The Stack Overflow Podcast

The estate of the late comedian George Carlin is suing the creators of an hour-long AI-generated comedy special that mimics Carlin’s distinctive delivery and material. [ Ed. note: not actually AI , still lawsuit .] Prefer your AI more Freudo-Marxist? Here’s a never-ending, AI-generated conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. You’re welcome. Google’s Bard surpassed GPT-4 to claim the s...

Find out what’s new with ML in production . Machine learning models must learn to unlearn . Open-source game engine Godot now has a free Nintendo Switch port for game developers . We’ve previously hosted Godot cofounder and lead developer Juan Linietsky on the podcast . Stack Overflow user areller earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to How to call a destructor . See Privacy Policy at https:/...

A white-hat hacker uncovered security vulnerabilities in an AI-powered hiring system used by fast-food chains and hourly employees around the world. Read the blog post or watch this explainer. Mariposa is a programming language with time travel. Want to be an individual contributor (IC) who still amplifies the performance of everyone around you? Be a radiating programmer . Congratulations to onmyw...

Mariposa is a toy programming language that has time travel as a primary feature. Bugs are a thing of the past (literally)! Miss having a physical keyboard when thumb-typing on your phone? Well, you’re in luck .  Over at CES, LG Electronics wants your devices to have “ affectionate intelligence .” Whatever it takes to make AI more human-centric and empathetic. Omar used to work on the Backstage pr...

Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered assistant you can keep in your pocket (but it’s not a phone). How will AI impact scientific research? A new collaboration between Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is focused on energy storage solutions. A US Senate hearing questions whether tech companies should be allowed to train their AI models on content produced by journalists without paying l...

Now you know: The human body can serve as a resonance chamber for remote car keys , effectively extending their range. A hackathon team used GenAI can create a fully playable D&D-style game in just one day . Skybox AI from Blockade Labs allows users to generate 360° skybox experiences from text prompts. A significant advancement in the brain-computer interfaces (BCI) space: a novel framework c...

Willis Gibson, 13, closed out 2023 by becoming the first person to officially beat the original Nintendo version of Tetris. Here’s how he did it . Want to understand the code that caused the ultimate killscreen? Watch this great explainer from HydrantDude. The 2023 film Tetris is based on the true story of the legal battle to license the game. Is the era of the robot butler upon us? Mobile ALOHA i...

Will AI fundamentally change software development or just add some efficiencies around the edges?  Surveys from Stack Overflow and Github find north of 70% have probably already tried using it and many incorporate it into their daily work through a helper in the IDE.  It's also worth reflecting a bit on the technology sectors that didn't have as great a 2023: crypto, VR, and quantum computing stil...

Along with his work at Stanford, Katanforoosh is a founding member of deeplearning.ai and co-created the Deep Learning Specialization on Coursera.  He believes the rapidly expanding capabilities of AI will mean that humans, and especially programmers, will need to learn new skills faster than ever. This doesn't mean machines are going to take our jobs. Rather, with the assistance of AI, humans wil...

Biilmann says we can't ignore the impact GenAI is having on developer productivity.  One of their engineers created a  GPT that automatically generates stories for React + TypeScript components, and after seeing how successful it was internally, Netlify made it open source for the public . We also chat over the results of their recent State of Web Development survey. The key takeaway is below:  Th...

SPONSORED BY DOIT The broken nose in jail scam is on the rise. With AI improvements, it’ll get harder to spot.  OWASP, a non-profit dedicated to software security, tracks the top ten security risks for LLMs . We’ve spoken with DoiT on the podcast before about LLM hallucinations .  DoiT ’s sales pitch is simple: they provide technology and expertise to clients who want to use the cloud, free of cha...

On today’s home team episode, Ben and Ryan discuss the implications of a lapse in section 174 of the tax code. Here’s a great explainer on how it’s affecting startups and software firms, threatening jobs and potentially bankrupting some struggling companies.  Video game employees are exploring a union and Microsoft recently announced it will stay neutral in the process.  What’s the difference betw...

