Runtime Arguments

Jim shares his adventure into running LLMs on his own hardware. For him it's less about saving money and more about privacy — working in healthcare, he can't send patient data to the cloud. App vs. model: Claude Code and Codex are applications , not models. Features like plan mode come from the app. (Wolf's "Opus Plan" is a Claude Code mode that uses Sonnet 4.6 for most wo...

You almost never have exactly the right amount of compute for the job. Either cores are sitting idle while your code runs on one, or you've got more problem than machine. This episode is about the two fundamental tools for closing that gap — and why picking the wrong one makes things slower, not faster. Topics covered : Concurrency vs. parallelism — the core distinction: concurrency is a sche...

Jim talks about his struggles to get decent Wi-Fi in all corners of his house. The big issue is all of the numbers and codes and things they use to describe the different Wi-Fi  technologies. Hosts: Jim McQuillan can be reached at jam@RuntimeArguments.fm Wolf can be reached at wolf@RuntimeArguments.fm Follow us on Mastodon: @RuntimeArguments@hachyderm.io If you have feedback for us, please send it...

Don't let the language be the problem — let the problem be the problem. You're not picking a language; you're picking an ecosystem. Boring is a feature. Resume-driven development is real, it's expensive, and everyone has done it at least once. Python is slow. But is your service slow? And is it slow because of Python? If your team is debating the language, you may not be debati...

From rsh to certificates: The story of how we learned to log in safely. SSH has been around for a long time, over 30 years in fact. In this episode we talk about what came before and why SSH is such a huge improvement. We talk about choices you can make in using SSH, such as choosing the right key algorithm and how to securely store those private keys and how to distribute the public keys. Hosts:...

You already have an editor. You already love it. Nothing we say is going to change that — and we know it. But your editor shapes how you think about editing, which means there are problems it could solve for you that you've never even thought to have. We walk through the real differences between editors, IDEs, and the technologies underneath them — TreeSitter, LSPs, the Debug Adapter Protocol...

If you've been using Linux on the desktop you almost certainly have been using the X Window System. In this episode we dive into what that is, where it came from and what kinds of choices you have. We get into the toolkits like GTK and Qt and talk about desktop environments like Gnome and KDE. Then we get into the future, namely Wayland. If you want to run an X client application on a remote...

If you've ever debugged a program, looked for lost socks or tried to figure out why red spots are developing on your skin, then Bayes' rule was almost certainly used to help you on your journey. Even if you don't know anything about it. Humans have evolved to solve problems but along the way, we as a species sometimes fall for traps or fail to consider all the evidence when figuring...

Containers have become the standard way for deploying applications on servers and the web and sometimes even on the desktop. In this episode we dive into what containers are, how they work, how to build them and what you can do with them. Whether you are using containers in your development environment, deploying on servers in your data center or as a cloud service, containers save time, handle de...

In episode 8, Wolf talks about using AI to write code; and a bit of the landscape around that. In this episode, he describes what he’s learned on his journey from just coding to using AI as a major tool in his toolbox for addressing friction in every area of (mostly) work and (a bit of) life. Less about the landscape and more about the applications, the reasoning, the big-picture, and having the r...

Jim brings his vast knowledge of Databases and dives into the history, some theory, some best practices and some choices you can make. Links: Claude best practices guide - https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices Passkeys Server and Client - https://github.com/Runtime-Arguments/passkeys-demo Webassembly History - https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/ten-years-of-webassembly-a-retrospective...

Git is an amazing tool for managing your source code. Lots of people use it every day but most people barely scratch the surface of what git can do. In this episode, we dive in and explain lots of features from the simple to the complex. Links: Julia Evans Wizard Zines https://wizardzines.com - The main page https://wizardzines.com/comics/inside-git/ - The git specific 'Zine Hosts: Jim McQuil...

