealed to me. And also I was going to get my master's degree at the same time. So for me, coming out of college was like about continuing my education, but also about getting to try a bunch of different things. Cause I feel like it paid off for me, but I, I've always been in the philosophy, like the earlier you in your career, you really want to like, for, for my personality, it was like really sample as many things as you

can, like become good in things. Uh, at some point though, it's like a, you know, pyramid, you want to have like a good foundation. But as you like go up, you want to like narrow in your focus until you become better and better and better at certain things. But that you have like a good foundation that you've built up on. So yeah, I guess coming out of college first was at a defense contractor. I enjoyed my time there. I learned a lot. I wasn't ready to go straight into I mentioned earlier, I've been at a couple of thing companies, but lot. I wasn't ready to go straight into, I mentioned earlier, been at a couple of FANG companies, but I wasn't ready for that right out of college. I needed to mature a little, grow a little before getting sort of thrown into that. So I appreciated that first job, but there was a time when it was no longer the right job for me. And so I was thankful that I was able to rotate out of that. Yeah. In you know i was really really uh competitive in the i actually

won the high school programming contest in my high school um and so because of that i ended up doing a lot of low level programming just because um most of these competitions you use c++ um you could use java but there were some things where java was not fast enough and so your answer would be correct if it was in c++ and so i had a brief period on the competitive side where i was where I was using Java and I switched back to C++ and so that that gave me like a very uh um um like like a like a very low level mindset where um you know the joke about the CSV file and not using a database I mean that's not far from the truth when when I was uh just starting and uh um and so that's kind of how i was in college it's just like you know any problem let's just throw c++ at it not no uh no third-party libraries no nothing

just write everything in c++ um um i went to the same job as patrick that's how we met was at our first job um and uh i guess the thing that makes that kind of uh interesting is is um you know it was uh just a job in the area i think that so many people might feel like their first job you know really defines who they are i mean actually my I mean, actually, my first tech job I had while I was still in college, I worked part-time for the state of Florida doing some tech stuff for them. But yeah, I think I wouldn't really stress too much about your first job. I think whatever you get your hands on is going to be a great experience. And we were there. Patrick, how long were you at our first job? I was there about five years.

I think I was there exactly five years. Yeah, I think it was just shy of five. I think it was like four and some change. Yeah, apparently at five you got, I think think a clock or something, but I left too quickly. Yeah, I know. I literally hit the fifth year, but I think I left so quickly after that, I didn't get my clock. But, you know, it was five amazing years. And, you know, it was basically for my point of view, for Patrick, it might be a little different. My point, for my point of view is basically just throwing a dart at a dartboard. I just knew about this company interviewed, uh, and then just worked there

for five years and, and it was extremely rewarding. And so if, if just a random draw gave a really rewarding job like that, then the takeaway for me is that it really doesn't matter what your first job is. You're going to, you're going to learn a lot. Yeah. I mean, I'll drop right here and then we'll probably have to go into lightning round for the rest of these questions but uh also i don't think jason not no offense to him or myself but neither of us came from sort of target schools for big tech companies so like right that they don't recruit there but like we didn't come from schools that you know traditionally you see as people going there and so i'll say the same thing people get really really like worried about exactly what college they go to exactly what first job they have you know traditionally you see as people going there and so i'll say the same thing people get

really really like worried about exactly what college they go to exactly what first job they have i think it's just about building up your character and your your skills and your abilities and you know it might take time and it can be harder or easier based on certain decisions but like i guess like jason said it's i think it's a fairly robust kind of thing for the most part, you know? And so, but again, it's, it's about being that like realistic about where you are and where you want to be and do you need to grow? And so some, some people have a sort of outsized view.

You got to be humble, but practical. Like don't, don't, don't err too far on either side. Don't underestimate your skills and don't overestimate them either. You have to be realistic about where you are and where you want to be. Yeah, totally. So we'll do the final shirt. The final shirt is going to a gentleman named, and I hope I don't butcher your names, Arieb. Arieb K.

Arieb has been a patron for four years. Thank you so much, Arieb, for your patronage. And we will get a t-shirt over to you. All right, I'll read the next question here, Jason. All right. Which is, a lot of people already specialize. Oh, I think I already answered this. Uh-oh.

People already specialize, at least knowing what path they want to be on, whether it's AI, security, DevOps, data engineering, web dev. I'm an early career backend software engineer, and I get to play a little bit with almost everything. And that's what I like about it. But from a career perspective, should I be thinking more about specializing? Is specialize even real? Or is it just like a title? This is from cup of geo yeah that's a great question i think that i think you should um you know within the context of of engineering you should do what you uh what you enjoy you know what what gives you the most strength so uh you know again within the context of your job so um so if at your job you know you do find yourself doing a lot of different things, you're hopefully on a team and, you know, maybe you can do some horse trading and say, hey, I'll do the, you know, this part of the work.