Does ChatGPT have seasonal depression ? AIs aren’t building apps on their own, at least not yet—but they are helping developers build them. Read Isaac Lyman’s article about the three types of AI-assisted programmers . ICYMI: Listen to our interview with linguist Gašper Beguš , director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about how LLMs and humans acquire language.  Shoutout to Stack Overfl...

SPONSORED BY FIREHYDRANT While FireHydrant is mostly known for their incident management software, they’re introducing Signals to modernize alerting and consolidate it with incident management.  FireHydrant was born out of an incident where a database was dropped at 5:30pm on a Friday right before network maintenance started. It also led to Robert’s social media handle, Bobby Tables .  This one ti...

Gemini , Google’s new AI model, is great at competitive programming , among other things . AI Explained is a YouTube channel that covers the latest developments in AI. One problem with regulating AI is that the technology evolves (much) faster than regulators can. Wikifunctions is an open repository of code that anyone can use or contribute to. Did we need another study to tell us that longer comm...

CommandBar is a user assistance platform (UAP). Their flagship product, Copilot , is an embedded user assistant agent that companies can configure to help their users with on-demand help, including interactive walkthroughs and personalized responses.  Read James’s article about why CommandBar built Copilot , then get started with their docs . Follow James on LinkedIn and Twitter . Follow CommandBa...

Do LLMs herald the end of computer programming (as we know it)? A Harvard lecture weighs in on this contentious topic. An epic hardware bug story . Question from the academic trenches: How bad will it look to prospective employers if you refuse to defend your PhD ? (Answer: Pretty bad.) Another intriguing question: Were postal pneumatic tubes in Berlin really cleaned with wine ? The Jetsons misled...

As the year winds to a close, some big employers are facing lower-than-expected attrition rates —in other words, fewer people than expected are quitting. What a difference a year or two makes. People have strong opinions on the return-to-office conversation. Read Eira’s article and let us know how you feel. We are just beginning to explore the effects of prompting on the capabilities and performan...

Bito AI is an AI coding tool that helps developers work more productively with features like code completion within the IDE and personalized answers drawn from your codebase. Get started with their docs here . ICYMI: Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is a way of addressing LLM hallucinations and outdated training data. Listen to our recent episode about how an original architect of Jira is reth...

Cloudflare is a cloud provider used by almost 20% of all websites . Developers new to Cloudflare can get started here . Cloudflare recently launched Workers AI , an open, pay-as-you-go AI inference-as-a-service platform that lets developers run machine learning models on the Cloudflare network from their own code. Developers can get started here . On a related note, read Ryan’s article exploring t...

Sana automates user enrollment, training reminders, and other manual/admin tasks associated with onboarding and learning. Sana AI , their AI assistant, is trained on a company’s data so employees can self-serve the knowledge they need. On a related note, listen to our interview with Gašper Beguš , director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about his research into how LLMs and humans acqu...

SPONSORED BY CHRONOSPHERE Episode notes: Chronosphere is introducing Lens , a cloud-native observability tool to view data flows between services.  At Uber, Rob created M3 , an open-source metrics engine compatible with Prometheus.   Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, ralf htp , for their answer to How to read an image in Python OpenCV .  If you want to meet Rob and the Chronosphere team, they’ll...

ICYMI, listen to part one of this conversation. Craig is the cofounder and CEO of Stacklok , which helps developers and open-source communities build safer software, secure the supply chain, and choose safer dependencies. Stacklok’s free-to-use service, Trusty , employs a statistical analysis of author/repo activity and a package’s source of origin to assess its trustworthiness. Craig cofounded th...

Stacklok helps developers and open-source communities build safer software, secure the supply chain, and choose safer dependencies. Trusty is their free-to-use service that employs a statistical analysis of author/repo activity and a package’s source of origin to assess its trustworthiness. Craig cofounded the Kubernetes project, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and manage...

Sleuth helps engineering teams systematically improve efficiency by tracking speed and release quality, preventing slowdowns and bottlenecks, and removing toil and unnecessary friction. Try it for free or see how teams are using Sleuth . Interested in the automations they offer for teams, check out their public marketplace . Dylan was an original architect on JIRA , so he’s not exactly new to issu...