The Stack Overflow Podcast

William is the CEO of Lightning AI and the creator of PyTorch Lightning, the lightweight PyTorch wrapper for high-performance AI research. Dive into their docs or explore the developer community . ICYMI: Across tech, layoffs are boosting share prices . Follow William on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn . Shoutout to Brian61354270 , who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering ModuleNotFoundErro...

Is it possible to make a PDF bigger than Germany ? Here’s one larger than the known universe. As its creator says, “it’s mostly empty space, but so is the universe.” Massachusetts is leading the way in the skills-based hiring revolution by eliminating degree requirements for state jobs. Did you miss these deeply uncanny AI-generated food images, from the conjoined chickens to the macaroni and chee...

AI-generated code is “not equivalent to reliable and robust code, especially in the context of real-world software development,” according to a new study whose title got our attention. Tech layoffs continue in the wake of the pandemic hiring boom, sending some share prices into the sky. Take a look at how AI coding assistants are already changing the way code is made. Shoutout to Stack Overflow us...

A theory explores how to play DOOM inside a human cell . Fair warning, you'll need about 600 years to complete the game. Looking for a good prompt builder to help you get the most out of your LLM? Try this one or explore this huge collection of prompts. Startup Twin Labs wants to build a product that automates repetitive tasks by letting AI take over your cursor. Harvard Medical School researchers...

Intuit shares more about their generative AI operating system (GenOS) in this Medium blog .  Learn more about Intuit technology here . Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Mohsin Naeem for answering the question How can I extract metadata from an MP3 file? Connect with Merrin on LinkedIn or X .  Connect with Shivang on LinkedIn . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy...

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...