Data centers are sprouting up every where. Do we really need more of them? In this episode, Jim and Wolf talk about what data centers are, how prevalent they are and what it takes to build them. We talk about the sizes and energy uses and all sorts of other things related to data centers. It was a fun episode to research and very eye-opening. Links: https://statista.com https://cloudscene.com/regi...

This episode is a little different from our normal format. When you listen to podcasts, watch Youtube videos or even sit in a conference room listening to a speaker, they almost always will mention things and assume you know what they are talking about.  And lets face it, we don't always know what they are talking about. In this episode, Jim asks Wolf questions.  Questions about things you he...

When people talk about the power of their computers, we've heard all kinds of claims: I have more power on my desktop computer than the Apollo had to put a man on the moon The phone in my pocket has more power than the Apollo space program had I have more power on my wrist watch than the lunar lander And the latest one: I have more power in my key fob than the Apollo capsule had Are any of th...

Wolf has lots of great information about the tools you should consider using when developing software projects. Jim chimes in with his own ideas. Takeaways Just a few take-aways this episode and I hope by this point you have already internalized them and this is just a summary. I’ve presented categories: the tools you will absolutely need to get your job done. You will need an editor. You will nee...

Listen in as Jim describes what POSIX is, what it means to be "POSIX Compliant" and why you should (or shouldn't) care. Hosts: Jim McQuillan can be reached at jam@RuntimeArguments.fm Wolf can be reached at wolf@RuntimeArguments.fm Follow us on Mastodon: @RuntimeArguments@hachyderm.io If you have feedback for us, please send it to feedback@RuntimeArguments.fm Checkout our webpage at...

Wolf surfaces five fundamentals to becoming a better developer (that you probably didn’t even know you didn’t know)! This is a fiery one! Jim asks questions, and also questions Wolf's choices. Takeaways The problem comes first—ask more questions Start with the simplest thing that could reasonably work Measure before you optimize (but don’t be stupid) Understand what’s actually an error Test s...

Jim takes us on a walk down memory lane! Terminals have been around for a long time, probably much longer than you'd ever guess. Join us as we talk about the history of computer terminals and get a bit into how they work and how they've evolved into the amazing applications that we have today. Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33...

It's Wolf's turn this episode, and this one required research! GPUs obviously do tons of work. You see it every time you play a graphics intensive game. You know how crypto-miners are using them. You’ve heard AI companies using them for model building. You’ve got this hardware in your machine! Can you use it? Should you use it? Where even to start? GPUs can help if your problems, data, s...

Jim demonstrates more of his networking knowledge, though this episode still required a lot research. Wolf, of course, has questions. The internet has been around for more than 40 years in some form. It's outgrown its ability to handle all of the hosts but fortunately, there's a solution. IPv6 is mature and wide-spread and not only does it increase the address space to 128-bits (up from...

Wolf hands you the keys to the old-world kingdom, which turn out to still be valuable, just much less used! Most programmers are comfortable in their IDE but still click through file managers and manually handle repetitive tasks outside of it. You might know basic command line navigation, maybe even write the occasional script, but you're missing the real superpower: composition - the art of...

We talk about data types and their importance in software development. Modern dynamic languages hide type information from you but it's still there, under the hood. Statically-typed languages, on the other hand, bring types right out in front of you. What are the fundamental types and why are they important? What about user defined types and aggregate types? Join us as we dive right in and tr...

Wolf has a lot to say about AI and coding! If you’re expecting AI to write entire programs for you while you sit back and watch, we're going to disappoint you right up front—that’s not what these tools do well, and chasing that fantasy will waste your time. But what if we told you there’s a tool that could help you interpret cryptic error messages, navigate tricky syntax in unfamiliar languag...

If you need to connect to remote networks, or if you are outside of your network and would like to connect into it, then almost certainly you need a VPN. Jim has lots of real-world experience connecting networks together. In this episode we talk about various ways to connect and list some of the issues that you might run into. Take-aways from the episode: There's a difference between a "...