You know, I'll do the refactoring if you take this other item or what have you. And you can kind of find the thing that you really enjoy and double down on that um um and so you know in that sense like it's going to kind of guide you to be more and more specialized over time um but at the same time like uh um you know you have to kind of keep your eye on the kind of overall market and kind of where the puck is going. Um, so, you know, I think, uh, if like, if you're at a company that uses, um, um, what's it called? Like ASP.net or something, right. Which like every year, you know, loses market share. Well then, you know, take a little bit of time to learn um to learn uh you know node.js or something just so that so that you you you're kind of skating to where the puck is going

there um even if you're not using it at work so so you know it's a balance to strike i would say really it depends on what gives you kind of strength and energy as a as an engineer and different people have different things some get bored really easily if they start specializing um other people um you end up in the sort of analysis paralysis when they have too many options and they really just need to pick something and start start specializing so it's a very personal question, but I think the biggest thing is just monitor yourself and adjust accordingly. Yeah, I think for a slightly different tech, but I already kind of mentioned it. I actually don't think it's super important to worry about what you want to be when you grow up.

I was having this conversation with my kids and I don't really know what I want to be when I grow up. I mean, my current specialty as a software engineer is like, or I guess what I've been working on the last many years, it's completely something I didn't really necessarily knew existed. It's not something I would have been working on. It's, uh, you know, in a field supporting things that I didn't like probably weren't even an option when I was in college. And so I think that like, it's very hard to predict some of those things and i started out doing you know we talked about a defense contract doing like low level

embedded programming doing multi-year government maintenance contracts like really weird stuff and then i you know went to fang company and did you know giant large scale distributed map reduced projects and uh you know i've done everything in between and i've sort of taken the tack that like i want to always be learning new things and figuring out how stuff works and there are i i think places in the space that you can learn stuff that's just too niche or like it's uh sort of the expected value of that sort of niche skill is is is low so it may have really high payout but very low probability of that payout um and you can you can gamble on those things if you look back you know uh there are things i i don't want to i don't want to attack

anyone there are technologies we've even named so far which could be considered like big gambles with potentially big payouts um But they're just that. And you may like that. That may be exciting. Or you may say, which has kind of been more my tech, is take things which are interesting to me, but are somewhat stable or adjacent or skills that will sort of go along with me. And that has served me well.

So I feel that there's a lot of, can be a lot of peer pressure. And a lot of people just know or think that they know, and they might be wrong. But a lot of people who think that they know, and just don't feel that pressure. Like do stuff that you like. And for me, it's about, and Jason kind of mentioned those things about regrets. Don't, I try to look at the upside.

There's always been something to learn from all the things I've done. Some stuff has been truly terrible and maybe less learned. Um, but I'm still thankful that I did those things and make sure that I know how to like not do them again, or how could I maybe have avoided that? Right. There's always sort of lessons to be learned. So, uh, I mean, I think first 10 years, I think you don't really have to pick a specialist. I don't know you ever do, but I would also say there is a danger and sort of on a given project, like,

you know, saying that I just will do anything. I don't want to do any one thing. And you know, every job I take must be different and sort of being a Renaissance person, uh, can be a little dangerous as you want to get promoted further and further. So I think there's about,

you know, it, there's different ways of playing that game and sort of having enough attention spans that you really learn something but then realizing that you can have that time slicing over time is probably better and more stable than sort of going into a project and saying i want to do a little bit of everything here um and sort of forcing yourself to be super spread thin uh doesn't allow you to learn in depth any one thing. And so I would say learn things deeply sequentially, rather than, you know,

spread yourself too thin. Yep, that makes sense. All right, we were up to our final question. Thank you so much for the questions. Really interesting stuff. We're going to end on a really light note here do you guys have a favorite this is from sky to see do you guys have a favorite esoteric language um i mentioned it a little bit earlier although i think i got the name wrong but piet which is the one where it's a picture the source code is is literally a picture and the compiler reads that picture and turns it into some algorithm i just think that's really cool. I could imagine some kind of like, it'd be cool to get a PIT program

that sorts into a canvas and put it up in my house somewhere. That'd be pretty neat. Maybe I'll work on that for 2024. But yeah, I just thought that crossing media there I crossing media there, I think, is really interesting. Maybe we can have ChatGPT create a Piat program for me or something. I was going to go Egyptian hieroglyphics before I realized that it meant a programming language, not a...

I don't really, you know, we joke a lot about, but I've never really sat down and tried to program in many esoteric languages, probably some assembly language. You know, it's interesting the difference between CISC and RISC architectures and assembly. So I did some programming in Motorola 68K assembly, which is CISC. So complex instruction sets. And I actually kind of like that. I guess I don't know if that's considered esoteric. I might offend some people by saying it.

But I feel like that was a pretty cool opportunity. So, you know, for a non-mainstream language for today, I think, you know, that would be my pick. That makes sense. All right. Let me just do a quick check of the other channels and the live show chat. I think we're good. All right, let me just do a quick check of the other channels and the live show chat. I think we're good. All right. Thank you, everybody, for a bunch of really interesting questions.

It's been an amazing year. Thanks, Patrick, for taking so much time to be a huge part of the show. And we will catch you all next year. Patrick, any final words? Ah, thank you, Jason. And thank you for the compliments. Thank you for all the listeners out there as we beam this across.

If you're an alien listening, send us your cobalt in an asteroid. All right. No, no, it's been great. It's another good year. And so, yeah, I i'm happy i'm thankful thankful for lots of things but uh thank you jason thank you for uh sticking with this and uh yeah all the work you do as well yeah totally all right everyone we'll catch you later have a good

year music by eric barn dollar programming throwdown is distributed under a creative commons attribution share alike 2.0 license you're free to share copy distribute transmit the work to remix, adapt the work. But you must provide attribution to Patrick and I and share alike in kind.