The Stack Overflow Podcast - Hacking the hamburger: How a pentester exposed holes in hundreds of fast-food chains

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 onmyway133, winner of a Stellar Question badge for What does the suspend function mean in a Kotlin Coroutine?.

The Stack Overflow Podcast - Sending bugs back in time

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 project at Spotify, so we quoted him in our article on it. 

Now he works on personalization, including Discover Weekly, which drops a new mixtape on you every Monday like a hipster with a crush.

The Stack Overflow Podcast - Letting algorithms guide our path to the next great invention

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 licensing fees.

Learn how to build a mechanical computer from Legos.

The Stack Overflow Podcast - How to build a role-playing video game in 24 hours

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 called DeWave integrates “discrete encoding sequences into open-vocabulary EEG-to-text translation tasks” without the need for “eye-tracking fixations or event markers to segment brain dynamics into word-level features.”

Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Vineeth Chitteti, who earned a Favorite Question badge with Is it possible to hit multiple pods with a single request in Kubernetes cluster?.

The Stack Overflow Podcast - Maximum Glitch: How to break Tetris

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 is a low-cost and whole-body teleoperation system for data collection. Check out some of what it can do.

Explore the questions and answers on the Mathematics Stack Exchange.

The Stack Overflow Podcast - How long till we run out of fresh data to train the AI?

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 still seem far from mainstream adoption. 

We dive a little into the half-life of skills, which seem to be shrinking, especially in IT. Got any resolutions to learn something new this year?

And what about the data we use for training? We highlight a comment from Kian Katanforoosh, a lecturer who helped create Stanford's Deep Learning course with Andrew Ng, who says we'll run out of high quality data as soon as 2030.

A big thanks and congrats to Stack Overflow user  Corn3lius for helping to answer a question and being awarded a life boat badge: How can I create spoiler text?

The Stack Overflow Podcast - He created Stanford’s Deep Learning class. Programmers will need to learn faster

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 will become far more capable, learning faster and mastering more domains. 

Not surprisingly, Katanforoosh has built his business with the goal of addressing this issue. Workera aims to help companies identify where their employees lack skills and provide them with personalized instruction that can quickly bring them up to the next level.

You can find Kian on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Stanford's website

Thanks to Stack Overflow user PaxDiablo, who was awarded a Life Boat badge for providing a great answer to the question: Given  a month in numeric form, how do you find the first month of its respective quarter? 

 

The Stack Overflow Podcast - Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann explains what we’ll see with UI 2.0

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: 

The 80% of developers that have integrated AI into their workflow are quickly reaping the benefits. Seventy percent report using AI to automate manual and repetitive tasks and 42% are using it to improve internal knowledge sharing and increase productivity, freeing up more time for impactful work and enabling faster launch times. Over 50% of developers also realized new opportunities that AI created, such as generating new web projects with a single prompt or reading API documentation.

However, AI experimentation is not without its own unique challenges. Developers are concerned about receiving incorrect answers and information (65%), security issues and leaking confidential information (52%), a lack of regulation (48%), and a decrease in code quality (45%).

So much opportunity, but plenty of risk as well. 

Last but not least, Biilmann tells us what he's looking forward to in the near future, specifically apps that can reformat their UI on the fly to be more customized to each user. He calls this UI 2.0, and it sounds a bit like what Google showed off in its recent Gemini demo. 

Congrats to our lifeboat winner of the week, Petrus Theron, who answered the question: How can I make a public struct where all fields are public without repeating `pub` for every field?

The Stack Overflow Podcast - From prompt attacks to data leaks, LLMs offer new capabilities and new threats

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 charge, with the big cloud providers paying the bills.